Yahoo Completes the Switch to Bing in Europe and Asia

Yahoo is announcing that the switch to Microsoft Bing-powered organic search results has been completed in most of the places Yahoo Search is available. All of the European markets have been transitioned as well as the Asian ones, with the sole exception of South Korea.

Yahoo started a big push to transition all of its local search engines to Bing earlier this summer and has been updating several countries at a time. In the latest batch, many of the remaining countries in both Asia and Europe were completed.

"The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance continues its great progress with the completion of algorithmic transition to Microsoft for all Asian markets, except for Korea," Kartik Ramakrishnan, vice president, Search Engineering at Yahoo, wrote.

"The team also recently completed European markets with algorithmic transition," he said.

"The global transition to Microsoft’s back-end algorithmic search functionality enables us to continue to focus on creating compelling and innovative search experiences that will help people stay informed, productive and entertained. We will be sure to keep you updated," he added.

Yahoo is announcing the completion of the transition to Bing in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. In one fell swoop, the Asian market has been covered.

The announcement doesn't mention a couple of big Yahoo sites in the region, Yahoo Japan and Yahoo China. Despite the name, Yahoo doesn't completely own those two properties, though it has significant shares in them.

Yahoo Japan announced last year that it is switching to Google and will not use Bing for search results.

In Europe, the picture is clearer, with the addition of several new countries, Greece, Poland, Romania, Switzerland (German, French and Italian languages) and Turkey, Europe completes the transition to Bing for organic search results.

Yahoo has already switched in several countries in South America and the Middle East and North Africa region. At this point, the transition is still pending in a few more countries.