Yahoo! this week completed the transition of its search engine to the Bing back-end in both the US and Canada. The move comes almost 14 months after the two companies first announced their sweeping agreement to align in the search space to take on market leader Google.
"I am happy to share that Bing is powering Yahoo!'s search results in the US and Canada," Microsoft Senior Vice President Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post this week. "This is a great milestone for Bing and Yahoo! and our customers, and we are happy to report the transition has gone smoothly and we feel great about the progress our search alliance has been making over the summer."
Currently, only English-language Yahoo! searches are being delivered via Bing, but that will change in the weeks ahead, Microsoft says. Yahoo! searches will switch over to Bing in other countries throughout 2011 and 2012.
The big question, of course, is whether this change will do anything to alter the competitive landscape, since Google still dominates the search market with almost 66 percent usage share in July. By combining Yahoo!'s and Bing's search shares, however, Microsoft should be able to command more advertising dollars and better improve the underlying search technologies.