From a search marketer’s perspective this is great news. Yahoo! has been a lame duck for a few years now and Microsoft can potentially pump some air back into an otherwise lifeless site. Microsoft has typically delivered such small numbers that measuring performance rarely went beyond educated guesses due to lack of statistical relevance. The big question is, will this merger have what it takes to defeat Goliath? With initial numbers from Bing not as great as expected, the immediate boost will increase their market share significantly however, the problem that lies ahead is conversion. How can this partnership convert the other ~70% of people who religiously use Google to give Yahoo! or Bing another try and, more importantly, to make these users stick. Personally I have not used Bing since the week it launched, but that is only a focus group of 1. I stopped, not because I didn’t like it, but because it is very difficult to change old habits. Microsoft does have experience creatively incorporating search into their homepage, msn.com, and now they have another portal to try and do the same, however that will require these two to learn how to play in the same sandbox.

It seems like just yesterday that Microsoft was coming out from under Yahoo!’s wing and launching their own search platform. My how the tides have turned.

In typical corporate world fashion, Microsoft engineers are again attempting to build a new search engine platform (Kumo) that promises to help you “not just search, but accomplish tasks”. It does appear that Microsoft is finally using the thousands of employees they have as a focus group by releasing it internally and redirecting employee traffic from live.com to Kumo.com, requesting feedback. If only they could redirect internal Google.com traffic… A recent Microsoft insider reported that 4/5ths of internal searches were completed on Google. This is an amazing statistic and should be a rude awakening to the big guys over in Redmond that they cannot buy market share, but rather they must provide a superior user experience.

All of this commotion comes as talks with Yahoo! heat up, again. It appears that Microsoft is positioning themselves to make a big splash in late 2009, with their sights set on Google during the big holiday push. Plans for a $100 million ad campaigns are also bouncing around the advertising world. In my opinion this money will be better spent if they no longer have Yahoo! between themselves and Google.