Yahoo has been in the news lately because of a Microsoft bid to purchase it. The result of this would be a combining of the Yahoo and Live search engines. It is understandable why Microsoft would want to buy Yahoo with all of its features and its long history of providing search capabilities to the internet community. Yahoo has been around since 1994. It was one of the major search engines on the internet before Google. It is a total information portal and its search results are comparative to Google’s. What are some of the features of Yahoo that make it so desirable for Microsoft to want to latch onto? Let’s look at a few of them here:
To understand the Microsoft bid, you have to understand the trend. When you really size up the internet search engines today, you can see that it’s all about advertising. That’s where the money is made. Most software that will ever be developed is developed. Any teenager can develop a web site so there is really no money there. People don’t like to pay to see content and the certainly don’t like to pay for subscriptions to sites. Plus, there is stiff competition between developers of paid software and open source software. It’s the advertising that companies compete over. And targeted advertising on the internet wants to show you ads as quickly as possible in order to encourage impulse buying. What better way to encourage impulse buying than to show ads in as many places as possible and the best place is through a search engine and a mobile device.
The Yahoo search engine has a clear advantage in the mobile realm. This is one of the features it has developed over time that has surpassed the Google search engine. However Google focuses on searching and not mobile as its main priority. Google does have its mobile version of search and Gmail. So, since most software that will ever be developed is developed, Microsoft would want to shift away from software to developing applications and content delivery systems. The search engine already has an excellent suite of mobile applications through Yahoo Go and its gallery of mobile widgets.
Yahoo has an extensive gallery of mobile widgets. You not only use Yahoo Go to search for information from your cell phone. You also have applications allowing you to monitor your Ebay activity, access MTV news, and access your Myspace social network. And you don’t have to be at a computer to do it. Other widgets include photo sharing with Flickr, accessing your e-mail, news, weather, sports, and finance. A developer knows that integrating widgets into mobile applications is never simple but Yahoo provides a free system developer’s kit (SDK) to ease the task. Microsoft’s purchase of the Yahoo search engine would give it rights to these mobile widgets for leveraging and upgrading.
And the search engine services don’t just stop at mobile. You have video searches, subscriptions search allowing access to information not normally accessed by search engines, and travel search. You can get news alerts on your mobile device. You have an online bookmark organizer with MyWeb. You can find a job with Yahoo Hotjobs. And there are many more services. The list is quite extensive but it is obvious that Microsoft will get a very good deal by purchasing Yahoo.
Tags: mobile, search engine, Yahoo!
