Why Microsoft will win Yahoo and Google is not the greatest tech company
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
It seems pretty obvious that people will not switch from the GOOG just because MS has attained search quality parity (which, incidentally, I doubt). If they built a _better_ search engine than Google, then people would go there and use that instead, and the advertisers would follow. Then they wouldn't need to buy Yahoo.
The Yahoo strategy to me seems to imply acceptance that they just cannot equal Google in terms of search quality, so they are looking for another way to compete. Saying they're of equal quality doesn't make it so.