The death of Microhoo may mean an end to the Microsoft/Yahoo rumors, but don't expect talk of mergers and acquisitions to go away anytime soon.

Yahoo boss Jerry Yang says he's still open to a bid from Microsoft, which says it has moved on. Meanwhile, AOL's corporate parents are looking for any buyer, News Corp. says it's open to all sorts of deals, and Google is sitting pretty. In many ways, the world looks a lot like it did before the Microhoo soap opera began three months ago, but some say the pressure to buy and sell has intensified greatly now that Microsoft has walked away from Yahoo.

Confused? Saul Hansell, a technology reporter at The New York Times, has a nice breakdown of the M&A mania that is likely to sweep the web in the coming months.

According to Hansell, deals are likely to fall into one of three categories. Search-focused deals are all but dead because only Microsoft and Yahoo are seen as viable competitors to Google. Display ad deals could see names like Revenue Science and ValueClick being bandied about as potential targets for some of the web's bigger players as the trend of consolidation in the ad network space continues. But the struggling AOL, which many see as the biggest prize on the display side, could be the first to fall. Finally, deals that are built around a pure audience play are likely to pick up steam.