The agreement was originally scheduled to be announced in late October 2009. Surprise surprise this hasn’t happened!
Obviously it is a very complicated agreement that the two companies have to make and as such it is taking a lot longer than the original suggestion (as these things always do).
Both companies are apparently “optimistic” about a deal being completed early in 2010 although they haven’t yet specified a date (we’ll see, I think their idea of “early in 2010″ is going to be very different from other peoples)
Yahoo! and Microsoft are hoping that once they have come to an agreement and things get implemented they are going to be able to challenge Google’s dominance of the search field (well, pretty much everything as it seems to be heading) … Personally I think that they will make very little impact at all, even with their combined technologies Google must have a lot of projects in the background that they haven’t mentioned anywhere yet – as with most recent releases they always have something to compete!
A release, linked to by Hitwise UK Press Centre, by Livescience says:
According to Experian Hitwise, Google accounted for 71 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 3, 2009. Yahoo! Search grabbed 16 percent and Bing 9 percent of searches, while the remaining 53 search engines accounted for just under 4 percent.
This gives Yahoo! and Bing a combined share of 25% compared to Google’s 71% share (admittedly US only)
This is compared to last years search shares which state that in December 2008 Google has a 72% share compared to the Yahoo! and MSN combined of 23%
Basically Yahoo! and Bing/MSN/Microsoft are going to have to pull out something pretty heroic in my eyes to make a major dint in the Google monopoly!