With search deal, MS wins back everyone who had Live hijacked by Yahoo

So Microsoft has partnered with Yahoo!, and Bing will now provide the heavy lifting when it comes to search. When I read the news this morning, I immediately thought of all the Yahoo bloatware I've seen over the years on certain OEM systems - I won't single out anyone like HP for this.

Live (and now Bing) would have been the default search engine on all these systems, were it not for the Yahoo! bundle. Now, after years of this and Y! Messenger sneaking the Yahoo! toolbar onto the machines of my click-first-and-read-later customers, it looks like Microsoft is going to win back all that search juice.

And the default search engine swap to Yahoo! was perpetrated by more than their own software. Loads of applications - like the non-slim version of CCleaner - come bundled with the toolbar. It all adds up to a big time win for Bing on the desktop.

All without end users lifting a finger to make their own choices. That's important, because many of them weren't paying attention the first time around.

Tags: bloatware, microsoft, search-engines, share, yahoo