New Zealand's portal wars have been torturous to watch over the past year - and in YahooXtra's case, at times torturous to visit. First Microsoft, a one-time shareholder in Xtra's parent Telecom, parted ways with our favourite telco. Xtra rushed into bed with Yahoo ... and, well, you know how well the YahooXtra Bubble launch went as management of email and other services was abruptly shunted across the Tasman. Meanwhile, MSN.co.nz is a mere link farm compared to other Microsoft portals around the world.

Now, Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $US44 billion. It's a deal that's likely to through. It's a very good price; Yahoo needs a hand; and no regulator could block it at a time when search ad revenue is king (Google's projected revenue this year, $US16 billion, will be more than the top four US TV networks combined) but Microsoft (14%) and Yahoo (18%) badly trail Google (56%) in search share, according to Nielsen. That matters at a time when Microsoft sees the market for online advertising doubling from $US40 billion in 2007 to $US80 billion in 2008.

And if it does indeed go through, it'll necessitate another round of shenanigans as YahooXtra and MSN.co.nz again fragment then realign (MSNYahoo!??) for a third time. However things shake out, it's unlikely that NZ and Aussie media partners will be at the front of the wrestling giants' minds, as Rob O'Neill points out over at Computerworld.

The only sure thing is that it's more good news for nzherald.co.nz and stuff.co.nz, which in the absence of the usual serious portal competition from Yahoo and MSN, have become the nation's default portals. As Fairfax Digital's outgoing head Bernard Hickey noted at the Digital Summit, in world terms it's very unusual for newspaper sites like his Stuff to dominate, but they'll take it.