Yahoo’s partnership with Microsoft is moving along smoothly and quickly. The transition of Yahoo’s back-end services to Bing are continuing, with six additional major countries now seeing Bing results when they conduct a Yahoo search.
The Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance
Yahoo is a search front-end with a strong web portal platform, but it’s not of a search site anymore. That doesn’t mean Yahoo isn’t gaining some profit from their search, however. They’re still the second most popular place to search from, and only 12 percent of their ad revenue gets bumped back to Microsoft. Additionally, Yahoo can lower its costs, cut some employees, and focus on more profitable services.
That’s the plan, anyway. Shareholders haven’t been particularly happy with Yahoo of late, and some have even called for the resignation of CEO Carol Bartz. The calls for resignation were largely in response to dismal Q2 earnings. Bartz and others have defended the company’s plan, however, stating that the completion of the transition will cut costs dramatically.
Yahoo still runs their own search back-end in several regions, but six major countries are now seeing Bing for their Yahoo searches. “This week we have transitioned algorithmic results to Microsoft in France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom,” stated the official Yahoo blog entry discussing the matter. That’s in addition to six countries that migrated in late July (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Peru, and Venezuela). In total, Bing now runs Yahoo’s search algorithm an search ads in 17 countries.
Once the transition is complete, Yahoo will no longer need to maintain their algorithm or ads, and several additional search-specific services (such as their webmaster tools) can be shut down). Servers can also be closed or re-purposed. Whether it will really turn Yahoo around or not, there’s no doubt that finishing the migration will be a boon for the company’s cost of operations.
[Sources include: The Yahoo Blog]
