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.

By using AJAX to build their interface, Google has created a platform that now uses common sense technology. If you see something you wish to change you click on it and change it. For example, in the old system if you wanted to update bids on a term you would check the term and click “edit keyword settings” and then make your changes and click “save changes”. While the page refreshes were relatively quick, to make changes you had to follow only this process. With the new platform, keyword bids changes can be made on any screen where that keyword appears, including reports. Additionally, the idea of bread crumbs have been eliminated and you can navigate between adgroups, even across campaigns, with one click and no loading, allowing more time for reporting and optimizing.

This is a huge leap from the technology found in Yahoo!’s Sponsored Search or Microsoft’s AdCenter. Yahoo! for example, actually takes Google’s setup and converts it to another document that then needs to be uploaded into their platform. This makes no sense. If you create the technology to convert it, why not just upload it straight in. As for making bid changes, tedious is not a strong enough word. While the process is just as many steps as Google, the average page load takes upwards of 10 seconds. This is fascinating since it takes Yahoo! 0.13 seconds to return 216M search results on the term “allergy”.

At least Yahoo! can allow you to upload something into their system, MSN has tried and failed miserably at creating a system for uploading new campaigns. Therefore you have to rely on people to do it for you, which can take days. And for the little amount of volume it typically brings, who has the patience for that?

I am not surprised that Yahoo! lags so far behind, it did take 3 years for them to implement a performance bid model, but MSN has no excuse. Microsoft, arguably the technology leader, should have the resources and the intelligence to create an interface that makes it easy and manageable to run a search campaign. Solving the dashboard issue won’t create searches, but if the plan MSN has to become a real force in the search world succeeds, the worst thing they can do is create a speed bump with their advertising interface.

My recommendation: For Microsoft and Yahoo! to please sign-up for Google’s new AdWords platform and try to learn a few things and accept the fact that Google knows what they are doing.