It has been suspected for some time that there was a proposition in the pipeline for these two search giants to join forces in a bid to be able to seriously compete with Google. This week the deal was made public and the two have thrashed out details of an agreement to suit both parties, in a move comes more than a year after Microsoft’s failed bid for it’s competitor.

The crux of the deal: Microsoft will power the search platform whilst Yahoo! will be the sales force for premium search advertisers.

By combining the services of both it is hoped that users will receive results faster whilst being more relevant. The partnership, which has been agreed for 10 years is to give Bing the ability to " more effectively compete, attracting more users and advertisers, which in turn will lead to more relevant ads and search results." according to Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer.

Still with Google estimated to have over 70% of the market share the new partnership will have some serious work to do in order to recover some of this ground.

This does raise some interesting questions from a PPC agency perspective. Will they combine the backend admin? Will we be billed 1 invoice? Will we lose our Microsoft rep whilst our Yahoo! Rep is trained up on the full offering?

Watch this space…