I just received an email update from Parked.com regarding the Yahoo and Bing merger, and the change over from the Yahoo feed to the Bing feed for Parked customers.  I would imagine this update also goes for WhyPark customers as well.

Here’s the email update:

As many of you may be aware, the migration from Yahoo to Bing.com/Microsoft is already underway and will be completed within the next few days.  All traffic that is currently sent to Yahoo in the US and Canada will be migrated from Yahoo to Bing.  Since these changes are being implemented in phases, we wanted to keep you informed of the process by providing specific dates of each phase to make the transition as seamless as possible.

Currently in the initial phase, 20% of all traffic we receive is sent to Bing. On Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 10am PST, Yahoo is scheduled to migrate up to 50% of the traffic to Bing.  Then in the final phase on Monday, October 25, 2010 at 10am PST, Yahoo will be migrating all of the remaining traffic to Bing.  So far the migration has been going very well and we’re seeing some nice increases in overall revenue across the board.

Parked.com has always utilized the PST time zone in regards to our reporting, because our primary ad provider, Yahoo, has always used PST.  Bing however, uses UTC as their time zone. As a result, we have decided to change the time zone of our reports to match those of Bing to ease the transition now and going forward.  This means that today we will be changing everything to use UTC which will result in 7 fewer hours in the reporting day.

While the overall migration is going very well, there have been some delays in receiving stats from Bing.  The stats for October 8th and October 15th were received after the payments were finalized for the 22nd payout date.  Instead of causing any disruption to the normal payout schedule, we have updated your account and added a credit on the next payment which will be on November 7th.  If you generated any revenue with Bing on these particular days, you will be receiving an email from us indicating how much additional revenue was added to your account.

There are additional changes that are currently occurring as a result of the migration including how keywords are used, changes in countries/markets, and traffic quality scores.  For more information on these and any other changes, please check our forum which is updated with the latest information as it becomes available. The forum is located at http://forum.parked.com/forumdisplay.php?23-Yahoo-to-Bing-Migration

If you have any concerns please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager with any questions or simply post them on the forum.

In a shrewd move that many (probably most) companies don’t consider before launching a new product or service, Microsoft went ahead and purchased many Bing related typo domain names prior to launch. Some of the domain names now owned by Microsoft include, Bimg.com, Bibg.com, Bihg.com, and Binf.com.

All of these typo domain names were previously owned by other people and companies before Microsoft acquired them. One common link between these names is that it appears they were acquired by a company known as Media Market of Boise, Idaho between being owned by the former owner and Microsoft. You can see the Whois lookup for Bibg.com from February as an example.

One interesting domain acquisition they made was Bing.com. The reason it’s particularly interesting to me is that it was previously owned by General Mills, another Fortune 500 company.

Unfortunately, there were many Bing typos that Microsoft didn’t and/or couldn’t acquire. Among them include Bong.com, Bingo.com, Bin.com, Big.com, and Ing.com. I don’t know if the traffic increase can be linked directly with the Bing launch, but just look at the Compete scores for  Bong.com, Bung.com and Bin.com after May.

The Yahoo and Microsoft on-again off-again partnership/buyout discussions have been all over the financial and Internet news for a while, so I don’t need to chronicle those here. Yesterday afternoon, news broke that Yahoo and Microsoft were not only talking once again, but a deal was imminent. This morning it was announced that a deal between the two companies had been completed – finally.

According to Reuters, the upshot of the deal is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will handle search duties on all Yahoo-owned websites, and Yahoo will be responsible for selling the premium search ads. This means that Bing will now be the search engine for nearly 30% of all searches, up from 8% in June according to a report from Comscore. This is big news for owners of generic domain names.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article stating that Microsoft’s Bing search engine seems to love developed generic domain names. I listed a small sample of search results for generic domain names on Google and on Bing, and they clearly ranked much better on Bing. While I was doing my small sample, noted domain investor Edwin Hayward was doing the same comparison with similar results, and the white paper he wrote shares his results.I didn’t report Yahoo’s search results, but they were somewhere between Bing and Google for the most part.

This is very good news for domain investors, because it means if a company has a generic domain name, it should rank higher for almost 30% of web searches rather than just 8%, making these domain names more desired and valuable. I won’t speculate about what will happen with PPC payouts because domain parking is a very small % of 1% of my total revenue, so I will let other experts provide commentary on that side of things.

I believe this is good news for owners of generic domain names.

I love Bing. Not only do my developed generic domain names rank well in Bing, as I mentioned in a post last week, but today Bing has an image of my apartment building on its homepage, directly under the magnifying glass. The love must be mutual – thanks Bing!

Want to see a side-by-side comparison of how your developed websites rank in Bing and Google? It’s as simple as visiting Bing-vs-Google.com. This new website shows the results from both search engines directly next to each other, allowing you to easily see how your sites rank and the description and title for each page. Sure, you can just go to Bing and Google independently, but why not search both at once?

From my point of view, the most interesting aspect of this is the domain name.  It would seem to be a risky endeavor to use both trademarks in a single domain name, especially because Microsoft is known to vigorously defend its marks. I don’t see any monetization of the website, so I don’t know about the legal issues.

The New York Times has an article in today’s paper, where they cite this website, so I am sure if it wasn’t on either company’s radar before, it is now. Ironically, the domain name without the dashes (BingvsGoogle.com) is also registered but is undeveloped. That page has the default Godaddy landing page, which is monetized with PPC links, potentially causing problems for that owner.