It's not obvious what the acquiring group mentioned in this article would do with Yahoo after they've bought it, to make it worth the price. They'd have the 5th most visited domain name on the Internet, but as Yahoo has demonstrated, visits don't automatically turn into money. (Twitter has a similar problem, and sits at #8, but they have a social aspect that Yahoo doesn't.)
Unless Alibaba comes with the purchase at a discount, or someone wants to acqui-hire whatever talent hasn't already fled, an acquisition doesn't seem even remotely sensible.
A few quick checks suggest that Yahoo's searches-per-day traffic is still decent, at 12.4% of the market (2.2 billion searches/month); perhaps redirecting that to some competing search engine might be worth it for a cheap enough price.
It's funny you mention Alibaba. I did a little digging, and it turns out that Softbank (who owns ~35% of Alibaba to Yahoo's ~24%) has a 35% stake in Yahoo Japan. Very interesting stuff.
Yahoo! Japan is a separate company from Yahoo, Inc. It was formed as a joint venture between Yahoo, Inc. and SoftBank, thus both of them holding a stake.
Unless Alibaba comes with the purchase at a discount, or someone wants to acqui-hire whatever talent hasn't already fled, an acquisition doesn't seem even remotely sensible.
A few quick checks suggest that Yahoo's searches-per-day traffic is still decent, at 12.4% of the market (2.2 billion searches/month); perhaps redirecting that to some competing search engine might be worth it for a cheap enough price.