San Francisco, Jul 29: According to many reports, the Microsoft and Yahoo deal is in its final stages and a formal announcement is expected to be made soon.

Some reports suggest that the deal calls for the Microsoft to handle the search through a newly designed Bing on Yahoo sites as well as its own in exchange of payments. Yahoo would also reserve the the right to continue to sell text-based search ads alongside some of the queries.

The companies have been wrangling over the deal for more than a year. Most media reports suggest that the two companies are likely to settle for a simple deal that will evolve into a strong competition for the Internet giant, Google.

While Google handles about two thirds of the search queries, both yahoo and Microsoft put together will account for 28 per cent (Yahoo-20 per cent and Microsoft- 8 per cent). Implementation of the deal will place tough challenges for both the companies as they may have to merge their search marketing, sales and engineering departments.

Commenting on the compexity of the deal, an analytist said, "It's not something you flip a switch and it happens."

OneIndia News