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Bing's marriage with Yahoo! will be a phased affair not a big bang, Microsoft has revealed.
Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services division, said Tuesday that Yahoo!'s switch to using Bing's search algorithms and its ad serving platform will happen in two steps in September and October.
The search algorithms will go first, followed by a switch from Yahoo!'s Panama ads platform to Bing's adCenter, Nadella told members of the press during a gathering in San Francisco, California.
"When it come to Panama migration, that's where we want to make sure quality is great - they [algorithmic and ads serving switch] will be staggered," Nadella said. "Our day jobs are to mange the complexity and physics underling this between September and October."
Until now, Microsoft has simply talked in terms of Yahoo!'s switch over to the underlying Bing infrastructure being a single event set for this autumn. The company has been saying it's on target to complete the switch ahead of the retail-friendly Holiday shopping season.
The staggered approach seems designed to ensure there's no drop off in either traffic or money from advertisers. Ad revenue is a lynch pin of the deal.
Microsoft will pay Yahoo! 88 per cent of revenue it makes from search from Yahoo! sites during the first five years of the companies' deal. Bing will drive search for Yahoo! properties such as its home page, mail, personals, and shopping.
Nadella noted "the premise" of Microsoft's deal with Yahoo! is to combine the marketplaces, so having a drop off in traffic and money would be, ahem, "problematic."
Microsoft also revealed that it's developing a version of Bing for handsets powered by Android, the OS from its number-one search rival, Google.
Bing engineers demonstrated Microsoft's search engine running on a Samsung device at the San-Francisco event, although it would not reveal the carrier.
Nadella would not give a date for delivery if Bing on Android, but Microsoft typically updates Bing on a weekly basis and likes to brief press and analysts on Bing's progress every six months – recapping recent changes and upcoming updates. It's therefore reasonable to assume Bing will land on Android sometime before January 2011.
Microsoft has already struck a deal with handset provider Motorola to put Bing on its Android phones, starting with devices in China in the first quarter. Bing was due to become available as a widget either via pre-load or over-the-air download.
Mobile is an important part of Microsoft's growth strategy for Bing. A Bing widget was made available for Apple's iPhone six months ago and updated to version 1.2 last week. Microsoft claimed 4.3 million Bing-for-iPhone download to-date in the US.
As a whole, Bing mobile has 23 million users with 160 per-cent year-on-year growth in queries – from a base of zero – and people switching from using WAP on Bing to HTML to search maps and pictures. Images are one of Bing mobile's most popular search categories. ®
COMMENTS
I like Bing
Forgive me for not playing the part of MS hating technodweeb, but if you take a fair look at Bing it is a good tool. It is better in many ways than google. Google has started copying the Bing layout, so that should tell you something. I've found Bing's image and video search far better than Googles. The quick preview in search window is a nice touch so you don't click into the youtube video that has the one screen to make it look like what you want only to be some drunk shmuck blabbering in his underpants. The two will yield different results, but I don't see that you could actually call one's results better than the other. Google's seem to me to be more shopping based results (probably due to paid placement).
Depends how you look at it
They are not saying Bing started from a 'base of zero' but Bing Mobile started from a base of zero. They are stupidly claiming Bing and Bing Mobile are two separate products, which essentially they are not.
At the end of the day even if it does have 23 million 'users', and I use that term lightly, quite a lot of these were bought when Microsoft paid Verizon to change the default search for Blackberry users which now cannot be changed back. Typical Microsoft in that it can only get users by force!
"From a base of zero"
That's hardly correct. Bing replaced MSN search, which was (and still is) the default search for Internet Explorer. If they're actually increasing marketshare, then I give them credit, but it's not coming from zero.
I know that the only times I've ever used bing have been when I've had to use IE and the search box has defaulted to bing. The results are rarely as good as Google's (in my single man highly scientific poll).
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