At press time the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Yahoo! and Google think they’ve come up with a way around the Justice Department’s anticipated objections to them climbing into bed together – one of Yahoo!’s alternatives to being acquired by Microsoft – and that a deal could be announced next week.

Yahoo!, the Journal said, was just waiting to see which way the Microsoft chips would fall – whether Microsoft would turn hostile or retreat.

They think the trick lies in a non-exclusive deal – and they think they could get away with it without undue bad press.

The Journal says they’re thinking of a real-time auction system “that would choose the most lucrative ads for any given consumer query from among those sold by Yahoo!, Google and any of their competitors” – even Microsoft’s ads could be sold alongside Yahoo’s search results.

It could even happen if Microsoft acquired Yahoo!, the paper said.

Whether it would pass regulatory scrutiny remains to be seen. It’s unclear whether they’ve sounded out the DOJ, which has been asking questions since Yahoo! and Google ran their two-week experiment and reportedly raised an eyebrow at least. Google and Yahoo together represent 83% of US search advertising, according to one estimate.

Citigroup estimates that outsourcing search advertising completely to Google would increase Yahoo!’s cash flow by a billion dollars a year.