• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, August 16, 2005

Miva, the search company formerly known as FindWhat.com, said Monday it had settled a patent infringement suit with Yahoo! concerning use of the keyword bidding system for paid search. The agreement provides for Miva to pay $8 million to Yahoo!, as well as licensing fees.

Both companies had been locked in a four-year battle over the validity of Yahoo!'s patent for a keyword bidding system used for sponsored search listings. In 2001, FindWhat filed suit to declare Yahoo!'s bidding system patent invalid. Yahoo! filed its own lawsuit against both FindWhat and Google for patent infringement.

FindWhat and Yahoo! took the dispute to trial earlier this year, but the case ended with a hung jury in May. Google settled last August, immediately before its initial public offering, by agreeing to give Yahoo! 2.7 million shares of Google stock.