Matt Cutts from Google has a poll on his blog about who got the better of the Yahoo Microsoft deal.  The stats are below and 80% of people are saying MSN did and Iwould agree. Yet there are many good comments about Google being the winner or better yet the end user.

I would think that MSN is now in the position to challenge Google and they are in much better shape now then they have been in awhile, at least in the search engine game. Plus they have a lot of money and maybe they aren’t done spending it.   Yahoo didn’t do that bad here because they have been overmatched and out of it for a long time and they knew it, the results at Yahoo organic suck and the Yahoo PPC program is weak.  So now they can focus on other things and in the long run it probably will be the end user and advertisers who come out ahead.

From Matt Cutts Blog:
Who did better in the Microsoft-Yahoo deal?