SEO Review

Until recently, there were five major players in the search engine world: Google, MSN, AOL, Ask.com, and the Yahoo! search engine. These top Internet search engines quickly could be narrowed down to four, however; AOL uses the Google algorithm and will yield nearly identical results. Further narrowing is rapidly occurring – Ask.com seems to be stepping out of the spotlight to focus on specific markets, and in early March 2008, Microsoft began attempting to purchase the Yahoo! search engine. If there are just two top search engines with which to be concerned, what does this mean for your business and for SEO as a whole?

What’s Going On with the Yahoo! Search Engine?

As almost anybody with access to a news source knows by now, Microsoft put in an unsolicited offer to purchase the Yahoo! search engine in early March 2008. Yahoo! rejected this offer at first, saying that it undervalued its company as one of the top engines (and a provider of other services, including email and chat as well). Microsoft did not increase the offer at this point; it instead decided to enter a proxy battle.

A proxy battle would involve Microsoft putting up its own board of directors to let shareholders decide if its purchase of the Yahoo! search engine would be acceptable or not. In essence, Microsoft has decided that it will attempt to convince shareholders that their interests are better served by people who will approve this acquisition between two of the top Internet search engines. And Yahoo! shareholders have been beaten down for some time, so it is widely expected that the majority will in fact favor this acquisition.

Meanwhile, Yahoo!, on spurning this offer, began talking with other companies in order to build strategic partnerships and keep itself as one of the top engines, as it had been for so long. It was rumored that MySpace’s parent company, News Corporation, was in talks to work with the Yahoo! search engine, as was Google. However, these talks seem to have fizzled, and Yahoo!’s board of directors has begun speaking directly with Microsoft’s board. Yahoo! bought a bit of time by delaying the election of its board, but it is believed that this is all the shareholders will stand for at this point.

So I’m assuming that if the acquisition goes down, the Microsoft search engine and the Yahoo! search engine will likely be using the same algorithm, even if they remain separate sites. It just makes sense not to spend the money to have two separate research departments, especially when the Yahoo! search engine is widely regarded to be superior to Microsoft’s.

Will Ask.com Continue to Be One of the Top Internet Search Engines?

For a time, Ask.com seemed to be trying to go head to head with Google and to position itself as one of the top Internet search engines – period. You may remember the "algorithm" ads that it ran for a time on television. However, recently Ask.com announced that it will instead be tailoring itself to the niche market share of which it already has control. In other words, they’re no longer trying to be all things to all people in the way that other top search engines like, well, Yahoo! and Google are.

What we know about Ask.com’s demographic is that it is largely female, although Ask.com refutes the notion that it is focusing on "older women." According to an article in Forbes, an Ask.com spokesperson said that:

…reports of the site becoming oriented towards older women are false and were fueled by an erroneous Associated Press article that has since been changed. Ask acknowledged that married women do compose a lot of its core users and these matronly queries are often dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia type queries – as well as categories like health and entertainment(1)…

Seeing as Ask.com also laid off 8% of its staff at the same time that it refocused, it seems clear that the company is no longer aiming to be considered one of the top Internet search engines.

And this means that we are down to two search engine technologies dominating the entire landscape: Google and a MSN/Yahoo! search engine hybrid (Micro-hoo? Yah-soft?).

How Will This Affect Consumers?

If there truly are only two major top Internet search engines, the industry will be like Coke vs. Pepsi. Sure there are other, smaller players like RC Cola that some people will be brand loyal about, but for the most part it’s either Big Guy One or Big Guy Two.

And this means that businesses that had good rankings and that were getting good traffic from, say, Ask.com and MSN but not the Yahoo! search engine, will be in a bind. With only two top Internet search engines, there will be less real estate to compete for and the same number of businesses vying for this real estate.

How Will This Affect SEO Companies?

In one sense, having only two serious engines makes the job easier for search engine optimization companies – there’s just less algorithms to absorb and master. However, it makes the opportunity for volatility much more likely. Before, if the Google or Yahoo! search engine changed its algorithm, you had three or four other engines to fall back on while you worked to update your practices. But with only two major players, a tweak to either the Google or MSN/Yahoo! search engine algorithm could have much further reaching implications to individual companies in the search space.

Who Will Compete Next?

Google has been coasting for many years as being seen as the underdog in the industry – the cool, hip engine to use that’s not owned by the big guys. However, search engine optimization practitioners have started to see some cracks in that veneer. The truth of the matter is that Microsoft is seen as a huge corporate conglomerate, with Google starting to be seen similarly. And now Google has to answer to shareholders, rather than just going along trying "not to be evil." Google has its own set of privacy issues and conflicts of interest, such as its recent purchase of DoubleClick, which came along with a SEO company. [See my recent article A Slippery Slope: Google Owns a Search Engine Optimization Company on this topic for more information.]

So when there are just two top Internet search engines, the door is opened for competition. If another company can come along technologically that is on par with the Google and Yahoo! search engine algorithms and that does not have huge corporate considerations, it could very well start gaining some market share in this space. I’ll let you know if I see any contenders.

