Yahoo! Starts Selling Users To Bing ?

As Google Search was failing me, I jumped on Yahoo! Search to see how it would perform. Unfortunately, Yahoo retrieves exactcely what Google retrieves on its results page. So from Yahoo Search, I typed Bing to see if Microsoft would win the battle. To my surprise, here is what happens when you search Bing from Yahoo search:



Notice the search box that says: "You could go to Bing, or you could stay here and get straight to your answers". Of course, this doesn't happen on Google:



What's even more interesting is that, through the Bing search box on Yahoo, you can search Bing, but the results will be displayed on a Yahoo! results page. What does this all mean?

The win-win gist of it seems to be that while Bing gets a premium placement to invite visitors to discover content through their supposedly-better search engine, Yahoo! monetizes the results. That's quite smart.

I can't help but seeing this as the solution for declining search engines (hem, Yahoo! search) to slowly sell their users to other search engines, and slowly abandon search development efforts to focus on other core competencies. Any thought?

 Screencast Pro: Screencasts With a SEO Twist !