Here is Yahoo! Search Marketing’s official statement:

What’s Ahead
There will be no immediate changes to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. Both companies are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial to you as possible. Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the U.S. prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective. Approximately three months in advance, we’ll begin providing you with detailed information about what to expect and how we will assist you.

How the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance Will Benefit You
Once implemented, the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance will enable you to:

Reach more customers.

Save valuable time and effort.

Benefit from rapid innovation.

The CLOUD

The air was still. Silent.
All but the constant drum of “MS..MS..MS..”
Beyond the horizon, however, a small CLOUD appears.
An APParition

Thin and solitary.

A lonesome spirit in the BIG BLUE.

Suddenly, the winds of change blow gently across my keyboard.
A tingle travels down my spine, disrupting my MEMORY.
Where was I? Time warps.
Something stirs in the air.

An approaching CLOUD
Massive and thunderous in APPearance.

In the streets, DRIVERS stop and stare.
Others gather from near and far, sensing something wonderful in the air.
A gentle rain begins to fall.

The HARD WARE and tear of our grounded existence begins to wash away.
We feel lighter, untethered, carefree, ethereal.

The rain falls harder but the CLOUD defies Mother nature’S laws.
It grows in size. APPearing to become more substantial.

We connect with it somehow – this strange CLOUD gathering substance and sustenance from those it has FREEd from their earth-bound tethers.

We have been changed.
Our CONNECTions to each other have grown stronger.

I pause to take a breath of fresh air and look around me to see a better world.
And so I WAVE goodbye to all those with whom I am now CONNECTed. And they WAVE back.

Wave is Google’s new collaborative, universal messaging platform. It is an open source system allowing developers to build collaborative ‘WAVE” communication objects. So, that means you can connect with communication and collaboration systems like email systems, VoIP, IM, photo-sharing, use WAVE as a platform for building blogging sites, discussion groups, build wiki-like sites, and use WAVEs to collaboratively edit documents.  It includes a set of extension APIs allowing you to build games collaboratively inside ‘a wave’ ,  connect with Twitter, Facebook, etc.  It’s about integration into workflows and appears to that ‘ubiquitous‘ collaboration platform talked about often.  The list goes on, but it’s beauty lies in the ability of each of these apps to interact cross-platform seamlessly.    And, it’s all done in the browser. It’s quite remarkable.
wave.google.com (sign-up to become one of the first 100,000 to beta test it)
code.google.com/apis/wave – API documentation
www.waveprotocol.org – whitepapers and protocol

Check out the demo..

Keep up the momentum Microsoft – and we may starting seeing the creep of Google domination (share of searches) start to diminish or perhaps even reverse? Yahoo! Search – with a battering from both sides now, it’s time to beef-up your battleship stations!

One nice feature I like about Bing is how it helps you decide whether you want to click on the link by providing additional information beyond the standard listing (Take NOTE Google and Yahoo!). By scrolling over a vertical line to the right of each listing, AJAX pops up an expanded summary of the page PLUS the major navigation links associated with that destination page. Nice job Bing.

However, from Microsoft paid search advertising perspective, this new feature may actually reduce their revenue by minimizing the number of clicks searchers need to find what they’re looking for. In the end though, that presents an advantage over Google and Yahoo! and may start converting folks over….

CarbonFoot will be watching Bing‘s progress and report back to you.

Search Engine News Blog | CarbonFoot

Find the latest news on the major top-tier search engines as well as second or third-tier search engines right here. But let’s face it – the majority of our blog posts will cover Google.

That said – the re-launch of Microsoft’s former LIVE.com search engine in it’s new incarnation – BING , may begin to change the landscape for market share of searches and thus our coverage of not just Google, but Yahoo! Search and Microsofts’ Bing. For now, we’re sticking with the 80:20 rule – or pretty close to that. According to a Wall Street Journal report from June 23, 2009 – As reported by market research group comScore Inc. (SCOR) last week – Google still outruns them all by a mile wiht about 75% of paid clicks, Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) in second place with approximately 20% and Microsoft a little under 5% share of U.S. paid clicks.

There are other reports that claim Google’s share is even larger but that was months ago and in terms of the changing search engine marketing world – that equates to eons, but it was TechCrunch that quoted a January 2009 Comscore’s qSearch report that a whopping 90% of searches are conducted on Google published on TechCrunch (see full article: Google Gobbles Up 90% of Search Engine Searches

And so the news continues….

We welcome your comments!

- CarbonFoot Interactive

PS – Don’t forget to check out CarbonFoot’s: Search Engine Marketing Blog that delivers the latest trends, tools and technology on digital marketing. Keep up-to-date with online marketing news. Subscribe today!