Last year, Yahoo! started using the Bing search engine of Microsoft to power its search results. According to recent reports, Yahoo! will now allow you to sign in with the user IDs and passwords of Facebook and Google accounts. For enabling this, the OpenID authentication protocol will be used. Analysts say that the move from Yahoo! is to increase its number of users by simplifying the login process. This is likely to attract new users as a Yahoo! account will not be required for logging in.
Yahoo! officials said that that it will help both end-users and web site providers as there will be no need to create and remember yet another ID and password. The OpenID authentication system is aimed at streamlining the user identity creation procedure. It will benefit the web community to a great extent. It seems Yahoo! executives are correct in their opinion, but the fact is different. Yahoo! is enabling access from competitor’s account but not vice versa. This shows that the market share of Yahoo! has decreased in the past few years. Recently we saw Yahoo! Japan forming an alliance with Google. Yahoo! and Google, both are market leaders, and the partnership between the two was expected in Japan.
