If going from a ridiculously distant 2nd and 3rd place ranking for total search traffic to simply a distant 2nd is viewed as a success, then congratulations are in order for Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo!. As of August 24, Bing is now powering all of Yahoo’s North American searches.
According to comScore, Google dominated July traffic in the US with 66% of the total, followed by Yahoo with 17% and Bing’s 11%. With the partnership and approx. 30% of US search traffic, the two companies are in much better position to compete with Google, which has long held the top spot.
Visually, the only difference on Yahoo’s pages that users may notice is “Powered by Bing™”, which appears at the bottom of search pages. Microsoft will be licensing Yahoo’s search technology and the two sides will be splitting all revenue.
With the exception of Google and the search engines at the bottom of the list, all parties should benefit from this move. Most importantly, with some added competition, users should see some more innovation than we have over the past few years. Yahoo has already touched on this aspect as the move will allow their engineers to focus on creating new search products. As for the alliance, Bing will get a huge bump in traffic and access to Yahoo’s decade of search experience, while Yahoo! can free itself of one major issue as their search traffic has dropped in the past year, while continuing to earn profits and taking advantage of Bing’s steady growth and youth.
It should be interesting to see what, if anything Google does in response.
Here is another article to check out, which delves deeper into what the alliance means for users.