Yingoo: The Yahoo-Microsoft Search Engine
You may have heard that, finally, Yahoo and Microsoft have teamed up in the search engine arena. That’s all well and good, and actually a smart move by both companies. The new Bing engine from Microsoft is nice and a huge improvement over Microsoft’s previous search engine. Meanwhile Yahoo rocks at providing great services like Flickr, Yahoo Answers, and Delicious (or at least buying them and allowing them to keep rocking).
By allowing Microsoft to focus on Yahoo’s search technology, it frees up a lot of resources at Yahoo to focus on improving its service offerings. It also strengthens Google’s greatest search competitor by consolidating the second and third place engines. While we at The 42nd Estate love Google and all of its search and secondary service offerings, strong, healthy competition is a good thing for everyone involved, including the search engines and their users.
That leaves us with one remaining problem.
Branding.
Bing + Yahoo = Yingoo
Continuing to run with the Yahoo and Bing brands will only serve to confuse consumers, who know that they are really one and the same.
So, even though Microsoft just underwent a huge re-branding campaign, we say it’s time to re-brand again.
To better explain why, let’s first talk about Google. Their brand name has become so synonymous with search that people routinely refer to searching for something as googling for that term. It’s a brilliant piece of branding that has enabled Google to permeate our subconsciousness. We no longer tell people to go search for a topic, we tell them to Google it. There’s even phrases and acronyms that have built up around the name, such as “Google is your friend” and “lmgtfy” (meaning Let Me Google That For You).
For the Bing-Yahoo engine to take the next step, they need to go into a similar re-branding mode and verbize their name [yes, I just made up a word there]. Let’s see how each of the three brand names works as a verb (this is crucial!).
- I Yahooed you
- I Binged you
- I Googled you
- I Yingooed you
Terrible, does not roll off the tongue. Has connotations of corralling someone, putting them in a box, not discovering them.
Better, but still not so good. Sounds like you’re flicking someone off. Reminds me off Chandler Bing from Friends (not a good thing).
Near-perfect. There’s a reason Google as a verb has taken off, it rolls off the tongue, sounds slightly perverse and is extremely fun to say.
Nice! Sounds a little esoteric and mysterious. Is fun to say. Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well as googled, but certainly better than binged or yahooed. It’s also unique and has no relation to this guy.
Yingoo also has the added benefits of being close to the term Yin Yang, giving a connotation that combined together Yahoo and Microsoft deliver a perfect union of services and searches. Plus, it has the word goo in it, which might just be the real reason Google has taken off (after all, who doesn’t like saying the word goo?).
Building a technically sound search engine that delivers solid results should be at the forefront of the MS/Yahoo search engine, but giving it a name that acts as a verb, is fun to say, and includes the word goo will help push them as a true competitor to Google. Assuming, of course, their search engine begins to compete with Google on result relevancy.
Tags: branding, google, microsoft, search engines, yahoo
I googled yingoo and find Auto Produts & Service site. lOl…
There also yingoo page on facebook about modeling. Hahaha…
I think the real question here is something you touched on, Adam: will “Yingoo” become as ubiquitous as Google? I think they’d have to give you some sort of value add, like either real time search or social search in with whatever bots they are running. This is the time to strike before Facebook really jumps into the social search game.
Very true Alison. I think the new Yahoo homepage is a start, where visitors can add modules to pull in their social networks and other tidbits. It’ll allow them to be a search engine plus a portal. That’s the big differentiator between Yahoo and Google right now, Google focuses on search and also provides other services while Yahoo focuses on other services and also provides search.
Real-time search is already in Google, sort of. Under show options they have filters to show results from the past 24 hours or recent results. Since search engines are about finding resources across the web and across time, I don’t think we’ll see a huge real-time integration. But even adding dates into the main search results would be a positive step in the right direction.