It took almost two years, but Yahoo has finally switched all of its search sites over to Bing, with the sole exception of South Korea. What's more, all search partners that had integrated Yahoo Search features are being powered by Bing as well.
Yahoo made the most progress, in terms of the number of countries switched over,
these last few months.
The process is now complete and Yahoo can finally look forward to a future where it doesn't have its own search infrastructure.
"It is with great pleasure I’d like to share that Yahoo! has completed the algorithmic transition to Bing in all global markets (except Korea), across desktop and mobile, for all Yahoo! and syndication traffic," Kartik Ramakrishnan, VP of Search Engineering at Yahoo,
wrote.
"This has been a huge effort spanning 20-plus months involving many people across Yahoo! and Microsoft," he said.
Yahoo hasn't been able to complete the transition in South Korea since its involvement in the market is linked to a big local player in search, Daum.
Yahoo detailed the complexity of the switch and also some of the hurdles it had to overcome along the way. Bing is now powering Yahoo Search in 40 markets. It is also powering search sites that rely on Yahoo Search BOSS in more than 50 places.
The company also boasted that it wasn't a matter of simply replacing the backend and calling it a day. It wanted to make sure that search quality doesn't suffer as a result and has worked with Bing to improve the areas where there were big gaps between Bing and Yahoo's existing search technology.
It also wanted the switch to be completely invisible to users and this meant that all important Yahoo Search features had to work as before after the transition to Bing.
On another note, while the technical hurdles may have been overcome, Yahoo is still not seeing much of an improvement in terms of revenue it gets from the paid search part of the deal, Microsoft is still pouring money into Yahoo since the minimum revenue guarantees are not met.
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