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The love-hate relationship between Microsoft and Yahoo will be tuned to “hate” for the remainder of the month.
In private, the companies are working on separate versions of integration plans that will send some Yahoo engineers to work for Microsoft as it prepares to take over delivering automated free and paid search results to Yahoo.
On the world stage, meanwhile, the two are slugging it out for users and for display advertisers, in front of whom they will continue to compete.
Microsoft, which launched its well-received search engine Bing at the end of May, didn’t even make it through the summer before putting out improvements. The company gave a peek at the first big one, which it calls visual search, at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco on Monday.
On select topics, such as the ever-popular “celebrities” and potentially more lucrative “digital cameras,” it lets users see what appears to be a three-dimensional rendering of images from various websites.
That does a couple of things, besides look nice. It puts a greater number of viewable images on display at once. And it aids people who want to then narrow the search by a subcategory, be it actresses or multi-megapixels. (It will also help Microsoft get more people to install Silverlight, the company’s answer to Adobe’s Flash, which is required for visual search to work.)
Bing  is already on the way up. Nielsen said today that Microsoft had 22 per cent more searches in August than in July, enough to move it from a 9 per cent market share to 10.7 per cent share. And more tweaks are coming very soon.
Yahoo executives, on the other hand, are heading en masse to New York next week for the annual autumn advertising gatherings.
They will be making a full pitch on why they are the place to spend. That setting also would be a logical place for the company to roll out its own anticipated marketing campaign, which CEO Carol Bartz has promised is in the offing.
By handy coincidence, the stepped-up public displays of aggression come just as the Justice Department goes deeper in its antitrust inquiry into the alliance. This much fussing and fighting could help convince the feds that the tie-up will help everyone but Google.