Yahoo! recently announced they are in the testing phase of have Yahoo! Search results powered by Microsoft. Initial testing will only provide the Microsoft powered results to about 25% of the U.S. search traffic on Yahoo!

During this testing the user will not notice a difference in the listings powered by Yahoo! versus those by Microsoft; however, other layout tests are being conducted with this Microsoft test. The near future will also see Microsoft powered results making it to Yahoo!'s mobile platform.

Following successful testing, Yahoo! states their timeline to roll Microsoft powered organic search results to all U.S. and Canada traffic in August or September of 2010. Paid search listings will following suite in October.

The “alliance” between Yahoo! and Microsoft was announced back in February of 2010.

What does this mean to you?

Users of Yahoo! will likely see more focus from the company on usability improvements and an effort to pitch Yahoo! has a complete launching point for all of your Internet needs. Less competition in search algorithms, but probably a smart business move for Yahoo! Time will tell.

Since Google's Caffeine search index announcement, all the buzz around search indexing has been about page load speed. In a May 26, 2010 report Google released some interested stats on some key factors that play into page load speed.

Key takeaways from the data:

• Average web page transfers 320 KB of data.
• Most websites could reduce their HTTP requests by combining JavaScript and CSS files respectively.
• The average page has almost 44 resources, 30 of which are images.

Some of the metric data does have a yep factor; though it's not all that suprising. The era of "cloud computing" lends a lot to the gets per post and hosts per request.  Just keep in mind, reduction of some of the reported metrix data could improve your web page's page download speed.

The data in the report is based upon a sample size of 4.2 billion pages. Yes, that is billion. We are talking about Google's search index.