It was announced today that Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers.

The transaction will have to go under regulatory review before it can be made official. Therefore it will probably be early 2010 before we actually see this deal come to fruition. In the mean time the Microsoft and Yahoo! have established a website at http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com to provide consumers, advertisers and publishers with additional information about the benefits of the agreement.

This "merger" is a step in the right direction for Microsoft Bing if they want to compete with the search giant Google. If you look at the graph below you can see that Google has a large lead on the competition but second and third place belong to Yahoo and Microsoft. Combining the two together could finally put some competitive pressure on Google.

Read the full article here: http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=399702