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There's no doubt that you would have to be sight and hearing impaired not to have heard about the offer that Microsoft hopes to make in an effort to purchase Yahoo!. News of it has been everywhere on the Net as well as getting plenty of time on television and radio news and in the newspapers too.

It's been blogged about, it's been the source of numerous threads on Webmaster boards in mainstream and adult and it will probably go on being a hot topic for a few days yet. Instead of jumping into all that craziness I stayed right away from anything anyone was writing about it ... after all, it's mostly speculation and the first people to start rambling about such a merger are usually those who are basically clueless.

So after reading the initial report on CNet I switched off and went on with life as if nothing was happening ... and that's basically what the situation is. Nothing has happened, they're only talking about making an offer and that's as far as it may ever get. Even if Microsoft and Yahoo! do go further there are a lot of obstacles in their way and it could be a very long time before the two do come together.

In the meantime there's a lot of work we should all be doing with the search engine landscape that we have at the moment. For example, do you understand just how important search engines are becoming in today's world?

I'm writing this early on Monday morning my time - that's early Sunday afternoon on the east coast of the United States - and currently six of the top 10 Google search trends for today have to do with what time Super Bowl kicks off. People aren't bothering to look in the newspapers or switch on the television to find kick-off time; they're going to the search engines to find out something as simple as kick-off time.

That's how important search engines are becoming to the lives of normal people! When they want to find some very basic information they're hitting the search engines. And don't be fooled here ... don't make the assumption that everyone is hitting Google for the information that they need. Don't assume that in every country in the world Google is the number one search engine.

There is no doubt that in many parts of the world Google is the leader but that's not the case right across the planet and it may never be the case. For example in Japan Yahoo is more popular than Google; in some parts of Europe such as Estonia and in Russia local search engines see far more use than Google and in Italy MSN is the most popular search engine by quite a large margin.

In South Korea Google doesn't even rank in the top three search engines and Yahoo! only just make it in to the number three spot. In France, from the figures that I can find, Yahoo! and MSN are perhaps more popular than Google and Yahoo! seems to do better in the United Kingdom than Google does. Here in Australia Google is out in front but MSN is not very far behind.

Of course, you may disagree with some of those figures but don't disagree just because Google is the only one who seems to be showing up in your stats. Your sites may not be as attractive to the other two search engines as they are to Google so you may be missing out on a lot of traffic. Don't presume that just because MSN and Yahoo! aren't appearing in your stats people aren't using those two search engines to look for sites like yours.

So right now, instead of working yourself into a frenzy over what someone says about a possible merger between Yahoo! and MSN on a message board or in a blog post what you should be doing is discovering what you have to do to get those two search engines to rank you as well as Google does. And there is a difference; each of the three major search engines see things a little differently and place importance on different things.

So what are the differences? That's some research you should do for yourself and perhaps the best place to start is a recent blog post on seobook.com. Search engine optimisation is not something that works all the time every time for every person who tries it so you need to find what works for you; that's why I suggest you do your own research ... and your own experimentation.

When you do your own research and testing - and you achieve those first page results that you've lusted for on all three major search engines - then you can dance around the house like Steve did on Saturday afternoon.

I'm sure the neighbors thought he was crazy but who cares about the neighbors when you've just found that you're in the top four in all three major engines for several serious search terms nationwide for a client who couldn't even be found in Google before Steve started work on their site.