You may recall the recent partnership between Google and Yahoo!, which saw Yahoo! serving Google paid search ads alongside its own for a period of 2 weeks. The two week trial has now been called a “brilliant test” by Google, who would happily expand the advertising partnership in an effort to prevent Microsoft from renewing their bid.

By making sure Yahoo! does well, Google are effectively preventing the company from falling into the hands of Microsoft, who is eager to join with Yahoo! to seriously compete with Google.

“We were a big partner of Yahoo a few years ago,” co-founder Sergey Brin said. “It’s great to be working with them again.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt also remarked, “We have had a brilliant test which was two weeks long.”

All these comments are a strong indication from Google that they would love to further expand the advertising deal and contribute to Yahoo!’s success.

Aside from assisting Yahoo!’s success, the deal also worked out well for Google in another way, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer commenting that the Google test was one of his reasons for terminating negotiations with Yahoo!:

“In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us.”

All this means for Google, is that by perusing a long term deal with Yahoo! - they would go a long way towards blocking any further negotiations between Yahoo! and Microsoft.