After about a week of testing, Yahoo and Microsoft just announced that they have now finalized the transition from Yahoo’s own search engine to Microsoft’s Bing. Microsoft now powers all of Yahoo’s free, organic Web, image and video search results in the U.S. and Canada, though Yahoo will continue to offer its own set of search tools like Site Explorer and Search Monkey. The fact that Yahoo search is now “Powered by Bing” marks the end of a one-year transition period. Last July, after two years of back and forth, Microsoft and Yahoo agreed on a 10-year search and advertising deal.
According to the latest data from comScore, the combined search engine market share of Yahoo and Bing in the U.S. is now about 28%. Google, of course, remains the biggest search engine on the market with a market share of 65.8%. It remains to be seen how Yahoo’s users will react to this change, but given the quality of Bing’s search results, we don’t expect any major backlash against this change from Yahoo’s users.
For Microsoft, finalizing the Yahoo transition puts Bing in a far more competitive position than ever before. With close to 30% of the search market, Bing is now a force to be reckoned with.
Even if you don’t regularly use Microsoft’s search engine, Bing’s history of continuously improving the search experience for its users (especially by giving users access to the information they are looking for with fewer clicks) is keeping Google on its toes and driving it to improve its search products as well.
