In an official announcement on Tuesday, Yahoo declared that Microsoft’s Internet search platform, Bing, will henceforth power the back end of Yahoo’s searches in the US and Canada. 

The announcement implies that Yahoo Web, image, and video searches for desktop and mobile services will now be powered by Bing – a move that has come more than a year after Yahoo and Microsoft entered into a far-reaching decade-long search partnership, to combat Google’s dominance of the Internet search arena.

Despite the fact that Yahoo and Microsoft’s combined Web search market share – 28 percent - falls way short of Google’s whopping 66 percent share, the Yahoo-Microsoft team-up will be able to offer more substantial competition to Google.

Meanwhile, the powering of Yahoo’s searches by Microsoft Bing does, in no way, imply that Yahoo is giving up on the search business. The company intends to persist with the development of its own front end for Internet searches as well as create new search related products and services for its users, though with Bing search engine underneath the Yahoo services and applications.

Noting that Yahoo will “continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike,” Sashi Seth, the company’s Senior VP for search products, said in a blog post: “We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo network.”