After Yahoo and Bing announced their partnership for PPC advertising and organic search services in 2009, the landscape of internet search engines, their ranking order and nature of SEO work required of webmasters has changed dramatically.
Up till now, webmasters had to contend with four major search engines – Google, Yahoo, ASK and MSN. With the release of Microsoft’s Bing in 2009, the market shares Google and Yahoo went down by few percentage points. In July 2010, comScore reported Google share of searches in US at 65% with Yahoo far behind at 16.7%.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine got 11 percent share.
In August 2010, Bing and Yahoo announced the transition of search infrastructure of Yahoo to Bing for results in English in North America – U.S and Canada. Users in these two countries will see ‘powered by Bing’ in small point size when they search in Yahoo for Web pages, image, and video on both desktop and mobile devices. The two companies, Yahoo and Bing, have not announced roll out dates for other countries, but by the year 2012, expect search queries in Yahoo to be driven by Bing index for all countries.