Although it’s fascinating to examine how search engines operate on a consumer basis, it’s always good to know what’s going on in the corporate side of things. In an effort to increase revenue Yahoo has been exhausing every avenue possible to avoid a hostile corporate takeover by Microsoft. Microsoft has offered to buy out Yahoo for $42 billion, but they are making every effort to keep from accepting the deal.
Their latest move has been to discuss having Google (their largest competitor) advertise on their website. This deal could possibly lead to a larger partnership, which could change things for the little people like us that use the search engines every day. It seems to be an act of desperation for Yahoo to turn to Google; they’ve discussed similar deals in the past with companies such as Time Warner and AOL. If the partnership between Google and Yahoo were to blossom, it is said that Google would then own a consolidated “90% of the search advertising market.” This could lead to allegations of Google being a monopoly and so on… Hopefully Yahoo can find a way to support itself without having to partner with anyone at all.
Here’s a news articles about it:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/09/technology/moritz_yahoo_google.fortune/?postversion=2008040918
And a blog post with an amusing video:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/06/yahoo-leaks-that-tomorrow-theyre-going-to-write-a-very-stern-letter-to-microsoft/
