Microsoft announced today that it has made an offer to buy Yahoo for nearly $45 billion dollars. The move would allow Microsoft and Yahoo to join forces to compete against Google in the Web search market.

Currently, Google controls about 80 percent of the worldwide Web search market while Yahoo is second with about 16 percent and Microsoft third with 4 percent.

If the buy out is successful it would be interesting to see how this affects Google’s current market dominance and if either Microsoft and/or Yahoo will drastically change their search algorithms in any way which could result in changes in search engine optimization techniques used by webmasters.