The company said in a statement, “Though much of our testing is already happening offline, this month we’ll also test the delivery of organic and paid search results provided by Microsoft on live Yahoo traffic.”
The statement was part of an email Yahoo sent discussing some of the organic Yahoo-to-Bing transaction topics that are on the mind of its advertisers.
Yahoo said the “testing volumes will fluctuate during this period” and it will make sure to keep “paid search volume in particular kept low,” as to not impact advertisers.
The switch over will happen sometime in August or September and possibly later if testing doesn’t go well.
Yahoo played up the importance of this change saying that according to comScore, Bing will ultimately power 30 percent of the search queries globally on both paid and organic search.
Last July, Yahoo made a search advertising deal with Microsoft to abandon its own search technology and let Bing power Yahoo Search.
According to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, the company can’t compete with Microsoft in search. Microsoft has proven it is willing to invest a lot in search, Yahoo can’t do that. Instead, Bartz said Yahoo will “ride their coattales.”
According to the deal, Yahoo will keep 88 percent of the search revenue generated off the sites it owns or operates.
Microsoft gets the remaining 12 percent.
“In essence, we can get virtually all of our search revenue at no cost because Microsoft wants to make the investment and wants to win. That just frees me up to invest in a better portal, better display, better advertising,” Bartz said.
Bartz says Yahoo will focus on delivering content from serious news to celebrity gossip. It will also focus on advertising, selling pay per click text ads for Yahoo and Bing search and for the Microsoft and Yahoo portals.
Yahoo will focus on the “premium search advertisers.”
The deal not only eliminates a major competitor, but Microsoft Bing now doubles in size and also saves Microsoft money by not having to buy Yahoo.
According to Microsoft, the deal does not cover “each company’s web properties and products, email, instant messaging, display advertising or any other aspect of the companies’ businesses.”
Yahoo Mail and Hotmail will continue to compete.