Shocking the search industry, Microsoft has officially submitted it’s bid to acquire the search and internet giant Yahoo! for a stunning 44.5 Billion USD. I do say , a shocking news, but many would easily say that such a bid was forthcoming, following Yahoo!’s recent downfall in share prices, clubbed with its sacking of near 1000 employees. Openly inviting the press in a conference call, the software giant’s CEO Steve Balmer spoke to Jerry Yang and the board of directors of the most popular website / portal of the world and express their interest in furthering the expansion and synergis-ing their resources and efforts to counter the search #1 , the big G.

Microsoft has proposed to Yahoo’s Board Of Directors that Microsoft acquire all Yahoo shares for $31, which is currently estimated to be worth $44.6 billion. Yahoo shareholders would get either cash or Microsoft shares (0.9509 of shares per 1 Yahoo share)

As a follow up , Yahoo! inc. accepted :

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today said that it has received an unsolicited proposal from Microsoft to acquire the Company. The Company said that its Board of Directors will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo!’s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.

This would probably be too early to analyze what this means, what the repercussions would be on the search industry along with the internet / web in general. However, it would not be out of place to mention a few points i can think of :

This is not the first time MS has submitted a bid to acquire Yahoo! , the last time they did was in previous year almost 10-11 months back, when Yahoo! board of directors openly refused saying , it was no time for such offers.
Even with the current low Yahoo has hit , Yahoo.com is still the website with highest traffic in all internet – in every metrics available on the internet, and Yahoo! also has several important acquisitions which fare highly in the current social web – namely, Del.icio.us , Yahoo Answers, Alibaba, Flickr , Facebook to mention a few. Yahoo email, Yahoo finance rates pretty highly on the radar of very many users , ranking over Gmail and similar applications.

On the other hand , Yahoo! has lost lots of ground on the search front , where Google has grown by leaps and bounds and truly a synergy of Yahoo and MSN could be the only force which might even come close. Microsoft on the other hand might gain a good deal by coming close with the Yahoo Publisher Network users and advertisers – which does have a sufficient base and development.

My personal feeling : I always liked Yahoo as a site , as a brand ( which Microsoft does as well, as Steve Balmer said in his note – intelligent minds think alike ), and a place to be. Google never had that and even less in Microsoft . As a person who has been on the net since 1997, i somehow would not feel impressed by a MSFT-YHOO clubbing. But then , it might be in the best of interest of the shareholders of Yahoo – What do you think ?

As i mentioned in my previous post , that I have been reading extensively about search engine marketing , and also watching various videos – one of the best videos i saw was a seminar by Avinash Kaushik – the from Google Analytics team . The full session was full of various insights on quite a few topics such data analysis , creating a data driven culture in a organization, checking ones web site’s bounce rate, and internal site search analysis and visitor intent . I spent the whole of sunday afternoon watching the videos , which were as i said before fascinating and insightful.
I have decided to using Web Analytics to the most , as possible .
And to start with that , I have have been toying with the idea of using either Google Site Search , which has the free and paid versions or creating our own custom internal search.

The pro’s of using Google’s Site Search is that
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After the recent catastrophe, things are settling down and i have decided to start reading more seo blogs. Not just seo blogs, i have also been using as much free time i am getting to read seo books, watch seo videos and catch up on the numerous webmaster and seo blogs , by subscribing to their feeds. Every day you learn something new – and it is necessary to keep one’s self updated with the industry. I am currently subscribed to Matt Cutts, Jill Whalen, Danny Sullivan , SeoMoz, Bill Slawski , Aaron Wall to name a few. I was truly not this organized in my reading before , even though i definitely checked those before too.
When i started thinking that i will do this, i wondered if I could do it with Outlook 2007 as thats something i use regularly to check for emails , so i might be able to check on these from time to time as well and not really have to open “any” site whatsoever for reading up.
MS @#!%^^# is hardly ever so rosy , that it will allow you to do what you want when you want it … ( and I am usually not a MS hater) . The first time added the feeds for seobook and mattcutts google only feed, i got
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Following the lead of google , MSN / Live now has a webmaster central . If you have been a webmaster for the past 2-3 years , you would be finding it very limited as compared to google webmaster central, but it is surely looking similar – with options to submit your xml sitemap , robots.txt checker for your domain etc.
It does require a existing LIVE account …. but not necessarily a Hotmail account . I login to MSN Messenger using my work email id , which i had long back associated using passport , so i could easily use the same here as well.
It does require you to have an XML sitemap for your website , which should be created using the same sitemaps protocol as google and yahoo. Once you do so , it shows your websites listed pages and links, provided you already have been indexed . If not , this would help them follow up your website at some point of time. Going by the way LIVE / MSN is trying to improve , this will surely help i can safely say .
However , in my experience i found their options too limited , as i said before … as well their results also pretty poor . It gives you results on which of your websites pages are ranking good and for which terms , but if you try to check back on it , it is no where the same.
Some people probably has termed it as another pagerank , but MSN has coined it as Domain Rank.
Sign up at this link : http://webmaster.live.com/