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Google Still Ahead In Search Competition
ricst writes "Google is, as we all know, King of the Hill. But Yahoo, MSN and others have come a long ways towards catching up as this International Herald Tribune article describes. The gap between 'best' and 'next best' has narrowed substantially. The good thing is that we all benefit as these guys keep challenging each other."
In case of slashdotting, the article is also available from the NY Times.
It wasn't a very informative read -- quick summary is that Yahoo and MSN are catching up to Google (they don't give many specifics as to what "catching up" means) and each of these companies is making more money from searches than they have in the past. They allude briefly to Yahoo improving their search technology and Google losing focus somewhat due to management being preoccupied by their IPO.
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Webmasters, go check your logs. It looks like MSN is heading for a very frequently updated search engine.
I host 13 websites on my servers, and on some of them, msnbots causes most of the traffic. It's about a crawl a day.
"To google for something" has became part of common language. People have associated the word with the web search concept, plus it does a great job and is quite innovative.
Every once in a while, I'll use yahoo (as I have an old email there mostly) or when google won't find something (almost never).
But don't count on me to use MSN. I think I've already paid far too much microsoft tax (starting to become more and more fed up about these guys), and they really don't need advertizing revenue from me. And the only way they seem to be able to get half decent results - is by using some bots to harvest google results (not completely ethical imho). Plus, I've always seen "MSN" as crap - especially after having seen the IM. Plus their webpage is quite "graphically overloaded" (yahoo is a bit like that too, flash ads are particularly annoying). When I want to do a quick search, I like google simple logo (which changes with holidays) and a simple seach box.
Google works. The results are great, the (text) ads are unobtrusive, they're innovative, and they've earned everyone's trust. Competition is good sometimes, but I'm not about to switch to another search engine.
///<sig
>Shareholders usually prefer profits over ethics. True, but that's probably why there's a dual class share structure where the founders effectively retain control, allowing them to ignore the desires of other shareholders if they so choose.
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yahoo has a little known barebones search page too, at http://search.yahoo.com/
the article is correct too, for the past 2 or 3 months ive been using yahoo as my primary search engine to see if i could still tell a difference between google, yahoo still found everything about the same as google. i use http://local.yahoo.com/ pretty frequently now too, if they added store hours for every business it would be even better.
The old ideas of crumb trails (navigation paths on top of pages) are coming back, not because users need them but because Google needs them to crawl your site well.
No actually. Breadcrumb navigation is good for usability. Read about them from Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru himself, here and here. Breadcrumb navigation helps users get a mental picture of a website and where they are within it. It is particularly useful to users who come to a deep page from a search engine (be it MSN or Google) and need to orient themselves.
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Altering time, one time at a time.
>A company normally goes public because it needs
:)
>the extra bit of investment, right?
Yes, but Google isn't an ordinary company. Google is highly cashflow positive and didn't need to raise capital. I think the main reason it went public was so that there was a market for existing shareholders (like employees with options) to sell shares, and because they reached a size where they needed to disclose a lot of information anyway.
>Do shares continue to affect how much money it
>has once it's gone public?
Typically not -- unless they want to raise more money, or want to issue shares to take over another company.
>If investors don't care about ethics and google
>ignores this, their stock will go down and they
>won't be an attractive investment.
Yes, but since the Google founders have effective control, they might not care.
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Coprorations do not exist to do evil or good. They exist to make money for their shareholders.
www.jux2.com compares the result sets from google, yahoo, and ask jeeves and you can immediately see what's missing from each
Parent is not a troll -- this is a reference to a classic running joke on Saturday Night Live, lampooning news coverage of General Francisco Franco's death in 1965.
Presumably this was intended as humorous commentary on Michael's bizarrely editorializing headline, which recasts an article about Google's narrowing lead in the search engine market as a story about its continued dominance -- not to mention stating the obvious.
I still remember the time when Altavista and Yahoo were the kings. Then google came and dominated in a few years. I don't think it would be impossible for the same to happen again, but as long as google remains focused on improving their engine I think it's very difficult for this to happen.
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