“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,” said Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz. “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.”

“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,” said Ballmer. “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.  Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be.  This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.” said Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer.

Bing will become Google’s main competitor in search, with a market share of about 28% in the US  and about 11% worldwide.

In my opinion another bad move for Yahoo, which for a long period, until 2004, used to be powered by Google, which I belive was one of the reasons Google became so popular in the first place.