14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has announced that it is now very close to making the switch to Bing-powered search results for all US and Canada users. Yahoo has been testing the new back-end with a number of users and now says it will start transitioning all users this week.
"Last month we shared that we had begun limited testing of displaying organic search listings from Microsoft on Yahoo! Search result pages," Shashi Seth, Vice President of Yahoo Search Product Operations, wrote.
"Later this week, we will begin transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search in the U.S. and Canada (English) over to the Microsoft platform, and will post an update when the organic search transition is complete for both Web and mobile searches," he announced.
"Keep an eye out for the “Powered by Bing” indicator at the bottom of our search results page, which will indicate that you are viewing listings from Microsoft," he explained.
The move has been scheduled for quite a while and with testing going smoothly so far, the decision was made to make the final switch. It has been about a year since Microsoft and Yahoo announced the deal that would see the latter start using Bing to provide the actual search results.
The details of the transition took quite a long time to be worked out and the technical hurdles were equally challenging. But, between Microsoft and Yahoo's engineering prowess, it was doubtful that there would be too many issues.
Live testing began last month as a portion of the search results on Yahoo were served by Bing. To the users, the move was seamless as Yahoo Search user interface was not changed. Yahoo also continues to serve all of the features beyond the basic search results and the ads.
The team is now satisfied with the results of the testing and the final transition will begin this week. Soon, all search results on Yahoo for US and Canada will be provided by Bing. Yahoo has said it will make an announcement once the transition is complete.