Call it a partnership. Call it a strategic alliance. Call it whatever you want. But word that Microsoft and Yahoo! are back at the table talking possible merger was the biggest financial story to come out of last week. This news fit nicely with the overall ‘blockbuster’ atmosphere going into the weekend – the opening of Spider-Man 3, the Mayweather-De La Hoya fight – but just like we learned from those two events, when it’s all said and done, huge numbers can’t always mask our sense of mild disappointment.

And make no mistake about it: the numbers surrounding this deal would be massive. Microsoft and Yahoo! have a combined market cap of nearly $335 billion and together could leverage tremendous pools of capital in their online search and advertising war with Google. But most pundits got it right by saying that Google isn’t exactly quaking in its boots at the thought of this merger, or joint venture, or whatever they choose to call it. To extend the boxing metaphor, individually Yahoo! and Microsoft are like two talented featherweights in the online search world while Google remains the undisputed heavyweight champ. A combined Yahoo! and MSN search engine might qualify as a middleweight, but it still ain’t a fair fight.

The truth is Google controls more than two thirds of all searches on the web, holds a near impenetrable fortress of brand appeal with the web-savvy crowd, and has recently sunk its acquisition teeth into DoubleClick, the world’s leading provider of online marketing and advertising services. So powerful is Google’s presence on the web that one of MSN.com’s most frequently searched terms is actually “Google.com” – which is sort of the online equivalent of asking the operator for the number for 911.

But just like I was disappointed with Spider-Man 3 and with Mayweather-De La Hoya, there was something about the Microsoft-Yahoo! rumor that left me a wee bit … underwhelmed. I’m all for a viable alternative to Google’s dominance in the search engine marketing/targeted advertising world, but it seems like all the big players in the game – Yahoo!, MSN, Google, Ask.com – are more concerned with finding a place in the web as it exists today instead of leading the charge towards what the web is going to be in three or five or seven years from now. And my spidey senses are telling me that to find out what the future holds, we really ought to be looking at the past.

What are you searching for?

Do you remember those heady, halcyon days of yore – you know, the 1990s – when the web was still sometimes called the Information Superhighway? For word nerds like me, this intellectual wonderland was a dream come true, a place where every possible tidbit of information was available in a matter of seconds and almost entirely without the odious presence of advertising. But the web of 2007 looks quite a bit different from the web of 1997: it has become less about discovering information for information’s sake and more about being a huge virtual shopping mall. The blame for this change rests almost entirely with Google’s search marketing business model – something its competitors wish they could replicate, rather than trump outright.

But no one seems interested in asking the simplest and most fundamental question about the web: how many people are online at any given moment because they want to buy something and how many are online because they want to learn something. Google’s biggest weakness – possibly its only weakness – is that its business model cannot really distinguish between these two occasionally related but ultimately different user experiences. Google assumes that if you’re using the web, you must be doing so with credit card in hand. The whole notion of ‘relevant search results’ has become less about prioritizing information and more about slinging out websites that attain an acceptable mix of ‘information’ and advertising in order to make a sale. But is this really what you want when using the web?

So the reason I was so ho-hum about last week’s news is because neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! seem interested in addressing this issue with their respective search engines as a way of effectively competing with Google. But mark my words: savvy search engine users will eventually begin howling for the return of a truer Information Superhighway once ‘spammy website burnout’ sets in. And which large conglomerate is currently positioned to answer that call? Yes, there is the whole Wikipedia phenomenon (personally, I prefer Answers.com, which I find more detailed, reliable and user friendly), but are wikis the same as a search engine, and if so, does Google consider them a threat?

The search engine that will dominate the web 10 years from now will be the one that has found a way to distinguish between a user looking to buy and a user looking to learn. If you type in the name of an obscure book, should the number-one search result be abebooks.com or an essay published in an august literary journal? If you type in ‘mutual funds’, are you looking to open an online account or do you want information for a project you’re writing for a Grade 11 personal finance class? How might a search engine tell the difference? Answer that and you’ve probably found the next decade’s big online juggernaut in which to invest.

The only search engine out there doing anything radically different with its results pages is an unassuming little site called Pagebull.com. This site is as adorably quaint as it is effective. What’s their gimmick? They don’t communicate their search results with words. They instead give you a small screenshot of each site that comes up. In other words, you get to see the site before you see the site – a wonderful way of making sure you’re not clicking your way into spam. I’m not necessarily saying that Pagebull’s gimmick (with patent pending) is the wave of the future, but it does represent the kind of radical thinking that the web needs right now. And if Pagebull’s search engine does take off like a house on fire, remember that you read about it here first!