The Yahoo and Microsoft on-again off-again partnership/buyout discussions have been all over the financial and Internet news for a while, so I don’t need to chronicle those here. Yesterday afternoon, news broke that Yahoo and Microsoft were not only talking once again, but a deal was imminent. This morning it was announced that a deal between the two companies had been completed – finally.

According to Reuters, the upshot of the deal is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will handle search duties on all Yahoo-owned websites, and Yahoo will be responsible for selling the premium search ads. This means that Bing will now be the search engine for nearly 30% of all searches, up from 8% in June according to a report from Comscore. This is big news for owners of generic domain names.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article stating that Microsoft’s Bing search engine seems to love developed generic domain names. I listed a small sample of search results for generic domain names on Google and on Bing, and they clearly ranked much better on Bing. While I was doing my small sample, noted domain investor Edwin Hayward was doing the same comparison with similar results, and the white paper he wrote shares his results.I didn’t report Yahoo’s search results, but they were somewhere between Bing and Google for the most part.

This is very good news for domain investors, because it means if a company has a generic domain name, it should rank higher for almost 30% of web searches rather than just 8%, making these domain names more desired and valuable. I won’t speculate about what will happen with PPC payouts because domain parking is a very small % of 1% of my total revenue, so I will let other experts provide commentary on that side of things.

I believe this is good news for owners of generic domain names.

One of my favorite travel websites is Farecast.com. The website makes predictions about the price of airfare for major airlines, and it advises whether consumers should purchase their tickets or wait to purchase them, based on a proprietary algorithm (which is based on historic trends and other factors).

From a branding perspective, Farecast is a great brand. Fare from “airfare” is combined with “cast” from forecast, creating a “farecast,” which is a forecast of airfare. The brand is short, unique, and memorable, a powerful branding combination.

A few months ago, I noticed that when I typed in Farecast.com, I was redirected to Farecast.Live.com. The site was still branded as Farecast, but it was redirected to a Microsoft URL. Based on this, I assumed Microsoft had purchased the company, but nothing had really changed so I didn’t think much of it.

Yesterday I received an email from a sender called “bing travel,” and the email notified me that, “Live Search Farecast has joined forces with MSN Travel to become Bing Travel.” I visited Farecast.com, and noticed that the header said “Bing” and there doesn’t seem to be any mention of Farecast. In my opinion, this is a HUGE branding mistake.

Not only has Microsoft killed a great unique brand in Farecast, but it rebranded as a still little-known brand, “Bing.” I understand what they are tying to do – get people familiar with the Bing brand, but it just seems too risky. IMO, “Bing Travel” sounds like a small family travel agency rather than a powerful airfare comparison tool. I think this is a “bing” mistake.

The other (smaller) mistake Microsoft is making is that BingTravel.com doesn’t resolve. They were smart enough to buy it back in July of 2007, but it currently goes to a dead page, despite being on MSFT nameservers.

Only time will tell if this was a smart move, but at least in the short term, I don’t think it wasn’t. This is especially true because I would find it strange to recommend Bing Travel to friends, especially because BingTravel.com doesn’t work!