Last week, Yahoo and Bing announced that they had migrated over the organic results in Australia, Brazil and Mexico to Bing.
Yahoo and Bing joined forces in 2009 to form a search alliance in a bid to knock Google from the number one spot.
Kartik Ramakrishnan, Vice President of Yahoo! Search Transition blogged;
“The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance team has reached yet another important milestone today. As planned, we are moving forward with the global transition of certain Yahoo! Search back-end functions to Microsoft’s search platform, and have just completed this process for organic search in Australia, Brazil and Mexico.
This news is another step forward for the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance as we continue our efforts for a quality transition with our worldwide advertisers and partners.”
Currently Yahoo Search in the UK is still running off the original Yahoo index and algorithm, but there is some speculation that Yahoo UK is next to make the Bing migration.
Recent discussion in the WebMaster World Yahoo Search Engine and Directory Forum indicates that some webmasters and SEOs are noticing that the Yahoo UK results have “two different indexes” on refreshes.
So if a person searches once and then again, they are seeing two completely different set of results. Also, when they compare one of those sets, it seems to match up with the Bing results.
One member posted;
“I have a new website which is appearing on the first page of Yahoo.com for a very competitive term. However i notice that it goes in and out of this page when refreshing the page.”
He continued;
“Ok i can now see results shifting all over the place – there is clearly an update going on. I am surprised that knowbody else is talking about this.”
In a post made on Search Engine Round Table, Barry Schwartz suggests that this shows evidence that Bing and Yahoo are heavily testing the UK migration and it might be next up on the list.
View the whole discussion at www.webmasterworld.com
