Vogel Internet, Information Technology and e-Discovery Blog : Texas Internet, Information Technology, eCommerce & E-Discovery Lawyer & Attorney Peter S. Vogel : Gardere Wynne Sewell Law Firm : Dallas TX

No major changes in the war over search engines in past two months, first place Google grew to 65.4% (+.5%), second place Yahoo! declined to 18% (-.8%), and third place Bing (Microsoft’s newly named engine formerly “Live Search) grew to 9.9% (+.5%). Interestingly the two greatest search increases are for YouTube (+7%) and Bing (+8). So messages can we get from the US search engine competition? Well for starters Google’s and Bing’s growth make sense, but what about the decline for Yahoo!? These numbers may make a Microsoft Bing alliance with Yahoo! more likely.

Wolfram|Alpha -Bing’s New Ingredient?

Microsoft recently announced that Bing would add an enhancement that relies on the computational information from the relatively new search engine named Wolfram|Alpha. There is a video interview of Stephen Wolfram on a Microsoft blog in which he says "What we’re seeing with Microsoft and Bing now is a first step toward taking computational knowledge and deploying it in an application, in this case a search engine."

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I assume everyone knows that the SEO industry has grown dramatically over the past 14 years (since the 4th Big Bang of free Internet Explorer with Windows 95), and one can even get a SEO Certification. Of course SEO is a success because Google and most search engines save all user inquiries for 18 months so that search engines can monetize this information and also as by-product maybe help improve the value of searches for users and websites. Stay tuned as SEO and search engines continue to evolve.

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There are reports that Microsoft’s new search engine known as Kumo is about to be released (ultimately it may be called “Bing”) which will replace “Live Search.” Apparently Microsoft leaked copies of Kumo recently and from all reviews there’s nothing too radical, but what is radical is the Wolfram|Alpha search engine which was seen on TV news last week. The Wolfram|Alpha search engine provides users very different information, however since it is so radically different it remains to be seen how successful its approach will be.

Update on Search Engine Rankings

comScore just released its new search engine rankings without much surprise- Google increased slightly from 63.7% to 64.2% of all Internet searches between March and April 2009 while Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask, and AOL were relatively flat. Since Microsoft (20.4%) and Yahoo! (8.2%) searches combine for 28.6% of all Internet searches, there has been renewed speculation that Microsoft and Yahoo! will form an alliance to try to get a larger market share and be more competitive with Google.

Microsoft vs. Google- Search Engines and Browsers

From earlier blogs you will recall that Google is complaining about Microsoft’s deployment of Internet Explorer in the EU as anticompetitive. Interestingly part of Microsoft’s defense is apparently that by expanding competition in the browser market in the EU will only encourage more Google Internet searches which will be anticompetitive to Microsoft. So it will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s deployment of Kumo may allow Google to argue to the EU that Microsoft’s defense should fail since Microsoft is aggressively competing with Google in the search engine market.

What do you think? I welcome comments.
 

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