Microsoft’s proposal to buy Yahoo! certainly has our hallways buzzing.  But the fact is, any attempt to analyze the impact of a Microhoo! union at this point would be pure speculation for a number of reasons.  First of all, it is far from certain that this deal will go through.  This was an unsolicited offer by Microsoft according to the media, so acceptance of the offer by Yahoo! may not happen.  Second, this deal will face much scrutiny from regulators in the same way that Google is getting scrutinized over their desired purchase of DoubleClick. 

If the deal does go through, it has not been reported as to how the companies will integrate.  Questions that remain:

1-       Will there continue to be two separate brands: MSN (and Live) and Yahoo!, or will they merge under one portal name?

2-       If they keep two separate brands, it is likely that they will use one company’s search technology, but that is still to be determined.

Keep in mind that this deal goes well beyond search engine marketing.  This is about all forms of online marketing including image based advertising and video advertising.  It is also a defensive move against Google, which is trying to more rapidly evolve the “software as service” business model.  With hundreds of millions of people on the combined properties of Yahoo! and MSN, that is a strong platform to build that business from.

Isn’t it great to be in such a dynamic and exciting industry?

So you enter a search term into a search engine like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. What happens next? Read on to find out… 

Search engines have a short list of critical operations that allows them to provide relevant web results when searchers use their system to find information.

1. Crawling the Web

Search engines run automated programs, called “bots” or “spiders” that use the hyperlink structure of the web to “crawl” the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web. Estimates are that of the approximately 20 billion existing pages, search engines have crawled between 8 and 10 billion.

2. Indexing Documents

Once a page has been crawled, its contents can be “indexed” - stored in a giant database of documents that makes up a search engine’s “index”. This index needs to be tightly managed, so that your search requests (which require the search engines to search and sort billions of documents) can be completed in fractions of a second. Continue Reading…