A new partnership with daily deals aggregator The Dealmap is the springboard for Microsoft’s entry into the explosive local-buying space.

Called Bing Deals, the new service will deliver discounted local deals and coupons through Bing’s search engine results on desktop and mobile devices. The offers will be aggregated by The Dealmap's DealExchange network, providing Microsoft with more than 200,000 offers in more than 14,000 locations from leading daily deals sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial.

The service is designed to make it possible for consumers to search for, discover and share the best local deals by using just one resource -- Bing search.

In desktop searches at Bing.com, the deals will appear in local listings and on business profile pages. On mobile devices including the iPhone and Android, users can use the new Deals tab on the Bing app and search for discounts by category, keyword or “daily deals”.

The service may also be very similar to what Google had intended when it offered $6 billion to acquire Groupon late last year. Since that offer was rejected, Google has said it is working on its own daily deals entry called Google Offers.

Google Offers could align very nicely with all of the changes occurring at Google Places over the past year and potentially disrupt the daily deals space currently owned by Groupon. For now those top companies competing for daily deals dollars stand to benefit from Bing Deals, but the long-term effects remain to be seen.

What we do know is that Microsoft has now entered the hottest category on the commercial Web with fairly little risk on its end, and also managed to ruffle the feathers of its fiercest rival in the process.