This morning it looks like Microsoft is offering 44.6 billion dollars to buy Yahoo. Holy Cow. That’s a far cry from the usual things I see when I browse my morning Twitter feed.

Actually, I’ve been wondering what’s taken them so long, since it’s clear they’re not going to get decent market share any other way.

All month, Yahoo site explorer has been excruciatingly slow, and this morning it appears to be completely unusable. I suppose it could be Comcats, or some problem in beteween us, but it’s been going on for over a week.

Just trying to do a simple backlink check can take over a minute or more,  and sometimes it fails to respond altogether.

In a blog post in July about Yahoo selling its SERPS, I pointed out that a search for Special K cereal came up with the Special K logo, any clearly paid advertisement at the top of the page.

That blog post got submitted to the new (at the time) social networking site called Sphinn, which is all content exclusively related to search engines and Internet marketing.

I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about Yahoo selling its search results , and now I’m seeing another anomaly that appears as if those “unmarked, yet sponsored serps” may be available for sale in other ways too.

If you do a search on Yahoo right now for “Wii”, you’ll be given all of the following:

I’m not talking about them selling the company, (although there are rumors) I’m talking about their integrity and their overall credibility as a search engine, by appearing to sell the number one organic search result to the highest bidder.

Yesterday I attended the Internet strategy conference in Portland, and one of the speakers was Cammie Dunaway, the chief marketing officer for Yahoo.