Powered by Bing

booleanstrings Uncategorized 3 Comments

For those who are wondering what is happening with the Yahoo-Bing deal, here’s an update.

We all know that Yahoo will power its search by the Bing algorithm – all over the world – soon. How does the transfer happen? It’s not that the Yahoo syntax will “gradually” be moved to the Bing’s syntax, adding Bing special search operators and removing Yahoo special operators. (Also, for those who wonder, this transfer does not affect Google – other than in its stock price.)

The way the transfer happens is that more and more users will see exactly the same results from a Yahoo search as they would see by searching on Bing. This is happening in the US. If you are one of those users – your Yahoo search, in fact, does this:

  • picks your search string,
  • sends it to Bing,
  • gets back the resulting pages,
  • shows to you.

This is a complete switch: the Yahoo syntax no longer works and the Bing syntax does. At this point, Yahoo in the UK, Yahoo in Russia and Yahoo in many other countries are still powered by the Yahoo algorithm. Many (if not all)  US folks already see the Bing search results when we use Yahoo.com.

To check which algorithm “your” Yahoo uses, try searching in Bing in parallel and compare the results. Or, take a look at the very bottom of the Yahoo search page and see whether it says “powered by Bing” in very small letters.

By the way the operator linkdomain, used alone, still works on Yahoo.com, forwarding us to its “site explorer“.

Comments 3

  1. It appears that the linkdomain command will be going the way of the dinosaurs in the near future, so besides Exalead, what other search engines allow flipsearching/backlinking? (I understand they may not have the coverage Yahoo provided.)

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