Google unhappy with the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger

News reports today suggest that Google is unhappy with the proposed buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft. Google are worried that Microsoft may try to press an “inappropriate.. influence” over the internet.

We for one are less concerned about the influence that a joint Yahoo-Microsoft offering will cause as compared to the current dominance of an overly powerful single player such as Google does exert. In the UK Google controls around 75% of all natural and paid search. This is a huge figure that in any other industry would no doubt have the Monopolies and Mergers Commission looking to investigate.

Any website that relies on search as it’s primary  source of traffic is at huge risk from losing it’s  natural rankings or seeing it’s pay per click costs escalated by algorithm changes at Google. Thousands of jobs in the UK depend upon the whims of Googles algorithms. This power over economies is actually much more worrying than anything that Microsoft has ever engaged in (and we are not Microsoft evangelists by any means, this post being written via the Firefox browser on a Linux desktop in an Open Source CMS).

If a combined Yahoo-Microsoft search offering can put together a product that will seriously rival Google then we will see the search risk mitigated for businesses that rely on search traffic and we hope will also leave space for a newcomers to the search arena to keep all the established search engines on their toes.

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