Yahoo has taken up the round-about way of beating Google instead of by itself and has come forward to support Microsoft’s latest wing Bing, as per reports appearing in the The Wall Street Journal and Boom Town Blog. Another report in Advertising Age says ads placed in the search results would be served by Microsoft’s new technology AdCenter and not by Yahoo’s advertisement platform Panama.

Editor of Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan is of the opinion that Yahoo is giving up on search and further analyses the matter thus:

Yahoo will continue to sell search ads both in its and Bing’s platforms with a 80% retainer; online search data and buying habits of computer users will be with Microsoft and will improve its ability to identify and serve up the most profitable and relevant ads in the long run; by running the technology underlying this arrangement, ultimate winner will be Microsoft.

Google has 65% and the Microsoft-Yahoo combination 30% in the present market share. But the progress Microsoft’s Bing makes with the support of Yahoo, will make it as the only search engine apart from Google. Surely an insurance for Microsoft and Bing.

Now there are media executives who are complaining bitterly about the way in which Google ranks sites and they feel that it is not a fair system. One does naturally have to remember that this is a primarily capitalist society and Google is a commercial concern, naturally it is going to promote those that pay it to do so. For this reason Google does put some media companies before others – they are generally referred to as trusted partners and there are a number of ways in which Google puts them ahead of the competition.  The search giant weights their domain higher than others, features their recent news in its News section and then also if one conducted a search and finally there is better coverage given to content that provides information and is not merely of a commercial nature.

This of course means that those in the media industry that are effectively not “in favour” with the search giant are at a disadvantage. But instead of sitting back on their heels and whining, perhaps they should view this situation as a challenging opportunity and rise up to take advantage of something that could change the way in which they produce their work and thereby generate revenue.

The simple fact is that there is a lot of nonsense on the web today and content that is well written is hard to find. Perhaps one of the easiest ways in which to determine whether content is good or not is to see the search ranking that the original article gets as opposed to a rewritten piece. If the rewrite scores higher, there is clearly something wrong with either the way in which the original was composed.

Ensuring that one has the right business model for the internet is another challenge that many companies face. Even if they were to get higher ratings from Google the fact remains that they are not adaptable enough for the dynamic nature of the internet. It is very important that media and marketing companies are flexible in their approach to the online medium. They cannot simply hope that a good article will mean they get fantastic coverage. Optimisation is not only about key words, it is about content that is linkworthy, interesting and relevant. It is only if content can fulfill these criteria that it can be considered to be of sufficient quality.