According to the Wall Street Journal today Yahoo could be talking Google about the outsourcing of search advertising sales. This comes as, so the report suggests, as part of two pronged strategy to fight off the Microsoft acquisition threat. The other prong being a deal with AOL to combine Internet operations.

But it's the whole is Yahoo finally admitting that Google does advertising better thing that intrigues me, and I suspect a lot of other Internet watchers. Especially considering that Yahoo has always dismissed the notion that Google is better in this regard up until now. Of course, it does still seem to be fairly dismissive, insisting that that it is "only a limited test" which will involve no more than 3 percent of Yahoo's web search queries and adding that it "does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense program."

Yeah right, and the Pope is Jewish.

By outsourcing to AdSense Yahoo could boost its cash flow, no doubt about that. Equally, I suspect, there is little doubt that industry regulators would take an interest considering that such an arrangement would give Google something like 90 percent of the search advertising market. So in order to fight Microsoft off, perhaps Yahoo will deliver an early Christmas present in an opportunity for MS to fight back at Google with an anti-competitive complaint…