As BoomTown reported earlier today, Yahoo Japan confirmed it would switch its search technology and paid search provider to Google from Yahoo.

The move is a definite blow to Yahoo’s new search and advertising alliance with Microsoft (MSFT), although Yahoo (YHOO) sought to minimize the damage in a statement (which you can read below in its entirety).

But make no mistake, given the huge Japanese market: It’s Googzilla totally wiping the floor with MicroHooSoftra.

While it might seem unusual that Yahoo Japan will be using Google’s search, the company is not actually owned by Yahoo, which holds a 35 percent stake.

SoftBank Corp., the giant Japan-based Internet service provider and cell phone provider, has a stake of around 40 percent in Yahoo Japan.

Both SoftBank Founder Masayoshi Son–one of the first key investors in Yahoo–and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang sit on the board of Yahoo Japan, which is operated independently as a separate publicly traded company run by President and CEO Masahiro Inoue.

Now that Yahoo Japan and Google (GOOG) have announced their engagement–in a statement at the time of Yahoo Japan’s first-quarter earnings announcement–it is certain that Microsoft will move to stop deal from gaining regulatory approval in Japan, even though a Google spokesman told BoomTown it had already consulted the proper authorities in Japan and had gotten no objections.

Still, I would not expect Microsoft to settle for that, and it is likely to do some lobbying
much as it did successfully when Google tried to enter into a similar deal with Yahoo itself in the U.S. in 2008.

That deal failed after government opposition to the creation of a near-monopoly in search in the U.S. became clear.

In Japan the combination is even worse, with the pair controlling almost the entire market share of search there, both paid and algorithmic.

In search query volume, according to one recent report, Yahoo Japan currently has just over a 53 percent share of the search market and Google has just over 38 percent.

Other polls differ, but it all spells an overwhelming and definite monopoly when combined.

Coincidentally, Bing just entered the Japan market with its branded search, but it has only a small share there of almost three percent.

The same market share among the big players holds in paid search too, with Yahoo Japan and Google controlling almost the whole thing between them.

Maintaining a modicum of competition in Japan was Yahoo’s to lose. And lose it did.

After Yahoo and Microsoft struck their wide-ranging search and online advertising partnership last year, Yahoo Japan–which now uses Yahoo technology for algorithmic and paid search–was then free to pick whatever search service it wanted.

Most expected it to use Microsoft’s Bing technology, which will be powering Yahoo in the U.S. by the end of the year, as well as in many other countries where Yahoo operates.

But, because Yahoo Japan is its own entity, any such deal needed to be negotiated among the parties, putting Yahoo Japan in play, much as if it were AOL (AOL) or News Corp. (NWS) unit MySpace in the U.S.

Investors are sure to ask what Yahoo management was doing as the Google effort took shape.

Those efforts obviously paid off, despite a declaration by Yahoo Japan’s Inoue in an January interview with a Japanese news organization that he was not impressed with some other Google services, such as its Street View mapping service.

Thus, the fallout from this is likely to be tough on Yahoo and also its nascent search relationship with Microsoft.

Yahoo Japan said the date of the switch was yet to be determined.

Here’s the statement from Yahoo on the changeover:

Yahoo! Japan announced that it has chosen to implement Google as its backend algorithmic search engine and paid search infrastructure. Yahoo! Japan made this decision as an independent and separate publicly traded company, in which Yahoo! holds a 35% equity interest. We amended our agreement with Yahoo! Japan as a result of this decision, and we do not anticipate that this amendment will have a material financial impact on our revenues. We will provide support, as required by our agreement, for the search experience Yahoo! Japan has chosen for its business, and we will continue to partner closely with Yahoo! Japan in other areas including mail, messenger, mobile, our content properties and more.

This decision by Yahoo! Japan does not impact the global rollout and implementation of the Yahoo! search alliance with Microsoft, except in the Japanese market. We remain confident in our transition plans for the search alliance, are driving innovation in the user experience around search on the Yahoo! network, and continue to be committed to our alliance with Microsoft.

Here’s an interesting irony–Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will have her 99th day in office on the very one that the Internet giant will announce its first-quarter earnings: April 21, 2009 at 2 p.m. PST.

Technically, it will mean that she has been running Yahoo (YHOO) for 100 days, a time when most administrations get their first evaluation.

Thus, if it’s good enough for President Obama, it’s good enough for Bartz!

While most expect the results for the quarter to be weak, due to the econalypse, the overall verdict from BoomTown’s needling of Yahoos to give me info on their new leader recently: Love, love, love Bartz’s innate decisiveness, and wanting more of the same.

“She has an opinion and she is not afraid to use it,” joked one high-ranking Yahoo. “That is a big deal for a lot of people here who have wanted a CEO who is very forceful.”

