While you were out U.S. and European Union regulators approved the disastrous Microsoft-Yahoo! search deal.

So before the deal can even be implemented, what we’re seeing in the SEO community is:

1) After months of Carol Bartz selling off and closing down as many Yahoo! properties as possible, Yahoo! has less Web visibility to prop up its dying search business.
2) PPC advertisers are now complaining that Yahoo! is not driving as much traffic as it used to.
3) Fewer people are pumping up pageviews on Yahoo!’s search results, but they are now pumping up Bing’s pageviews.

What this means for consumers is:

1) The better of the 2 organic search algorithms is going away
2) Search marketers have already begun homogenizing their Bing results to look more like Google search results
3) It will be more difficult to find non-commercial, factual or entertaining content in the now advertising-dominated commercial Web
4) Websearch just got a whole lot smaller and dumber

What this means for search advertisers is:
1) The cost of traffic acquisition will increase because of increased competition on the Bing/Yahoo! network.
2) There is one less competitive network to Google’s use.
3) A core audience demographic will essentially vanish, thus burying small business niche markets in the mega-advertiser space.

It’s been a bad week for search consumers and advertisers, but even though Microsoft will not gain any competitive advantage from the deal over Google, it has effectively eliminated a major competitor from the industry without even having to compete.

So what is Ballmer’s next hat trick? Is he going to buy Google?

My CAPTCHA reads: funk continued
Interesting.