Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer reportedly doesn't want to deal with Microsoft's Bing search engine anymore
On Tuesday, Yahoo reported in a new government filing that it has renewed a search engine revenue deal with Microsoft until March 31, 2014. That agreement is just a small part of Yahoo's overall deal with Microsoft that sees the website using the Bing search engine.
The Yahoo-Bing partnership was signed in 2009, but in more practical terms, started in early 2010. Now Yahoo's current CEO Marissa Mayer is reportedly looking to break the deal well ahead of its 10 year lifespan. The Wall Street Journal, via unnamed sources, claims that Mayer has been trying to cut the Microsoft contract ever since she came on board as CEO in 2012.
However, the report also states that the Yahoo-Bing deal isn't going away anytime soon. Analysts claim the earliest opportunity for the agreement between the two companies to be broken is 2015. Yahoo is within its right to break the contract if the revenue it gets per search goes down below an unspecified level.
The story also claims that the search agreement could be cut off if Microsoft were to sell off its Bing business. What's more interesting is that the article claims Microsoft actually though about doing just that in 2012. There's no other word on why Microsoft would consider such a move nor why they apparently decided against it.
Yahoo could develop its own Internet search technology as a replacement or it could made a similar search engine agreement with Google. Such a deal could run into antitrust issues with the US government, but any such agreement could be structured to avoid such problems.
Source: Wall Street Journal | Image via Yahoo
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