Yahoo! and HP in search agreement
A
recent agreement between Yahoo! And HP will feature the prominent
search engine being pre-installed as a homepage on millions of
computers.
The
agreement means that HP will have to set up desktop and notebook PCs so
that Yahoo!’s search engine appears in the toolbar of Microsoft
Internet Explorer 7. There is also talk of a co-branded Yahoo! / HP
toolbar which will allow consumers access to search, mail, news and a
range of other Yahoo! services.”Partnering with a company like HP, that
has been a leader in its industry for many years, puts Yahoo! in an
excellent position to be able to distribute our most widely adopted
offerings,” said Yahoo!’s COO Dan Rosensweig.The deal echoes a similar
agreement which Yahoo! made with Acer computers, an up and coming
Taiwan-based manufacturer, and is also reminiscent of the partnership
established between Google and Dell a few months back; it seems that
Yahoo! are following suit with HP in an attempt to catch up in the
search market share.No financial details about the deal have been
published as of yet, but it is suspected that both Yahoo! and Google
have promised their respective manufacturers ongoing revenue streams in
return for the valuable desktop space.The value for Google and Yahoo!
comes from assuming the role of a default search engine; and as the
majority of users do not usually change PC settings, the search engine
will likely be utilised for as long as the PC is in use.So now that
Google and Yahoo! are getting a foot in the door with manufacturers,
can we expect to see a rise in desktop applications? Google has, in
fact, already released a range of online applications; and by
partnering up with manufacturers, search engines will undoubtedly be
better equipped to extend such applications to users.Is pre-loaded
software going to prove useful in the battle for search dominance?
Well, we all know of – or perhaps are – types who have never placed a
priority on removing the pre-loaded programs from their computer. Don’t
we?