Microsoft Hopes to Buy Yahoo, Google not Pleased

Now granted, of course Google wouldn't want the other two big search engines to become one with a huge amount of market share, but I also have to agree that competition is a good thing for consumers.

If you want to catch up with the latest news on the potential buy, check out Search Engine Land's compilation of opinions about the story.

Online Tools Provided by Google and Yahoo

If you own a website, you should be aware and sign up for the webmaster tools provided by the Search Engines:

Yahoo Site Explorer will show you the links coming into any Web site URL. That allows you to see what sites contribute to a competitor’s current PageRank. The links listed below are from pages Yahoo! has indexed. Yahoo!'s links, of course, may differ slightly from the links in another search engine that has indexed different pages.

Google Webmaster Central provides many great tools for understanding the Google Index. One resource, Google's linking tool, shows only Google-indexed pages linking to your Web site. You can't use the tool, however, to check out another site.

Both will help you upload a sitemap, and monitor whether your site is experiencing technical issues that is causing issues for the search engine's spiders. Just a few more tools to bookmark and help you maintain your site performance!