Yahoo is getting ready to turn over search results on Yahoo Search to Bing later this week (it only took a year). There are some changes Yahoo announced today. It is shutting down SearchMonkey on October 1, as well as MyBlogLog, and Yahoo BOSS will no longer be free. MyBlogLog has long been one of Yahoo’s walking dead, but SearchMonkey and Boss were still loved by developers.
Also, for Website owners who want to make sure Yahoo, Bing, or whoever is in charge is still picking up changes to their sites, that raises a question about which webmaster tool to use: Yahoo’s Site Explorer or Bing’s Webmaster Central. These are the tools webmasters can use to make sure the respective search engines are indexing their sites correctly.
Yahoo wants webmasters to keep using its tool, Site Explorer, at least for now. As part of the partnership with Bing, updates to Site Explorer will be passed along to Bing. And since only the U.S. and Canada are switching over this week, if a webmaster simply switches over to Bing’s tool now, then all international searches on Yahoo won’t benefit from any updates.
International markets are not going to transition until 2012. Once that happens, then you can drop Site Explorer for good.
Yup, this transition to Bing search is already going smoothly for everyone involved.
Update: I just spoke with Shashi Seth, senior VP of Yahoo search products. He says that existing SearchMonkey apps will still continue to work and be indexed by Yahoo, but the SearchMonkey developer tools will no longer be available. He also says that Yahoo BOSS, which is “our most successful API in search,” will continue to be available (as expected), but not for free. Developers who use Yahoo’s customizable search API will have to show ads or perhaps pay for the data. Details of the new model will be made public in the next 30 days. In terms of Site Explorer, he says Yahoo will continue to invest in it and add analytics for Yahoo properties beyond search.