Search Engine Land’s post on the proposed Yahoo! buyout has email from Y! CEO Jerry Yang to the employees. From the way it sounds, one thing that won’t be going directly to Google is the search marketing portion of Yahoo! In the “actions that need to happen” section of the email, Yang writes:

must buy: at the same time, we will increasingly make online advertising easier and more effective for marketers, opening up new ways for them to address consumers. our right media exchange, acquired last year, is more open and easy to use, simplifying transactions for buyers and sellers of online ad inventory. another 2007 acquisition, blue lithium, brings us best in class performance marketing. while we’ve historically tracked the success of our ad business by focusing on metrics related to our owned and operated sites, our goal is to increase the percentage of the total online advertising demand we touch—to 20% of our addressable market over the next several years, from an estimated 15% in 2007.

I had wondered about that, since Panama’s only been running for about a year. Even before they announced their rejection this morning, there have been rumors of Yahoo! renewing talks with AOL. I haven’t a clue what that would gain Yahoo! in the long term since AOL is a slowly-failing dinosaur who uses Google’s search results. Who still uses AOL?