Today Yahoo! and Bing have announced that the transition to Bing powering Yahoo! Search is now complete. When searching with Yahoo! in the United States or Canada (English) you will see a “powered by Bing” notification at the bottom of the listing and will appear on all web, image and video searches on both desktop and mobile devices.
Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products announced on the Yahoo! Search blog that Microsoft’s Bing backend is now powering Yahoo! search results and said that he was “proud to announce that the transition of organic search between Yahoo! and Microsoft is complete”; he also encourages readers to read the Bing blog post regarding the issue. Organic search means none paid searches.
Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, said that they are continuing to migrate to adCenter and “are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall” and hope that the work they are doing on the transition doesn’t affect advertisers over the holiday period.
The Search Alliance, made up of both companies, were keen to point out that they will now be hard at work on bring the Bing powered results to more markets and for different languages.
It was only a week ago that Yahoo! announced that the two companies were starting to make the transition from Yahoo!’s backend systems to Microsoft’s so it comes as a slight surprise that the number two and three search engines have completed this transition so quickly.
This completion of the transition to Bing powering Yahoo! might take some time to be observed within market share. However Bing should now provide better, more accurate results as it is hoped the search platform will now have critical mass allowing the search algorithms to really work to their maximum potential. This news should also mean that Microsoft is now the number two search engine, only behind Google by about 30% of the search market; the Search Alliance has some way to go yet.