Last summer Microsoft and AOL signed a significant deal where the former was effectively selling off its advertising sales business, while the latter was adopting Bing for all of its search needs. Now the Bing team has confirmed that the migration is finished.
According to a new blog post aimed at advertisers, the entirety of AOL’s search needs are now being fulfilled by Bing, with Microsoft’s search engine covering web, mobile, tablet as well as paid and algorithmic queries.
Microsoft is quick to espouse the benefits of its partnership such as the added reach of its engine and the access to AOL’s public, which, supposedly, spends more money online than a “regular” internet searcher.
Also of note is the new market position that Microsoft’s Bing finds itself in, where thanks to its partnership with Yahoo and AOL, it now sits at almost 30% market share in terms of US PC web searches. Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s no comment on Bing’s virtual absence in the charts when it comes to mobile or non-US searches.
It either case, for better or worse, Microsoft is now powering AOL’s search. Whether anything comes of this remains to be seen later this year.