Webdiro Directory : web information guide

After years of take-overs and mergers, the top 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live, are showing all the signs of 2008 being the year they finally square up to each other in the war for dominance of the search engine market. The smallest players have been bought out or reduced to irrelevance amidst expanded service offerings and higher expectations from consumers. The first shots have already been fired, now the world waits to see who will lead the charge.

Google, Yahoo, and Live Search

The top three search engines have been built up quite differently from each other, they each started with different goals at different times in the evolution of the search engine market. Strategic acquisitions are complementing organic growth. Each has now built a solid business, protected with a range of patents, and driven by talent, and most importantly, access to massive investment dollars. Here’s the breakdown;

Google is currently number one in terms of market share and brand awareness. Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google has always been a search engine utilizing off page links to webpage content as the basis for determining the popularity and authority, and therefore the relevance of indexed content. Google owns Adwords, AdSense, Picasa, YouTube, and Feedburner to name but a few. They also operate one of the most popular free email services, Gmail.

Yahoo!, currently number two in the search engine rankings was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo as a hierarchical directory of websites, later adding a search engine as well. The Yahoo! Search Marketing is Yahoo!’s answer to Google’s Adwords program. Yahoo! owns Geocities, Overture (owner of AltaVista, and itself the owner of the popular Babelfish online translator), Flickr, and del.icio.us.

Microsoft’s Live Search is the search engine offered by Microsoft. Originally part of the Microsoft Network, an ISP setup to provide services on the Windows desktop, all services are now being progressively re-branded through 2007 and early 2008. Microsoft provides advertising through the Microsoft AdCenter, a service that is being expanded into new markets to compete with Google and Yahoo!

What the Top 3 Search Engines Do

Each of the 3 top search engines has indexed billions of pages, and in many cases is broadly comparable with each other. A quick comparison of the number of search results and speed of retrieval shows;

Paris Hilton

Yahoo!, 253,000,000 results taking 0.13 seconds

Live Search, 53,995,402 results with no time displayed

Google, 15,700,000 results taking 0.18 seconds

superbowl

Live Search, 174,283,406 results with no time displayed.

Yahoo!, 10,300,000 results taking 0.17 seconds (’super bowl’ suggested as alternative)

Google, 9,740,000 results taking 0.22 seconds

manure

Yahoo!, 10,100,00 results taking 0.12 seconds

Google, 9,420,000 results taking 0.27 seconds

Live Search, 3,008,033 results with no time displayed

While this can’t be taken very seriously in determining which search engine will ultimately prevail, it does show that Google’s lead could come under significant threat.

The latest ranking results, from 19th September 2007 released by Hitwise show that Google still commands a significant lead in its popularity for search, rating at a whopping 64% of all searches. Significantly the same report shows Yahoo!’s ranking unchanged at 22.7%, with Microsoft (which includes MSN and Live searches) a very distant third at just under 8%, a drop from just under 12% the previous year.

An earlier report by Nielsen in August 2007 showed different figures;

Google at 53.6% and 4,199,495,000 searches

Yahoo! at 19.9% and 1,561,903,000 searches

Microsoft at 12.9% and 1,011,398,000 searches

The Hitwise report fails to mention the actual number of searches so it’s difficult to know how accurate their data is, but both sets of results do lend credence to the market’s perception of the big three quickly consolidating their leads at the expense of smaller search engines.

The above reports definitely put Google in the lead, but referring back to our search results for ‘Paris Hilton’, ’superbowl’, and manure we can see that Google and Yahoo! are fairly evenly matched in the number of search results, but Yahoo! consistently produces faster results, suggesting Yahoo! may have a better handle on its caching of results.

Microsoft’s Live Search on the other hand is showing wildly different results for the number of indexed results, and in their market share. Given they don’t advertise the length of time to retrieve results we can only speculate on how good the Live Search caching is, but, with total results varying so much from Google and Yahoo! it seems Microsoft might still have a lot of tweaking to do.

Getting Your Site Indexed By the Top 3 Search Engines

Webmasters often want to know how to get their sites indexed by the top 3 search engines, each engine provides a page with a submit site form, however most SEO experts agree this is not the best method to use. Search engine crawlers are active almost all of the time, and they frequently visit more popular websites so obtaining several back links to your website and waiting for the crawlers to visit is often seen as quicker and more reliable.

Once the crawlers reach your site, they will all first start by looking for a sitemap file, and finding this, will begin crawling your site. All of the top 3 search engines recognize the sitemaps xml protocol having agreed to cooperate from November 2006. Not providing a sitemap won’t prevent indexing, however pages may get missed.

In conclusion, Google’s commanding lead in the search engine wars is unlikely to be seriously threatened in the next few months. Microsoft have yet to complete their re-branding and roll out of services so a jump in popularity could be expected over the next year, whether this will be at Google’s or Yahoo!’s expense we cannot say. What is certain, all of the top 3 search engines are actively expanding their index to include images, video and audio recordings, as well as developing online office suite applications, the consumer is in for an exciting yea in 2008.