Is it R.I.P. for Yahoo! as we know it?

And so Microsoft and Yahoo! finally agree terms of a partnership which will change the face of the web search market. Historically – and let's face it, this story has been ongoing since January 2008! – Microsoft always wanted to take over Yahoo!; but on reflection both parties probably felt that forging a partnership was most likely to give them success against the market leader. So this has to be good news, no?

Well, it'll do some good to have the dominance of Google properly challenged by the next two biggest fish - and Google will probably be concerned. But their partnership entails that Yahoo! Search be powered by Bing and, in return, Yahoo! will become the sales force for both companies' premium search advertising. We've noted recently that Bing is good and was an admirable adversary for Yahoo!, but will a Yahoo! front-end powered by a Bing back-end mean an end to some of Yahoo!'s excellent retrieval tools (often documented on this blog, see this, this, this and this, for example) and, more importantly, an end to their innovative research strategies to better harness the power of structured data on the web? Is the innovative SearchMonkey Open Search Platform to be jettisoned?

The precise details of the partnership are sketchy at the moment, but it would be tragic if this intellectual capital was to be lost or now neglected...