It looks like Google may have scored big time in the UK Market. What if it is being used by one of the leading online portal in the UK as a search engine. But what is more important is the fact that online portal happens to be a co-branded service of BT Broadband and BT Yahoo?
Connected Internet UK is reporting that BT Yahoo has just replaced Yahoo search for the portal’s natural and sponsored results. Although the new arrangement will not affect other Yahoo services on BT Yahoo, the fact still remains that it will be using Google, not Bing to power its UK portal’s search engine.
Interestingly, this has to happen right after Yahoo and Microsoft has agreed on a search ad deal in the U.S. With this deal, Yahoo is actually sending 35% of its search traffic to Google rather than to what could possibly be a Yahoo/Microsoft search portal once their deal kicks off.
The report also mentioned that BT Broadband is actually hoping to increase its portal’s search usage while may be unintentionally gaining from Google’s higher Revenue Per Share.
The Google folks are most probably happy by now since they have finally captured almost all of the big ISPs in the UK. But the question is would Microsoft do something about it? Especially since it has been trying to snag a big share of the search market from Google which will be further strengthen by its deal with Yahoo.
