• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 14, 2013

Oh, please. The reports that Yahoo wants to wiggle out of the 10-year deal with Bing should not come as a surprise to anyone, especially with Marissa Mayer at the helm. If Bing hadn't locked in that deal prior to the former Google engineer taking charge at Yahoo, the search landscape might look a whole lot different today.

Microsoft continues to do its best to squash rumors and accelerate growth. David Pann, GM of the Microsoft Advertising Search Group, lists several milestones of the agreement and explains in a blog post that Microsoft and Yahoo recently extended a revenue guarantee arrangement that "will further stabilize our partnership and instill confidence in the continued success and growth of the Yahoo Bing Network."

An interesting line graph from comScore shows the increase in queries for Microsoft sites since May 2009, and decline for Yahoo since January 2007. Around November 2011, Yahoo's decline deepens and Microsoft's increase widens. The data firm expects to release April 2013 numbers Wednesday afternoon.

Several years of decline in explicit core search market share led Yahoo sites to 11.8% in March 2013 from 26.9% in February 2007. In the same time frame, Microsoft rose from 16.9% to 20.4%, while Google rose from 52.6% to 67.1%, respectively. Microsoft has been serving query results on Yahoo since 2010.

The Bing Yahoo Network grabbed 21% of the U.S. paid-search market share in the first quarter of 2013 -- up from 18.6%, sequentially -- and 18% in the year-ago quarter, according to The Search Agency.

Pann took a trip to London this week for meetings with advertisers to provide updates on the Yahoo Bing Network, emphasizing that it's not about Bing for search, but how Bing the engine will integrate with Xbox, display, tablets, smartphones, automobiles, and more.

"Rope Knots" photo from Shutterstock.