A marraige made in search heaven: Microsoft are “considering” making a move on search rival Yahoo!, according to Reuters. The software giant who already failed in its $47.5 billion takeover bid to buy out the troubled search engine in 2008, whom it already has search partnerships with, recently attributing the rise of Bing marketshare with Yahoo! association.
Yahoo! is said to have a market value of $20 billion, but is in a bad state of affairs, with its Chairman recently firing CEO Carol Bartz by telephone, after slumping market share and wide shareholder discontent.
Bartz replaced Jerry Yang as CEO just two and half years ago in January 2009.
However, Microsoft sources told Bloomberg the software giant is ‘nowhere close ‘ to a takeover bid, although does does plan to review Yahoo’s financial information, which is doing the rounds to potential buyers later this week.
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If the deal did go through, it would give Microsoft’s Bing a bigger slice of the search market – currently it accounts for 14.7% of all online searches – against rival Google, and has lost a whopping $5.5 billion on since its launch in 2009.
According to comScore,Google sites ranked No.1 most visited in the US with 183.4 m visitors, followed by Yahoo! with 177.5m and Microsoft with 177.2m in August. If Bing could double its marketshare it could emerge as a very serious competitor to market leader Google.
Chinese telecom giant Alibaba have indicated their interest in Yahoo! with Chairman Jack Ma saying he is “very interested. ”
Shares surged 10% following the Microsoft takeover rumours.
Read Hello, You’re Fired. Goodbye. Yahoo! Here
