Yahoo is planning on transitioning its European organic search results to Microsoft's Bing starting Aug. 3.
Yahoo is
migrating its organic search results in the European market to Microsoft's Bing
platform, marking the next stage in a broad-based transition that began in the
United States.
Blogs such as SearchEngineLand reposted a note from Yahoo
detailing the switchover. "The organic search transition will begin on
August 3, 2011, for Yahoo! European properties in the U.K., France, Germany,
Spain and Italy," read a notice offered by Yahoo. "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."
Preparation
for those changes, apparently, includes comparing organic search rankings on
Yahoo Search and Bing "for the keywords that drive 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.
Yahoo is "not
transitioning paid search results at this time," the note concludes, but
will apparently notify users before such an event takes place.
Yahoo completed
the transfer of its back-end search to Bing in the United States back in August
2010, following the terms of an agreement signed in the summer of 2009. Under
the terms of that agreement, Yahoo would take over worldwide sales-force duties
for both companies' search advertisers.
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.
Meanwhile,
combining 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's 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.
"This is
a long-term journey," Qi Lu, president of the division, told The New York Times July 30.
In addition to
focusing on the granular features that supposedly differentiate it as a "decision
engine"-including the ability to search for flights and deals on
products-Microsoft seems intent on boosting Bing's viability via partnerships
with other companies. That includes not only Redmond's deal with Yahoo to
handle the latter's back-end search, but also a deepening relationship with
Facebook.
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Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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