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Microsoft and Yahoo have just announced that they’ve reach a 10 year deal which will see the two search engines become one. However, it sounds like you can still search using Microsoft (Bing) or Yahoo, it’s just that it won’t mater which you choose, the results will be the same.

In terms of market share, Google owns the biggest piece of the pie when it comes down to search, putting Yahoo in second and Microsoft in third. With this new deal combining the resources of both Microsoft and Yahoo, it looks as though we’re down to a two horse race (unless you count Ask..). The idea obviously being to put up a real alternative for people to consider outside of Google.

Personally, I think this is a great deal for Microsoft and Yahoo stands to really get hurt out of this one. Microsoft have a lot of leverage in terms of what they can achieve on the desktop and they are actively trying to integrate their online services with this. Given 10 years, I can see Microsoft being able to put together some sort of desktop search feature which will also search the web via Bing.

We’re already seeing the foundations of this being forged in Vista and Windows 7 where you only need to push a single key on your keyboard to run a search on your PC for any file or application you want. Should Microsoft extend this to bring in Bing results, people wouldn’t have much of a reason to go back to Yahoo! to search for things any more.

At the end of the day however, a deal like this looked inevitable for Yahoo. They weren’t really making much ground in their current form and something had to change. Whether doing this with Microsoft is the change they needed is yet to be seen, but here’s hoping that whatever they do, it keeps Google inspired to continue producing the competition crushing solutions that brought about all of this in the first place!