Both the US and European regulators have extended an approval last week to Yahoo! and Microsoft's multi-million pound search deal.

The arrangement, which will witness Microsoft's search technology power Yahoo!'s search engine for the next decade, is expected to go unnoticed by users of both services, as it is no more than back-end tweaking.

Yahoo!'s decision to "outsource" its search operation, in exchange for managing the search advertising business of both companies, is cited as a sign that it has ducked out of the search war that's raging between Google and its competitors, including Microsoft's own Bing platform.

Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder told delegates at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last year, "I think Yahoo! had a number of innovations there, and I wish they would continue to innovate in search".

However, as per Yoelle Maarek, Senior Director of Yahoo! Research, nothing could be away from the truth. She explained that the deal should be discerned as liberating Yahoo! to aim at front-end search innovations, rather than spending time and money on ensuring the back-end technology is working well.