Microsoft makes search and ad deal with Yahoo

After two failed attempts to acquire Yahoo last year, Microsoft has struck a 10-year deal with the Internet company to take on Google. Under the deal, Microsoft will power Yahoo's search engine while Yahoo will take care of both companies' premium search advertisers. The deal must still pass regulators and the companies expect it will take a year or two to fully get the partnership up and running. Full details including the financial side can be found over at CNET.

Less expansive than the all-out, $44 billion acquisition Microsoft proposed last year--and even than some of the search partnerships once discussed--the deal does allow the companies to share resources and combine their engineering efforts. Even together, however, the two companies have only about 30 percent of the search market compared to Google, which has more than twice that amount.

"This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement. "Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we've created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness."