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On Saturday, Microsoft formally withdrew its proposal to acquire Yahoo. With the Microsoft-Yahoo mashup scrapped (for now), who are the hidden winners and losers?

I’m not talking about the stockholders, advertisers, employees, CEOs, management teams, boards of directors or other stakeholders of Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. They are the obvious winners and losers.

No, I’m talking about the hidden winners and losers – or, at least the ones that have been hidden in plain sight. I may have missed some. I’ve been busy. (I’ve got a day job.) But, here are the ones I was able to find on Sunday:

Hidden Winners of the Scrapped Microsoft-Yahoo Mashup

The biggest hidden winner is AP photographer Mark Lennihan. His May 4, 2007 file photo of a Times Square news ticker flashing a headline about Microsoft above a billboard for Yahoo became one of the most used images in Google News to illustrate stories about Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo.

Another hidden winner is the Flickr group photo pool, “Microsoft: Keep You Evil Grubby Hands Off Our Flickr.” Its About Us statement reads, “THIS GROUP WILL STOP MICROSOFT FROM BUYING YAHOO! AND DESTROYING THE FLICKR WE KNOW AND LOVE OR WE WILL DIE TRYING.” Put down the camera, son. It’s over.

Kevin Ryan on the Microsoft Yahoo bid (Associated Press)

The final hidden winner is Kevin Ryan, the global content director for Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch. His comments to AP on what the possibility of a Microsoft-Yahoo conglomerate means for the online marketplace ranks #1 in YouTube if you search for the two-word term, Microsoft Yahoo.

Hidden Losers of the Scrapped Microsoft-Yahoo Mashup

The biggest hidden loser is the Y-Que T Shirt Superstore. While it ranks #1 in Google Product Search for MircoHoo, that wasn’t as popular at term as “Microsoft Yahoo,” according to Google Trends. And now it’s stuck with a bunch of funny t-shirts commemorating the takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft.

Another hidden loser is Kevin Heisler, executive editor of Search Engine Watch. What was he doing Saturday night at 9:59 p.m.? He was posting a story to the Search Engine Watch Blog entitled, “Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Offer; Yahoo Responds.” He should have been out watching Iron Man, like Deborah Richman.

Steve Ballmer going crazy

The final hidden losers are the Rapid Response Team at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide and the staff at Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher. Do a search for Steve Ballmer on Google. See the YouTube video of Steve going crazy? I’ve got four words for public relations professionals: Search Engine Reputation Management.

UPDATE: Editors’ Note: At the request of Google, we’ve removed the photo of Google engineer Jayant Madhavan, co-author (with Alon Halevy) of the Google Webmaster Central blog post, Crawling through HTML forms, posted by Maile Ohye, Senior Support Engineer at Google. The photo was deleted at Google’s request to respect the privacy of Google’s corporate data and the personal privacy of Jayant Madhavan.
– Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, Search Engine Watch

A few hours ago, Google announced to the world that the company has been crawling forms on “high-quality” Web sites to index “Invisible Web” content in the Google.com search engine.

Google’s intention (as always) aims to improve the quality of search results for users of Google’s search engine.

Crawling Web site forms, though, constitutes a sea change in terms of data privacy; specifically, the privacy of corporate data.

“In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google,” according to Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy, from the Crawling and Indexing Team on an official Google blog.

Here’s how Googlebot does it, according to Google engineers:

“We might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.”

Last year, as the search marketing analyst for JupiterResearch, I said that the biggest issue in 2007 would be the threat to the privacy of corporate data.

I was wrong, 2008 is the year corporate IT departments worldwide will be forced to spend time, money and resources to ensure that search engine spiders do not inadvertently index data a company would prefer to be private.

The same holds true for non-profit organizations and other institutions.

From a personal standpoint, I have confidence in Google’s data security systems, despite the recent departure of Google CIO, Doug Merrill.

I have full confidence that Google practices “good Internet citizenship.”

I’m confident Google has paved the road to relevance with good intentions.

This is not simply a “pioneering move” by Google.

That the robotic filling-in of forms has already been practiced by AOL’s Quigo, according to SearchEngineLand, does not reassure me.

I’m sorry, Sergey, Larry, Eric. I can’t in good conscience defend Google’s decision to our readers. The costs to CEOs, CIOs and CTOs at corporations far outweigh the benefits to consumers.

Please, reconsider.

Do not make the robotic querying of Web site forms the default spidering practice for Google. As a search engine, Google has become the gateway to the Internet and with great power comes great responsibility.

End this experiment now.

Stop this experiment before the backlash against Google develops. It’s not a question you want to answer when Wall St. analysts quiz you on the company’s performance on April 17th during the First Quarter earnings conference call.

Jason Calacanis has owned the front page of Techmeme–the world’s most influential technology and Web 2.0 news aggregator–for the past 18 hours and counting.

Another Civil War in Silicon Valley? Well, it’s war anyway–even if not civil.

Aussie Duncan Riley of TechCrunch fame bodyslammed Jason after his Calacanis.com post on how to run a startup. Duncan said “Calacanis Fires People Who Have A Life.” So far, 164 comments on TechCrunch about firing anyone who’s not a workaholic …

Jason got up off the canvas, charged his opponent Valleywagged, and parried Duncan’s jabs by updating his post, How to save money running a startup by revising his VC deathmatch coda. http://www.calacanis.com/2008/03/07/how-to-save-money-running-a-startup-17-really-good-tips/

By then Duncan had tagged out: Allen Stern delivered a sidekick to Jason’s solar plexus that sent him all the way to Starbucks country: Working at Mahalo is Like Prison Except We Gots Better Coffee.

Jason Calacanis “Electrified Cage Deathmatch Bar Room Brawl” at SES New York in the SOLD OUT (Not Paris) Hilton in New York the day after St. Patrick’s Day.

Note: See it live! SES On Demand Video will be available to Search Engine Watch members only after the SES New York Deathmatch.

Celebrities on the front row: Kevin Ryan, John Battelle, Andrew Tomkins, Nick Carr, Gordon McLeod and many, many more.

Tickets on sale now!

Opening Keynote this afternoon: Don E. Schultz, Professor (Emeritus-in-Service), Integrated Marketing Communications, Northwestern University & President of Agora, Inc.
Some quick hits from a conversation I had with the Don (not The Donald). If not yet the godfather of search marketing, he’s definitely our HL Mencken. Brilliant, funny, brutally honest. His quotes: audience food for thought [...]

It’s been a really interesting year here at Search Engine Watch. I’m happy to say traffic to the site is strong, if not at an all-time high, due to the fantastic work of our bloggers, expert columnists, and SearchDay contributors. News Editor Kevin Newcomb deserves much of the credit for those areas as well, since [...]