Search Wars!
Very interesting development and not really that surprising given MS history - they don't give up markets very easily.
It's an interesting time in the search area and I agree with the coments from MS that its early days yet - I think there will be a lot of new developmets in the search area in the near future. It seems to me that G have become a bit complacent and are relying on Pagerank to give them an edge in search but PR is - what 5/6 years old now - the other engines have caught up. G has lots of baggage now as well - sandbox, supplemental, not counting x links, now counting x links, slow updates etc etc. They seem to have taken their eyes of the ball - like the England goalkeeper!!
I was surprised to see in the comscore article that only 13% of searches are via the toolbar I thought it would be higher than that. In my experience (limited) people are searching from their homepages - mostly MSN which is very popular in the UK, and is my largest referer. Something else which surprises me is that G have never developed a portal built around search - portals are much more likely to become homepages that the stark white, unchanging G search page. In my expereince you can get get decent results for everyday searches from the MSN and Y! homepages. Or even from the BBC homepage has a good search function and an interesting line in news etc. G need to get their act together and look at what surfers want (not search engineers) or they will get overtaken in the near future. Search is rapidly becoming a commodity - that is there is little difference in the product offered by different engines and other factors will determine a persons choice as to which SE to use.
And what about Ms Dewey! ;-)
Regards
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