So the tech news and blogs have been all going crazy over the past few days since news broke regarding Microsofts’ proposed purchase of Yahoo. To be honest something like this, in my opinion, has been on the cards for quite a while and could, if approved, allow for some proper competition for the daddy in the search engine business, Google.

Of course a lot of people are focused on how Microsoft would plan to use the Yahoo search technology in a direct fight with the Google search pages, but to be honest I think we need to be looking at more subtle changes that could happen as part of this proposed relationship.

For a long time Windows users have been accustomed to creating complex filing systems on their computers. I’ve seen some people who have some folders nested 20 deep, with some of these folders containing a further nest of 20+ folders. They say it’s organised, but I say they probably spend a good portion of their day searching for documents, rather than working on them.  Of course the computer doesn’t really care about this complex folder system, and to be honest at a low level probably isn’t even aware of it. At the end of the day you have an amount of physical storage in your PC with your files somewhere on that. The best way to find those files, in my opinion, would be to use the search tool.

Now before you starting throwing things at me, I know the current generation of Windows search tools are basic, at best. If, however, you look at how Windows Vista is presented when you first login you notice quite a few icons are missing, replaced by one important box - search !  I know a few people who have, when experiencing Vista for the first time, thought something has gone wrong with the installation given that so many friendly icons are now missing. To me this shows that Microsoft is keen to get us using the search tools as part of our daily interaction with the system.

Although the search tools have been improved somewhat with Windows Vista, I still don’t think they offer the same level of complexity as Spotlight, the Mac OS default search engine.  This is where I think the Yahoo purchase could come in very handy. One of the main reasons why Google is the search engine most people use isn’t because it’s necessarily better. I’d love to poll some of my friends who use Google to find out if they did a comparison between available search engines before choosing Google - I bet not. It’s because it’s what everyone else is using. It’s the cool kid on the block. It’s Branding to coin a marketing term.

Now consider how many homes have a Windows based computer. If the Microsoft/Yahoo relationship could get all of these people used to this new search engine on their local PC, then all of a sudden it has a mass following. I also believe that the boundaries between physical local storage and online virtual storage are being blurred. This means that we no longer want to just search our local documents, but rather online archives, search engines, Flickr pages social networks and the like. For me the search engine of the future will underpin everything we do and I believe the proposed Microsoft / Yahoo partnership is better placed to deliver a solution to the masses than Google is.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on some of the other back end tools Yahoo could bring to the already plentiful dinner provided at the Microsoft feast.