Wal-Mart has teamed up with Oodle to offer Wal-Mart Classifieds, Beta to consumers who would like to try out their free services. Like Craig’s List or eBay’s Kijiji free local classified services, Wal-Mart Classifieds sees this service as a way to appeal to a new market segment and perhaps siphon off some cost-conscious shoppers into their own online store.

The current beta of Wal-Mart Classifieds has around 30 million items listed from local sellers. In a fitting bit of irony (or turn about is fair play) Oodle was founded by former eBay executives in the San Francisco and San Mateo areas of Northern California.

Oodle is a large aggregator of online classified ads pulling from resources such as eBay, Myspace, other websites and local newspapers. The Oodle classifieds feature car, home, pets, jobs, personals and other common categories.

Wal-Mart Classifieds has a much more visually pleasing interface with plenty of photo previews, than say Craig’s List. In the location that I searched the results were pulled primarily from the Penny Saver.

Wal-Mart Classifieds presents another opportunity for those who want to go “garage sale-ing” online. But, it’s also an opportunity for the small business person to market products and services or even test market products and services before spending too much money on more traditional marketing methods.

Look for Wal-Mart Classifieds to not only be a low-cost first stop for local shoppers online, but a valuable marketplace for small businesses and startups wanting to launch their local businesses as well.

For instance, Google has announced that despite losing a little market share to Yahoo, that the world’s largest search company revenues of $5.19 billion for the quarter, up 42-percent from the same time last year, and 7-percent better than the preceding quarter.

Yahoo, on the other hand posted a 57.6-percent jump in online ad spending over the same time last year. Yahoo’s market share has also jumped 4.6-percent while Google’s has fallen 4.1-percent over last year. Analysts are saying the rise in Yahoo is due to its Panama platform released last year.

Later today, Yahoo is expected to report its first quarter earnings that will likely affect the Microsoft takeover bid price. If the earnings are high enough, the bid may be thwarted altogether or at least Yahoo will receive prime dollar for its properties.

But, no matter what happens, one thing is for sure. The soft economy in the U. S. has not hampered the hard dollar on the Internet and one can expect this trend to continue for some time to come.