It's been over a year since Microsoft and Yahoo signed a deal to use the Bing decision-engine to provide all of the search company's results. In that time the two have been testing their systems as they move towards full integration.
Finally, though, the new Yahoo has come out of the development-phase and is now fully relying on Bing's results - at least in the USA and Canada. A post on the official blog declared that Microsoft's technology will be used for all of the English-language Yahoo searches in that region from now on.
Testing began in July of this year, where up to a quarter of Yahoo's search-traffic was being handled by Bing servers while all of the kinks were worked out.
Relatively speaking, this is quite a small step for the partnership as the rollout only applies to a single region and language. However, this is a milestone nonetheless, as the companies' home territories provide a very large proportion of both search engines' market share. With the changeover now complete, a rollout to the rest of the English-speaking world cannot be too far behind.
The transition for non-English speaking territories may be somewhat further off, though. Since Bing's deployment outside of North America is still lagging somewhat - many of the European search engines are still in beta as they transition from the older Live Search - integration with Yahoo for these regions may take some time.
However, testing in other territories and languages can begin to proceed in full now that English-language deployment in North America is complete.
