Eleven years ago, the most popular search engine was AltaVista and the most popular directory was Yahoo. In the interim, some of the other popular search engines like MetaCrawler and Excite disappeared and/or were reborn. Just like any other relatively new industry, the search engine industry has experienced a tremendous amount of consolidation.
Yahoo now owns AltaVista, All the Web, and Overture, (renamed Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions). MSN was using Yahoo’s Search Marketing to provide their “sponsored†results but now they have their own pay per click division. Google has a pay-for-placement service, called AdWords. Which search engines are most popular today?
According to Hitwise.com in June of 2007, the popularity break down for the top four search engines were as follows:
1. Google – 63.92%
2. Yahoo – 21.31%
3. MSN – 7.73%
4. Ask.com – 3.42%
As you can see, more people use Google than any other search engine. In fact Google’s market share of search has grown 20% in the past two years. Lots of users evidently prefer Google because they consider Google’s results more relevant to their search objectives.
Each of the major search engines uses a pay-for-placement model along with a free (organic) search component. When your search yields items headed “Sponsored Results,†those are companies paying to be found under the search terms that you chose. Relevancy can be a matter of commercialization. As companies agree to pay more for top search results, the consumer’s typical search may turn up fewer and fewer companies to choose from, as a direct consequence of the expanding budgets going to pay-for-placement.
Regardless of which search engine you choose, your top concern as a consumer is to get the most relevant results. While continued commercialization of search engines is inevitable, ultimately it is the consumer who determines future trends. Your Internet search decisions today will ultimately anoint the search engine leader of tomorrow.
This post comes from Search Engine Land. ” The documents are used by Google Quality Raters to aid them in classifying queries, measuring relevancy, and rating the search results. To do so, the Quality Rater must understand how Google works and this document has a bunch of that. Let me pull out some of those [...]
In my 13 years of working with customers on the Internet, I have never dealt with a service provider worse than Cherie Young of Online Marketing Strategies. I have so many examples of this ineptness as well as her devious nature, I cannot possibly list them all here. However, if you are considering doing any [...]