The Microsoft corporation announced earlier today that it is in the process of making an offer to buy Yahoo for about $45 billion dollars. The buy-out is an attempt for Microsoft to join forces with Yahoo to compete against Google in the Web search market.

Currently, Google controls about 79 percent of the worldwide Web search market while Yahoo is second with about 16 percent and Microsoft is a distant third with 4 percent.

If Microsoft is successful in buying Yahoo, it would be interesting to see how this affects Google’s current market dominance and if either Microsoft and/or Yahoo will drastically change their search algorithms. If so, this could result in changes in search engine optimization techniques used by webmasters.