Yahoo & Microsoft renew their search vows for another year

Microsoft is set to power Yahoo’s search through April 1, 2014, according to a recent SEC filing.

This isn’t really oh-my-gosh-it’s-so-new news. Microsoft has been dealing with Yahoo since MG Siegler still worked at VentureBeat, a.k.a. 2008, a.k.a. the mists of time.

Also, as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer pointed out today while speaking onstage at a tech conference, her company sees most of the innovation in search happening around interfaces and voice controls rather than the underlying technology (or the revenue models that make it worthwhile for one or two companies to index all the information on the Internet.)

In that case, it makes perfect sense for Yahoo to focus its considerable engineering and design talent on tasks like prettying up its mobile apps rather than coming up with yet another programmatic formula for web search.

Microsoft also announced this year it’s powering web search inside Facebook.com‘s garden wall. Facebook, for its part, was busy focusing on Graph Search, its new method of indexing and serving up all the social nodes and edges inside Facebook rather than on the web.