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Yahoo has teamed up with PayPal to announce that Yahoo’s sponsored search results will feature a blue shopping cart icon linking to merchants that accept the PayPal Express Checkout as a method of payment.

The search listings of participating merchants’ will be enhanced with a shopping cart icon, pointing consumers to a bright orange button on the merchants’ checkout page, offering a simple path to complete purchases via PayPal Express.

The icon displayed by Yahoo is a verbatim copy of the original Google Checkout icon, that is showed alongside search results that accept Google Checkout as a method of payment. I wonder if Yahoo is doing this to blur the brand difference between the two competing payment offerings.

A confusion in recognizing Google’s checkout brand will surely benefit PayPal which has more than 100 million existing customers and a 42% penetration rate in 2006, seven times as much as that of Google checkout, according to a J.P. Morgan study (pdf document).