Business Insider is reporting that some users searching on Yahoo from mobile devices are seeing the “Powered by Bing” removed from the footer of the search results page.
The screenshots show a redesigned look to the search results, looking far different from how they appear to most users today.
Could this signal something significant to do with the search agreement between Bing and Yahoo? Possibly. It is known that both parties recently extended the 30 day window for changes to the ten year agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo for Bing to provide search results and advertising to Yahoo. So there has been plenty of speculation about whether Yahoo would continue with the deal, turn to alternative search engine such as Google for results, or forge ahead on their own.
Could it merely be an oversight by the redesign team? Possibly. It is unclear if these results are “in the wild” or merely on a test results server.
The search results appear to be the same ones as Bing serves, according to Business Insider. It is well known in the industry that Marissa Mayer is interested in relaunching a search engine, however she has been tied to the ten year agreement to serve Bing results and it is unknown at this time how far along the company’s plans are to launching their own search engine and being able to serve quality, relevant search results.
However, Bing also has a vested interest in ensuring Yahoo continues serving their search results as they get many ad views for their Bing Ads pay per click ads.
Yahoo has also been striving to increase their search share, regardless of who is serving the results for them. Yahoo became the default search engine for Firefox which saw their search share go up at the expense of the previous default search engine Google.
It is definitely worth keeping an eye on this situation to see if the “Powered by Bing” returns to the new style of Yahoo Search results. If it does, it will likely confirm it was just an oversight. However if it doesn’t, all eyes will be on Yahoo to see what they are doing and who is actually serving their results.
Jennifer Slegg
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[…] recently was also testing a version of their mobile search results with “powered by Bing” removed from the footer. But it isn’t know if this was […]