Yahoo Switches to Bing for Organic Search Results

Following the search alliance it formed with Microsoft last year, Yahoo has announced that Bing is now officially powering all of its organic search results in the U.S. and Canada, meaning webmasters and search-engine optimization professionals need only focus their efforts on one major engine besides market leader Google.

According to ComScore, the completed transition will now give Microsoft’s Bing engine a share of around 28 percent of U.S. searches, compared with a share of around 62 percent for Google.

Announcing the completed transition in a blog post today, Shashi Seth,
SVP of Yahoo Search Products said the company’s Web, image, and video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by Bing in the U.S. and Canada, but did not give any indication of when the switch would take place in other markets.

The company added that it has also begun testing paid search account transitions, helping advertisers port their campaigns over to Microsoft’s adCenter platform. It intends to switch its entire paid search platform to Microsoft’s by the end of October, but stressed it may defer that until after the holiday period if it concludes it will improve overall advertiser and user experience.

News of the organic transition is likely to be welcomed by search engine optimization professionals, however, who now have one less platform with which to work. Yahoo is pointing those users to Bing’s Webmaster suite of tools to ensure their sites are crawled and indexed successfully.