After a struggle for 18-months, Microsoft has finally persuaded Yahoo to surrender its search engine Yahoo search to Microsoft search engine Bing. As per the 10-year deal, Microsoft’s technology will power Yahoo’s search results, while Yahoo will handle ad-selling duties for both companies’ search sites.

“I am very enthusiastic,” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO said in an interview. “This is what I have basically been saying for the past 18 months: The world will be better served for consumers, advertisers and publishers, and there will be more competition for Google, if we can somehow figure out how to get Microsoft and Yahoo together in search.”

According to the research firm ComScore Inc, it is expected that Bing’s U.S. market share would instantly increase to 28 % which is triple that of current rate, whereas, Google holds 65% of U.S. searches. In the share market, the share of Yahoo Inc is dropped by 12 percent, while the share of Microsoft Corp is increased by 33 cents to $23.80.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa commented on the deal as “It’s ‘unfortunate’ that there will now be one fewer major search player because it will weaken the competitive landscape. In their quest to catch up with Google, both Yahoo and Microsoft were doing interesting and innovative things in search. That has been good for the industry”. And added that “With this deal, Microsoft is likely to feel less urgency to innovate and “move the needle”.

Google is looking at the deal as good one for net surfers, “There has traditionally been a lot of competition online, and our experience is that competition brings about great things for users,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said. “We’re interested to learn more about the deal.”

On May 26, 2009, Yahoo has unveiled a Creative Commons license filter that allows net surfers to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse. This feature will help people who are looking for a picture to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page.

On the Yahoo blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai have commented on the filter as “We knew from our March blog post about the release of the Yahoo! Image Search filters that our community wanted an easy way to search for images that could be reused. By launching the Creative Commons license search with Flickr and making it available to all our Yahoo! Image Search users, we aim to promote reusable work and to be transparent about the guidelines issued by the creator of a particular image. We’re proud to be the first image search engine to offer this capability.”

You will see a checkbox for creative commons that allows you to choose filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or modified. Now it is easy to find CC-licensed images on Flickr for any occasion easily.

Yahoo officially declared closure of GeoCities as “You can continue to enjoy your Web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now–we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.”

Now it doesn’t allows new users to open an account. GeoCities was so popular in 90’s, and its personal home page service will go an era of self-expression on the Web that’s largely been replaced by social networks and blogs.

Yahoo’s statement clearly infers that it may move a site to another service, as it did when shutting down Yahoo Photos, but in the current climate, it’s probably best not to expect such a graceful transition option.

In Washington, 17/12/2008, Yahoo announced that it will cut to three months the time it stores personal data gathered from Web surfing, making its retention policy the shortest among peers. Due to the pressure from European and other data protection officials to do more to protect the privacy of users, Google halved the amount of time it stores personal data to nine months. The European Union has recommended that Internet search companies keep data no more than six months and urged the sector to adopt an industry-wide standard.