(By Nikhil Pahwa & Diwaskar Chettri) 200 Yahoo India R&D employees will be offered positions at Microsoft as part of the 10 year Yahoo -Microsoft search deal that was signed in July last year, reports Business Line. A total of 400 offers are being made to Yahoo! employees globally for the effective implementation of the partnership, and Microsoft is looking at hiring both technical and management professionals. MediaNama contacted Yahoo India for more details on the transfer of employees, and got the following "detailed" response on behalf of Shouvick Mukherjee, Vice President and Head Yahoo! India R&D: "Yahoo! India R&D is a global products hub with exceptional talent and deep domain expertise to deliver leading edge consumer and advertiser products. We are happy to actively partner with Microsoft on the search and search advertising technology transition from India." That explains it. The self-proclaimed 'Internet King Maker' had announced at the time of the deal that such a development would take place early 2010 after receiving regulatory approvals. If employees do accept the offer they will be asked to join Microsoft offices and be part of the search deal implementation team. The integration is expected to be completed in 2 years. According to the terms of the partnership, Yahoo will host Microsoft's search engine Bing on its Owned and Operated Sites, give its search technology to Microsoft and replace its advertising platform Panama with Microsoft's AdCenter. Initially there were talks that Yahoo would exit the search space entirely but later it announced that the…
