Engineers for Microsoft Bing said today that plans to use their results to power Yahoo search are proceeding on-schedule and that the switch should occur sometime this fall.
The transition should happen in two phases, said Senior Vice President Satya Nadella. First, the companies will switch over Yahoo’s standard search results so that they come from Bing’s algorithm, then search advertising will be transferred as well. Yahoo is currently testing Microsoft search results with limited groups. Making sure this transition goes smoothly has become “in some sense, all our day jobs,” Nadella said.
Nadella and the other Bing executives were speaking to a group of reporters in San Francisco about their progress over the last year, and they gave an overview of recent and coming improvements to the user interface. They reiterated that these interface changes are for Bing proper, while the Yahoo deal is more about the search results and ads.
The team also highlighted new data from comScore saying that Bing has 12.7 percent of the US search market. That’s far behind Google (and there has been some debate about how accurate comScore’s numbers are), but Bing has better momentum. Asked about how Microsoft is achieving that growth, and how much it had to spend, Nadella said most of the growth has come from integration with MSN and from distribution deals, where Bing is available in toolbars for Dell, HP, and others.
“We will continue to compete super-aggressively in all dimensions,” Nadella said, meaning that Microsoft plans to continue spending on the product, on marketing, and on distribution deals. “We clearly understand that ultimately, the product has to carry the day.”
As for when Bing will become profitable, Nadella said that question would be better directed at Microsoft executives like CEO Steve Ballmer. He did say that if Microsoft was really determined to make Bing profitable, it could do so now: “We could just take out a bunch of cost.”
In terms of the feature previews, perhaps the most noteworthy one was of a native application on an unidentified device using Google’s Android operating system. The first Bing Android app should come in a month or so, with more coming later.