Yahoo! and Microsoft building a search company?

At least John thinks they should.

It seems that currently both still have a tough time, even though Panama seems encouraging. And there are a lot of players out there that make things more interesting, like the efforts of wunderloop.

So John suggests for them to join forces instead of trying to kill each other in the race to catch Google. They should form a new company, name Soverture ;), throw in their search monetization and syndication plays and recruit together. They can also build a killer AdSense product he believes. All in all a good idea but not thought far enough.

There are too many players out there already and for the portals, those with the best deal should win. What we need is an open market place where everyone can be plugged in. We need to be able to allow a publisher to handle ads themselves, but have a backfill from different other providers that fit best. The publisher then has to be able to decide how much share of their revenue they want to spend on optimization, taking somebody out there that does content match well, or adding somebody for demographic targeting or social targeting. We have to stop this being a walled garden, a blackbox from all sides where everybody believes they will only win if they will not tell anyone how it works. THAT will be interesting and I propose a similar corporate structure like VISA.