The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo will be testing search advertising fed by Google in an effort to stave off Microsoft’s takeover intentions.

The testing period is slated to last two weeks and will affect no more than 3% of Yahoo’s search queries. The goal of this testing period is for the two search giants to test the revenue potential of further outsourcing from Yahoo to Google.

From Google:

“Yahoo will be testing Google’s AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant ads alongside Yahoo’s own natural search results,” said Google in a statement. “This is only a limited test and does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense program.”

And from Yahoo:

“The testing does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result,” Yahoo said in a statement.

In my opinion this partnership would at best offer a short term boost to Yahoo but over time I believe Yahoo would go the way of AOL after they outsourced their search to Google, namely leading to the decline of Yahoo as a major player in search.

Google announced on their official blog today that they will be selling Performics Search Marketing, a company they acquired as part of their DoubleClick acquisition.

Most people saw this coming as it seemed an obvious conflict of interest having the largest search engine owning and operating an SEO/SEM firm.

The announcement was met by great disappointment from the staff at Performics as they’ve been dreaming of all the free food and snacks they were going to eat at the Google Campus.

Sorry guys