Yahoo yesterday announced that the Yahoo-Microsoft search alliance will officially begin later this week, and the companies are starting to transition the back-end technology to move Yahoo search to the Bing platform.

Yahoo yesterday announced that the Yahoo-Microsoft search alliance will officially begin later this week, and the companies are starting to transition the back-end technology to move Yahoo search to the Bing platform. Yahoo offered some insight on organic search and the future of paid search on the platforms, which marketers may want to keep in mind.

Improvements to the back-end technology for the transition are "an important step toward [the] goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo organic search results and attracting a larger audience," says the Yahoo team. With the transition on the horizon, Yahoo is boosting itself as a contextual search engine, as Brafton reported last week. The search engine's initial efforts seem to be satisfying consumers, as we reported yesterday that Yahoo was up in search market share.

Yahoo offered marketers some tips to ensure their web pages come out on top in these organic search results back in July. These included a suggestion to review the Bing webmaster tools in order to optimize sites for Microsoft's crawler.

Additionally, Yahoo now says it will offer a transition portal in users' Yahoo Search Marketing accounts to help them create Microsoft Advertising adCenter accounts, making it easy to modify paid search campaigns as needed.

While Yahoo seems to be preparing marketers as best as it can, some are still skeptical about the transition. One commenter noted, "I don't think adCenter is ready for the transition. I hope Bing makes updates to it. Compared to [Google] adWords features, adCenter is well behind."

It's easy to see why some are sticking close to Google. The search engine still maintains a strong lead in the search market and it continually updates its tools for advertisers. Just this week, Google announced a new Enhanced CPC automated bidding feature that will help marketers allocate their budgets toward ads that will likely convert.  

Katherine Griwert is Brafton's Marketing Director. She's practiced content marketing, SEO and social marketing for over five years, and her enthusiasm for new media has even deeper roots. Katherine holds a degree in American Studies from Boston College, and her writing is featured in a number of web publications.