Important Updates Search Transitions

Important Updates on Search Transitions

Organic transition beginning this week; paid search transition testing happening now

As we continue to work toward implementing the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we’ve reached some very significant milestones and wanted to share this important news with you.

Yahoo! organic search transition to begin

Later this week, we will begin the work of transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search over to the Bing platform. This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo! Search, to ultimately put your ads in front of more potential customers.

You’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change, so be sure to check out these tips and stay tuned to the Yahoo! Search blog for confirmation of when the organic search transition is complete.

Testing of paid search account transitions has begun

Soon, you’ll be able to access a transition portal from within your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. This portal will walk you through the simple step-by-step process of creating a Microsoft Advertising adCenter account and importing your campaigns, or linking an existing adCenter account that you may already have.
Before we make this transition portal broadly available to all advertisers in the weeks ahead, we are currently testing it with a limited number of accounts. You will be notified via email once the transition portal is available.

Commitment to a quality transition continues

As we’ve stated all along, our primary goal is to provide you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. We continue to make great strides toward this goal, and we evaluate our progress every day. However, please remember that if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may defer the transition to 2011.
We’re looking forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance!

— The Team

Yahoo Microsoft Search Alliance

Last month we shared that we had begun limited testing of displaying organic search listings from Microsoft on Yahoo! Search result pages.  As we continue to work toward implementing the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we’re reaching some additional significant milestones that we want to share with you today.
Later this week, we will begin transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search in the U.S. and Canada (English) over to the Microsoft platform, and will post an update when the organic search transition is complete for both Web and mobile searches.  Keep an eye out for the “Powered by Bing” indicator at the bottom of our search results page, which will indicate that you are viewing listings from Microsoft.  And of course, as we’ve stated before, you’ll continue to enjoy the same enhanced Yahoo! experience that surrounds the listings themselves – such as rich results, Search Assist suggestions, site filters, related topic suggestions, and more to come.

I know many in the developer and publisher community have had questions about whether this transition will impact tools we offer like SearchMonkey, Site Explorer, BOSS and our search APIs.  We’ve been hard at work sorting through these details with Microsoft and are happy to share updates for you today on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, and in the blog posts below from the Site Explorer and SearchMonkey teams. Yahoo! has learned a lot from working with the developer and publisher communities on these products, and we are committed to supporting and enhancing a strong ecosystem that you can count on. We look forward to the next generation of search-related publisher tools to come, so stay tuned for more on this front.

In addition, this week we’re beginning testing of paid search account transitions, and advertisers can read more about that on our Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.

Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products