Los Angeles — After Microsoft’s unsuccessful bid to acquire Yahoo and a later flirtation that led to a more limited partnership — Yahoo said Tuesday that beginning this week, searchers on Yahoo will start to see a little “Powered by Bing” message at the bottom of the results page, as the two companies begin to switch over its search backend to the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada, the cornerstone of an agreement reached between the two companies last July, the company said.
In separate blog posts by the companies, Microsoft and Yahoo said they will officially begin shifting searches carried out by users on Yahoo’s site to Microsoft’s Bing Internet search, part of a deal the companies first announced a little over a year ago. Under that deal, Microsoft is to provide the back-end crawling, listing, and ranking technologies that generate search results while Yahoo retains responsibility for presenting those results on search pages.
“Later this week, we will begin shifting the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search in the US and Canada (English) over to the Microsoft platform,” Yahoo! search product operations vice president Shashi Seth said in a blog post.
“Keep an eye out for the “Powered by Bing” display sign at the bottom of our search results page, which will indicate that you are viewing listings from Microsoft.”
However, it would still be some time yet before other outlets worldwide transition to Bing, for which Yahoo gave no time-line, although it is assumed that the full transition would not be accomplished until 2012. Of course, one notable example would be Japan: that division is switching to a Google back-end pending regulatory approval and any legal challenges.
While the mechanism of Yahoo would change, the search company stressed that most of the functionality around the search would stay the same. Webmasters who had worked with Yahoo search products such as BOSS (build your own search service) can breath a sigh of relief, as that product will continue, Yahoo said. However, Yahoo will start charging developers to use the service, which had previously been free.
Also, publishers who had been using Yahoo’s SearchMonkey galleries and applications for highlighting search results will have to figure out a new strategy, as that product is going away. Web services product SearchMonkey is a notable departure: that service shutters effective October 1.
Yahoo’s SearchMonkey service is no more, a victim of the Microsoft-Yahoo search outsourcing deal. (Credit: Yahoo)
“As a result, third party custom result apps, infobar apps, and data services will no longer appear on Yahoo!’s search results, product manager Natasha Fattedad wrote in a blog post announcing the move.
Nevertheless, Yahoo would continue to provide its Search BOSS, YQL, and Site Explorer tools, although the company said it was still assessing others, and would charge for access to some of them.
Another possibly baffling aspect of the transition involves the fact that even though results on Yahoo pages will be powered by Microsoft, Webmasters that need to report problems or highlight new sites within Yahoo will need to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer for Yahoo pages, and Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Central for Bing pages. That’s because the transition is rolling out first in the U.S. and Canada, and it will be some time before results in other parts of the world are powered by Bing.