Ins & Outs

The short answer is, not really. The searcher is still going to benefit from Yahoo! and Bing, with their individual offerings. Yahoo is not going to suddenly become obsolete and transition completely into Bing.

Quote from the Search Alliance website:

When the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is implemented, both companies will continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences. However, Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by adCenter) search results.

What this means is that Yahoo will still look like Yahoo, but the search results will be powered and thus syndicated by Bing, much in the same way that Google syndicates its search results to AOL.

Yahoo will try to give its search results a bit of a twist by innovating around the listings it receives from Microsoftby integrating Yahoo! content, shortcuts and tools.

The really simple answer for consumers is that unless they plan on buying shares in either of these companies, the intricacies of the search alliance will not be that obvious to them. The implications of Microsoft receiving a 10-year licence to certain Yahoo! search technologies thus making Bing and Google the principle big II search engines will be interesting to say the least.

On the flip side, the search advertiser who is putting their dollars into Yahoo has a little bit more to worry about. The ramifications are slowly starting to become clear " more on that soon!