Originally posted by: SagaLore
Originally posted by: Deeko
If MS buys it, they will kill it.
Well at least it's not AOL. If AOL buys it, they will torture it first, then kill it, then rape it's corpse, then grind it to pulp and feed it to jackels. i.e. WinAmp, ICQ, the Internet...
Actually, I believe AOL quietly has a fairly significant financial stake in Google as part of the deal they negotiated to syndicate Google's search and AdWords services.
And like somebody said above
THIS DOESN'T MEAN MSN WANTS TO BUYOUT GOOGLE. They simply want to be competitive with Google in the search field. Yahoo has similar aims which is why they bought Inktomi's search engine technology. Most people are so head over heels in love with Google (understandably so) that they fail to realize that there are other search engine companies out there now with relevancy quality just as good as Google - or at the very least, with the potential to be as good with some minor tweaking. I love Google, but there ARE areas where their ranking algorithm is weaker compared to other search models since Google places an overwhelming amount of its weighting on link popularity. While this is fantastic for general searches (which most searches are) it's not as strong for more specific searches. However, they're able to minimize this weakness by the sheer size of their index which is larger than any other engine except FAST.
If I was a betting man, with Yahoo snatching up Inktomi I'd put money on MSN eventually switching to the Wisenut search engine which is owned by their partner LookSmart. Wisenut could easily serve up results on par with Google if it was only given a chance to stretch its legs and get out from underneath LookSmart.