Yahoo takes Bing’s search results

At the start of January, Yahoo7 in Australia announced that it would now be displaying search results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The change happened soon after, so that the variety of search engines has been further diminished and the Australian market is now largely dependent on search listings from Google and Bing, with the former still being used by around 90% of the total search market.

This merger between Yahoo7 and Bing’s search results (which are used by NineMSN) was not unexpected following the long-running merger between the two US search giants. In the US the change had already taken place at the end of 2010 and the roll out is expected to be completed globally over the next few months, with the UK and other European search engines to follow soon. However, it was expected that the Australian merger may take longer to implement due to the unusual partnerships between the search services and the Seven and Nine TV networks, although this is more of an issue with the advertising channels.

Yahoo7 sent an email out to companies to prepare for the changes. It suggested they compare their organic search rankings on Yahoo!7 Search and Bing to help determine any potential impact to traffic and sales, although for most companies this is such a small share of their overall search referrals! What it does mean, however, is that businesses should review their listings on Bing’s webmaster tools and optimise their website for the Bing crawler, to ensure that their site is indexed and prominently listed in both Yahoo!7 and Bing’s organic search results.

Yahoo originally developed as a web directory in the 1990′s and became one of the leading resources for the slowly emerging list of websites that were starting up. However, as the size of the web grew rapidly in the 2000′s, Yahoo’s human-edited directory couldn’t keep pace with the growth and Yahoo purchased a number of established search engines to integrate with their search service. Pioneering search engines such as Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST were acquired by Yahoo but the experience and technology behind these tools didn’t help Yahoo grow as a search engine in the face of Google’s dominance.

Now Microsoft has taken another step in their challenge with Google for market share, through their Bing search engine. In the US the market share of Yahoo and MSN is larger than in Australia and many other countries, and so the merger or ‘alliance’ between Bing and Yahoo has given Microsoft a stronger position to develop their search service and to compete for users. For Yahoo, it’s another stage in an apparent downward spiral from the once dominant site, which is now essentially a partner for the Bing network of search results. For users in Australia, and worldwide, it’s another stage in the growing monopoly of available search results with a limited range of options now available to find information online.

As a footnote to the recent merger, the transition of the Yahoo paid search services (PPC) to Microsoft technology is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2011. Outwardly this will show little change, since Yahoo currently supplies the paid listings to Yahoo7 and NineMSN, but for the advertiser it is hoped that the new platform will be more user-friendly than the existing Yahoo! one, and that it will help to give advertisers a more effective alternative to just focusing on Google Ads (AdWords).

If you’d like to know more about the merger between Yahoo and Bing’s search results, and how it might impact your search engine marketing strategy, please contact us now.

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