News about our Search Alliance with Microsoft

Today we issued a press release announcing that we’ve received clearance from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission for our search agreement with Microsoft. Now that we’re full steam ahead, I’d like to share what we at Yahoo! see as an exciting opportunity to focus on creating new ways for people to search online.

Today’s Yahoo! Search:

First, let’s take a step back and explain what this alliance means for people who search with Yahoo! Most of the things you see on the typical Yahoo! Search results page below will not immediately change as a result of this alliance. What will change is that the basic search listings and ads will be provided by Microsoft instead of our own back-end platform – those are the text and links that you see in the left-hand image.

However, as you can see highlighted in the right-hand image, Yahoo! will continue to enhance the search result listings as we do for people today. A few examples of this are:

1) Providing you with rich results that display the most relevant information from Yahoo!’s rich content properties, as well as other great product, local, entertainment, reference, social and tech sites.

2) Showing specific results from vertical search products, like Yahoo! News.

3) Providing handy tools on the left-side of the page, such as our Search Pad and Search Scan apps, site filters that help you refine and explore the search results more easily, and related search term suggestions to help you refine your search further if the results aren’t quite what you were looking for.

Tomorrow’s Yahoo! Search:

And what you’re seeing today is just the tip of the iceberg. With Microsoft providing us the underlying list of search results, our Yahoo! team can now focus on making the overall experience of finding stuff online and getting things done easier for you – whether you’re searching at yahoo.com or just looking for specific information in the moment while using our many great products and properties on any device. We have lots of ideas for things we can do to help you with three main aspects of searching:

• Ways to find things faster when you’re just starting your search – by continuing to enhance our great Search Assist technology and also weaving search more deeply and conveniently into other Yahoo! products.

• New ways to help you explore the things that matter most – whether that’s with more rich results and options for organizing the search results page, or by showing you interesting Search topics that you might want to browse through in other relevant places that you spend your time on Yahoo!

• More apps and other tools to help you get things done as quickly as possible. We know that people don’t want to search per se – you want to complete tasks in your day, and we’ll be inventing new ways to help you do that.

I’m very excited about the opportunities ahead and hope all of you will come along with us for the ride. Go to Yahoo! Search today, try out a few searches, and give us feedback. If you have questions about the alliance, we’ve posted more information at the official search alliance Website, on our Yahoo! Search Marketing blog, and on the Yahoo! Developer’s Network blog.

Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Search Products

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