It seems fitting that almost one year after we published a detailed account of the dramatic history between Microsoft and Yahoo! that the rival web outfits may finally be close to an actual deal.

News of rekindled romance broke yesterday when 24/7 Wall Street revealed that sources inside a major client of the investment firm ThinkEquity said that a deal was “imminent.”

The alleged imminence of the deal has triggered a new round of speculation over the terms. Sources outside ThinkEquity’s sphere have suggested that Microsoft will deliver $3 billion up front and 110 percent of its net search revenues, declining to 90 percent after the third year.

This most recent endeavor to finally ink an agreement may be more than the incensed phone calls and posturing PR releases of old. Former WSJ business analyst Kara Swisher has reported that key Microsoft search execs are on the ground in Silicon Valley to spend a weekend with their old flame.

One source close to the situation said that the nuptials are “down to the short strokes.” They continued: “it is just a question if we can finally close this.”

Even in today’s tepid economic climate, there continues to be a business case for a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! ComScore’s June search statistics suggest that the two companies are trading blows for their respective shares, rather than growing the business by eroding Google. The stats reveal that Big G held steady at 65 percent while a 0.5 percent drop in Yahoo! search coincides with the $100 million introduction of Bing. A deal that unites Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search divisions could do away with the share-exchanging wheel spinning and unite 30% of the market under one roof.

For Yahoo!, Microsoft may simply be an inevitability. Even after ousting Yahoo! founder and Dear Leader Jerry Yang, issuing pink slips to some 1400 employees and raising former Autodesk exec Carol Bartz to the spot of chief exec, the overall outlook of the company has remained grim.

Year to date, a six month uptick in the value of Yahoo! stock seems fortuitous, but the upswing has yet to put the company back at $20 a share– a value that plunged to less than $11 over the span of four weeks between September and October of last year.

ComScore data also reveals that deep purple has lost a share of the search market every month since the start of the year.

Finally, while Google continues to expand the size and scope of its operation and Microsoft has refreshed its face with Bing, Yahoo! has seemed positively paralyzed in comparison. Efforts to enhance the admittedly clever YQL and BOSS initiatives don’t do a lick of good to bolster the company’s primary focus on public search and advertising.

In many ways, both companies are still struggling to recover from burdensome portfolios that became crushing in the wake of the .com bust. After diversifying into personals, automobiles, finance, auctions, shopping, sports, games and chat, the “portal to the web” model seemed quite the anachronism in light of the simplicity and transparency Google has offered users and investors.

You know it, we know it, and Microhoo knows it: Yahoo! and Microsoft are in dire need of a little simplicity, and a fat-trimming search merger would not only help to streamline, but help to instantly realize the market share aspirations neither company can realize alone.

New Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz once asked bankers and pundits to give the company some “frigging breathing room.” Without this deal, she may as well have asked for gasping room instead.