The Yahoo/Bing “merger” has happened within the past two weeks in the US and Canada. Searches on both Yahoo and Bing are now powered by Bing’s index and pay per click (PPC) results on both will be combined soon. Both companies see this as a big deal, especially in terms of helping them compete with search goliath Google, which still gets about 70% of all searches.
This doesn’t, however, mean that results on Bing and Yahoo will be identical. While both are using the same index (the list of pages on the web with information about their content and linking), the two search engines maintain different algorithms. That means that different ranking factors are being weighed more or less heavily by each of them.
We can expect rankings in Bing and Yahoo to resemble one another more closely than they used to, but our client rank checking shows they’re still quite different.
Web Pro News has a video news report that goes into more detail on this and some of the implications for SEO.
November 26th, 2010 on 11:44 am
How stupid can the management at Yahoo get?
Yahoo has always had the best search results for relevency. Google has been more successful for the simple reason of simplicity. Google’s homepage is very simple with a search box and very few links. Yahoo’s homepage has always ben cluttered with news, stock information and about a million links to stuff most visitors don’t care about. Yahoo has been simply too stupid to realize this simple fact that has resulted in Google taking all their traffic. So now Yahoo has ruined the only thing it had going for itself by aligning its search results with Microsoft’s search (or Bing or whatever they’re calling it now). Microsoft has always had the worst search relevency, and changing their name to Ping and putting some fancy backgroung pictures is not going to change that. It’s just so sad how stupid the bureaucrats running the show at Yahoo have become. Simply put ,I’m now a Googler for life since they now have both the simplicity and the best search results.