Microhoo! - The Microsoft/Yahoo! Search Partnership

Microsoft(Bing) and Yahoo! announced a search partnership to begin in early 2010. You can read more at CNN Money. This partnership will put Bing search results from between 25-30% of total market share. Yahoo will still be responsible for attracting premium advertisers, no word yet direct effect this will have on PPC advertisers.

The search partnership has great timing as Bing continues to spend its way to popularity. This should lead to another swing of talk about the, now more interesting, Bing vs. Google competition. Although Google is still king, and will be for the foreseeable future, this is the first real competitor (as far as search share goes) they've seen this decade.

With Bing now a substantial piece of search results, will PPC costs in Google begin to become cheaper as advertisers shift budgets around? Or will advertisers even bother shifting budgets any more than they already have? Will the relatively low PPC costs of Yahoo! and Bing begin to cost more?

Plenty of questions around this merger, should make for an interesting 2010 for SEM.