Yahoo and Bing Agree to Another Year of Search Partnership

While Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer has made no secret of the fact they've been contemplating their options for the future of their own search engine, it looks like they've re-upped with Bing by the signing a 12 month extension on their RPS or 'revenue per search' guarantee.

Under the original agreement, Bing guaranteed that Yahoo would either make a set amount of revenue off of search or Bing would compensate Yahoo for the deficit. The original deal was supposed to be in place for 18 months and expired March 1st with the Yahoo/Bing search share still falling short of the proposed RPS goal, meaning Microsoft no longer had to compensate Yahoo for the deficit.

The new agreement guarantees that Bing will continue to compensate Yahoo for the deficit for another 12 months and stops Yahoo from seeking out a partnership with anyone else....hmmm, I wonder who else they may be able to partner with?

The original Yahoo/Bing partnership was a 10 year deal, with only a few loopholes to break it before the halfway point in mid-2015. It's a difficult position for Mayers to negotiate out of because although the RPS is not meeting their goals it has not been consistently low enough over 12 months to allow them out of the contract.

It's also interesting to note that Bing and Yahoo have gain a combined full point of search market share at the expense of Google.