With all the hype going on about the attempted takeover of Yahoo! (YHOO) by Microsoft (MSFT), maybe it is time to take a look at several of the publicly traded search engine companies.

Yahoo! is one of the most popular search engines on the Web, based on unique visitors, which top out around 130 million uniques per month and around 3.4 billion page views per day on average. The company recently turned down Microsoft's $31/share takeover offer. Interesting fact: A Korean blog predicted a year ago that Microsoft would take over Yahoo!. Latest quarterly revenues for Yahoo! were up 7.6%, but earnings were down 23.4%. The stock has a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 60.

Although it's a very small portion of its business, Microsoft does have its own search engine through MSN.com, which had an almost 3% share of the search engine market in December 2007, according to a report by comScore. Microsoft also owns msdewey.com. Microsoft has a P/E of 16, a P/E-to-growth (PEG) ratio of 1.3 and pays a yield of 1.6%.

Google (GOOG) is by far the largest search engine in the world, with over 62% of the market share of total searches. Earnings for the latest quarter were up 17% on a revenue increase of over 50%. The stock has a P/E of 38.

The Chinese Internet search engine Baidu.com (BIDU) is now in third place by number of searches, according to comScore. The company, which was founded in 2000, has a P/E of 96 and a PEG of 1.

Time Warner (TWX) owns AOL, which used to have a big market share, but in terms of search engine searches now has less than 2% of the market. Time Warner has a P/E of 14, a PEG of 1.1 and pays a yield of 1.5%.

Ask.com is owned by the Oakland, Calif.-based IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI). Ask has slightly over 1% of the market share of searches. IAC has a forward P/E of 12 and a 0.9 PEG.

InfoSpace (INSP) has several search engines including Dogpile.com, InfoSpace.com, Webcrawler.com, MetaCrawler.com and Zoo.com. The stock has a P/E of 20.

Amazon.com (AMZN) owns the search engine A9.com, which utilizes Live Search. Amazon has a P/E of 64.

By Stockerblog.com.

Author owns TWX and MSFT.