Things have really changed over the summer! There has been a flurry
of acquisitions which resulted in some well known names like
AltaVista, Fast (AllTheWeb), Overture, and Inktomi all now being
owned by Yahoo!
The changes are still underway but the end result will see a
lessening in the importance of Google. Right now, Google is
unchallenged as THE major search engine. Google currently supplies
the search results to Yahoo, AOL Search, IWon.com, and Netscape so if
you have trouble ranking in Google you are really hurting.
With Yahoo's acquisitions they will be dumping Google and using
results from Inktomi instead. They have been testing this
occasionally already at Yahoo.ca
Yahoo is still a large part of the reason for Google's success so
the fact that there will now be more competition is great news for
webmasters and the searching public and bad news for Google.
Currently, the biggest competition to Google is MSN Search and they
are planning on getting even better. MSN Search gets their primary
results from Inktomi. Right now for many keyword searches on MSN
Search, the results at the top - after the few Overture results- are
"web directory" results which come from Looksmart - and those cost
you a fee every time someone clicks on them.
MSN Search has announced that in the interest of relevancy they are
dumping the relationship with Looksmart in January. This is great
news for most of us that rank well in Inktomi but did not want to pay
Looksmart and therefore ended up ranking on page 2 or 3 of search
results. The bulk of those Looksmart listings are made up of lead
generation companies trying to scoop leads and sell them to Realtors
so I am sure no one is shedding a tear for them! In January, suddenly
there will be a big boost in MSN's relevancy and the ranking of many
Realtor's web sites will jump dramatically.
MSN Search has long range plans on eventually dumping Inktomi and
introducing their own system - they do not want to be putting money
into rival Yahoo's pockets.
This will only increase MSN Search's popularity which gives us 3
major search engines, Yahoo, MSN Search, and Google - each of which
will deliver a lot of traffic. Hooray!
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