Yahoo’s board of directors says it is looking over a $44 billion bid from Microsoft to buy the company. Microsoft has been quietly trying to acquire Yahoo for at least a year in its attempt to become a more formidable challenger to Google. But even a combined Microsoft-Yahoo will have a hard time overtaking the nation’s dominant search engine.
When it comes to search and the ad revenue related to it, Google is No. 1, hands down.
“Google has become a verb,” notes David Smith, an analyst with the research company Gartner. “People think they’re going to go Google something, and it’s become just basically part of the lexicon of the way people talk and act today.”
Google now has around 60 percent of the search market, and its share is growing. Yahoo is a distant second, with about 16 percent. Smith says Microsoft can’t seem to win much more than 4 percent of that market, so the company is buying it.
“They had to make a big change and make a big investment and basically buy a large amount of market share,” Smith says.