Silver Lake Partners, a private-equity firm, works with Microsoft in order to bid on Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! in the past and apparently it didn’t give up. If we consider the search market share of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, it is obvious why Microsoft wants Yahoo!. Google’s search market share in the U.S is about 65.4%, Yahoo!’s is about 17.2% and Microsoft’s 13.4%. Microsoft is in the third place and has about the 1/5 of Google’s market share. By acquiring Yahoo! Microsoft is automatically moved to the second place with almost the half search market share of number one in the U.S which is huge. If that happens, things will change a lot for Google and searching. That said, I will still be using Google search engine since it is the best by far.
Source: [The Wall Street Journal]