On Feb 18th Microsoft announced the upcoming partnership for search advertising. This new initiative, called The Yahoo! And Microsoft Search Alliance, will see both ad management programs combined under one umbrella run by Microsoft’s ad platform, adCenter, and powered by Bing (TM). The new partnership promises “More volume, less effort.” and ” of over 150 million searchers in the U.S.” The full rollout is scheduled to be completed by 2011.

You’ll use a single platform—Microsoft adCenter—to manage your campaigns easier and faster. With just one buy your search ads will reach users on Bing, Yahoo!, and other premium partner sites and networks, such as The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, msnbc.com, FoxSports.com, Facebook, and Buy.com.

It remains to be seen if this will present a significant challenge to Google however, one interesting thing that caught my attention was the mention of your ads reaching users on Facebook. With Facebook poised to be the new super force in online advertising, the ability for Microsoft adCenter customers to reach Facebook users could be significant. I’ll be keeping an eye on developments over the next year.

If you want more information, the new website is http://www.searchalliance.com/home