A slide leaked by a Yahoo employee has inadvertently tipped the internet company’s hand as to its plans: reportedly, Yahoo is planning on shuttering several social sites and tools, including popular social bookmarking site Delicious as well as Alta Vista, Yahoo Buzz, AllTheWeb, MyBlogLog and the Traffic APIs. Two of these sites – Alta Vista and AllTheWeb – fall into the search category, the source of Yahoo’s origins. Despite – or rather because of – Yahoo’s participation in Bing, at least one observer sees this move as Yahoo’s final exit from search, and possibly as an independent internet company.
“The reality is that Yahoo has very little of its revenue-producing business model left after it made the decision in late August to outsource its search to Bing,” Stephen Woessner, a business professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse told the E-Commerce Times. “I suspect that many people thought that the entrance of Bing into the search market would equate to a decrease in Google’s market share – and yes, Google has experienced a slight decline. But in reality, Bing hastened the demise of Yahoo.”
What he doesn’t understand is why Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz refers to search as one of Yahoo’s strengths. “If search was a strength, then why outsource it to a competitor?”
Recent figures, though, do show Bing inflicting damage on Google, according to new data from Compete. (via MarketingCharts).
Between September and October 2010, the market share for Bing-powered search – which includes Yahoo as well as Bing – increased 8.5%, from 25.8% to 28%. Meanwhile, Google’s still-dominant market share slipped 3.4%, from 70% to 67.6%.
Google’s search share dropped even more compared to October 2009, when it stood 7% higher at 72.7% (Bing did not officially debut until June 2010). Microsoft Search represented most of Bing’s increases in monthly search share (up 12.8% from 12.5% to 14.1%), and dramatically improved in yearly search share (up 38.2% from 10.9%).
Source:-http://www.marketingvox.com/did-outsourcing-search-hurt-yahoo-048328/
