How Yahoo Can Get Out of the Microsoft Bear Hug

Let me start this post by saying that I don’t think Microsoft will achieve its goal of obtaining some sort of balance and scale in the search market with an acquisition of Yahoo. If you look at the share of search that Google has had over the past five years, it’s an ever increasing line. I think that line will keep increasing, year after year, until Google has all of the search market (at least here in the U.S. and the English-speaking world). I don’t think there’s much that Yahoo and/or Microsoft can do about it. There are many reasons why I think that is going to happen. First and foremost, it’s because Google does search better than any of its competitors. And we all know it. So we go to Google to search. I don’t think people are going to stop going to Google to search and start using Microsoft and Yahoo. Google also does a better job of monetizing search better than Yahoo and Microsoft, so they [Google] have better results in the right rail, and that is becoming increasingly more important in areas like travel and financial services where the organic results are getting spammed up.

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