After finalizing their deal last December 2009, Microsoft's Bing will now replace search giant Yahoo's search engine. The said transition will put Yahoo's SearchMonkey to rest.

According to the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, the back-end crawling, listing, and ranking technologies that generate search results will be provided by Microsoft. Yahoo, on the other hand, will be responsible for presenting the results on search pages. A little "Powered by Bing" message will be seen at the bottom of the results page.

Bing, formerly called Live Search, is predicted to capture as much as 31.6 percent of the market share in North America. The said search engine currently owns a 7.07 percent share in the Northern American market and a 3.44 percent share worldwide. Google, which is the biggest search engine right now, meanwhile has 84.53 percent market share in North America.

Canada and the United States will be the first countries to experience the Yahoo's switch to the Microsoft platform. It may take a few more years before other countries transition to Bing. The full transition is set to be complete by 2012.

Even with the change in search engines, Yahoo expressed that most of the functionality around the search will remain the same. SearchMonkey will be an exception though, as the search engine shuts down the said service on October 1. This would lead to the disappearance of third party custom result applications, infobar applications, and data services.

Webmasters will still be able to use Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), YQL (Yahoo! Query Language), and Site Explorer. Developers will have to pay for utilizing the said tools though which used to be for free.

The Yahoo-Microsoft deal actually only covers the search results part of Yahoo. Other services will not be affected by the said transition.