Microsoft and Yahoo! join forces to compete with Google.

I imagine this has gone mostly unnoticed by most Yahoo! users, but this past week there’s been a significant change to Yahoo! search results. Effective Tuesday, they are “powered by Bing” (see bottom of Yahoo! SERP)…

So after nearly two years in the making, Bing can now claim it’s the #2 search provider in the U.S. I imagine this additional search volume will help them to become an even better search engine in the next several months, and beyond. 

Although Google’ still claims 66 percent of the U.S. market (7/10), Microsoft’s 11 percent and Yahoo’s 17 percent will now represent a 28 percent share. Out of the 15.6 billion times a search button is clicked every month in the U.S., 4.4 billion will now go through Microsoft’s Bing. Pretty exciting for Microsoft, they’ve been #3 for more than a decade.

“We’re obviously happy,” said Adam Sohn, spokesman for the Microsoft Online Services division. “In the grand scheme of things, we’re barely a year since the original deal announcement and we’ve deployed in the largest search country in the world.”

In time the Sponsored Ad’s will be merged as well, advertisers will manage their PPC campaigns via Microsoft’s AdCenter.