Sunnyvale, California — Struggling Internet pioneer, Yahoo is finally planning on migrating its organic search results for its European properties in UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy to Microsoft’s Bing’s, according to an update today indicating that its “Search Alliance” with Microsoft will get underway in Europe as soon as August 3rd, marking the next stage in a broad-based transition that began in the United States.
Although, it would not be a full-fledged transition, the way it is carried out in the states, at least initially. Yahoo will switch to Bing results for organic search results only. Yahoo said that advertisers should continue to manage their Yahoo Search Marketing accounts as usual, and that it will provide ample notice before the paid search transition in each respective market.
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“Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be merged into a new, unified search marketplace, giving advertisers of all sizes access to a unified audience of 607 million unique searchers worldwide,” the Search Alliance explains on its UK site.
In the UK and France, Yahoo! and Microsoft will integrate their existing marketplaces. In other markets throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America, this transition will be seamless as Microsoft is already an existing Yahoo! partner, drawing from the Yahoo! Marketplace, the UK site reads.
According to another influential tech blog SearchEngineLand that republished a note from Yahoo detailing the switchover. “If organic search results are an important source of referrals to your Website, you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change,” read a notice offered by Yahoo.
Readiness for those changes, apparently, includes comparing organic search rankings on Yahoo Search and Bing “for the keywords that propels your business” in order to “help determine any potential impact to your traffic and sales,” reviewing Bing Webmaster tools, and deciding whether paid search campaigns need to be modified.
“We have modified the planned timing of the paid search transition for the UK, France, and Ireland,” it says. “Yahoo! advertisers with accounts in the UK and France will not transition to adCenter in 2011. Advertisers should continue to manage and optimize their campaigns on Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft Advertising adCenter separately. We will provide advertisers with updated timing information well in advance of when transition activities begin, with further details to help them plan and prepare.”
However, Yahoo is “not transitioning paid search results at this time,” the note concludes, but will obviously notify users before such an event takes place.
Yahoo concluded the transfer of its back-end search to Bing in the United States back in August 2010, following the terms of an agreement endorsed in the summer of 2009. Under the terms of that agreement, Yahoo would take over worldwide sales-force duties for both companies’ search advertisers.
Moreover, Yahoo executives have repeatedly claimed that, despite Bing’s handling their back-end search, their Web properties will continue to maintain a robust Web presence. Over the past year, Yahoo has introduced a variety of new features to its core properties designed to retain and attract users.
Additionally, integrating Yahoo’s search-engine share with Bing’s will allow the latter to compete more heartily than Google, which currently dominates the search-engine market. Bing has gained incremental but steady market share over the past two years, but that has come at an enormous cost to Microsoft, whose online services division lost $2.56 billion over the last fiscal year despite a rise in revenue.