Bing...and the Google is gone!

Where have I heard a similar phrase before...ah yes, Barry Scott!
In the light of the Microsoft/Yahoo agreement this week, I thought I'd take some time to talk about Bing, Microsoft's "decision engine", and the implications of the agreement for SEO.

From what I can see, it looks like Bing is now going to power Yahoo's search results, and to be honest, I'm far from convinced this is a good thing for the seo industry.
I've been working in SEO and online marketing for a number of years now, and MSN/Live/Bing has always been the most unpredictable search engine. I dont know if it's because of the companies I worked for, but I've always struggled to achieve decent rankings in MSN's SERPs for my core keywords even though the same keywords were delivering great results in Google and Yahoo.
Now that I've had a bit of time to look at Bing. it still looks to me like the results are based on the old Live algorithm and do not give me what I expect to find, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one to feel that way. So excuse me Mr Microsoft, but I need more than a slick looking interface to convince me (yes, Bing does look very nice and clean, shall we just call it Bling then??).
On the plus side, Bing offers some webmaster and keyword tools (thanks Rochelle for the post suggestion!) and until I test them further I'll reserve judgement. One can only hope they'll be as good as Google Webmaster tools....but very unlikely. Maybe they'll help SEOs understand how the algorithm works, but I'm still worried that the transition from Yahoo to Bing is going to hurt a lot of websites in terms of organic traffic.
It'll also be interesting to look at paid results as a lot of advertisers (including me) have already heard the rumours that click through rates in Bing are higher than in Google (less ads displayed)

If I were Google, I wouldn't be really worried about this new alliance yet, and as an online marketer, I'll still focus most of my efforts on Google while keeping an eye on what's going on on the other side, but until I can see some tangible results for my sites in Bing results, I'll remain unconvinced.