And the only substantive negative: Some remain worried about her lack of Internet savvy, although most of those admit she has been a quick learner as the 100-day mark comes to a close.

In Yahoo’s case, 100 days has a special meaning–when he got his job in late 2007, former Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang declared that he was going to give the troubled company a 100-day evaluation with “no sacred cows.”

The Yang-farmed bovines, as it turned out, just got fatter.

Under Bartz, more have been under the knife, as the hard-charging exec has started to really put her imprint on the company.

She has certainly talked tough since the meet-the-press conference on her very first day on Jan. 13.

Some memorable Bartz quotes were about Yahoo’s immediate needs, in her estimation: “some friggin’ breathing room” and “frankly, [the company] could use a little management.”

That kind of tough-lady, Annie-Get-Your-Gun quote-making has been Bartz’s signature, whether it be in folksy Friday memos she has sent out to staff or at the fourth-quarter earnings call in late January, only weeks into her tenure, when she declared:

“This is not a company that needs to be pulled apart and left for the chickens.”

Well, except for the management structure, which Bartz pulled right apart and reshuffled six weeks in.

Cleaning up and simplifying the complex reporting structure in an all-roads-lead-to-Carol set-up and tossing out the CFO were main points of the reorganization. Many at Yahoo expect there to be even more cuts in staff sooner than later, many sources said.

And there have also been departures of key staff, including: PR head Jill Nash, Zimbra founder Satish Dharmaraj and soon, high-ranking techie Venkat Panchapakesan.

Yang too, although he remains on the board, has not been present as much at the company.

Curiously, though, except for the new CMO, Elisa Steele–whose office is powerfully located right next to Bartz, as many Yahoos noted to me–there have been no further appointments for open positions for CFO, a new Customer Advocacy top exec and a new international head. Presumably, they are on the way.

Not that Bartz has not been busy–visiting Yahoo staff and clients all over–as well as finally finding time for a face-to-face meeting with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Silicon Valley recently.

Before the recent meetings, in a classic negotiating tactic, Bartz (pictured here) has projected a disinterested, poker-faced attitude about the situation, even telling Yahoo staff in one meeting “that she plans to spend a lot of time investigating whether to sell Yahoo’s search business, but that her ‘gut’ was not to do that.”

Well, a sale of Yahoo’s search business might not happen, Bartz was only buying a little time in being so confident and projecting the affect that Yahoo had some leverage and a choice.

But that is exactly what she does not really have, given that Yahoo faces the prospect of spiraling costs to maintain a search share, even as it has a good chance of declining.

So, last week, the news–first reported here Friday–that Bartz was involved in preliminary talks with Microsoft (MSFT) about an extensive commercial advertising and search partnership–should have come as almost no surprise.

A re-engagement between the companies, after a bruising takeover battle that ended in tears all around, has been long hoped for by investors and other observers, given that both have struggled against the search behemoth that is Google (GOOG).

(Or, in a nickname that BoomTown is trying unsuccessfully to popularize: Googzilla.)

The talks–which are not about the software giant making another acquisition offer for Yahoo–are ongoing and might not lead anywhere, but it is in both sides’ interest to avoid that outcome.

“Yahoo has to do some kind of deal or Bartz will be facing a decline even she cannot manage,” said one person close to the situation. “And Microsoft, if it wants to compete in search, needs Yahoo’s share along with its own.”

Among the surprisingly innovative ideas being bandied about: Yahoo might take over all of Microsoft’s display and premium advertising business to sell along with its own, while Microsoft would run the search advertising business for the pair.

And, while the discussions could degenerate into chest-pounding and pointless jockeying, one assumes that Bartz gets the idea that Yahoo needs a lot of help–including from some rapprochement with Microsoft, from making its staff even leaner, from streamlining its product focus and from striking other significant partnerships.

Many inside and outside Yahoo certainly hope that spirit–and not the one from this video below of a fabulous scene of Betty Hutton and Howard Keel in the musical classic, “Annie Get Your Gun,” singing “Anything You Can Do”–prevails with Microsoft in the next 100 days.

Of course, that has nothing to do with the fact that most people think the Singleton speech was aimed at the search giant and its burgeoning power over the distribution of media, although Google was not named by him.

Still, it’s always nice to make nice. Sort of.

So, it was hard to resist translating this Google (GOOG) blog by one of its lawyers.

Google wrote: Some questions related to Google News and the Associated Press
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 8:03 AM
Posted by Alexander Macgillivray, Associate General Counsel for Products and Intellectual Property

Translation: Questions? Someone has questions about our practices? OK, we will answer them only to assuage the panic among the little brains about our size and power over IP.

But remember: They don’t call us Googzilla for nothing!

