Following the big news about the Yahoo!/MSN search deal, everyones been wondering how this might impact Google and what it means for competition. Marissa Mayer, Googles VP of search has given the thumbs down to the deal, saying it might hurt competition and consumers.>In case you missed the big announcement, Microsoft effectively bought second place in the search engine wars by announcing a deal which will see Yahoo! transition over to using the Bing search engine.

In an article by PC world, Mayer said if Yahoo! adopts Bing instead of their own search engine, it will reduce the search market from three major players to two which might reduce innovation. According to Mayer, Everyone runs faster in a race where there are more people.

She also added that several groups at Google are studying the proposed partnership. The deal is expected to close sometime next year, following a green light from trade regulators. I would say that Google will be closely looking at this to try and put something together about why it should not go ahead.

Google has a commanding lead in the search race, controlling around 60% of worldwide searches. With Yahoo/MSN starting on a base of around 25-30% theyre going to have to work very hard to close the gap.

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