Search will be a two horse race by the end of the year, attention to “Microhoo”

London, 19 February, 2010 - Microsoft's plans to buy Yahoo's internet search and search advertising businesses have been cleared by both European and US regulators. This will mean Bing powers the natural search results for Yahoo!, while Yahoo! handles advertising for Bing.

In a press release last week, Greenlight, the UK's leading independent award-winning search marketing agency, revealed its top 10 predictions for natural and paid search. It predicted the search landscape would be a two horse race by the end of the year, drawing attention to "Microhoo".

Microsoft and Yahoo! finalised their tie-up in early December, shortly after the competition regulators in Canada and Australia approved the deal. Greenlight said it expected other countries to follow suit, paving the way to integration before the year is out.

"Having pledged 5-10% of their operating profits ($22.5 billion in 2008) to promoting Bing over the next 5 years, Microsoft has a good chance of increasing Bing's market share over the next year (much as they have in the US)", says Adam Bunn, Head of SEO at Greenlight. "That could make 'Microhoo' worth paying much more attention to from an SEO perspective."

Greenlight's other predictions for paid and natural search include:

• Investment into 'TwitFaceSpace' will continue to rise
• Google's Twitter integration will change fundamentally
• Google factors the content of videos into page relevancy scores
• Internet use on mobile phones will accelerate and mobile search will take off
• Google will find more ways to monetise the excess inventory in AdWords
• Winning the click will be more important than ever
• There will be increased spends across Google's Contextual Network
• Latency becomes part of the Google algorithm
• Domain structure will play a bigger role for Paid Search

Read Greenlight's top 10 predictions for Paid and Natural Search here