Last year, after the failed takeover attempt of Yahoo by Microsoft, the two much smaller legs of the search marketing tripod (which also includes Google as a much, much bigger leg) came together with a different sort of deal. Microsoft will still be taking over Yahoo's search marketing but not taking over Yahoo as a whole. Today, the deal was finally approved by the US government and the European Union.

This brings us full circle. It started with Overture, a smart little company that sort of invented search marketing, in a way, which was purchased years ago by Yahoo. Trhough Overture, you could not only advertise on Yahoo properties, but also on Microsoft's search engine: MSN/Live. Eventually Microsoft realized that they could be making the sort of money that Yahoo was raking in with Overture and decided to part ways and develop their own platform which they labeled MSN adCenter. Overture was renamed Yahoo Search Marketing and carried on with an improved interface. Now, with Yahoo in financial dire straits, Microsoft has come a-knockin' to save it from the revenue stream that it helped to bring to prominence.

This is a really sad development, in my mind. Yahoo was far from perfect and far from Google AdWords, but one thing that it was not, was MSN adCenter. Confused? Fair enough. Basically, Google AdWords is the alpha dog. Not only do you reach more people through it than through Yahoo and MSN/Bing combined, but it is also--by leaps and bounds--the best interface with the best user experience and best tools. Yahoo is a distant second. However, as distant a second as Yahoo may be from Google, MSN is more so a distant third to Yahoo. Using adCenter is the search marketing equivalent of Sisyphusian toil. I won't bother with the details here. My worry, of course, is that, eventually, adCenter and all of its dreadful shortcomings will replace what is a flawed but working Yahoo interface rather than the other way around.

Most people think of me as a pessimist and they're right. I'm the guy with low expectations who is secretly hoping to be pleasantly surprised all the time. I mean, it's possible that a Yahoo/Microsoft cooperative effort will actually increase competition with Google and, therefore, drive improvements all around, right? I don't know, my hopes are pretty low; they are almost as low as when I saw the movie Valentine's Day this past weekend. Those were some monumentally low hopes. Even still, Valentine's Day still managed to disappoint. So, to Microsoft, I proffer, "Please, if possible, consider that if you blow this, you will have succeed in trumping the movie Valentine's Day at being remarkably terrible despite impossibly low expectations."

Please don't blow this. [ReadWriteWeb]