Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land, said that the marketplace had changed since the last Google-Yahoo deal was proposed and the partnership could be more palatable to regulators now. "Yahoo lost all the market share it could lose, gave up its search technology and became this outer fiefdom of Microsoft," he said. But Mr. Sullivan said partnering with Google would not solve Yahoo's longer-term problems in search. "Whatever numbers you look at, Yahoo's the third-place player," he said. "How do you get back to being a second-place player?"