Driving to errands after work, a story came onto NPR’s Marketplace that was so riveting I sat in my parked car, little heart all aflutter with hope at what I was hearing. See, Microsoft is attempting a hostile takeover of Yahoo! That’s not the fun part, though. Yahoo! is trying to rally by paring down to doing what they do well and outsourcing what they don’t do so well. Namely, search.

That’s right–the execs got together over the weekend to discuss Yahoo! outsourcing their search and paid search to Google. It’s like a Valentine’s Day gift from the universe to search marketers.

Okay, that’s probably not nice of me, but I have a major problem with Yahoo! putting paid results in with the natural ones and not differentiating them. Not PPC ads, but an additional service called Yahoo! Search Submit. The clicks are cheap, but you don’t have a say in what search terms they use to display these listings you’re being charged for. We’ve found that our clients are usually paying for clicks on their own name–positioning that they should have for free. There’s an argument for it providing a lower-quality user experience as well, since the results aren’t going to be as truly relevant as Google’s.

Why pay at all if the practice is a little bit sketchy? Because otherwise, it’s crazy hard to get listed in Yahoo! at all. Since they index your site and drive traffic there by giving preferred positioning, it’s not such a bad deal, even if it is a bit devious. To just have the second-largest market share of search become one with the largest would have us SEO nerds blissed out like you wouldn’t believe. Fingers crossed!

Everyone’s been all atwitter about Google’s smack-down on blogs that function as link farms. They adjusted page rank scores, taking some from the bigger blogging networks that cross-link down to a PR 4/10 from a PR 7/10. This sucks for bloggers who weren’t intentionally seeking out sketchy linkage and are getting punished because the company automatically formats their blogs to include a bunch of cross-links. Scraped blogs that are definitely in the gray hat area? This is exactly what they deserve. Profiting (rankings-wise) off of other writers’ work is not contributing anything, it’s parasitic.

In the overall scheme of Google and the internet, anything that removes the bad and discourages people from using it as a quick fix is a good thing. You can’t get the results without the work. Affected blogs are getting the attention right now, but with this being the third very recent update to PR, it portends changes that reach much further than blogs. If page rank is about backward links, and it’s harder to get them, will Google be adjusting their importance in the algorithm concerning cost-per-click in their pay-per-click advertising services? It’s beneficial overall to push sites to prove their relevancy to the topic and give a good user experience, but it’s unfortunate that a lot of little guys will get burned for their ignorance.

In checking around about this, I’ve seen plenty of comments complaining about Google’s dominance. Google’s not the problem here. If they weren’t providing better results, they wouldn’t be so strongly in the lead–especially in academic, business, and technology sectors where they’re overwhelmingly preferred. The problem is that other engines propagate poor quality content by not punishing it and really working to eradicate it. As long as the dross is mixed in, and often in preferred positions, the savvy users won’t be changing loyalties.