Online search and advertising used to be a surefire way to make boatloads of money. Then it became a guaranteed ticket to the poorhouse, when the Internet bubble popped six years ago.
These days, the old plethora of startups has been replaced by three giants of varying stature and a mere handful of hopefuls. Let's dig in to see what makes our search masters tick.
If it isn't already patently obvious, I'm talking about Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), and the Web services division of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), formerly known as MSN.
