Just because Yahoo Inc.’s U.S. Web site and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing are using the same technological ingredients for searching the Internet doesn’t mean they’re slicing and dicing the results the same way, too.
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Understanding the differences can be helpful, particularly for people looking for the best alternative to Google Inc.’s dominant search engine.
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The 10-year search partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft still allows them to cook up different recipes for displaying the results. Both wanted that flexibility because even though Microsoft and Yahoo are now teaming up to fight Google, they’re still competing for traffic with each other. The reason: search requests yield more opportunities to sell the ads that appear alongside the results. If a person clicks on one of those ads while searching on Yahoo, it gets to keep $88 of every $100 in revenue, with the other $12 going to Microsoft. If a person clicks on an ad while searching on Bing, Microsoft gets to keep all the money.
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Yahoo switched its U.S. and Canada sites over to Bing’s search technology in late August to lower its costs and free up more time and money to focus on building other services. As things evolve, Yahoo has indicated it will do more things to make its search results more helpful than Bing’s, but so far, the distinctions have been subtle.
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A review by The Associated Press found the differences between the search results on Yahoo and Bing mostly have to do with the ways that the two services compile and display snapshots of key information at or near the top of the first page.
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These additional features supplement the boring blue links to other sites that have been standard fare on most search services for the past decade. When it came to those links, along with most of the photo and video snippets,…