Sources

1. Forbes.com

(c) Medium Blue 2008

About The Author
Scott Buresh is the founder of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including MarketingProfs, ZDNet, SiteProNews, WebProNews, DarwinMag, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.

Dig into any self-labeled "SEO forum" and you’ll probably find some neatly organized categories along the lines of "Google," "Yahoo," and "MSN". Checking the amount of activity in each will reveal the inclusion of Yahoo, and especially MSN, seems to be a mere "courtesy" on the part of the forum founders. Microsoft has been trying to change this for some time nöw, and the newly branded "Windows Live" is their latest attempt to do so. Will all those vacant MSN forums be lively any time soon? The short answer is "no," read on to find out why.

Live.com is many things, including a search engine, customizable web portal, and the latest attempt by Microsoft to dig into Google’s market share in search. Its opening page is a simple one, in keeping with the "expectations" built by Google, providing several options and an invitation for you to personalize it as your own web portal.

Most of the features on the site are functional; while a few remain in the development stage and some are in between. Only Passport members can fully customize the basic Live page with RSS feeds and "gadgets", much like Google’s portal page with Google Accounts. The basic, un-customized page offers a search bar with the options of Web, Images, News, Local and QnA.

The Web search performs much as other search engines, only it serves ads from MSN’s new ad network instead of Adwords. It does offer a "related search" section, something Google has yet to implement, but a standard feature of Ask.com for a while nöw.

The relevancy of the results, is, as always, a matter of debate. MSN’s Search performs ably in many regards, but one can’t help but wonder if the largër index Google provides means you’re missing something. Relevancy is undeniably important, though. It is one of the core reasons a searcher might actually make a switch, should his current engine of choice "let him down" too many times.

The Images search is an improvement on the Google and Yahoo technology, in that it offers dynamic thumbnail display in a "pageless" layout. Pass your cursor over a thumbnail and it will enlärge, with a brief description and the URL where the image can be found. The interface is intuitive and really feels innovative. The thumbnails can be dynamically resized, and the "scratchpad" can quickly create collections by drag-and-drop. The primary drawback to this very innovative feature is that it will respond slowly for those on dial-up and with weaker machines.

The News Search is a direct search function that lacks the "top stories" aggregator of Google News. Type in a word and you will get back a search list that is drawn from mainstream news outlets, which have stories that use your search term in the first sentence or two. The Local button will give you an interactive map of the area where hits for your search term are found. There’s little innovative here, but the presentation of the map is nice. It offers similar variations on the "route, aerial, and hybrid" graphical display popularized by Google Maps.

Windows Live Q&A allows you to post a question to the Windows Q&A universe and see who has an answer. This system is still in beta, so the technical specifics may change. Users post a question that is then open for 4 days to responses. At the end of the 4 day period, voting commences on the answers provided. This feature currently has no Google analog, though Yahoo has a similar service.

Additional Features- Betas

A variety of betas for Live services are available through ideas.live.com, the MS equivalent of Google Labs.

The Windows Live Mail is an in-house mail service that provides you with two gigabytes of storage and an updated version of what appears to be Outlook Express. It has some desktop features and keyboard hotkeys, new methods of sorting and categorizing, but nothing terribly radical. Windows Live Mail Desktop is a program that allows you to manage multiple e-mail accounts, including AOL, Gmail and others. It also manages newsgroups and RSS feeds.

Microsoft Live Office will be a web hostíng service designed to provide you with a basic business website and domain name. Google Page Creator has tread this territory before, but was aimed at personal use, whereas Microsoft, with the "Office" brand, seems to be targeting businesses.

Windows Live Shopping and Windows Live Product Search are both as advertised: attempts to provide web-wide searches for products and shopping opportunities. The product search gives a dynamic display that can range from a simple text list to a thumbnail layout that borrows from the innovative image search layout. Searches can be refined by seller, brand, and most interestingly, "related term", which provides a "tag cloud" of the kind popular with social bookmarking sites today.

Windows Live Academic, mentioned above, will provide search opportunities in "thousands of academic and research journals." If their database has some heft to it, this will be a great addition to the search process. It remains to be seen if this academic resource will rival Google Scholar. Like Google Scholar, the results can be frustrating as many provide links only to abstracts or excerpts. Access to the full text of such results requires purchase or subscription to the journal in which they were originally published.

Conclusions

Live.com’s primary innovative feature is the image search, and even that has issues with slower connections. So far, virtually everything else served up by Microsoft has been done by Google, or other search engines, before. Even if Microsoft was able to "do it better", it will have a hard time convincing existing users to switch from Google, as there is little incentive to do so unless these services are done so much better. That is not currently the case. Microsoft merely offers an "alternative" with Windows Live, not an indispensable alternative.

About The Author
Mr. Lester worked in the IT industry for 5 years, before serving for 4 years as the webmaster for Apollo Hostíng. Apollo Hostíng provides website hostíng, ecommerce hostíng, vps hostíng, and web design services to a wide range of customers.