Microsoft and Yahoo! deal close?

Stephen Withers
Monday, 20 July 2009 04:12

Your IT - Home IT

It looks like the on/off relationship between Yahoo! and Microsoft may finally be consummated.

Microsoft has expressed interest in Yahoo!'s search business since its attempts to buy the company fell through.

Reports emerged late last week that officials of the two companies had been meeting to pin down a deal.

The favoured version of the story seems to be that the deal would involve a multi-billion dollar payment by Microsoft to Yahoo!.

The partnership would see Microsoft look after search advertising while Yahoo! handles premium advertising.

Yahoo! would receive an ongoing stream of payments, along with access to search data.

There have been suggestions that Yahoo! would hand over its entire search business to Microsoft as part of such a deal. That would yield a major cost saving, while making the company reliant on Microsoft for search data.

Ultimately, any such deal is about trying to gain sufficient market share to be seen as a viable alternative to Google, which currently takes the lion's share of search advertising.

So how are the three search engines faring? Find out on page 2.