Can the two companies join forces and take on the current king of the search world?

Let me tell you a little story. It is not a fairy tale, but I will start it 'once upon a time' for all that.

Once upon a time, a beautiful woman told Shaw that if they both got married, then their children would be truly lucky to inherit Shaw's brains and her beauty. But the ever irrepressible Shaw asked, 'But, what if they get my beauty and your brain'?

That is the problem with marriages, whether they are between humans or corporations. You can never tell what will happen. And the recent deal between Yahoo and Microsoft for the search engine segment comes in this category.



What next?

Of course, just because we don't know what will happen doesn't mean that we have to assume the worst. For all you know, the combined entity may revolutionise search so much that Google could innovate even more, and thereby the overall quality of search itself could improve tremendously and give all of us really fabulous hits.

But the reverse is also trueu2014if Microsoft and Yahoo don't know how to iron out the minor wrinkles of the relationship, then the confusion that could emanate from their deal could see Google rise to greater heights.

But prima-facie, there is one questionu2014how will they do something big? If Google, Yahoo and Microsoft each held 30 per cent market share, then this could work because then a Microsoft-Yahoo combo could become king of the search engine hill with a combined total of 60 per cent. However, since Google currently holds 65 per cent, Yahoo and Microsoft joining forces currently takes the figure up to only 28 per cent.

User benefits

In some ways, you cannot call this a marriage after all, it is not as if Microsoft has actually bought over Yahoo, as it had planned to do in February 2008 for $44.6 billion. Right now, as per the 10-year deal, Microsoft and Yahoo will merely combine technologies and revenue sharing and try to exploit the combined mutual synergies of the ad search sales staff.

But no matter what sort of a deal it is, it is primarily one way in which both the companies are trying to fight Google. And in this fight, Microsoft's growing expertise with Bing may help a little according to comScore, Microsoft's average daily penetration reached 16.7 per cent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 per cent age points from the May 25-29 work week prior to Bing's introduction.

But, no matter what happens to these tech titans, as users, we hope that we get fast and relevant results to our search queries.

The search makers
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Yahoou00a020
Microsoftu00a008
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AOLu00a003
Figures indicate rounded-off market share per cent ages for June 2009 Source: comScore

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