A year after Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to shove Bing on Yahoo search, it is all finally happening. Searches on Yahoo from the US and Canada are starting to use Microsoft's search engine.
Any paid search results will not be delivered by Microsoft until autumn, that is unless Bing fails to come up with the goods. Yahoo vice president Shashi Seth said that most users won’t be able to tell the difference, but the relevance should be better, he admitted.
Yahoo still competes with Microsoft in the way the search results are presented. To do that the search engines are going deep to provide a lot more local detail. Yahoo said that it has had to look at restaurant menus, so that it can display results not just for Spanish restaurants in a given neighbourhood but for those serving paella.
All bets are off for mobile search too. Yahoo recently developed a “Sketch a Search” application on the iPhone, which allows users to narrow a search by drawing a target area on a map.
According to ComScore Yahoo has been making a bit of a comeback lately and regained some of the ground it has lost in the past year on search share. Currently it has 20.1 per cent of the US market. It looks like video search has increased its share.
A year in the making
Nick Farell
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