For many years Yahoo! has been largely forgotten on the NZ internet landscape. Due to the dominance of Google in the search space and MSN\’s cooperation with New Zealands largest telco, Yahoo! hasn\’t had a look in.
However, the recent announcement, that Yahoo!7 (itself a joint venture between Yahoo! and the 7 Network in Australia) is to join forces in a content and services agreement with Telecom and its ISP Xtra, means that Yahoo! has emerged as a serious player in NZ overnight (Well on 1 March when the agreement starts)
For all of those non internet savvy consumers that leave most of their technology on the defaults that things come with, the high proportion that are Xtra customers will soon be using Yahoo! whether they like it or not (or more like whether they know it or not)
For some this is the key to a change of this kind. Most of the people who use the MSN search box at the top of the Xtra web page will blindly use the new Yahoo!7 search box and not really know the difference. It may look redder than before, but for these consumers it\’s too hard to change so why bother.
Yahoo!7 will take advantage of this behaviour to generate instant traffic, traffic that MSN will lose just as instantly.
For the rest of us who have chosen our search engine, most of who choose Google, things wont change much.
But for Web developers like us here at Deepweb, will need to take a closer look at Yahoo and its newly discovered penetration into the New Zealand market.
Will you change? Do you conciously choose your search engine?
We shall wait and see
Till Next Time