Microsoft is handing over parts of its display advertising business to AOL, the company announced Monday afternoon.
As part of the deal, AOL, which is now owned by Verizon, will make Bing its default search engine instead of Google for the next ten-years. The switch will take place January 2016.
This is pretty big news for Google, which lost its partnership with Mozilla to Yahoo late last year, causing its largest drop in search marketshare since 2009.
Right now Google is the default search for Apple's Safari process, but there's been talk that Apple could ditch for Bing or Yahoo too.
Not that this is necessarily all doom and gloom for Google. It's unclear whether the company made a bid to renew the partnership — Google had no comment when Business Insider reached out.
Google must pay a percentage of the revenue it generates from offering search on AOL's site, which may have made Google less eager to renew the deal.
In Q1 of this year, AOL pulled in about $116.4 million in revenue from its search properties. Given that number, a source with knowledge of the situation indicated that Google would only have made "tens of millions" from an AOL search deal.
That's compared to the $11.93 billion in search revenue Google saw from its websites — which include distribution deals — in Q1 of 2015.
