Its official, Yahoo! Search is now being powered by Microsoft’s search engine technology Bing.  Almost a year ago, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! for $40 billion only to face rejection but the persistent buggers then made a bid for $1 billion for Yahoo!’s search business which was shot down again by Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz.

And now the deal has finally been made and the whopping figure at which its been finalized is ZERO!

According to report, the new deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is more of a revenue share. Not to get into long boring details, I’ve jotted down some basic pointers:

1. Yahoo search engine will be replaced by Microsoft’s Bing for the next 10 years
2. For the first 5 years, Yahoo will keep 88% of the revenue generated and after that 93% of the same
3. Yahoo will keep its current interface but Microsoft gets the “Powered by Bing” branding on it
4. Microsoft’s AdCenter technology is expected to the sales platform
5. Yahoo! will be moving out of the search technology business and moving towards media, advertising and sales
6. There are growing concerns by the management that lobbying attempts by Google might delay the deal
7. The regulatory authority’s blessings over this deal have caused some concerns with the parties involved
8. Advertisers are happy about the deal as they feel that there should be another large entity in the market which they can use apart from Google

All the above points are valid and it will be interesting to see what the outcome is at the end of the day. How soon will this change be implemented as there are massive infrastructure and technology changes expected by both Yahoo! and Microsoft in the next few months under the terms of their deal.