Yahoo Search is no more. Well, let’s be clear — you can still search for things on yahoo.com (if you’re doing that for some reason) but the power behind that neon purple facade has been coming from a new place since (at least) January 17th with the full transition of all accounts estimated to take place by March 2019. Scroll to the bottom of the Yahoo Search page and you’ll see the latest addition to Yahoo Search: “Powered by Bing™.”
The public announcement of the agreement was not a complete surprise to most and was a long-anticipated move for a good number of search engine marketers. On the SEM side of things, Yahoo Search (aka Oath, as it was recently, seemingly futilely re-branded) has been on its last legs for some time.
The comparatively small volume of available traffic paired with a slow and incredibly frustrating to use SEM interface to create a clustered mess that required maximum time input with minimal impact on your actual business. On top of these factors, Bing and Yahoo already have a history of cross-platform compatibility, as Bing ads have been eligible to serve on Yahoo queries through Bing’s Syndicated Partner Network for some time.
But make no mistake, this official merging of the two systems is an SEM game-changer. While Bing has been right behind Google in terms of available features and query volume for some time, the argument for Bing to be considered a simple ‘additional opportunity’ as opposed to a ‘complete necessity’ could previously be made — this is no longer the case.
With Bing already recommending a 10-15% budget buffer to support the expected influx of traffic from the Syndicated Partner Network, the volume of searches that you could potentially miss without Bing is now far too large to ignore for businesses that want to stay at or reach the peak of their SEM opportunity.
For agencies or businesses that are already taking full advantage of all of the available SEM outlets, this move is a great big step forward in the streamlining process of day-to-day account management (possibly the largest step forward with this intent since DART search was introduced in 2006). It’s also an exciting move that increases the impact and credibility of some of the interesting Bing testing initiatives and unique features (such as LinkedIn targeting) that are the main positive differentiators from Google’s service.
We’re very excited to see where this opportunity can take the performance of our Bing campaigns and how this impacts the search landscape for 2019 and beyond!