The INTco.biz Search Engine FAQ
Search Engine News
May 2007
Silver Surfers Close to Becoming Largest Demographic Group Online
According to Hitwise, UK Internet users aged 55-plus are set to overtake 35-44 year olds as the demographic age group with the largest representation online.
Those aged 55+ accounted for 22% of UK visits to all categories of websites in the four weeks to 12th May 2007, up 54% since 2005 and 40% since 2006. This compares to 23.5% of Internet visits from 35-44 year olds.
May 2007
Google Search Just Keeps Growing
Statistics published this month show Google gaining ground on both sides of the Atlantic.
Figures from Hitwise UK show that Google powered 79% of searches with Yahoo it's nearest competitor at just 8%. MSN and Live follow on with 6% jointly then Ask with 5%.
On the other side of the pond, Nielsen Netratings show Google at 55.2% of search with a year on year growth of 42%. Yahoo follows with 21.9% and growth of 28%. MSN has 9%/7.4% and AOL 5.4%/6.1%. Ask has 1.8% of search, a negative growth of 2.3%
February 2007
Is Google just too big?
The future of search is local - that's the proposition being put forward by Dominic Blackburn, new technology director at 192.com
Dominic argues that businesses and consumers alike are missing a trick if they just rely on Google. Google may have the size but lacks local knowledge. Businesses without the resources for search management strategies are finding that they're getting lost in the enormity of the Google world.
This is not an entirely new subject - and Google and other search engines are somewhat aware of the issue, which is why we have Google Local. But could the size of Google restrict its effectiveness in local search? Or will hte Google Guys be beavering away behind the scenes to improve the value of their local search facilities?
Bearing in mind that Dominic has good reason to punt the local search virtues of 192.com, his article does contain thoughts that are worth reading.
Find Dominic's article Is Google just too Big here
January 2007
Open Directory taking submissions once more
dmoz.org is once again taking submissions to the directory. What exactly is going on behind this directory remains a closely guarded secret and it does appear that the Open Directory is trying to find its future niche.
November 2006
Problems at Open Directory dmoz.org
A message dated 25th October 2006 indicates that the Open Directory is having problems with its servers. The problems persist as at 30th November 2006 - read the message here
May 2006
Google Is Most Used Search Engine in UK
According to web monitoring firm Hitwise, Google remains the UK's most popular search engine with a massive 77% share of the search market during May 2006.
This dwarfs both MSN and Yahoo search who took about 7% of UK searches.
Google is also the most visited website in the UK, with more than twice the share of visits compared to its nearest competitors MSN Hotmail.
In the United States the picture is similar but slightly more competivie with Google on 59% of searches and Yahoo at 22%.
According to Hitwise, UK consumers are aware of all three brands, Google, MSN and Yahoo, but use them differently. Google is used to navigate and search the web, MSN to communicate and Yahoo! for content.
Weblink - Hitwise
January 2006
Project Quaero
Project Quaero has been described as a European competitor for Google, but will be much more than a text search device ......read more about Project Quaero.
September 2005
Organic SEO delivers better ROI
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35% of organisations that promote their web sites with both natural (or organic) search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising recognise a higher return on investment (ROI) from SEO.
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just 11% of marketers report that PPC ads produce higher ROI.
The above results, from the iProspect Outsourced SEO Metrics & ROI Study (PDF file), tell us that three times as many webmasters who can measure the ROI of each method recognise a higher ROI from natural SEO than from PPC advertising.
The study confirms that, while pay per click can be a good addition to normal web site promotion activities, a better return on investment is achieved with natural search engine optimisation.
Business owners and webmasters can find it helpful to learn how to better use both Organic SEO and PPC through participation in a Search Engine Marketing Workshop.
August 2005
Top 10 Search Engine Ratings
Nielsen/NetRatings have released the top 10 USA search engine share rankings for July 2005.
Google Search continued its lead with 46 percent of all searches, followed
by Yahoo! Search at 23 percent, and MSN Search at 13
percent. AOL Search tool five percent of searches and My Way Search saw
two percent.
Read the full Press Release here
July 2005
Google Wining Search Engine Wars?
