“Now that quasi-white knight Google is out of the picture,” said Staci Kramer in paidContent.org, “Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang has some advice for Microsoft:” Buy us. The now-scuttled deal in which Google would have placed search ads on Yahoo sites was meant as “a wreath of garlic cloves to ward off evil Microsoft,” but that was when Yahoo was trading near $30 a share, a price that seems “incredibly remote” to Wednesday’s close of $13.92.

Well, Yahoo shareholders are betting that “Yang & Co.” can resurrect a Microsoft deal, said Therese Poletti in MarketWatch, but that “road is a long one.” Yahoo “turned up its nose" to "a takeover offer priced at $33 per share,” and now it would be lucky to get an offer in “the low $20 range,” or any offer at all.

“Many analysts believe Microsoft will in fact return with a new bid,” said Robert Hof in BusinessWeek online, but probably not until next year, to avoid an antitrust case “stuck in regulatory limbo under the lame-duck Bush administration.” Ironically, it’s not clear the antitrust regulators were right to sink the Google deal—Google will come to dominate more of the search ad market, even if Microsoft buys Yahoo.