NP: Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid

The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft and Yahoo! are talking about an advertising partnership again. As it relates to search advertising, most of the market share news has been pretty grim for anyone who isn't Google in the last year. comScore has Google holding pretty steady at around 63% of searches, although they don't provide year-over-year numbers in that release. If I remember correctly, those looked a bit worse for Yahoo!

Now that I look at that release, one interesting side note on those search engine numbers is the jump for Ask.com in February. When they unveiled their new vertical strategy, the biggest question in my mind -- other than, "how convoluted of a quote can I come up with in response?" -- was "what would success look for with such a niche player?" An 8% increase in search queries is pretty darn good, given that February was a shorter month.

Anyway, back to this possible merger -- one of the reasons it may not have gone down last time is that Google threw its considerable weight around to stop it. Now that times are tougher for everybody, Google included, they might not be in a position to get so heavily involved. Similarly, the recession might make this partnership seem more necessary for the other two players, especially now that Yahoo! has had their next-gen search platform (whoa-oh-oh-oh) in the market for quite some time without it being able to put much of a dent in Google's lead.