The Changing Search Market - March 26, 2008

The search market is in essence dominated by four key players, Yahoo, Google, Ask and MSN. In an increasingly competitive market each of these players has had to adapt in order to meet user demands and increase market share. At present Google is the dominant force in the market and for the unforeseeable future this looks unlikely to change. Therefore the other key players have started looking at targeting specific groups or niche markets.

Ask is a prime example of change. In recent months Ask has had to announce significant layoffs as the search engines user base has fallen dramatically. This downfall has lead to executives announcing a whole new strategy for the search engine. Ask realised that its core user base was women aged in their late 30’s and mainly came from the Midwest and Southwest of America. The company now wants to refocus on this core market and bring in new and experienced people to deal with this change. It will be interesting to see how Ask will deal with this change.

Yahoo has remained in a respectable second position for many years now but they are simply not contempt with remaining as number two. It is expected that Yahoo will announce some major changes to its search engine at SES New York. We are still waiting for a complete analysis before we comment. Yahoo has however in recent years moved towards a task based approach to search. They believe in making peoples online tasks much easier and have therefore introduced numerous assistants and tweaked the search results. Yahoo will also look to improve the monetization of its search engine as it wants to close the gap on Google. Yahoo has taken over Flickr and MyBlogLog but has failed to do anything with them. Yahoo simply lacks the levels of integration that is offered by its counter part Google.

MSN is focusing on extracting more information from its users so that it can serve more relevant results. MSN essentially gives users more input options when carrying out queries and is looking to improve the results it delivers. MSN has been criticised for bringing up too many so called spam results and the levels of relevancy has been poor. Microsoft’s strategy has been to improve this.

It’s important for us to keep an eye on these trends as it will inevitably change the way we work. At present we primarily focus on Google but if Yahoo for example was to overtake Google then we would shift most of our focus on to that search engine and look in more detail at how it works. SEO is dependent on search engines and our techniques fall inline with any changes made to the search engines.

Mark
SEO Programmer

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