Wow, major news breaking on the horizon. Microsoft have offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion.

Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.

So what is this? One last attempt to kill Google? Or two companies whose recent online strategies haven’t made an awful lot of sense joining up to make an even bigger mess of things?

Update: TechCrunch reports that it’s all about the ads.