Marcia - 10:43 pm on Feb 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

>>Three major search engine spiders are better then two.

I couldn't agree more. It's far better to stand 1 or 2 chances out of 3 to get organic traffic than 1 out of 2. And if the acquisition goes through, I think it would be wiser, even from Microsoft's point of view, to keep the two organic search entities separate, if only for statistical comparison, not the least of which would be for comparison of impact on PPC revenues between the two and trends in usage statistics.

To be perfectly honest, while I've always been a "fan" of Microsoft because of the opportunities their software opened up, primarily for the job market, when I keep hitting cloaked redirected pages (some to very "non-family-friendly" sites) and periodically get hit with circle jerks and/or drive-by malware downloads, it certainly doesn't encourage continuing to use a search engine. I see that happening regularly at Live Search, but not at Yahoo Search.