It has been another wild week in the battle between Google, Yahoo and MSN; the current Big Three of the search engine world. After suffering several setbacks over the past month, Google seems to be regrouping its forces on several fronts, most notably in Europe. Meanwhile, recent investor documents from Yahoo were released detailing the desperation with which Yahoo courted Overture. MSN has been operating in stealth mode this week but an examination of your server logs will show that MSN-Bot has been extremely active and is starting to rival Google for the number of visits to a website each week.

Google outflanked Overture (owned by Yahoo) in the European theatre by striking a deal with one of Europe's largest Internet Service Provides, T-Online. Supporting over 12.7 million subscribers, T-Online operates Net access service in Germany, France, Spain and Austria as well as supporting Switzerland's most active web portal. The loss of the European IT powerhouse will hit Overture where it hurts thus devaluing Yahoo's expensive acquisition. US financial analysts predict that the loss of T-Online, coupled with the pending loss of Overture's MSN contract might make Overture a suddenly unprofitable operation.

Yahoo is about to close its deal with Overture. Its most recent shareholder's prospectus releases juicy details of the great pains Yahoo went to in striking the acquisition deal. Talks between Yahoo and Overture began in May of 2002, resulting in a formal takeover bid being entered in November 2002. Overture called off negotiations in February 2003 after spending approximately $206Million purchasing AltaVista and AlltheWeb. By May 2003, Overture's books started showing losses as the search engine war with Google was starting to heat up. This prompted Yahoo to offer to reopen negotiations as Overture was beginning to bleed money. By early July, a deal worth over $1.7Billion in cash and stocks was struck bringing Overture and its assets into the Yahoo camp.

The financial numbers thrown about in these deals serve to demonstrate the perceived value of search as a major component of Internet usage. Yahoo, MSN and Google have all began setting aside huge sums of money to either attack each other or ward off attacks. While the general war grinds on, each of the fronts is getting more interesting by the week.