Yahoo! and Micrsoft Join Forces

It's been one of the world's worst kept secrets, but yesterday long-time rivals Microsoft and Yahoo! finally joined forces in order to tackle industry leader Google.

The deal will see Yahoo! abandoning its old search engine in favour of Bing, the new search engine recently released by Microsoft. Despite this, Yahoo! will have an equal say in proceedings which will see them taking full control of paid advertisements.

According to a press release, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz stated: "This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry. And I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development.

"Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides. Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers. Finally, this deal will help us increase our investments in priority areas in winning audience properties, display advertising capabilities, and mobile experiences."

Carol Bartz's new colleague Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, added: "Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company."

The single company that Mr Ballmer is referring to is, of course, Google. However, according to some areas of the press the merging of Mircosoft and Yahoo! will actually help Google's progress rather than hinder it.

It is thought by some that the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! may actually deter previous users of these search engines, most notibly Yahoo!, as their search engine will change quite drastically. And as these two search engines only take up around 15% of the search market in the UK then things could be looking even rosier for Google.

Time will tell though on the success of the deal and whether Google really is the unkillable monster that it appears.