A year after Yahoo and Microsoft finally agreed to combine their search efforts, the result is showing up.
Starting this week, natural searches on Yahoo from the US and Canada will begin being “powered” by Bing, the Microsoft search engine. Paid search results are still on track to be delivered by Microsoft this autumn, Yahoo executives said Tuesday, unless quality issues force a delay past the winter holidays.
Most users won’t be able to tell the difference, but the relevance should be better, said Yahoo vice president Shashi Seth.Yahoo will compete with Microsoft in the way the search results are presented. A lot of that involves more deep-searching, as both are doing. Yahoo has plowed through enough restaurant menus, for example, so that it can display results not just for Spanish restaurants in a given neighborhood but for those serving paella.
In mobile, search presentation is even more important. Yahoo’s “Sketch a Search” application on the iPhone, which allows users to narrow a search by drawing a target area on a map, has been downloaded millions of times, Mr Seth said.
ComScore figures show that Yahoo has regained some of the ground it has lost in the past year on search share, getting back to about 20.1 per cent in the US in July, while featuring trending video searches and the like have increased engagement. Microsoft had a 12.6 per cent share, while Google’s stood at 61.6 per cent.
Since the search alliance was first proposed, a number of related Yahoo programs have faced an uncertain future. Yahoo executives are beginning to spell out what will happen to those.
Probably the biggest change announced this week was to Yahoo’s BOSS, or Build your Own Search Service. That will start showing Microsoft-generated search results soon, and for the first time developers who deploy the service will have to run advertisements.
