• Search Engine Land, Tuesday, February 5, 2008 1 PM

Greg Sterling examines the Microhoo deal from the local search angle, noting that both giants have local-focused properties, services and partnerships--and ultimately, the management team would have to choose a "winner" from each category that would continue to receive resources and manpower.

While MSN's Live Local is similar to Google Maps, its Virtual Earth mapping platform is actually the most powerful of all three engines'. But Yahoo Local's community content and brand recognition are powerful in their own right, so Sterling thinks that the company would ultimately create some sort of hybrid that leveraged the best of the tech and consumer awareness.

Both Yahoo and MSN's online yellow pages sites seem like afterthoughts, so it's likely that they'd be scrapped in favor of better integration of business listings in the standard local product. In verticals like cars, real estate and jobs, which Sterling argues are actually local-focused searches at heart, a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would have ties to both CareerBuilder and HotJobs, and fairly strong (and visually similar) real estate and auto portals. The question of which to keep would be more difficult--though Sterling says that Yahoo's set of properties may have a slight edge in terms of development.

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