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Yahoo and Microsoft have concluded an agreement this week where Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, will be used on Yahoo’s website.
This effectively creates a new combined rival to search engine giant Google.
How does this influence us in South Africa?
Locally Bing has an estimated search market share of 4%, while Yahoo currently has 2%. Their combined local market share of 6% is still miles behind Google, with a share of 92%.
The major benefit for us is that Bing allows you to limit searches to South African websites. This delivers much improved local search results which was previously only possible with Google. If you can’t find what you’re looking for on Google, you now have an alternative.
We’ve already seen the traffic from Bing on our client websites increase due to this improved functionality.
The new competition would also fuel further innovation and improvements to both Google and Bing, which should result in a much improved user experience.
Benefit for local advertisers
From an advertising perspective, Bing is good news as Google was the only real search engine with enough volume to run a campaign.
If Bing can increase its local market share to around 15%, it could provide an alternative to Google with a lower cost per click which would save advertisers money.
Final thought
I believe competition is good in any market and this agreement plays to Microsoft and Yahoo’s strengths – Microsoft with its search technology and Yahoo with a formidable advertiser base and advertising sales team.
Yahoo has been without strategic direction for a number of years and they are finally now moving forward, while Microsoft now has a platform to compete directly with Google.
Let the games begin! |
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