Early this morning, right after the witching hour, Yahoo pulled the trigger and dropped Google search results from their Yahoo Search function. The move was expected by many in the search industry, especially after Yahoo bought out the Inktomi search engine and Overture Search Advertising last year. Around the same time, MSN expanded their new NewsBot across the International search borders, expanding their service to South America and Asia. Around the same time, Google announced that their index now includes 6 BILLION web pages and documents.
It’s been a busy 24 hours in the search engine world.
In an interview with Reuters News Service yesterday, “There’s a new level of competition and we need to take it seriously,” Brin added “We’re definitely seeing much more attention going to search from Microsoft and Yahoo.”
According to a OneStat survey, Google was BY FAR the #1 Search property in 2003:
However, yesterday a comScore study showed that Google is far behind other web properties when it comes to site users and visitors. The study showed the amount of web users and the Internet properties visited. According to the study, in January, the total U.S. Internet population totaled 152.4 million users who spent an average of 28.9 hours online, an increase of 5 percent versus
December.
The top five web properties were:
Yahoo Portal : 110,821,000 users
MSN (and Microsoft Sites) : 109,113,000
Time Warner Network (AOL): 107,977,000
eBay: 72,561,000
Google: 60,463,000
Yahoo and MSN almost doubled Google’s traffic in January- showing the power that portals provide. Take away Google branding from Yahoo results, give MSN a grand search function, and that’s trouble for Google. Given such conditions, no wonder Google (still the #1 search engine) is making an extra effort to portalize itself with Groups, News, Images, Email (rumored to be in the works) and, of course, Orkut Social Network.
