Yahoo and Bing – now the same search engine?

Published on August 31, 2010 Yahoo and Bing – now the same search engine?

From today, Yahoo! and Bing will use the same search engine technology and database to return results to searchers. If you have historically gained a lot of traffic to your website through the Yahoo! search engine or Yahoo! advertising, this has implications for your online marketing. What does this mean for your business and how can you take advantage of it?

One important thing to note is that although the two search engines will now be using the same set of results, there will continue to be differences between the results that are shown for a given search result between the two engines. There are a number of reasons for this. One of these is that Bing results mix related searches into the search results of a given term and both use different kinds of filters to sort the results that are displayed – so that the two still deliver different results.

Let’s look at an example – let’s say you were searching for “shop online supermarkets” in pages from Australia. As the search technologies are the same, and the search database is the same the results should be the same, right? And you would expect to see Australia’s two biggest supermarkets Coles and Woolworths feature prominently on both, right? No!

This can be seen in the example. In Yahoo! Coles comes up first and third. The same search on Bing delivers different results: Woolworths in too. No Coles. So although the two use the same technologies, Woolworths has a presence on Bing and Coles on Yahoo! Interesting…

In fact, representatives for both search engines have said that they intend to control the user experience to suit the philosophies and approaches of the two search engines – that’s in their best interests too – otherwise ultimately one of these search engines would end up disappearing as there would be no benefit in using it.

Some outtakes for your search engine marketing strategy:

• Consider whether the search term you are optimising on has related searches showing up in the top 10 results on Bing.
• If so, consider the relative number of searches for each of the term and related terms and optimise one page on your site for each.
• If you mainly focus on your home page for optimisation on Bing, optimise the most searched term for that phrase.
• Optimise one page for each of the search engines – you may need to create a content page, or if you sell a featured product optimise the product page for that product.
• Continue to track the click-throughs and rankings you are getting from both search engines and optimise appropriately. Also, consider how you are going relative to your performance in Google. There’s a lot of science in search engine optimisation, but it’s an art too!