Today Yahoo finally made its deal with Microsoft public.  Under the new agreement, Microsoft will now power all Yahoo searches and Yahoo will become the sales force of the two firms’ advertising customers.  Additionally, Yahoo will continue to focus on building customer-facing portals and Internet destination sites.

So, in effect, Yahoo has abandoned any type of unique identity it once had as all the capital and manpower invested in its search assets are down the drain.  You see, in the three horse race of desktop search, Google was number one, Yahoo was a second place with about 20% of the search market, and Microsoft was third place.  Now, Microsoft has secured the second place and will now be in a better position to challenge to Google in the lucrative desktop search market.

Yahoo was once a mighty giant in the Internet space.  It even commanded the number one spot in search for many years.  Then, abandoning its search technology, Yahoo adopted Google as their search provider.  in more recent years, Yahoo abandoned its deal with Google and went pack to powering their search queries on Yahoo.com.

Now, with search results provided by Bing, Yahoo has gutted themselves of any identity as a provider of any valid services.  With today’s announcement and its deal with Microsoft, Yahoo has admitted defeat to Google in the search market.

Who’s the big winner in today’s deal?  Microsoft, obviously.  They’ve now entered in to an agreement whereby Bing has asserted itself as a force against Google’s search dominance.

Unfortunately for Yahoo, they waited too long for this deal to be sweet for them.  Over the winter, they tried to hold out for a high share price to be taken over by Microsoft.  In the meantime, Flickr’s founders have left and so have the founders of Del.icio.us, Yahoo’s other exciting Web 2.0 acquisition of the recent past.

So, as a result, Yahoo has lost its sexiness as a provider of innovative web 2.0 services and their highly sought after search assets as well.  Hopefully Yahoo has something up its sleeve, otherwise Microsoft stands out as the clear winner in this deal between the web giants.

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, the wiki-based community encyclopedia, has announced that that Wikia Search will be closed down soon.  While this is terrible news for proponents of the popular community-based search product, the impact of Wikia Search will live on.

Wikia Search, for those unfamiliar, is a search solution that relies not upon mathematical algorithms for ranking search results, rather Wikia Search utilizes user input to rank and position search results.  Additionally, the Wiki community had the ability to delete, add to, and comment on entries, creating a community feel to the once-popular Wikia search engine.

This Wiki-based search is a very popular service.  According to an eWeek article, Nielsen Online reported that Wikia Search was the web’s 5th fastest growing member-driven destination in February 2009, following sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Even though Wikia had a short life, it’s impact on the search market was pronounced.  In fact, as a result to community-based search being so popular, Google recently implemented SearchWiki, a similar service now found inside a typical Google search result set.

The point that remains is this: No company “owns” search and there are loads of innovations that will manifest from companies who are focused on bringing them to market. We at Taptu believe we are helping push search into the mobile market in an exciting new way.

We look forward to having you join us on our journey!

Look ma, we’re on the telly!

On Friday, Sky News broadcast a report on Google’s 10th Birthday (Happy birthday, guys!) Looking to the future of search, Sky interviewed Steve, our CEO, on how mobile search fits into the exciting times ahead.

You’ll find the Taptu segment on mobile search at the 4 minutes mark, but the whole report is interesting, covering the likes of Microsoft Live Search, Cuil and Powerset semantic search engine.

Last week, Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief at The Next Web, interviewed Steve, our CEO, asking some very interesting questions about the mobile social search, wondering whether we were bonkers for seemingly going against Google, the giant of search.

After interviewing Ives and trying out the service myself, I can say that Taptu has found Google’s Achilles heel. Mobile social search is one of those ideas that seem obvious after somebody explained to you – just like Paul Arden’s books. The service is still in early beta, yet when Ives tells about his ambitious plan, I truly believe he can achieve them.

Since launching the new features a few weeks ago, many new users have echoed Ernst-Jan’s thoughts, and it’s truly great to hear it. Without you, our users, we’d just be this mad David against the Goliaths of Search. But with you, we can be mad and daring together. So thank you!

This morning, I woke up to find that Robert Scoble posted his review of our mobile search engine. I was convinced that Robert would enjoy using Taptu, but the review is simply glowing!