Late on June 13th, Yahoo and Google announced that they have agreed to a “non-exclusive” agreement to display Google paid ads on the Yahoo network. Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the history of Yahoo, it goes a bit like this:

• Yahoo started as a school project in 1994 by two Standford University Electrical Engineering Ph.D. candidates, David Filo and Jerry Yang.
• In 1995, David and Jerry turned Yahoo into an actual company after receiving 1 million hits in a single day to their unofficial “guide to the internet”
• Yahoo then grew from an online directory to a search engine and an online directory.
• They did OK for a few years.
• In 2003 Yahoo acquired Overture, a pay-per-click advertising service
• Yahoo had a bright future….. or so it seemed
• In 2007 Panama – Yahoo’s version of Google AdWords – was born! It was a good day for Yahoo.
• Soon after it’s release, everyone in the search marketing world soon realized that Panama stunk (I mean, it was – and still is – awful)
• In 2008 Microsoft was pushing Yahoo into an acquisition … until Jerry Yang basically screwed it up. So what is poor little Yahoo to do….. join forces with Google of course. Is it me, or is Yahoo suffering from an identity crisis.

Before Panama, Yahoo was the 2nd largest search engine with 28% of the market share until 2007. Now, Google continues to grow by leaps and bounds, and all other major search engines continue to drop.

Today, Yahoo has 11.68% of the market share. Only time will tell if the recent “agreement” with Google will help Yahoo achieve the success they once thought was possible.