Yahoo Powered by Bing in 17 Countries, Europe and Asia Next

Yahoo has now completed the switch over to Bing, to power its search engine, in 17 countries. The migration, which started a year ago, is still ongoing and the bulk of the countries where it has been completed only came recently.

In fact, after the initial roll out in the US, in August 2010, Yahoo took its sweet time transitioning other markets. There are several big reasons for this.

The first and the most important is that the US is Yahoo's biggest market and it was a priority. What's more, it was the US that the lengthy negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft over the search deal focused on.

After the companies struck a deal for the all important US market, they took their time reaching an agreement over the international markets which, while part of the initial deal, involved more negotiations.

There are likely technical reasons for the delay as well, the two companies wanted to see how smooth the transition would be in the US and use the lessons learned there when deploying in other places.

Yahoo probably wanted to see how well the ads would perform as well, since Microsoft also powers search ads in the US. Paid search is not provided by Microsoft in most of the other markets that have transitioned to Bing for the organic search results.

There's good reason for this, revenue from search ads has been disappointing for the past quarters, adding to Yahoo's already paltry financial results.

Still, the roll out is moving on, Bing is now behind Yahoo search in 17 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada (English), Chile, Columbia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Spain, the United Kingdom, United States, and Venezuela.

Other countries in Europe, which has only recently started to be included, and Asia, where there have been no Bing transitions, will be added to the list in the coming months Yahoo says.