Yahoo Inc, which has spent a huge amount of money on developing new real-time search capabilities, has hit a deal with Microsoft Corp, the deal that is believed to fortify both companies against Google.

Speaking on the deal, Carl Icahn, an investor, said, "I think it is an excellent deal, and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and her team did an excellent job under the circumstances."

The 10-year agreement shifts control of Yahoo search results and ads to Microsoft, which will utilize Yahoo's site as a platform for its new search engine named Bing.

On the other hand, Microsoft will bear the expenses for infrastructure it requires to run search technology.

Yahoo would get 88% of proceeds from the sale of ads for the first 5 years.

It may be noted here that Yahoo has already burned up more than 2 billion dollars on purchasing additional search engines, which includes assets from Inktomi and AltaVista.

However, Yahoo's share in the US market has shrunken to one-fifth, down from one-third in 2004.

The alliance would be able to enjoy around 28% of the search market, still much from Google's 65% share. Yahoo alone has 20% share of the search market.

Yahoo stock dropped to 14.32 on July 31 from 17.22 on July 28. However, Microsoft's stock did not show much fluctuation.