Well well well. Microsoft has made a play for Yahoo! In an offer worth $44.6 BILLION dollars, the ball is in Yahoo!'s court to either reject (which the have done before) or accept (which would totally suck for the software freedom movement). But the funny thing is, Google is being referred to as the "borg" and a monopoly that needs to be challeged. I just don't get people sometimes. Only a few years ago Google were the rebel forces. Now we're positioning Microsoft as the underdog. Crazy.

Well, at least some people have a sense of humor about it.

Following close on the heels of the Google/DoubleClick merger, Yahoo! made a big announcement this week that they are buying (or have bought) the remaining 80% stake in Right Media, an ad network that they already owned 20% of. Not to be left out of the action, a rumour is going around that Microsoft, who apparently lost out in the bidding war for DoubleClick, have their sights set on 24/7 Media with a rumoured bid of $1Billion. Seems like everyone's banking on online advertising these days to be the ultimate money-making engine of the internet, so let's just hope all the folks out there who actually have to put up with these ads don't start installing ad-blockers. ;-)

This week Yahoo Canada announced it's own entry in the Search Marketing forum. The new service, called Yahoo Search Marketing, allows online advertisers to create pay-per-click campaigns tied to specified search terms, just like Live Search's AdCenter and Google Adwords. The system allows users to determine the position of their ads on the results page, track the number of clicks received, set budget limitations and test their creative.

“We've received an overwhelmingly positive response to the new search marketing platform to date and are thrilled to open it up to all businesses that want to take advantage of Yahoo Search Marketing's more intuitive and powerful system,” said Martin Byrne, Yahoo’s national director of search marketing in Canada. “By giving companies the right tools, visibility and environment to create highly effective search marketing campaigns, Yahoo is connecting businesses to consumers more effectively than ever before.”

So now the Big Three each have their own Canadian search engine ad solution. The challenge for Yahoo, as for Sympatico / MSN, is to get a share of the pie previously owned by Google.

The latest figures released by comScore show Google and Yahoo! making further gains during the month of October (for U.S. search queries), at the expense of MSN Live and Time Warner's AOL network (which includes Netscape Search). Ask.com remained steady. This marks a continuing trend in the search market that MSN is a tough time trying to reverse. Here are the numbers posted today on Information Week:

• Google: 45.4% of U.S. search queries, up 0.3% from September.
• Yahoo: 28.2%, up 0.1%
• MSN Live: 11.7%, down 0.2%
• Ask: 5.8%
• AOL: 5.4%, down 0.2% 

According to the report, Google's share of the U.S. search market has risen by 6.4% since last October, going from 39% to 45.4%. Microsoft's and Yahoo's share fell by 2.9 and 1 percentage points respectively during the same period.

There have been a number of significant announcements lately around the topic of mobile search advertising.

Just over a week ago the folks at Yahoo! announced they would begin embedding sponsored ad links in mobile search results.

Not to be outdone, this week MSN announced they would be extending the Windows Live Search sponsored links model to the mobile search market. In both cases advertisers would bid on keywords using the auction model that has become so popular lately.

As if to justify these announcements, a report came out recently indicating that mobile web users are significantly more accepting of targeted ads than non-targeted mobile ads.

Going against the grain, Ask.com just announced that they have launched their own mobile search service, without any advertising, at least for now. What's interesting about the Ask.com solution is that they actually reformat the sites linked to in their search results to fit on small mobile screens using technology from Skweezer. My initial tests resulted in Gateway Timeout errors however, so I can't really comment on the effectiveness of this approach.