24 hours after the sudden passing of Michael Jackson, I decided to take a look at how fresh the results were from various search engines.

WolframAlpha shows a date of birth and a date of death for former President Ronald WIlson Reagan.

For Michael Jackson, WolframAlpha only displays a date of birth.

Next, I compared Google and Bing. In the snippet from Wikipedia, Google’s cache is more up to date than that from Bing. Google’s display the date of birth and the date of death.

Bing does not.

Curiously, the snippet that Yahoo displays from Wikipedia excludes the date of birth. However, if I view Yahoo’s cache, I can see that they have the older version of Michael Jackson’s biography, like Bing.

Microsoft made a bid for Yahoo last Friday. This move should prove beneficial for Yahoo if it can escape from the clutches of the Redmond behemoth. Yahoo has been wandering for a few years now, and it really needs to focus and execute again. Hopefully, this will accelerate their turn-around plans.

Yahoo used to be my #1 destination for news, e-mail and maps. Now, Google and Yahoo divide my attention equally for news and e-mail, and Google has completely taken over for maps. For me, the turning point for maps was Google’s introduction of draggable maps. That was when I switched over to using Google exclusively, even though Yahoo now offers something similar.

I still prefer My Yahoo over iGoogle, though it took me forever to switch over to the My Yahoo beta. I kept switching back-and-forth between the classic My Yahoo and the My Yahoo beta for the longest time. I simply didn’t feel that the beta was an improvement, hence the back-and-forth.

As bad as Yahoo is struggling right now, I think Microsoft is faring even worse. I still keep a hotmail account, but I really don’t check it all that often. I don’t visit any of Microsoft’s online properties, and I don’t know anyone else that does. If Microsoft took over Yahoo and imposed their kludginess on Yahoo, I might have to switch to Google exclusively.