I normally don’t have much good things to say about commercial entities. I hate them to the core. But once in a while, we would come across a good for value deal out there. Godaddy’s domain registration is one of them. In fact, all my domains are under registered with Godaddy. There business model is fair. Probably the first Domain Registrar that offers good quality, low priced domain registration to the masses. And with a easy to use interface, Godaddy gave me the flexibility of changing hosts whenever I need to. I have the complains about Godaddy. I guess without Godaddy, we will all be paying US$40-60 per year for our domains. Thank god for the Superbowl ads. What I am even more surprised is that there are still domain registrars out there providing expensive domain registration to webmasters. Don’t they watch the Superbowl? And if Godaddy can offer such low prices, I wonder how much those extremely greedy companies are making off domain registration!!

Yes, Godaddy did offer to show my face at the next Superbowl ads if I say good things about their business, but it was somehow rejected by CBS. They claim that my face would bring down the ratings and scare audiences away. Some old ladies may get heart attacks which could even result in death. So they decided to show me mooning the crowd instead. My butt is am going to be famous! Finally some recognition for my flashing skills.

I wish I could say the same good things about their webhosting services. No, I don’t host my websites under Godaddy but from what I read at WHT and other forums, it seems that there is a lot of problems with their Linux hosts. I think they modify their apache servers and this may break a lot of CMS scripts, even popular ones. Sure, they offer very good pricing for their webhosting service too, but what’s the point? My opinion is for you to check out whether a script has any problems with their hosts first before committing. And get ready to ask your friends for help, I hear their support isn’t that great.

What will you think will happen to the Search Engine market? Microsoft also owns MSN/Live which is the third largest Search Engine and combining with Yahoo!, will we see a real competition to Google? Sure, Google’s Search Engine is probably much better than Yahoo!’s, but now with the resources of Microsoft behind them, how much an improvement will it result? Commercially, it is sound. One less competitor for MSN and one more step for global domination. Microsoft could just ditch MSN and start using Yahoo’s search results while concentrating MSN as a complete Internet portal. Or they could work side by side, each providing their own results and complimenting each other.

I myself believe if such a merger were to happen, it will be a good thing. Google has grown lax and unimaginative in the recent years, and have produced a lot of failures and disasters for themselves(think Googletalk). And their Search Engine, though currently still the best on the web, has not improved much (in my opinion). Their very restrictive policies and arrogance has actually hurt a lot of webmasters and web entrepreneur and this has made the Internet larthargic. I feel that with Google at the helm is not good at all. In fact, I think that Google is holding back the potential of the Internet. Although I don’t trust Microsoft, at least it will force Google to really improve their search engine and start behaving responsibly instead of like a web thug by forcing everyone to do whatever they say. Thus I am still very keen to see what will happen if Microsoft takes over Yahoo!.

What do you think? Will it be a good idea? Will we be trading one monster for two lesser ones? Or will we see the golden age of the Internet coming soon? Please discuss.