There"s been much speculation in recent weeks that Yahoo might bring an end to the search partnership that it entered into with Microsoft back in 2009. But today, Yahoo announced that it has renewed its agreement with Microsoft, along with several changes and new commitments.
One major change is that Yahoo says it will now be afforded greater flexibility "to enhance the search experience on any platform, since the partnership is non-exclusive for both desktop and mobile." Despite this non-exclusive arrangement, Yahoo promises that it "will continue to serve Bing ads and search results for a majority of its desktop search traffic."
Another significant change will affect the advertising sales teams for both companies. Yahoo will continue to focus exclusively on selling ads for its Gemini platform, while Microsoft will now exclusively sell for its Bing Ads platform.
The two companies will also "integrate sales teams with those responsible for engineering [to] allow both companies to service advertisers more effectively."
Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer said today that "search has, and will continue to be, an incredibly important part of Yahoo, and this new partnership represents a major step forward in our renaissance."
While today"s announcement did not go into detail over the financial value of the renewed deal, it did confirm that the framework of the existing revenue sharing agreement - in which Yahoo takes a cut of revenue from Bing Ads served up on Yahoo searches - will be maintained.