If you pulled a Rip Van Winkle this quarter, you might want to read on and learn just what’s happened in the world of the search engines. It’s been months of mergers, acquisitions, and positioning.

Here are just a few of the major events:

Overture buys AltaVista
Yahoo buys Inktomi
Overture buys FAST
Google Launches Huge Ad Program
Google Acquires Blogger.Com

What’s going on here?

Convergence. Soon there may be little difference between Google, Yahoo!, and Overture. Yahoo soon will most likely offer its own “pay per click” listing model and leave or downgrade its Overture partnership. Overture will need to build its own front-end rather than rely on Yahoo and its other partners. And Google will continue its vision of world domination.

Convergence may make our jobs easier in the professional services market but we do have a concern about competition. We need there to be at least these three search players to ensure that the price per click doesn’t experience significant inflation due to lack of competition. Then again, if you compare the relative cost of advertising between these low-cost options and offline options, online inflation has a long way to go to catch up.