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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is continuing to pursue the purchase of Yahoo Inc on its own, despite having entered into talks with News Corp (the owner of the Wall Street Journal and Dow-Jones) aimed at a joint purchase of Yahoo. This would seem only to muddle the picture, involving AOL / Time-Warner and News Corp in the tangled bodies now involved in Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo. Predictably, neither News Corp nor Microsoft would comment on the WSJ reports.

This comes after the Yahoo Board of Directors failed to take any actions on the proposed buyout after considering a number of options, including trying to strike a deal with AOL, Google, or Microsoft. AOL, apparently, is continuing to pursue a Yahoo purchase as a lone agent, as well. Also predictably, neither Yahoo or AOL saw fit to comment on the report.

Google comes into the matter after announcing a pilot program under which Yahoo would place relevant Google Adsense advertising next to Yahoo search results on Yahoo pages. Both parties say that they are talking about a more robust advertising deal, combined somehow with search, although it is not clear how such an arrangement could ever be gotten by antitrust issues.

And the beat goes on…