A few weeks ago, talks between Yahoo and Microsoft have restarted. Yahoo’s new Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz and her counterpart from Microsoft Steve Ballmer met to discuss the possibilities, technology blog AllThingsD informed. 

 

The two companies have held a marathon of talks last year trying to either merge or form a partnership. Fortunately or unfortunately, the companies only agreed to disagree. The $47 billion offer that Microsoft made to Yahoo for a takeover fell apart to the frustration of some shareholders. 

 

Yahoo and Microsoft declined to comment on this subject. 

 

According to a source close to the talks, the conversations are in their early stages and are unlikely to lead to an agreement, The New York Times reported. The talks mainly focused on ways to corroborate the companies’ advertising efforts and a possible partnership under which Microsoft would sell search ads for Yahoo, and Yahoo, in turn, would sell display ads on Microsoft properties, was mentioned. One thing is certain: the CEOs aren’t talking about a merger or anything like that. 

 

The talks come as no surprise though. Last month, at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit in New York, Steve Ballmer said that Yahoo’s search volume would be of tremendous importance to Microsoft in its plans to take some bigger bights from Google’s market share. 

 

After the series of talks between the two companies did not end with a merger last year, Microsoft has focused its efforts in search business in order to give Google a run for its money. The efforts included the hiring of top search execs and engineers that left Yahoo such as Qi Lu, a well-known technologist who is now president of Microsoft's Online Services Group. 

 

However, since it took over as Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz has made numerous changes in the company and has also strongly underlined the fact that Yahoo is not entertaining the idea of selling off its search business.

 

A deal between the two companies under which Microsoft would be able to fully benefit from Yahoo’s search volume would be a huge breath of fresh air for the giant software company whose main concern in the battle with Google is that its audience and base of advertisers are incomparable with Google’s. A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership that would address that problem would certainly pave the way to a stronger No.2 in the Web search industry.