Unless you have been visiting another planet I am sure you have heard that Microsoft has been busy trying to take over Yahoo. Microsoft’s desperation is all over this deal, $44 billion, then $47 billion offered to buy Yahoo, the distant number two in search to Google who of course dominates.

Now Microsoft is planning on offering money just to use their search. Sounds like the 1990’s all over again with the folks from Redmond trying to “buy” their way into a market. Well hell it worked before.

This time things are a little different. Microsoft, the company with a disputable 90 percent of the desktop, has single digits in search. They have been chasing the search leader Google for years without much success.

In fact, the April search numbers are out from comScore, the guys that track this sort stuff, showing Google again extending their lead in the U.S. Google search grabbed a record-high 61.6 percent of the U.S. market in April, up from 59.8 percent in March while Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask all dipped lower.

The numbers stack up in U.S. search like this for April:

• Google 61.6 percent
• Yahoo! 20.4 percent
• Microsoft 9.1 percent
• AOL 4.6 percent
• Ask 4.7 percent

The numbers in Europe favors Google even more with Google pushing close to 80 percent of searches.

Microsoft’s search technology has been horrendous with promises year after year of it being better than Google. All the wasted time has now got Microsoft chasing a verb.

Even if Microsoft gets control of Yahoo they would still lag way behind Google. If they convert Yahoo to their own technology, they may lose engineering talent from Yahoo and all they really bought was some web traffic that may not stay.

Microsoft’s recently announced “cash back” plan shows their innovation plan may be failing, so spending dollars to get at least some footing in the market is the gimmick. Even Microsoft does not have that much money. More important do they have the time? I think not.

This week Time Warner announced another split after the AOL merger fiasco. They are now shedding Time Warner Cable. This shows how big mergers where corporate culture is so different rarely works.

Microsoft should spend more time listening to the old Smith-Barney ads. Remember? “We make money the old-fashioned way. We EARN it” (Smith Barney).

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