So Sad: Yahoo Finally & Officially Gave Up On Search

I really don't know why I am so upset, but I am. Probably not as upset as all those Yahoo Search engineers who are out of a job or as upset as Jerry Yang but I am really upset.

Yahoo has been testing letting Bing power their search results then ramped it up last week. Then yesterday, officially flipped the switch in the U.S. and Canada. Yahoo no longer powers the underlying organic search results on Yahoo Search, it is now Bing who powers it.

Shashi Seth of Yahoo said, " I am proud to announce that the transition of organic search between Yahoo! and Microsoft is complete." Bing's Satya Nadella said, "Today I am happy to share that Bing is powering Yahoo!’s search results in the US and Canada." Yea, I am sure he is happy.

The paid results are next and that will likely be done in the next month or so, in my opinion. We are still waiting to hear on Site Explorer, BOSS, Search Monkey dates for transition or future plans.

I am sad. Yahoo was powering their own results. They dropped Google, bought several search companies (AllTheWeb, AltaVista Inktomi +) and launched their own Yahoo Search. That is done, no more, gone!

To make things worse, they are embarrassed that Bing is powering them. Why? point font at the bottom of the page? Heck, with Google, they had a fancy Google logo on the bottom or top of the results.

I am just sad!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: So Yahoo responded to this blog post, without linking to it, saying they will always be a search engine. I tweeted it and got this response back from an SEO that I found to be dead on:

Two more quotes, these from Danny Sullivan, who I am glad agrees with me: