Everyone knows that Microsoft is desperate. After borking their bid to buy up Yahoo, Big Evil is looking for any way it can possibly increase its competition with Google in search and more importantly, search advertising.

The Empire seems to have found one new way, thanks to a newly-formed partnership with Hewlett-Packard, the world leader in personal computer sales. According to the company's announcement, HP will now pre-load a special version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer onto every PC it sells in the United States and Canada. This rivals Google's deal with Dell to pre-load Google search tools onto their machines, as well as the default Google search in Mozilla Firefox.

Microsoft representatives are quoted claiming 40% of searchers use the default search installed for their system. If true, the HP deal will give Microsoft an immediate audience of millions for its search offerings, though the company has declined to speculate on the amount of additional traffic and revenue expected from the deal.