Yahoo! loses spot at Britain's biggest ISP

Search function goes to Google

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Telecoms, 28th August 2009 08:02 GMT

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In a bizarre development Yahoo! has lost its search place on the BT Yahoo! home page to Google.

BT is the UK's largest ISP and the deal will presumably not do much for Yahoo!'s page impressions, which it puts at 720m a month for the UK and Ireland (that's from 2001). Google already provided the technology behind the search but this fact was buried in the FAQs*.

BT Yahoo! - Powered by quiet sobbing and the gnashing of teeth

A BT spokesman told us: "We are delighted that we are continuing to work with Yahoo! through to 2011. As part of this new agreement BT Yahoo!’s web search will be provided by Google. We made this decision based on the fact that Google is the most popular search engine in the UK. The combination of Google’s search engine with Yahoo’s leading content and email services offers customers the ultimate broadband experience."

BT and Yahoo! originally palled up in 2003 to jointly-market broadband services.

We've yet to hear back from Google or Yahoo!, although to be fair, Google's HQ was smouldering yesterday.

You'd think Bing might have been in with a chance... ®

* See comments below.

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