Sharp45

Google: 3Q Results Reveal Chinks in the Armor

"The new talk of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo won’t help matters either. If these two finally get together, they could present formidable competition to GOOG, eventually chipping away at market share."

If you really think a combined Microsoft and Yahoo will preset a formidable challenge to Google, I would guess you have a poor understanding of the search-advertising market. No offense. Most people don't.

I work with the 3 major search engines every day, spent about $1.5 million on search advertising so far this year.

#1 - Search advertising is an auction/bidding based system. You bid on keywords, and whoever has the highest bid and the best ad gets their ad placed higher (more traffic/leads). Read up on Google's quality score if you're not familiar with this process. If people are getting great sales/leads from Google at x price, will they decrease their spending if microsoft and yahoo merge? No.

#2 - Microsoft and Yahoo's search technology isn't even close to Google's. Their results just aren't as good, period. Their advertising platforms lag far, far behind as well.

If Microsoft does buy Yahoo, they'll probably insist that Microsoft's search remains the main platform, and Yahoo features be integrated. What a disaster that would be, ugh. Bickering engineers, red-tape hell, etc.

If you think a Yahoo/Microsoft merger will solve these problems.... Good luck to you sir.

Google is suffering from the downturn, just like everyone else. But I'm holding my shares and waiting to buy more.