Now Google Wants a Piece of the Yahoo Pie

Yahoo is looking more and more like a hot property by looking at who is going to the mat in what’s shaping up as a bidding war for the declining Yahoo empire. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is now preparing to offer a bid for the company.

It’s good to see the giants of the industry fighting over Yahoo – perhaps its acquisition will finally reverse its long, slow, painful decline into obscurity and irrelevance

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HELLS YEAH.

I don't care what anyone says, Yahoo is totally undervalued and hated on for no good reason.

They have great news coverage compared to other search giants (some of the best video news articles ive seen online recently), the yahoo answers thing is very informative and helpful for things outside of google searches, and I can name a few other things that rock about yahoo. (EMAIL! cough)

Not sure I get how acquiring a piece of Yahoo will really do anything, why would you want to spend money to get what Yahoo has... I'm assuming some data centers and code? Seems to me they could just as easily let them die out.

Google needs to be careful though if they do buy Yahoo that A.T. term might start getting tossed their way!

Not really sfsu..... besides Microsoft is tied to Yahoo right now, heavily.... what makes Google acquiring them any more "unsafe"? Paranoia me thinks.... but this WOULD take over all my email accounts (spread across yahoo mail and gmail at the moment, about 2 on each for spam and signups)

Yahoo news is IMO A grade, while Google News is about a B compared to yahoo news. Yahoo news is definitely worth buying, plus DONT FORGET ABOUT FLICKR! Pretty popular.

Also, yahoo is used heavily in other countries, sometimes the #1 used engine....... even over google in some countries IIRC.

I love Pie , hate MS and yahoo

I don't like the idea of Google buying up Yahoo. More consolidation of properties among a couple of global conglomerates does not look like a good thing for consumers (who aren't also stockholders). The big three search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo. I guess it may soon be just Google and Bing. How does this make things better?

Of course, Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo first, and Yahoo's CEO got canned by his board of directors when he refused all of MS's various offers. So if MS (and Yahoo's board) had gotten their way, there would still be consolidation to just Google and Bing. Only Bing would have had a better chance to challenge Google with a combined Bing/Yahoo, at least potentially. Now what chance does Bing or anyone else have against a combined Google/Yahoo? But Yahoo has been in obvious decline for years, so selling it off seems unavoidable. And while a Google or Microsoft buyout wouldn't sit well with me, at least it isn't Apple or Sony or a telco/cable provider trying to buy it. In the modern pantheon of megacorps there are still some that are less horrifying than others.

I got it: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation should buy Yahoo and turn it into a vehicle for increased global access and net neutrality! And free polio vaccines! Or perhaps AltaVista could buy Yahoo and try to become relevant again... are they still around? Or Yahoo could buy Wikileaks and become an entirely different sort of search engine/news aggregator. Yahoo could merge with Twitter, spawning all sorts of "synergy." Amazon could buy Yahoo and try to make their product searches more useful. Or everyone in the OSS community could chip in a bit of cash and together buy Yahoo and post all the code on Sourceforge, launching a dozen different spin-offs covering a wide range of uses. Or how about Google merges with IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Verizon, TimeWarner, and Texaco, then the new GigaGoogle Inc. could buy Yahoo just to mine it and kill it -- and then buy exclusive rights to the U.S. Congress. Imagination, people! You can use it even if you wear a suit!

I don't much care for Yahoo, but I think that Google may have trouble getting regulatory approval of any takeover, considering how much of the online search/ad market they already own.

The only part of Yahoo I use (or have ever used) is Flickr. I like that service.

I always prefered yahoo mail to the alternatives (until gmail). The inboxes of most accounts used to be tiny. Yet with yahoo it was a few hundred mb.

I used to use Yahoo for YEARS as my homepage. But my work wont let us upgrade past IE6 and so with all the gee-wiz that Yahoo uses on the front page I had to switch to just simple Google. Eventually all my computers went to Google.

poee said:

I don't like the idea of Google buying up Yahoo. .... Now what chance does Bing or anyone else have against a combined Google/Yahoo?

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Yeah, Bing doesn't stand a chance if Google buys them.

Google would never be allowed to buy Yahoo, the DoJ would be all over them (even more than they already are). They're just generating interest to increase Yahoo's stock, which will in turn cost Microsoft more to acquire them. Pretty much Google's M.O. in such activities.

Get rid of your biggest competitor with excess cash? Why not. It will prevent Yahoo! defectors going to Bing or a full buyout by MS.

Greene420 said:

Yahoo news is IMO A grade, while Google News is about a B compared to yahoo news. Yahoo news is definitely worth buying, plus DONT FORGET ABOUT FLICKR! Pretty popular.

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Yahoo! news is pure liberal propaganda and superficial garbage. They have daily Obama tributes. The only things semi-worthwhile are their sports and tech. Even still, when the iPhone 4s came out, they had all 6 headline articles on it. They cater to ignorant college kids.

I meant more of their "content creation" and hiring their own "digital news anchors" --- the Google.com/news page is 10x as easy to look at as the news.yahoo.com website.

Pure liberal biased? It has news from ALL the different sources on their main page, much like the google news main page I mentioned earlier, but its less pleasing to the eye In my opinion.

I love their tech video articles recently, grade A stuff, I wish I could link you to explain what I am talking about.... but thats what I meant....

So long as it gets rid of that cesspool for spam know as yahoo mail, I am all for it. I haven't used yahoo anything in 5+ years, I won't be sad to see it finally go. Now if someone would just buy and shutter AOL once and for all. I will finally not have to deal with their terrible email accounts that randomly stop working on everything.

yahoo is bigger in asian countries from what i heard. so google may just be trying to reach out more globally

Greene420 said:

HELLS YEAH.

I don't care what anyone says, Yahoo is totally undervalued and hated on for no good reason.

They have great news coverage compared to other search giants (some of the best video news articles ive seen online recently), the yahoo answers thing is very informative and helpful for things outside of google searches, and I can name a few other things that rock about yahoo. (EMAIL! cough)

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You mean the email system that is flooded with spam for no valid reason?