Yahoo-Facebook Collab? Don’t Hold Your Breath

Left to right: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Yahoo’s chief executive Marissa Mayer

These days, when you say ‘search engine’, you’re most likely referring to Google – and possibly to Bing, albeit marginally so. However, for several years now, many have been surmising that a powerful contender to Google’s supremacy is waiting in the sidelines, just stalking out the perfect opportunity to knock the search engine giant off its sometimes arrogant throne. Of course, we’re talking about Facebook, the social platform which recently announced having in excess of one billion users, active at the time, as of September 2012. For some reason, ever since a few years back, rumors have started cropping up, regarding the possibility of a Facebook-Yahoo team-up, set to dethrone Google and put Bing in its place for good. If you’re holding your breath, waiting for that alliance of the greats to be sealed, here’s what you should be taking into consideration.

Close Encounters

It all appears to have started with a series of events, which led many to believe that something was going on behind the scenes, to suggest that Yahoo and Facebook will be turning their relationship into a closer one. Perhaps the one major tipping point of the relationship between the two companies, as reflected in the media, was the meeting that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had with Yahoo’s chief executive Marissa Mayer. The meet-up was meant to seal the deal on several patent lawsuits that the two companies had going on, as well as to discuss a continuation of their collaboration. At the time, Facebook and Yahoo had worked together for several smaller projects, such as apps to feature Yahoo news on Facebook, and the people on the Yahoo board wanted the collaboration to go into the direction of web-based searches.

Where’s Bing?

The rumors were all essentially generated by a report in The Telegraph, which was largely speculating on the possibility of such a team-up. Reputed [tp lang=”en” only=”y”]SEO agencies[/tp][tp not_in=”en”]SEO agencies[/tp] and other industry experts have long since been researching the increasing impact of social media on search engine result rankings. Meanwhile, a Facebook-Yahoo alliance would certainly seal a clear sign of evolution in that direction. However, there is no reason to believe that Facebook is planning on leaving its already existent contract with Bing, in order to rally up with Yahoo. Facebook and Bing started working together over two years ago, in October 2010, and a lot has happened since. For one thing, Bing integrates Facebook results into its search queries, and for another, the search engine has a social sidebar that allows users to share their findings with friends. And, on a certain level, Yahoo is Bing, since the former has been relying on the latter to provide search engine services since 2010.

An Alliance of the Greats

The same newspaper report throws around the notion (which also emerged a while back, during discussions of a Microsoft-Yahoo team-up) that, with access to Facebook huge pool of users and user data, Yahoo would finally have the resources to beat Google out of the top search engine spot. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that Yahoo already has access to enough data to properly test out its search algorithms – over 12 per cent of all searches performed in the United States are carried out via Yahoo. Still, an ever-tinier search engine called Blekko is outperforming Yahoo at the moment, in terms of search results – proof that it’s not always about scale, but about the brains that power search engine algorithm construction.

6 thoughts on “Yahoo-Facebook Collab? Don’t Hold Your Breath”

  1. There is a tough competetion between bing and google .Google make his policies more strick then before because of some of success of bing

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    • Google has indeed a strickt policy, but i can’t see any hits from bing and yahoo to my websites. Facebook and bing are to far behind.

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  2. Well, honestly I don’t really think that this will change anything. I’ve read about this collab in a magazine few days ago, actually Facebook also team with with Firefox and add some unnecessary chat add-ons which I personally don’t like.

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  3. We all are addicted to Google as we’re to Facebook. So if anyone is looking to destroy there monopoly then one have to come up with its own unique features so that people force to try them. Otherwise you won’t see any competitors for both of these giants.

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  4. It would take more than a Yahoo-Facebook collabo to trump google’s might in the search engine sphere. Even if this is true, Google has nothing to be afraid about.

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  5. This is not about making a bigger corporation but about the technology that makes possible the “search engine”. I think even Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and the rest of the search engines team up, they won’t match Google because they do not have the technology that makes Google awesome. IT is just too powerful.

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