Microsoft’s Bing is now the sole provider of Yahoo search results in North America and Canada, the two companies confirmed yesterday.
The announcement marks the first major event since a deal was signed allowing Microsoft to power Yahoo searches for the next ten years. Under the deal, Yahoo were also given permission to use Microsoft’s AdCenter PPC advertising platform.
According to Reuters, U.S. and European authorities gave the deal the green light in February, but it is likely to take a further two years before the agreement is fully implemented.
At present, Bing only provides results in the U.S. and Canada in English, but other languages are likely to be offered in the very near future.
Yahoo and Microsoft have struggled to compete with Google’s popularity in the search market, and have been unable to keep pace with spending on paid search results. The Wall Street Journal say that the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership is a bid to combine market shares and provide more robust competition.
“This is a great milestone for Bing and Yahoo and our customers, and we are happy to report the transition has gone smoothly and we feel great about the progress our search alliance has been making over the summer,” Microsoft’s Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post.
Regarding Yahoo’s transition to using AdCenter, Nadella added: “As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season.”
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