The Hindu Business Line : Yahoo! not ceding search space in deal with Microsoft

Bangalore, Nov. 11 Yahoo! India, which is increasingly moving up the company’s value chain, will play an active role in the integration process of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search deal.

Clearing all ambiguity surrounding the deal, a Yahoo! India spokesperson said the arrangement will see both Yahoo! and Microsoft sharing their sales force.

Yahoo will also share a part of its back-end technology, while Microsoft will be responsible for infrastructure and maintenance of indexing and crawling (processes based on which search results are generated).

“The search deal will give us a significant chunk of the (search) market and advertisers will have the advantage of having a combined market place for their advertisements,” said Mr Shouvick Mukherjee, Vice-President and CEO - Yahoo! India R&D.

Role in integration

And Yahoo! India is gearing itself to play its part in putting together the deal, which could take about a year to roll out. Mr Mukherjee said, “Yes, we will be part of the integration team and play an active role wherever necessary.”

Interestingly, even with all the sales force sharing and technology transfer, Yahoo! says it will compete with Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) in the search space.

The deal has nothing to do with the actual search results and users of Yahoo! Search will still be exposed to “Yahoo’s unique and exclusive” content, says Mr Mukherjee.

According to a survey of the US search market by research agency comScore, Google is the leader in the search space accounting for 64.9 per cent of all searches conducted in September 2009.

Yahoo! comes second at 18.8 per cent, while Bing is third with 9.4 per cent.

Yahoo! India is increasingly making its presence felt in Yahoo’s global efforts with contributions in core technology platform, product management and cloud technology. Cricket.yahoo.com, which has 2.25 million unique visitors a month, is also an India innovation.

Globally, Yahoo! has 500 million unique users a month with 25.17 million coming from India.