Microsoft’s Bing team announced on their blog that that the Bing search engine is “powering Yahoo!’s search results” in the US and Canada for English queries. Yahoo also has a post on their Yahoo! Search Blog.

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

“Tuesday, nearly 13 months after Yahoo and Microsoft announced plans to collaborate on Internet search in hopes of challenging Google’s market dominance, the two companies announced that the results of all Yahoo English language searches made in the United States and Canada are coming from Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The two companies are still racing to complete the transition of paid search, the text advertising links that run beside and above the standard search results, before the make-or-break holiday period — a much more difficult task.”

Combining the traffic from Microsoft and Yahoo will give the Bing a more significant share of the Web search market. That should help them by providing both companies with a larger stream of search related data that can be exploited to improve search relevance, ad placement and trend spotting. It will also help to foster competition with Google focused on developing better search technology.

Hopefully, Bing will be able to benefit from the good work done at Yahoo! on adding more semantics to Web search.