All eyes will be on Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) as it reports quarterly results later today.

Analysts are expecting profit of 9 cents on revenue excluding payments to partners of $1.32 billion, according to Thomson Financial. But that is secondary.

Wall Street wants Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang to prove why the Internet portal is worth more than the $31 per share Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) has offered. To say investors are skeptical that the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company can do any better is an understatement.

"They're just trying to save some face and extract some value out of it for shareholder," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler in an interview with Bloomberg News.

Indeed, Bloomberg points out that Yahoo's net income probably fell for the ninth straight quarter. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the results -- whatever they may be -- won't affect Yahoo's value to the software giant. Though he hasn't ruled out LOWERING Microsoft's bid, chances are remote that will happen.

By some measures, China-based search engine Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) has 60% of the search engine market in that country, which now has more internet users than the U.S. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is a distant second.

According to Reuters, "Lee Kai-Fu, Google's president for Greater China, said in an interview that the Silicon Valley company intends to add 200 staffers in 2008 to its existing 600 employees and to keep up that level of hiring for the next three to five years."

All of the effort may not help. The Chinese may prefer to use the services of a company that was founded in their own country and where the search technology was originally based on their language. China has watched U.S. tech efforts from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to Hewlett-Packard (NASDAQ: HPQ) come into the country and dominate market share. The capital from those efforts makes it way back to the U.S.

Baidu is one of the few Chinese tech companies that has a huge lead on its Western competition. Many people there prefer it that way.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

The deal for Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) to allow Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) to sell text ads on the portal's search pages may happen more quickly than most analysts believed. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Yahoo Inc. moved closer to outsourcing its search advertising to Google Inc. after an initial test of the system yielded what the two firms deemed positive results."

The partnership could add several hundred million dollars of revenue to Yahoo!'s annual numbers. Most observers believe that regulators would be troubled by the two largest search companies joining forces.

The news still begs that question of whether any deal can be better than Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) offer to buy Yahoo! for over $29 a share. The first offer was at $31, but Microsoft's shares, part of the payment, have declined since then.

Yahoo!'s actions to run away from Microsoft seem to go along the lines of trying to stay independent for the sake of being independent. In other words, the company has no answer to the question of why investors are better off if Yahoo! stands alone.

Since no one other than Microsoft wants to buy the portal, the answer is that Yahoo! has lost all options to defend its present strategy. A deal with Google does not, in any way Yahoo! can explain, make the company worth $30 a share.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Google's (GOOG) shares continue to be stuck below $500 where they have been since late February. Part of the reason for the fall is that comScore data showed that the number of people who clicked on ads at the big search engine was weak in January.

It looks like the stock will drop again as "click rates" for Google ads rose only 3% in February when compared with the figures for the same month last year. According to MarketWatch: "Google reported 25% growth in paid clicks in its fiscal fourth quarter ended in December. But comScore data released last month showed flat growth in Google's paid clicks in January." Now, investors can ponder another piece of bad news.

The easy answer to the Google data is that a recession is slowing down advertising activity everywhere. Google carries millions of ads in its AdSense program, so it would make sense that it should suffer some fallout.

But, the answer may be more troubling than that. Readers of Google's search pages may be discovering that the text ads next to the listings are from marketers trying to take advantage of people looking for information by clogging pages with related messages. As more people understand the system of targeting based on search results, fewer are willing to be sucked in by companies trying to reach them due to their behavior.

If the Google system of matching ads to search results is putting its customers off, that would be worse news than the effects of a recession.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Steffen Mueller's past gig was as a product manager at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), working on Google Maps, Froogle, and Google Web Search. Well, now he's got his own venture: Topicle.

And yes, it's focused on the massive search business. Think of it as Google meets Wikipedia. Essentially, Topicle relies on the efforts of users, who collect helpful web links. These are based on voting, using a 1-5 scale.

Ironically enough, Topicle is in a way a move to the past. After all, when Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) got its start, the search results were primarily based on the decisions of, well, people.

In theory, Topicle makes sense and should result in relevant results. However, it's going to be tough to get critical mass, especially in light of the many search options available for users. Besides, building a site that's based on user participation is never an easy thing to do.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

In November internet search engine rankings by comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) again lead the pack, with 5.9 billion core searches conducted -- a 58.6% market share of all searches in the internet. This was almost the exact same level as October.

Coming up a distant second (as usual) was Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) with market share of 22.4%. The next three were Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) at 9.8%, IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s (NASADAQ: IACI) Ask.com at 4.6% and Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) AOL at 4.5%. In November (a seasonally weak month for web searches), U.S. web searchers conducted 10 billion searches -- a 5% decline from October.

Do these rankings surprise any web surfer? They shouldn't -- Google continues to dominate internet searches and Yahoo!'s Project Panama -- although technically a job well done -- is probably too late to the party to put any significant pressure on Google. Microsoft's Live Search push has garnered it about the same market share as in the past (a decent third place). The power of first-mover advantage is quite evident in Google's placement, and I'd suspect it's not going anywhere soon.

