The Un-Google - The Search Competition

WinEveryGame writes "The Economist is running an article on the state of the competition for Internet Search. While Google clearly dominates, and continues to have positive momentum, its leadership is still vulnerable. The search-engine battle is not over yet." From the article: "In terms of momentum — mass times velocity — Google's lead indeed looks daunting. It has by far the most mass, with an American market share of 43% as of April, which reaches 50% counting AOL, an internet property that uses Google's search technology. This compares with 28% for Yahoo!; 13% for MSN, which belongs to Microsoft; and 6% for Ask, which is owned by IAC/Interactive Corp, a conglomerate of about 60 online media brands. Google also has velocity: its market share grew by 17% in the four quarters to this spring, whereas Yahoo! and MSN both lost share. Only Ask has more velocity — its share grew by 35% — but then again it has little mass."

Comments

Where is my 'remove this site' button?

[Unxmaal]

At some point within the last few months, Google removed the "Remove this site from search results" button. I made heavy use of it, perma-banning resultspammer sites like ExpertSexchange.com and its ilk.

Sadly, this button is now gone from Personalized Search, and the resultspammer sites are steadily reducing Google's usefulness to me. Where I could once search for specific tech terms and get a good batch of reference resources, now I'm getting junk portal pages for the top five results.

Sure, I could report a link as spam, but that's a lot more time-consuming than the button, and it doesn't appear to have any immediate results for my searches.

This makes me sad. I've loved Google since I first met her, but I can't be with her if she's going to continue mainlining spam.