Archive for the ‘SEO / SEM’ category

Microsoft to (possibly) buy Yahoo

February 1st 2008 by Andrew Banks in General, SEO / SEM2 Comments »

If reports that are coming to the surface at the moment are to be believed, Microsoft are attempting to purchase Yahoo for $46 billion.

Although this is in it’s very early stages I can’t help wondering what this could mean five years down the line for us involved in online marketing. Microsoft and Yahoo already lag far behind Google in terms of search volumes but could their combined user base help them to catchup with Google in the search market?

The reach of both of these companies is huge, with Microsoft’s dominance in desktop computing they have the potential to push their/Yahoo’s products out to the majority of computer users at will giving them every possibility of catching up with Google. Imaging your default homepage now being Yahoo, your Microsoft Passport and Yahoo accounts being merged, your pictures on your PC being synchronised with Flickr (goodbye Picasa).

One big plus I see in this is the for the pending launch of Microsoft Gatineau. The biggest feature I see within Gatineau is the ability to profile your website users by age and gender, based on information from their passport account. If the same information can be harvested from a Yahoo account then the accuracy and validity of this data is massively increased.

There are many potential benefits to come from this deal, if it happens, and it will be interesting to see how this develops.

This also seems to be backed up by a report from Reuters and the full letter to the Yahoo Board has been publiched by the Time Online