Is the Microhoo deal going to hurt Google?

This week Microsoft and Yahoo announced that they had struck a deal, to come into effect in 2010, to make Bing the replacement for Yahoo Seach and to share advertising revenue. People around the internet were up on arms about how this is going to harm Google and how Google is going to have to change their model because of this but I really don't think that this is going to affect Google in any way whatsoever.

This deal is essentially going to remove Yahoo Search and replace it with Bing so all the Yahoo Search users will now be using Bing, removing one competitor of Google, who will not lose any users. In fact Yahoo Search might not like Bing and decide to make the switch to Google, giving Google more users and more revenue.

On the Advertrising side, Google will not be affected at all, they are not going to lose advertisers and may gain some from Microsoft/Yahoo because they may be turned off by the advertising model. Microsoft/Yahoo may look like they are getting more advertising revenue but Google will lose none, essentially meaning that Microhoo are making themselves look good while not harming there main competition.

Overall, this deal is going to be good for Microsoft and Yahoo as they will get more money from each other and, in the case of Bing, more people searching using their service. Google, however will not be affected much by this deal and they really shouldn't be worried by it.

BING! and Google Squared

Microsoft officially released their new search engine Bing this week. Bing is a replacement for their previous search engine, Live Search which wasn't very good and very few people used it except for seaching for Google. Microsoft hopes that Bing will bring them more revenue and will revolutionize web search.

I have been using it a bit lately and it has it's good and bad parts. Firstly the bad...It doesn't have pages for image search which means that it will load all the images on the one page meaning some lag and also it will be harder to get to the first image if you are near the bottom. Another bad thing is that that in the video search the live previews are too small and it is hard to get a real idea of what the video is. Also...it has a very bad background and the interface is very much like that of Google and that it doesn't have a very good search ranking system.
The good things are that it does provide good related search terms on the side of the page and the advanced search options are very easy to use and access.

Next to Google's new tool...Google Squared which was also launched this week. I have only just started using this and so far it can be very useful for accessing simple information very quickly and for accessing a whole set of data simply and easily. Just think of it as a much simpler WolframAlpha but without the real language search abilities. I will post more soon as I use this more but so far it looks like a very good tool from the overlords at Google.