Yahoo is still one of the most powerful search front-ends in the world, but in most regions, Bing now takes care of every back-end concern – including both the search algorithm and the search ads. Yahoo is continuing to transition its services to Bing today with the official migration of seven additional region-specific versions of Yahoo,
The Bing-Powered Areas
The seven additional countries where Bing is powering Yahoo are Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands Norway, Russia, and Sweden. Further, “several countries in MENA” (the Middle East and North Africa version of Yahoo) will be seeing Bing results in the Arabic language. While many major regions in Europe and the U.S. have long been powered by Bing, it’s clear that Yahoo is making is making a big push to complete the migration project; these 7 countries bring the total migrations for this month to 19.
How the Alliance Changes the Game
For Yahoo, the shift to Bing is a big cost-of-operations boon; Yahoo is currently splitting the transition costs with Microsoft while still maintaining their own search back-end in select regions. Once the transition is complete, Yahoo will be able to cut costs substantially while still picking up 88% of all search revenue – much to the relief of concerned shareholders.
For optimizers, the change means both a simplification of tools (Yahoo and Bing Webmaster Tools are combining, as just one example) and an increased incentive to work on both optimization and marketing with Bing. Between Bing and Yahoo, Microsoft now controls over 30% of the U.S. search market.
[Sources include: The Yahoo Blog]