Google wrote: Yesterday I entered the following search in Google News: [Phish in mountain view]. The search results led me to click on this headline, which took me to the full story by the San Jose Mercury News about Phish’s upcoming concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre.

Translation: Hey, we might seem like geeks over here at the Googleplex, chomping on organic flax crackers and making up scary algorithms, but we know of this hip Phish phenom. We looked it up under “hip” on Google!

[Complete digression: BoomTown was in a car pool with the very sweet Trey Anastasio for many years in middle school, and he was not such a hipster then!]

Google wrote: Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month. These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international–day and night.

Translation: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Google wrote: And once a reader is on the newspaper’s site, we work hard to help them earn revenue. Our AdSense program pays out millions of dollars to newspapers that place ads on their sites, and our goal is that our interest-based advertising technology will help newspapers make more from each click we send them by serving better, more relevant ads to their readers to generate higher returns.

Translation: Money makes the world go around,
the world go around, the world go around,
Money makes the world go around,
it makes the world go round.

A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound,
a buck or a pound, a buck or a pound,
Is all that makes the world go around,
that clinking clanking sound,
Can make the world go round.

Google wrote: The Associated Press (AP) recently issued a press release announcing plans to develop an initiative to “protect” the newspaper industry’s content online. Since then, some readers, users and journalists have asked us if the AP’s plan is about Google since we host complete AP articles. The answer is that it doesn’t appear to pertain to Google since we host those articles in partnership with the AP. We announced that partnership in 2007 as part of an experiment in hosting articles on our site. In hosting agreements such as this, we pay news agencies and display the entire text of articles, such as this one from the AP about President Obama’s visit to Turkey.

Translation: Ain’t nobody here but us chickens!

Hey, we pay up some! Not a lot! But some. I mean, YouTube doesn’t pay up and it has tons of content on the site that is not theirs.

Wait, we own YouTube. Forget that example.

Back to chickens. Nobody here!

Google wrote: We drive traffic and provide advertising in support of all business models–whether news sources choose to host their articles with us or on their own sites, and whether their business model is ad-supported or based on subscriptions. In all cases, for news articles we’ve crawled and indexed but do not host, we show users just enough to make them want to read more–the headline, a “snippet” of a line or two of text and a link back to to the news publisher’s website.

Translation: Hey, we only give consumers a little smackeral, in the lingo of the great Winnie the Pooh. Well, yes, that bear does always end up gobbling all the honey. Forget that example.

Back to chickens then, but chickens with an advertising-supported business model!

Google wrote: In the U.S., the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the US Copyright Act allows us to show snippets and links. The fair use doctrine protects transformative uses of content, such as indexing to make it easier to find [pdf]. Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index–all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards such as robots.txt or metatags.

Translation: Oh yes, the fine print. Legal stuff–fair use, transformative, indexing. In other words, we’re covered, and 3,476 Washington lobbyists have our back.

But hey, here is some technical stuff and we’ll also take it out–all you have to do is ask, although it will effectively make you undiscoverable for all of time!

And, if you do then want us to take it out, comb through our gazillions of search results to find your stuff, over and over and over again, like gerbils on a treadmill. We totally hope that does not exhaust you in every way possible.

Google wrote: As for Phish in Mountain View this summer, asking will get you nowhere because the tickets are already sold out.

Translation: Also, for anyone keeping score, Phish owes us too, since no one would have found tickets without us. Google HQ is right smack up against Shoreline Amphitheatre, so we are watching.

So let’s review: Ozymandias, King of Kings. Chickens. Smackeral. Hip.

Nothing to see here, so please enjoy this lovely Phish video of “Bouncing Around the Room” from YouTube (relax, it’s from their official channel):

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Misguided managers, Luddite corporate raiders, a dramatic hostile takeover from a software giant, a revolving door of employees, a dash of Internet moolah and a tough-talking lady CEO to the rescue! And even some Googzilla action thrown in for good measure.

Of course, it has all the elements of a good story for Vanity Fair magazine!

Actually, Yahoo (YHOO) has all the elements of a good Mexican telenovela, but it’s only a magazine article that is apparently in the cards to chronicle the stumbles and bumbles of the Internet giant.

According to sources at both Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo, well-known Silicon Valley scribe and author Alan Deutschman has contacted the companies about a piece he is doing about the company–and, presumably, its tangles with various Web powers like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft–for the Condé Nast-owned Vanity Fair.

BoomTown’s efforts to contact Deutschman to find out the particulars were, alas, unreturned as yet.

But it goes without saying that our site’s huge archive on Yahoo’s hijinks–with much more to come soon, including memos I tag with secret codes too, much as sources tell me Yahoo does these days under new CEO Carol Bartz to prevent leaks–is free of charge to him for research.

Until then, here is my personal favorite Yahoo-related video about the awkward dinner former CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang finally had with me after a year of haranguing: