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1. What company has the top email site?

2. What company has the top sports site?

3. What company has the top celebrity gossip site?

4. What company has the top financial news site?

If you answered Hotmail, ESPN, TMZ and WSJ you are wrong on all counts. The answer is Yahoo! across the board.

As newspapers fold (pun intended) and the mass news media recycles the same stories over and over again, Yahoo has a nearly unique opportunity to become the world's leading content creator/aggregator. Combine their place in these arenas and then consider the value in removing the yoke of Google-scaled search competition and you now have resources for marketing a whole new product to a public that has already shown an interest.

Yahoo! will (or should) position itself as your personal newspaper and internet launchpad.

Anyone wanna bet?

So what does this mean for businesses that rely on search results for their business? Here's a couple possible outcomes.

Nothing.  

This partnership may not have any effect at all on those that advertise on the web or rely on search results for business. While Bing has shown some interest and the launch has created some buzz, most think its just buzz and will pass. Google is the leader by a vast margin because it works well and people are resistant to change if there's no good reason to change and what they use today (Google) works reasonably well.

No one has been able to get and keep any additional share from Google in a long time. Many believe that this 'repackaging' will do little more than change the names on the pie graph while at the same time Google will retain the largest piece of that pie.

This is the most unlikely case, but as more and more people come to rely on the Big G for more than search (Google Voice, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.) Google opens itself up to greater losses. Imagine what would happen if Google was hacked or lsot critical segments of its infrastructure. Or, worse yet, they violated their 'do no evil' mission. That's the kind of thing that changes the seats around the dinner table.

The 'Nothing' scenario is what I believe to be most likely. In the end, I've got to believe that SEM will remain and good content will still rule the search engine relevance game.