Yahoo announced on Friday that it would finally shut down its Site Explorer in favor of Bing Webmaster Tools as part of the final integration steps. On its company blog, Yahoo said the move would be finalized on Monday, and that users would be redirected to Bing.
The initial move between the two organizations came last September and has evolved gradually since then. Any search query on Yahoo.com is now fielded by Microsoft’s search engine.
Last week, Brafton reported that Bing-powered search stayed true to trends of recent months gaining 2 percentage points in terms of total queries in October. Throughout the year, Google has held strong at roughly two-thirds of total search queries despite a push from Bing, much of which may be due to its Yahoo presence.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has urged internet users to give Bing a try, saying that the results are basically the same 70 percent of the time, Brafton reported. However, the message from Microsoft was not sufficient for people to move to Bing en masse. In terms of enterprise SEO campaigns, Google still accounts for most of the focus. Still, marketers must remember that developing a quality website will likely benefit businesses in terms of search visibility from both engines.
With the full integration of Yahoo and Bing now complete, Bing will continue its efforts to lure traffic away from Google. There are some additions Bing has made in recent months to differentiate itself from Google, including implementing airport maps to help travelers navigate some of the nation’s most popular travel hubs, Brafton reported.
