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If you have a favorite search engine that you use all the time, you might not realize how many other search engines people use. Some search engines operate in just one country or one region, and others do nothing but help people comparison shop for products. Each search engine is competing vigorously for its share of this growing business, but searchers are beginning to show brand loyalty, as Figure 1-3 shows.
Figure 1-3 Searcher share and loyalty. Google leads widely in share of searches and searcher loyalty.
Sources: OneStat (May 2004) and iProspect (April 2004)
Among worldwide search engines, Google and Yahoo! are currently the two top competitors, but the landscape can change quickly. As late as 2004, Yahoo! and Google were partners! Let’s look closely at the worldwide leaders in search and at leaders within particular countries and regions.
A googol is a mathematical term for a 1 digit followed by one hundred 0s, and served as the inspiration for the Google search engine name, signifying the immense size of the search index it searches. Founded in 1998 by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google (www.google.com) has become so well known that ”Googling” (searching for) someone’s name has even been mentioned on popular TV shows.
Like many Web businesses of the 1990s, Google started small and grew as the Web exploded. Unlike many of the dotcom companies of that era, Google resisted going public until 2004, and eschewed advertising, preferring to grow through word of mouth. Google has been such a wonderful search engine that this strategy has worked. Google is used by more than 80 million searchers a month—40 percent of all Web users—tops of any search engine. Google is one of the five most-visited Web sites in the world, offering results in 35 languages— with half of its visitors from outside the United States.
Google started by offering the most relevant organic results that the Web had ever seen, which is still its most striking feature. The I’m Feeling Lucky button that takes you directly to the first search result testifies to the confidence Google has in its organic search capability. Google, like others, has a huge number of pages in its search index—more than four billion—but seems to find the right one for each search.
Unlike some competitors, Google has kept its business focused on search, never straying too far into the territory of a portal, the way Yahoo! and others have offered news, weather, shopping, and other services. Google has always made its money through forms of paid search, allowing advertisers to purchase space on the results page based on what search words were entered. Over the years, Google has grown into one of the largest paid search companies in the world.
For the search marketer, Google is the 800-pound gorilla of the industry. You cannot ignore Google in your search strategy for organic or paid campaigns. But Google is not the only search engine in town. Although Google is the most popular search engine in the world, it receives fewer than 40 percent of all searches, as shown in Figure 1-4. You must include other search engines in your plan to maximize the benefits of search marketing.
Figure 1-4 Share of searches. Google is the leader, but has less than 40 percent of the total share.
Source: comScore MediaMetrix qScore (May 2004)Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, but its visitors do a lot more than search. Yahoo! is a leading portal, offering news, e-mail, shopping, and many other functions to visitors who register. The Yahoo! search engine is the #2 search engine in the world, with more than one fourth of all searches, but Figure 1-5 shows the difference in focus for Yahoo! and Google.
Figure 1-5 Yahoo! and Google company focus. Google is “all search, all the time,” whereas Yahoo! is a “full-service portal.”
Reproduced with permission of Yahoo! Inc. © 2005 by Yahoo! Inc. YAHOO! and the YAHOO! logo are trademarks of Yahoo! Inc.
Yahoo! is one of the oldest Web companies around, founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang.Yahoo! began as a Web directory—initially free to any company in its list—but later Yahoo! began charging a fee for each listing. Yahoo! quickly became a popular destination as its editors catalogued the growing Web, site by site, into its subject hierarchy. Yahoo! visitors believed they could find every Web site about any subject in just a few clicks.
When Yahoo! began offering organic search capability, it licensed the technology from other companies—at one time licensing Google’s search technology. In 2003, Yahoo! shifted gears, acquiring several organic and paid search companies so that it could control its own technology.
Yahoo! suffered no major drop-off in popularity, attesting to its search quality. If Yahoo! Search does not match the popular buzz of Google, it seems plenty good enough for its loyal users. Yahoo! has more than three billion pages indexed, but trails Google. More significantly, Google leads Yahoo! in total searches each month, especially outside the United States. Yahoo! Search is offered in fewer languages and lags far behind Google in countries where they go head to head.
Yahoo! is a force within the United States, but its share of searches varies widely in other countries. U.S. search marketers must target Yahoo! as part of their plans, but marketers elsewhere should analyze the leading search engines in their country before finalizing their plans. Yahoo! should be targeted in countries where it handles a high percentage of total queries, but that needs to be decided on a country-by-country basis.
Although Google and Yahoo! get the lion’s share of attention, other excellent worldwide search engines should also be targeted by search marketers in their plans. Although you will get less traffic from these engines than from Google and Yahoo!, it all adds up.
The Microsoft Network (MSN), Microsoft’s answer to America Online’s service, was launched in conjunction with the Windows 95 operating system, but has steadily trailed AOL in popularity despite Microsoft’s dominance of the PC software business. MSN has not cracked 10 million members, compared to AOL’s 30 million.
MSN Search (www.msn.com) is ranked third in the search race by most counts, with about 14 percent of all searches worldwide, but Microsoft has long tried to increase its share of searches. Microsoft introduced new technology for MSN Search in early 2005, and is rumored to be developing a new search facility built in to a future version of the Windows operating system. Windows users would then be able to search their own computer, their company’s servers, and the Internet within the same search. Today’s MSN Search, in contrast, looks a lot like the others, as Figure 1-6 shows.
Figure 1-6 MSN Search results. Like most competitors, MSN returns both organic results as well as variations of paid listings.
Worldwide search marketers must focus on MSN Search because of the sizable number of visits you can attract to your site—14 percent of all searches. MSN currently uses its own search technology for organic search and syndicates Yahoo!’s Precision Match technology for its paid search.
Now part of media giant Time Warner, America Online (founded as Quantum Systems in 1985) was an online company before most people knew what the Internet was. AOL was the original portal, gradually making its proprietary service more and more Web-oriented over the years. Still notable for its ease of use,AOL is the world’s largest Internet service provider (connecting people to the Internet), offering online access to more than 30 million people.
AOL Search (search.aol.com) is used mostly by AOL users, but that is still a lot of people— adding up to more than 12 percent of total Web searches, good enough for fourth place worldwide. AOL has a partnership with Google, so search results on AOL Search are nearly the same as for Google (for both organic and paid search), as you can see in Figure 1-7.
Worldwide search marketers need not do anything special to target AOL searchers—going after Google will get you AOL, too. In Chapter 2, “How Search Engines Work,” we discuss the various relationships between search competitors, of which the Google-AOL relationship is one of the most prominent.
Figure 1-7 Google or AOL? AOL’s results are nearly the same as Google’s for the same search.
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Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: August 05, 2005
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