If Yahoo's For Sale, Google's Interested

Yahoo's decision to dispense with the services of Chief Executive Laura Bartz last month drew a lot of attention in the industry.  One of the company's now said to be interested in buying it up is Google.

Co-founder Jerry Yang, who is still on the board, indicated that anything is possible.  That could include a total buy-out, a transfer of some parts of the business or a new management time.

There's no official news yet, but the list of potential buyers is becoming clearer.  One big name is Microsoft, which already attempted to buy the firm back in 2008 for $20 million, but Alibaba, a Chinese portal in which Yahoo holds is a stake is another name.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the seemingly unbeatable Google is also interested.  The newspaper reports that the search giant is already dealing with two private-equity funds to investigate the possibility of acquiring Yahoo.

Google in third place behind Yahoo and Facebook

One interesting feature of the potential buy-out that the Wall Street Journal raises is that while Google seems to have an incredibly dominant position in search, it doesn't enjoy anywhere near the same level of popularity amongst advertisers.  According to data from eMarketer, Google is the third biggest online ad platform, behind Yahoo and Facebook.



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