Really Bill, we all know Steve has zero technical talent where you were a code warrior once upon a time. Steve is more like the angry parent who yells at the coach when his child doesn’t get to play in the game. His idiotic ranting Developers, developers, developers should have been the writing on the wall, not to mention the countless other rantings I’m sure you have knowledge of that the general public does not.

So now Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo. At first I was against this move. But you know what? I have come around because I want Steve Ballmer to spend so much of Microsoft’s money that you have worked decades to accumulate and if possible go into serious debt (hopefully with outrageous interest) on your shopping spree.

Why on earth would you want to spend all this money on Yahoo’s old decrepit technology? It makes no sense.

I am looking forward to the day when a brand new company made by a few new kids renders your Yahoo purchase completely and utterly obsolete and the Internet mob moves to this new web site and it’s technology. Microsoft will hopefully be left with a crater of debt and technology that no body wants plus no visitors to your web sites.

To make matters worse I think you already know Bill that your company’s operating system days are numbered. Is that why you left, or was that Bono video thing really that inviting? Golly ain’t marketing wonderful?

I know you have nothing to worry about. Life is good even if you are just the third richest dude on earth. But it’s gotta burn a little seeing your baby get it’s ass handed to them doesn’t it? My Mom’s got a cool rocking chair she wants to get rid of. If you’re interested I’ll get you a good deal while you can still afford it.

I want to be one of the guys at Microsoft who comes up with these hair brained schemes.  I mean seriously, if I had 44 billion dollars to blow I'm sure I would be able to shop better than the guys who are filling up the shopping cart now.

This merger, or whatever it is supposed to be reminds me a lot of the Sears + Kmart deal.  You take two mid to poor performing companies and slap them together.  In the Sears/Kmart deal they thought at least Kmart had some interesting real estate.  Which makes me wonder if Yahoo has some nice network operations sites somewhere because Microsoft outsources most of their operations.

Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo have a decent search engine so combining two lousy search engines does not make a good search engine.

The other thing is this: what about spending some of that extra 44 billion that's burning a hole in your pocket and make a decent operating system?  If Microsoft wants to get out of the operating system business, how about open sourcing Windows Vista and let some talented people have a go at it?  That might make a Ubuntu killer.

I don't get why anybody would buy Yahoo even if it was only a few million bucks.  Somebody on Digg said Flickr was an nice asset, but come on, it's a bloody picture sharing application.  Microsoft already has the makings of that on their MSN spaces.  Do you want to tell me they don't have people smart enough at Microsoft to make a freaking Flickr application?  That can't be right.

So I keep coming back to the real estate question.  There is just nothing at Yahoo worth one billion much less 44 billion dollars.

BTW, I have a bridge I am selling you spendy Microsofties.

Anyway, I run a few web sites and I also do web development so I find myself testing different search engines to see how a particular site is ranking. I also consult others on getting their business web sites higher in the search engine rankings so I try to stay informed on the most popular search engines and their idiosyncrasies.

Recently I have noticed a drastic difference in the search results for these three search engines.

Relevance. Usually when you use a search engine you really want to see results that are relevant to your search words or phrase. I would say that a few years ago, 2003?, after Microsoft revamped Live.com that their search results were more relevant than the results from a Google search. Recently it seems that Live.com has lost that edge and Google has really improved. I am not sure exactly when this happened, but it is noticeable.

In my opinion Yahoo! has never been a very good search engine. Maybe they only have one or two bots cruising around the web updating it's index because it is very slow to notice changes to web site, or even to get newly launched sites into their index in the first place. I used to know some people who used Yahoo! but they kind of sucked so it just seemed to be a good fit for them.

See for yourself. Next time you need to search for something try a few different search engines using the exact same keywords or phrase and see how your results stack up. For me as I write this Google is definitely the leader in relevance and, in my opinion, the winner.