On the business side, however, what would happen if these two companies joined forces with a partnership or a buyout? What would they combine? It would need to be decided which search engine tech will be used – Microsoft’s or Yahoo’s! and then all future improvements/changes will be made to that platform. I don’t think, however, that either company is willing to dumb its search technology and adopt the other’s. If both companies couldn’t even sit down and talk business and discuss a partnership/merger/acquisition, how could they be expected to make bigger decisions such as which search engine tech to unify on? They should both just quit the search engine business and leave it to the company that does it best – Google. It will be interesting to see how Mahalo will play into search in the future as well.