Following the lead of Google using underscores as word separators, Barry Schwartz now informs that Yahoo!, MS Live and Ask.com have begun using underscores “the same as dashes or hyphens in the URL”.

Barry explains saying, "Some SEOs believe that the keywords in the URL of a page have some limited impact on the ranking of that page in the search engines. So if you sold blue widgets, and you had a page at www.domain.com/blue-widgets.html, those keywords are sometime perceived to help - while keeping all the other factors in ranking a page equal. In the past, Google treated hyphens but not underscores in a URL as a word separator. So in our example above, the blue-widgets part would be seen as two different words: blue & widgets. If it were like this, blue_widgets, then Google would have seen it as one single word: blue_widgets."

When asked by Barry Ramez Naam of Microsoft said:
“We treat underscores as word separators in URLs. Always have.”

Yahoo's Priyank Shanker Garg said:
“For URL tokenization(separating words in URLs), we treat dashes or underscores identically, but these are not our only tokens and we take a more general approach to finding words in URL.”

Ask.com is yet to reply.

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