August 2008

It now seems that the merger talk of search engines is dying a death and that we will be left with just the big three for the time being. The impact of the status quo is probably to be welcomed. The main issue for our clients is whether or not it is worth the effort to even consider rankings on MSN and Yahoo.

Our own view is that with Google controlling around 70% of the US market and nearly 90% of the UK market (Hitwise) what little competition is left has to stay independent of the monolithic emperor of search. It is however astounding that the resources of both Microsoft and Yahoo seem to be so inept at offering a reasonable challenge to Google - and that challenge must lie in the quality of their search engines. The results are simply not good enough - search for one thing and you get some reasonable responses and some useless ones. With Google the search engine results are of the highest quality.

For the time being we continue to optimise for all three engines, but not surprisingly when clients express concern about their rankings, we know that the only engine they have in mind is Google.