In February of 2010, United States and European regulators approved Yahoo! and Bing’s merger to create a competitive choice in search for advertisers and consumers.  The contract will last for 10 years and in that time both Yahoo! and Bing will maintain their own branding but search results on Yahoo.com will say “powered by Bing.” 

With Bing powering the search, Yahoo! will be responsible for getting premium advertisers.  

The partnership will assist both companies in speeding the pace of innovation to improve the search user experience, as well as help advertisers get better results and help improve monetization for partners. 

Although Yahoo! and Bing will both provide unique consumer search experiences, Microsoft itself will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic and paid search results, maintain all search campaign platforms, and support self-service advertisers. 

Yahoo! will provide support to different advertiser segments.  Yahoo’s sales team will support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients.  Yahoo! will also deliver a differentiated search experience for its users by integrating Yahoo! content, shortcuts, and tools to the listings it receives from Microsoft.

Yahoo! and Bing are already in testing stages of the merge and they hope to have the United States and Canada up and running before the holiday season of this year.

Yahoo! and Bing believe in the importance of transitioning with quality. They want the user to have the same quality experienceas before, with the same look and feel.  In an effort to not jeopardize the online holiday season, if the transition is not ready they have agreed to wait until early 2011.

It is anticipated that over 59 countries will be transitioned by the second quarter of 2012.

What does this mean for advertisers and consumers?  With Google owning over 84 % of search engine market share, the merger between Bing and Yahoo! will create competition and innovation in the market for consumers as well as advertisers. 

The merger will also create a bigger ad inventory.  Running ads through the Microsoft platform and having the ability to control targeting, quality and relevance will help them gain market share.  A bigger inventory will also help improve the relevancy of ads, and a higher success rate with user experience. 

According to comScore’s latest Core Search Report, in June of 2010 Google decreased by 1.1% in searches and Yahoo! and Bing both increased by .6%.  comScore reported that Yahoo! and Microsoft sites have experienced gains due to the continued utilization of contextual search approaches that tie content and related search results together.

“Combining the strengths of Yahoo! and Microsoft will create a competitive choice in search with the scale to fuel sustained development in good for both companies, good for advertisers, good for consumers and good for our partners,” stated Mike Morrissey and Greg Nelson of Yahoo! and Microsoft respectively. 

To read more about the Yahoo! and Bing merger, visit Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.