Microsoft's (possible) Yahoo takeover is getting more and more obscure. It seems that after Microsoft pulled out of the negotiations, the US-billionaire Carl Icahn build up a large Yahoo-stock-depot and now wants to use his voice in the matter to get the two companies back into negotiations. From the SEO-point-of-view, this also takes an interesting turn since Mark Cuban, who it seems is supposed to join the board of directors on Icans behalf, brought up the idea to just buy out the Google-index in a blog posting.

After a few of the usual thoughts on how to divert market-share in the search-engine market, Mark came up with the idea to pay the best sites on the Google-index to stop being listed through Google. With Mahalo.com's numbers, which believe that covering the 25.000 most common keywords is enough, Mark is suggesting to “buy out” the first 5 results from Google and bind them to Yahoo/Microsoft. In his sample calculation he assumes that this will be about 100.000 sites – at a price of 1.000 USD per page this process would only cost 1 billion US-dollars.

This is an interesting and particularly new proposal which admittedly has some weak points: The first problem will be that a large portion of Google's SERPs will not be able to be bought: universities, Wikipedia, associations – a large part of the plan should be thwarted especially thanks to Wikipedia's strength and quality. The next problem will be the fact that covering 25.000 keywords is not enough – as we all know searches are getting “long-tailed”, the amount of words per search is rising for years and users know how to search better and more accurately. Ultimately I can see the problem of a one-time, comparably low, pay-off. Be it 1.000 or 10.000 US-dollar, whoever can be found within the first 5 hits in the top25k-keywords will probably make more profit in the medium term staying listed in Google.