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Just about everyone else on the Internet has written on the potential acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft for $44.6 billion, but I thought that I would weigh in on what I think this might mean for search and Web services.

According to ComScore's search share numbers for December 2007, Google has 58.4 percent of the market share, with Yahoo and Microsoft trailing at 22.9 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively. If Microsoft and Yahoo combine forces and change nothing, that will put them at 32.7 percent to Google's 58.4 percent. While those numbers … Read more

It has only taken three years for Google to unseat Yahoo in search, become the online ad king, and get so big it prompts Microsoft to try to buy Yahoo.

Microsoft announced on Friday it has made an offer to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion. The news comes days after Yahoo said it would lay off 1,000 workers, saw its fourth-quarter profit fall, and gave lukewarm guidance for the current quarter. By comparison, Google on Thursday posted fourth-quarter revenue of $4.8 billion, up more than 50 percent, while profit rose 17 percent.

Google has been able to … Read more

It's clear that Yahoo is struggling against Google, and it's clear that Microsoft wants nothing more than to be important in the online services world. But the combination of these two behemoths, neither of whom have been particularly innovative with technology or customer acquisition of late, is the next AOL/Time Warner debacle.

Does anyone think that the merger of AOL and Time Warner was a success? Does the marriage of two companies that have no clear strategies ever make sense?

Microsoft hasn't proven that it can take advantage of this scale of web property and has wasted a huge amount of time and dollars with all the Live.com junk. Yes, MS should move into new markets and look to the future but Yahoo is a massive undertaking with a completely different culture. … Read more

You may be friending and poking your acquaintances on social networks, but that doesn't mean you are paying attention to the ads. Or, maybe Google just made a bad deal with MySpace in which it guaranteed to pay a lot of money even if you don't click on the ads.

Google's fourth-quarter results missed expectations on Thursday, partly due to a rise in traffic acquisition costs that cut into revenue. Executives acknowledged in a conference call with analysts that they made less money serving up ads on social networks than they expected.

The news, which prompted a … Read more

The Terry Semel era at Yahoo is officially over.

The former Yahoo CEO, who left that position last summer but remained as non-executive chairman of the board, is now out of the company altogether.

Yahoo announced Thursday afternoon that Semel will immediately relinquish his spot on the board.

According to a company statement, Semel began talking with other board members several months ago about stepping down and "targeted the time of the January board meeting for his departure."

Whether that's true or not is something we will likely never know, but one thing's for sure: there … Read more

Google's voracious appetite for new hires has eased off for the first time since the company went public in August 2004. In the last three months, the search giant added only 6 percent, or 889 people, to its employee roster--bringing Google's worldwide headcount to 16,805, according to the company's latest quarterly filing released Thursday.

That percentage is down nearly a third from the previous quarter's hires (2,130 new employees from June 2007 to September 2007) and off a third of its average quarterly hiring rate since June 2004, according to CNET News.com calculations.… Read more

One of our hits from 2007 was Google Gears, and our predictions for it was that many Web applications would begin to integrate it over the course of 2008. Already that prediction looks to be coming true, with what appears to be the first signs that Gears is coming to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The discovery was made earlier this week by Google Blogoscoped's Tony Ruscoe. He was able to edit document names and star them, but not open or create any documents without getting sent to blank browser pages.

Ruscoe's not letting anyone in on how he … Read more

The reserve price on a valuable sliver of spectrum was reached in the Federal Communications Commission's 700MHz auction on Thursday, triggering rules that would make the spectrum accessible to any device or software application.

After the 17th round in the auction, a bidder for eight licenses in the "C" block of the 700MHz spectrum auction surpassed the minimum reserve price of $4.64 billion, which had been set by the FCC before the auction began. The current bid is now at $4.71 billion. The minimum bid for round 21 is $5.18 billion, according to the … Read more

This post was updated at 3 p.m. PST with comments from a conference call.

Google on Thursday said its fourth-quarter revenue rose more than 50 percent and profit rose 17 percent, but the figures were just short of Wall Street expectations. Shares were down more than 8 percent in after-hours trading as a result.

Meanwhile, executives said their business had not been affected by any slowdown in the U.S. economy, despite worries of spending cuts in online advertising during an economic downturn. In fact, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told analysts in a conference call that he is optimistic … Read more