Microsoft and Yahoo! announced today (Wednesday, July 29th) that an agreement has been made to integrate Yahoo! Search engine technology with Microsoft’s new search engine (excuse me, “decision engine”) known as Bing.

The ten-year partnership will deal exclusively with search and search advertising. The two groups will apparently remain independent in certain sectors like news sites and electronic mail services

The partnership is intended to create a new “number 2” in an effort to strike a blow at Google (never really mentioned by name in Steve Ballmer’s video below), the behemoth of search and paid ad revenues.

Fickle Yahoo! has changed search partners before.

1995-Yahoo! directory first to “catalog the web”
1998-Yahoo! uses Alta-Vista and Inktomi for web search
2000-Yahoo! uses Google for web search
2004-Yahoo! kicks Google out, buys Inktomi and develops its own search engine
2009-Yahoo!and Microsoft agree to collaborate on a web search and ad partnership “Bing go!”

Because Marion follows standard SEO practices (cleverly executed) our rankings on Bing remain as strong as they were on MSN.com, if not just a little bit better. And instead of optimizing separately for Google, Yahoo and Bing, we only need to optimize for Google and Bing now.