The on-off relationship between Microsoft and Yahoo has been consummated. A new 10-year deal will bind the two companies as they seek to compete with Google.
In January 2008, Microsoft originally offered $47.5 billion to buy Yahoo outright. Despite Yahoo’s ongoing financial difficulties, the deal was rejected because co-founder and then director Jerry Yang demanded more money. Continue »
Yahoo has announced that two of its search engine-powered web services will be officially closed on 31 August 2009:
- Term Extraction — a service that provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger document, and
- Contextual Web Search — a service which allows you to search the Internet for web pages using a context-based query.
The announcement was made by Brian Cantoni of the Yahoo Developer Network in a Yahoo Groups posting. According to the post, both these public-facing sevices share an internal backend data source that is closing down. Continue »