Ever since the Yahoo become notorious for its service and financial issues, the longstanding web portal has yet again become the topic of acquisition talk.  The latest potential buyers include Google and Microsoft,who are apparently thinking seriously about participating in the bidding process for Yahoo.

But an interesting thing here is that neither Google nor Microsoft wants to actually buy, or run Yahoo.  Rather, both of them are considering giving financial support to private equity firms or others making a bid.  Taking a few steps ahead, both Google and Microsoft are in discussions with buyout firms.  While Microsoft is in talks with several leveraged buyout firms including Silver Lake and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, Google is also talking with two private equity firms about backing a takeover. Google and its prospective partners are in early-stage discussions, but haven’t put together a formal proposal. These private equity firms will be actively focusing on turning around the company, and Microsoft or Google will be backing the deal by supplying capital.

The reason behind why both these want Yahoo to continue its existence is that its network still manages to retain a monthly audience of almost 700 million unique visitors, which is a really good indicator of the web’s behavior.  Yahoo’s news counterpart also reported 81.2 million unique visitors in August, making it the biggest online news site. Taking these figures into account, Google can use Yahoo to promote its own efforts, including social network- Google Plus.  Google is also interested in selling advertising across Yahoo’s websites. On the other hand, Microsoft can leverage Yahoo’s network to integrate its latest acquisition, Skype.

But this is not the very first time that these industry giants looked into acquiring Yahoo. Back in 2008, Microsoft had a failed attempt of acquiring Yahoo for $47.5 billion.  Now, it seems that both companies are looking to limit their risk while trying to take maximum advantage of Yahoo to promote their own products. And they are doing this by acting as backdoor financiers. Let’s just see how this shapes up, and in whose kitty Yahoo falls!