Yahoo! will begin the transition to using Microsoft’s Bing for its searches for US and Canadian users later this week.
The company announced on its blog that it will start changing its back-end technology with Bing’s by the end of the week.
The search experience will remain the same, assures Yahoo!. It will still include rich results, Search Assist suggestions, site filters and related topic suggestions.
However, results will now show a “Powered by Bing” descriptor at the bottom of the pages. Bing won’t completely replace Yahoo!’s back-end search worldwide until 2012.
Microsoft’s AdCenter will drive self-service ads, allowing Yahoo! to use its own technology for display advertising and other business areas.
Both Microsoft and Yahoo! will keep separate display ad businesses and sales forces.
According to Microsoft, once this process is complete, Bing will account for 31.6pc of all searches every month.
While it is still much less than Google’s 65.8pc share, it puts Bing in a better position to catch up with the reigning search giant.