According to a report in ECommerce Times, Google's market share for search queries is increasing. In the second quarter of 2005 Google's USA market share was 37.6% of all US search queries (compared to 35.9% in the first quarter).
Both Yahoo! and MSN, in comparison, have slightly lost ground (Yahoo down from 31.2 to 30.4 - MSN down from 16.3% to 15.6%).
Ask Jeeves has seen a slight increase from 5.3% to a 6.1% - perhaps a further indication that we should watch this one long term.
The search engine wars are interesting. We may be back to a scenario where we have to consider four main search engines.
At the moment the best advice continues to indicate that we should continue
to optimise our sites to please Google - and most webmasters continue
to report that Google is the main player in delivering their search results.
June 2005
UK Google Local on Beta
The beta trial of UK Google Local is now active and can be found at http://local.google.co.uk - with the FAQ at http://local.google.co.uk/help/faq_local.html
June 2005
The Google Bourbon Update
Causing
a bit of a stir at the end of May has been Googles "Bourbon"
update. Will this be uisge beatha (water of life) or biscuits ?
Although some people are already reporting the fropping of their sites from the Google database, the best advice to date is to keep your nerve.
Indications are that implementation of the Bourbon update is only partial so far and may be different at Google's various data centres.
It is suggested that the update is less than 60% implemented, will be about 70% complete in a short while with the remainder taking some time longer to implement.
One focus that Google appears to have at the moment is to hit and remove more spam sites and hit them quicker - so perhaps a good time to make sure your site's don't have any of those "don't do" features in them.
April 2005
Google Local - Coming Soon
Googlers in the US, using google.com, have been enjoying the Google Local facility for some time, although it remains in Beta form and marked "new". Google Local provides the facility to search for results from a specified locality. Now the head of Google Germany has let is be known that Google Local will be coming to Europe, with Google UK leading the way sometime later in 2005. Google Local is viewed as Google's way of challenging the online offering from Yellow Pages and the Thomson, Kelly and Applegate Directories.
March 2005
Lycos to Switch Search Results Supplier
and get New Owner
Older internet hands will remember that Lycos once used to be one of the big names in the world of search. That changed some time ago and Lycos in recent times have been taking their search results from Fast/All the Web, one of the big customers for that search technology. Of course, Yahoo confused the marketplace by taking over All the Web and, since the launch of Yahoos own search engine in 2004, All the Web search results (and those being fed to Lycos) have in reality become Yahoo's search results. Lycos have now announced that they plan to switch search results supplier to Ask Jeeves / Teoma, an important win for the Ask Jeeves brand. No date is given yet for this switch, but for us search punters it means even more competition in the search engine marketplace with Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves all becoming the major players in the game. In some ways search is getting back to the way it used to be, except the names and the technologies have changed a bit!
Hard on the heels of this announcement, came the news that Ask Jeeves
is about to get a new owner in the form of IAC (Inter Active Corporation)
at a price of $1.9B. IAC already operates a diverse lineup of more than
40 Web sites, which include Expedia, Hotels.com and Ticketmaster and this
purchase as viewed as filling a hole in their current portfolio and amplifies
the throughts that we are about to see a new challenge to the existing
big three in the search engine market.
March 2005
Yahoo to re-brand Overture
Internet brand come and go - although there are some exceptions, like Yahoo. In 2003 Yahoo bought over Overture, a very strong brand in the pay-per-click marketplace. Yahoo have now announced that they plan to rebrand Overture (in most places - Japan & Korea will apparently keep the Overture brand) to the new name of Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions - doesn't quite trip of the tongue, does it? Yahoo's reasoning is that, alhtough Overture is a fairly well known brand, it doesn't have the same visibility as Google has - but Yahoo does! So, in the future, we will need to remember that in the world of search Yahoo means Yahoo Directory, Yahoo Search and Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions (or Yahoo's version of pay-per-click?)
January 2005
MSN Search Goes Live
MSN has traditionally bought in it's search results. Throughout 2004 Mr Gates' company has been building and testing their own search engine. In January 2005 the MSN search results took the place of the bought in results, providing a new competitor for Google and Yahoo in the search marketplace.