This week Yahoo! announced that their transition from Yahoo! Search powered results to Bing search results is complete. The organic results are now powered by Bing in the US and Canada, whilst the search ads are still from Yahoo!
As a result of the deal signed over a year ago, Microsoft now owns 28.1% of the US search market (as of July’s 2010 comScore numbers), though this figure still represents less than half of the 65.8% share held by Google. In the UK, Google’s market share is thought to be closer to the 90% mark.
The change may not be immediately apparent to Yahoo! users, as the search interface will remain the same. However, the eagle-eyed will notice on the status bar in their browser that the search data is actually loaded from Bing.
Another crucial factor in the deal is the migration of Yahoo! search advertisers to Microsoft’s adCenter platform. This stage is currently still under development, with Microsoft “optimistic about completing this phase later this year.”
So what does this mean for businesses? The main thing is that there is one less search engine to optimise a site for. If your sites were high up on Yahoo! but not Bing then this is bad news, if however, you were ranking well on Bing, then those high rankings you are enjoying will now expose your business to a lot more searchers.
The other main impact is the migration of Pay Per Click advertisers from Yahoo! Search Marketing to Microsoft adCenter. The programmes work slightly differently and anyone who was using YSM will now have to familiarise themselves with the Bing system.
