Microsoft’s attempted takeover of Yahoo! drags on and on and on.

Yahoo’s top leadership clearly hates the idea and is now trying to forward a Yahoo-AOL merger as an alternative.

That sounds a bit desperate to us. Microsoft is a bureaucratic giant and may easily kill off the innovative creativity that is left in Yahoo!, but a merger with AOL can hardly be the answer.

AOL is a relic from the time when users would sign up for closed networks for mail and content. As a web portal without its own search technology it would just be more what Yahoo! has already.

Next week Yahoo! will talk to both Microsoft and AOL. Maybe that will bring them closer to a solution.

Meanwhile, enjoy the following search engine related articles:

From Pandia:

• Using Google Docs for Surveys
• The Secret Google Quality Raters’ Handbook
• How much traffic do your competitors generate?
• Google is testing how to use web site search forms

From other sites:

• Why Mixx Hasn’t Gotten The Following It Deserves - Yet

  Mixx, a social media submission site, is a newcomer on the scene, so it understandably will take a while for it to catch up with older sites like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. (SE Land April 9 2008)

• Yahoo-Microsoft Battle Bolsters Google

  Microsoft Corp.’s attempt to take over Yahoo Inc. has become so tortured it may help Internet search and advertising leader Google Inc. grow stronger. (Wired)

• Google Changes Local Ranking Algorithm

  Whereas once it was the center of the city that seemed to be one of the most important factors in ranking well for specific sets of local searches, now that may not be the case. (SE Roundtable April 11 2008)

• Microsoft & Rupert Murdoch to Jointly Bid for Yahoo!?

  According to New York Times Microsoft Corp. is in talks with Rupert Murdoch about a joint bid towards the acquisition of Yahoo! (PageTraffic April 11 2008)

• How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly

  Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) sIFR is a technique that uses Javascript to read in HTML text and render it in Flash instead. (SE Land April 11 2008)

• Speculating About The Visual Future Of Search Results

  I believe that the future of search will be considerably more visual than it is today. (Greg Sterling SE Land April 11 2008)

• MixUp At Google? URLs And Page Titles Being Mixed Up

  It seems like Google is facing difficulties in mapping URLs and the pages associated to those URLs. (Searchnewz April 11 2008)

• Yahoo’s Quality Score Change Effective Next Week

  At the end of February Yahoo! Search Marketing announced that minimum bid prices for PPC ads would not be set. (Marketing Pilgrim April 11 2008)

• On the Menu at the Yahoo Top Managers Lunch Yesterday: Fear and AOL-oathing

  Yahoo-tops don’t like the idea of a Yahoo/AOL deal as an alternative to Microsoft (Boomtown April 11 2008)

• Google, Yahoo and Live Expanding Their Maps

  In the last 24 or so hours, all of the big three search engines have had news about expanding their maps programs. (Marketing Pilgrim April 11 2008)

• Do Domain Ages Affect Search Rankings?

  A new patent application from Microsoft ranks domains based upon the ages of domains which link to those domains. (SEO by the Sea April 11 2008)

• Blog Search Engine Twingly Launches Private Beta

  Twingly recently launched their next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. (AltSearchEngines April 7 2008)

• Flickr adds Video

  The photograph sharing website Flickr has added the option of uploading videos (Phil Bradley Apil 9 2008)

• Enterprise Search: Disappointing and Annoying Users

  Users are dissatisfied and work in “information grave yards.” (Beyond Search April 11 2008)

• Google Forms: A Data Snout for a Bigger Creature

  Google is testing how to search local search forms (Beyond Search April 11 2008)

• Getting Top Stories at Alltop

  Alltop takes forty popular topics and offers “All the Top” stories from each of the topics. (Researchbuzz April 11 2008)

• Introducing the new Summize Twitter Search

  They index Twitter’s public timeline in realtime, thread together associated twitters, and give you the search tools to dig in. (AltSearchEngines April 12 2008)

• Custom Search Engines in a Variety of Categories

  You can search for search engines, browse by recent or popular, or browse alphabetically, from Aad50 to Zivity. (ResearchBuzz April 12 2008)