IAC InterActive (NASDAQ:IACI)'s Ask.com has about 5% of the U.S. search engine market -- not much.

But the internet property is going to try to go against the trend. Instead of taking data from customers to target ads, Ask.com will let users "hide" their search data to promote privacy. The company is launching "AskEraser," which will destroy all personal information about a user.

According to The New York Times, unlike typical online privacy controls that can be difficult for average users to find or modify, people will be able to turn AskEraser on or off with a single click."

The privacy police will probably be very happy about the announcement. But it takes a big targeting tool away from Ask, and Ask can use all the help that it can get. It has tried and tried but has had no success in prying search share from Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) or Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO).

The move by Ask is based on the premise that most people care if search engines collect data on them to better target search results and advertising. Since very few people opt out of programs that collect data online, the answer is that almost no one gives a damn.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Shares sold short in Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) rose 56% in June compared to the May figure to hit 6.2 million.

The reason may be as simple as the nearly 10% rise in the company's shares over the last month. In the two months prior to that, the search giant's shares rose very little.

Stumbles at rival Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) and increases in Google's market share as seen in data of major research firms including HitWise and comScore have added to the market's perception that the firm's presence in search is so large that rivals have absolutely no chance of catching it.

But big growth almost always comes with some level of uneasiness. At $530, the stock is near an all-time high. While the company's revenue has recently grown over 60%, some analysts wonder when the increases in search-based text ads will start to come back to earth as it did in online display advertising started about two years ago.

The short position indicates that there are some who are willing to bet that Google's slower growth is nearer than that market expects.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

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Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) built a better product, and now the world's merchants are shoving money in its pockets as fast as they can. This hasn't escaped the attention of Jimmy Wales, founder of the astonishingly successful, volunteer-created Wikipedia. He has been kicking around the idea of a wiki-developed search engine for several years. Yesterday in a Tokyo news conference, he reiterated his intention to pursue the search market through his for-profit spinoff company, Wikia Inc.

While Google is using their head-start and the cash infusion from their IPO to race into new web-based technologies ahead of other massively-funded competitors Microsoft and Yahoo, Wikia could be a different kind of competitor. Think mercenaries vs. zealots.

Certainly Wales will have no trouble finding investors to fund such a project. In fact, he may already all he needs -- Amazon has already dumped a load of cash on his doorstep, and other investors have sent $4 million his way. Although Wikipedia operates as a not-for-profit organization, investors drool when they dream of the dollar value of the site, the most often visited as a result of a Google search. The traffic to Wikipedia has grown by 680% in the past two years.

Wales has shown he knows how to organize large groups of volunteers to develop open source media. While this might be a long shot, who would have bet on a horse named Google in 1998? Time will tell if the wiki hive-mind can create something better than the highly-paid minds of the Google empire. Empires have fallen before in the face of hoards all focused on a single purpose.

A piece in Monday's New York Times discussed up-start companies seeking to create new search engines that are better than Google. The most interesting threat may come from Wikia (the start-up of a founder of Wikipedia), which will try to create a search engine much as Wikipedia was created: with the help of programmers and users all over the world. Since 2004, venture capital firms have invested $350 million in 79 search-engine related companies. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has invested in ChaCha, another search-engine start-up.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) investors will want to pay attention to the number of competitors lining up with the goal of toppling Google. Remember, Google began its rise to dominance over Microsoft, Lycos, and others when two Stanford Ph.D. students started the company in 1998 in a friend's garage. All it could take for Google to be ruined is for two more college students to come along and invent a better search engine. I see that as being the primary long-term risk factor for Google investors. In 25 years, will Google still be the "World's Best Search Engine"?

Is it a sign of the apocalypse when newspapers nationwide continue to see declining revenues and employee layoffs while more and more traffic for information (news, entertainment, weather, etc.) shifts to the Internet? Not really. It's just a sign of the times as modes of information transfer continue to change, but a breakneck speeds these days instead of decades.

Horseback couriers used to exchange news with villages and towns, taking weeks to get the information transferred by horseback. Then came the automated printing press and overnight air-based distribution, which made sure news on all subjects -- bad and good -- was delivered hours after the fact. Now, the Internet makes it possible for real-time news and information transfer. As soon as it happens, citizens with cameraphones, bloggers and journalists are on top of it, instantly. No more waiting.

What could possibly compete with this insatiable need for instant information gratification? Newspapers, while quaint, can't really do this. Publishers and newspaper owners clearly have agendas with editorials and other content, left and right. But if that's the only game in town, you're stuck with it. Not so for the Internet. On the Internet, information comes to you the way you want it -- with or without an agenda -- with the content you want, not that someone wants you to have.

Is the consumer in control? More and more, that answer is becoming a sturdy yes -- and the newspaper industry is learning this the hard way as it keeps trying to maintain an archaic status quo.