• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, June 14, 2006

News Corp.'s MySpace.com plans to solicit bids from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to power search on the site, the company's Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin said at a Deutsche Bank Media & Telecom conference broadcast on the Internet.

"We will probably look to auction off our search business to one of the three big search players," Chernin said.

Currently, the MySpace search results are populated with ads from Yahoo Search, but those ads are served by one of Yahoo's distributors, said a Yahoo spokesperson. "We have no direct relationship with MySpace," the spokesperson said. It wasn't immediately clear which company syndicates Yahoo's ads to MySpace.

In addition to its search ads, MySpace also offers contextual text ads on some pages. Those ads also originate with Yahoo, but are distributed on MySpace by Revenue Science.

Chernin also said Tuesday that News Corp. hopes to "change the ad sales mix" so that 80 percent of the site's ad dollars come from display ads sold on a cost-per-thousand impression basis. Currently, about 20 percent of the ad dollars comes from display impressions, with the rest stemming from sales of remnant inventory.

He added that the company was bullish on ad sales prospects. "Revenue is growing incredibly quickly," he said. "We've just scratched the surface of how to monetize it."