Jiminy is not amused

At the Cannes International Advertising Festival this week, Microsoft exec Kevin Johnson called Yahoo's search deal with Google anti-competitive and bad for advertisers.

But advertisers already knew the latter, and — judging from unearthed documents dating months before the Yahoo/Google liaison — apparently Yahoo has long been aware of the former.

Johnson expressed his opinion during the Cannes Debate, moderated by Martin Sorrell of WPP, alongside fellow panelists from Google, AOL and Yahoo, reports The Guardian.

Put on the spot about Yahoo's "love affair" with Google, Yahoo exec Hilary Schneider remarked, "This is very much about supercharging Yahoo to be more competitive. Opening up to Google is recognising that … Google has better coverage [in the search marketplace]."

She called the liaison a "win-win," at which point Johnson snarled, "If 'win' is consolidating 90 percent of the paid search market [in the US] to Google, then that's a win."

Johnson recently wrote an internal letter that went public last week. The letter revealed that before Yahoo burnt its bridges for good, Microsoft offered it $8 billion for a 16 percent stake, plus an additional $1 billion for its search business.

"The concept of search is to link buyers and sellers … so why does the middleman keep all the money?" Johnson demanded.

Last week Yahoo formed a non-exclusive relationship to outsource sponsored search to Google, which serves almost 70 percent of US searches. (Yahoo serves close to 20 percent.)

Yahoo has long maintained that choosing a sponsored search deal with Google, versus any kind of deal with Microsoft, is in the best interest of its stockholders.

Meanwhile, Yahoo execs flee by the dozen.