Having gone years without a serious challenger to its search-engine throne, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has spurred perennial second fiddle Yahoo search to join forces with Microsoft's upstart Bing search engine.
The two search engines aren't combining, though. Both sites — Search.Yahoo.com and Bing.com — will still exist, but Microsoft's Bing search will now power Yahoo's. Meanwhile, Yahoo will act as the sole face for all advertisers who want to spend money with the two companies.
The deal will last for 10 years. Both companies are pitching the merger as a necessary response to Google's dominance of the search-engine world, going so far as to launch a website called ChoiceValueInnovation.com to promote the move.
Yahoo and Microsoft are the only other search engines on the market that command any significant percentage of the market. Yahoo gets about 20 percent, while Bing attracts about 8 percent. Yahoo has been a major player on the Internet and in search for years, while tech giant Microsoft launched Bing this year to huge fanfare and surprisingly good reviews.
The adult industry will also possibly benefit from the merger, because Bing will now power Yahoo search. Besides its many good reviews, Bing also attracted attention (and scorn) for its porn-friendliness. Bing's video search returns a grid of video thumbnails that users can play with a simple mouse-over. In addition, Microsoft launched a separate domain, Explicit.Bing.net, to handle explicit content, thereby giving it an enshrined home while also giving system administrators an easy way to filter out adult content at the server level.