Sure, a minute of Super Bowl air time is the equivalent of a rounding error for Google, but plunkin’ down the cheddar to put some distance between themselves and Bing may not be a bad play. I’ll have to dig into some data and figure out how much GOOG’s search market is being eroded by Bing, but I’d venture to guess pulling the trigger on a Super Bowl advertisement is a good sign that Bing is gaining ground a little too fast for Big G.

Also worth noting: this video has been available for free on YouTube since November 19, 2009. It currently has 1,868,941 views. According to Nielsen ratings, 106.5 million people watched Super Bowl 44, making it the most-watched television event in history.

Money well spent.

a) Give back to the websites that create the content that search engines currently scrape for free: pay sites for only being indexed in one search engine and refuse the other engines. In particular, allow access to deep link archives of value-added content for users entering from your search engine. Value proportion to users: When you search on engine X, you find stuff that’s otherwise not available.

b) Give back to the users. For example, pay IT departments for redirecting all searches emanating from their company to engine X. Value prop to advertisers: if you want to reach the B2B audience, you need placement on our SERPs because that’s all business users see in 70% of the Fortune 500.

Finally, and most importantly: improve basic search performance. For example by creating human-readable summaries of the search results instead of the horrible 2-line snippets currently used.

One idea is to hire a million people (probably no more than ~$1B/year) to use an instrumented browser that requires them to pass judgment on the usefulness of every search hit they visit. This data could allow sorting the SERP by usefulness instead of popularity and thus vastly improve the quality of searches.

All great ideas, to be sure.  If you’re not already subscribing to the Alertbox e-mails, you should be.  

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston. Bridget Moynahan and Tom Brady. Romeo and Juliet. And now, there’s Microsoft and Yahoo.

You can add the Microsoft-Yahoo love story to that list of famous break-ups and jilted lovers, as Steve Ballmer has officially withdrawn his three-month-old offer to combine the companies. According to a press release close to the deal, Ballmer still believes that the “proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole,” and that Redmond was prepared to raise its offer from $31 a share to $33, but Yahoo wanted at least $37 per share. That dainty Internet portal proved very hard to please.

The real winner?  Google.  Take that, Microsoft.

So, does this leave the door open for Apple to swoop in and play ball? They’ve got a lot of cash on hand and a purchase of Yahoo would add to their already awesome suite of applications.  Keep your eyes peeled — I bet those rumors will start to surface soon.