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The European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice just cleared the proposed search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo. Under the terms of this deal, Microsoft's Bing will soon replace Yahoo's own search engine on Yahoo's sites, while Microsoft will get an exclusive 10-year license to Yahoo's search technology. Yahoo will receive 88% of all the revenues from search ads on its site for the first five years of the agreement and handle the sales for Microsoft's and Yahoo's premium search advertising inventory.

Google still dominates the search market in in the U.S., while Bing, Yahoo and Ask lost a small slice of the market in December. According to the latest data from Hitwise, Google's market share continues to hover around 72%. Yahoo now owns 14.83% of the search market and Bing accounted for 8.92% of all U.S. searches. Hitwise also looked at the success rates for the top search engines. Hitwise defines this as "the percentage of executed searches that result in a visit to a site other than a main search domain." Here, Bing used to trail Yahoo and Google by a significant margin, but is now on par with Google.

After months of slow but steady increases in its market share, Bing's share of the search market in the US and globally fell for the first time in September. According to StatCounter's Global Stats, Bing's share of the search market in the US fell from 9.64% in August to 8.51% last month. Globally, Bing didn't fare much better, as it went from 3.58% to 3.25%. Yahoo's share went from 10.5% in August to only 9.4% in September. The combined share of Bing and Yahoo has now fallen to 17.91%.