I see they offered close to $50 BILLION a few years ago to buy yahoo.  But their offer was turned down. Yahoo was recently sold for almost $5 BILLION.  

So I ask,  if Microsoft bought them for $50BN would yahoo's value have dramatically dropped and it would have been a terrible deal,  or would Microsoft have kept yahoo as a top player in the game?

Did Microsoft unintentionally dodge a bullet? 

Yahoo is crap and Bing is crap. Putting those two together wouldn't make them any less crap. If anything, they would be more crappier. 🤔

They would have been written off like the Nokia phone division eventually, if that deal went through.

They certainly did dodge a bullet. I don't see how they could have saved Yahoo, it was already a floundering company at the time. 

they weren't buying Yahoo for it's search engine, they were buying it for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo!

And they probably did dodge a bullet. Yahoo has been going down since they removed their auctions section.

That's a nice list of crap. 😛

Just yesterday a video came up on my YouTube suggestions for 10 biggest fails and one of them was the Google and Yahoo story. It's amazing looking back now at the decisions that could have saved companies from going down under or becoming shells of their former selves.

https://youtu.be/jtSY04_camQ

Yeah, I never said it was good stuff (flickr might be the biggest one). But then remember, MS bought Mojang for $2.5billion... which at the time was a company that was making about $90mil a year profit. It will take them over 20 years to get that back from the company if they stay around that sum. So not really sure how MS value things.

I use it all the time. What's wrong with it?

Aside from not being Google? 

I've had instances where it yielded better results than Google.