The Seattle-Search.com Blog

A few choice words may say it best.

Not “B-I-N-G” — “Because It’s Not Google” — but rather…

“And then there were two!”

“Make no mistake, Yahoo’s out of the search game,” confided colleague, search pundit and pioneer, Danny Sullivan. We “know the spin. Better user interface, new ways to innovate, a winning play. Let’s not kid ourselves. They’re done. Not today, not necessarily in a year, but down the line.”

Yahoo was simply spellbound by Google. The Y! leadership couldn’t communicate clearly how it was a strong second place player. The Avis to Google’s Hertz, the Pepsi to their Coke. Yahoo seemed weak, ripe for the picking, and Microsoft went to pluck it last year. Google tried for Yahoo itself through a partnership deal. The US Department Of Justice said “No, no, no.” Do that, and we’ll take anti-trust action against you, Google.

This was not an impulse play, however. CEO Steve Ballmer noted on the conference call that the two sides have a 100-page playbook as opposed to a two-page term sheet and also noted that the negotiations were handled by management as opposed to representatives of the company’s boards. Microsoft did not give Yahoo any up-front payment.

Here are the major deal points:

- Microsoft’s Bing will now be the search engine on all Yahoo sites.
- Microsoft now controls a bit less than 1/3 of the search engine market.
- Yahoo’s search will remain branded by Yahoo.
- Yahoo will provide the relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.
- Microsoft will compensate Yahoo through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo’s network. Yahoo will receive 88 percent of revenue from search ads on its site, for the first 5 years.
- The term of the agreement is 10 years.

While this is the fourth reincarnation of the Microsoft search engine, make no mistake: this is Microsoft’s best shot yet at beating its arch rival on its home turf. It’s never put so many resources towards that goal.

“And then there were two!”

While fireworks were cancelled this year in downtown Seattle for the Fourth of July, the Seattle Space Needle towered above a minor inferno late Thursday night that created major headaches at one of Seattle’s most modern data centers, located directly across the street.

Seattle’s Fisher Plaza, home to KOMO TV, KOMO Radio, the Internap Data Center, and several other area Internet companies including Seattle Web host provider, Adhost, was the scene of an electrical blaze triggered by a blown transformer at around 11pm July 2nd  that shut down internet access in the East Data Center of the Fisher complex and knocked out dozens, if not hundreds, of area Web sites until the afternoon of July 3rd.

Among the largest sites affected, Authorize.net, and Microsoft’s BING Travel, were laid low, the former a critical link in many e-commerce transactions and the latter among the slowest to be restored because of special configuration requirements. A list of other blacked-out sites, including Big Fish Games, AllRecipes.com, the Pacific Science Center, and this site, Seattle24×7.com, among others, were disabled.

Seattle tech reporter Todd Bishop lamented that this is the second time a fire has created an outage at the  world-class Fisher Plaza facility, and the problem underscores the question of uninterrupted Web services, cloud computing, SaaS and e-commerce in an age where power outages can vanquish whole city blocks.

The early pioneers of Internet design used to point to the Net’s virtuallly indestructible capacity to survive in a catastrophe by routing around an outage. But until such time as the decentralized Web creates a protocol for a global 301 redirect that automatically forwards users to a secondary, off-site server location, a single co-location solution will always be vulnerable.

This isn’t a criticism of any of the companies in Fisher Plaza because the same situation can happen anywhere. Imagine a plane crash, an explosion, or a fire taking place in your Web hosting facility. If you don’t have a duplicate copy of your Website in another building or at another facility you are flamed out, like a spent fuse on the Fifth of July. [24x7]