Read: MS can't get traction, Yahoo devolved their homepage away from usability years ago and now neither of them is strong enough to be a player by themselves.
Really? To me, it seems like Microsoft finally has a compelling search product and they're trying to ramp up usage as much as possible. Nothing indicates that Bing "can't get traction".
well, if you compare the total combined traffic that was going to MSN search with what bing is receiving right now all that it was to date was a big 302 operation. The yahoo deal makes them a real contender. At least they won't be able to switch it off so easily. Microsoft has a bit of a history launching stuff with great fanfare only to quietly retire it a couple of years later.
search.msn.com , msn homepage search all these used to be a good bit of traffic, they now redirect to bing.
It makes good sense for them to get yahoo on board, it makes it harder to sell yahoo to some third party and they get a bunch of traffic. For yahoo it is mostly about cutting costs and not having to compete with both microsoft and google at the same time.
EDIT: I just noticed this, even lots of the regular text links on the msn homepage now redirect to bing.com, that's simple statistics inflation. For instance check the hot topics section on http://www.msn.com/
Statistics inflation? Please. Microsoft is simply linking popular searches into their own search engine from one of their primary properties. I see no issues here.
Is Google Trends 'search inflation' too? Or what about the popular topics links on the home page of Twitter.com?
That space used to be used for links to articles, not for links to search results on msn search. That was just a sample, check how many links on the msn homepage pretend to be some kind of article but actually link to bing search results.
Rome wasn't built in a day. The big difference this time around is that -people like Bing-. You'll have to give Microsoft more than two months to put a dent in Google, but I'm positive they will.
MS has barely been working on defeating Google in the last few years. I think the last attempt was Live.com, when did that launch?
I believe the main issue that prevented MS/Yahoo! from defeating Google early on was their reliance on the 'portal' aspects of their sites. Not wanting to lose the revenue from all these complimentary network sites they cluttered their home pages, and focus which kept Google in the position as the lean-mean/no-nonsense search option.
Live.com was an attempt to rectify that, but it was too late to matter.
