Why do I feel like I've written this post before? Fueling yet another news cycle in the Yahoo-Microsoft saga, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said late yesterday that the company remains uninterested in an acquisition of Yahoo, despite Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's comments earlier this week that such a deal wouldn't be a bad idea. Yahoo shares plunged on the news.

However, Ballmer left open the possibility of striking some sort of search partnership with Yahoo.

"We're not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition," Ballmer said at an event in Sydney, according to Bloomberg News. "I'm sure there are still opportunities for some kind of partnership around search."

That has clearly been Microsoft's inclination for a while -- to strike a search deal with Yahoo, boosting its market power against Google without all the complications of a full-blown acquisition. Previously, Google's proposed advertising search partnership with Yahoo prevented Microsoft from going that route. However, things changed when Google backed out of that deal earlier this week, deciding it wasn't worth a big antitrust dust-up.

Based on that, it appears from Ballmer's comments that Microsoft would be still be open to working out a search partnership of its own with Yahoo. But more than 8 months after Microsoft made its original acquisition offer, the fact that the companies are back to communicating through the media makes this less meaningful than if they were talking quietly in behind-the-scenes meetings. Maybe that will happen at some point, and in a couple months or so they'll emerge with some sort of agreement.

Until then, as Ballmer would say, Blah, blah, blah-de-blah.