Yahoo will start providing Bing-powered search results for a small portion of the traffic this month. This is the next phase in the ‘merger’ of the two search engines which is slated to be complete by the holidays. Yahoo has already been testing the Bing integration offline, in a controlled environment, but it will now start using Bing for live traffic as well.
“Though much of our testing is already happening offline, this month we’ll also test the delivery of organic and paid search results provided by Microsoft on live Yahoo! traffic,” Yahoo said in an email to advertisers
uncovered by Search Engine Land.
Yahoo has been working on replacing its own organic search infrastructure with Bing, after a major deal signed by Yahoo and Microsoft. So far, the testing has been done offline and not on Yahoo Search. This will change this month, according to the company.
In all likelihood, users won’t notice any difference as there is no way to tell where the search results are coming from, other than comparing them for the same query on both search engines. Even in this case, the ranking may be identical even if the results don’t have the same source.
If everything goes smoothly, Yahoo Search will be transitioned completely to Bing results in the next two months. However, the company has said that it is prepared to delay the transition, possibly into the next year, if things don’t work out, so it won’t affect the winter holiday period which is critical for advertisers.
“Another key aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is the transition of Yahoo organic search results (those found on the main body of the page). Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe,” the email also said.
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