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Search Roundup: Google Skips While Others Trip 
By: Jason Lee Miller 2006-07-20 It's hard out here for a portal. Yahoo! and MSN keep ramping up their offerings in order to take back some of that search share they keep losing to Google. How's it working for them? Yahoo! stock tanks, MSN loses its Google assassin team all while el Goog finds success in quirkiness. This is a roundup of what's going on in the search world.
comScore released the latest search share report, which shows more of the same. Google was the search engine of choice for 44.7% of searches in June, up from 44.2% in May, and 36.9% in June 2005. If Google's gaining, it stands to reason that the rest are losing. Yahoo! has lost nearly 2% since last year; MSN is down almost 3%; and Ask.com asks where nearly one percent of its audience has gone. The big news could have been that Google appeared to be selling advertising on public benches. This morning WebMasterWorld was discussing a recently discovered photo of a street bench with an invitation from Google to advertise on it. That thread is currently blocked, as the site administrators discuss whether it is real or a hoax, and whether it says to "google 'bench ads'" or Google (with a big G) Bench Ads. So we'll switch from potentially big Google news to really cool Google news. The Google Video team introduced a new feature that allows you to send video links to friends cued to the exact moment you want them to see. So if you want to skip the Ted Stevens dump truck analogy and move straight to the series of tubes part of the speech, then you just need to which hour, minute, and/or second to the URL. MSN Microsoft has lost a few key employees recently, some to its biggest rival, Google. Like with Kai Fu Lee last year, Google seems fully prepared to take non-compete lawsuits as business expenses. Valleywag has more details on the drama. Meanwhile, MSN added a new feature to its search engine, matching a function Google has had for a while. MSN now allows searchers to track Fedex, UPS, DHL, and USPS shipments by typing the package ID number into the search bar. Yahoo! What some see as a negative, others can spin as positive. If you bought or owned Yahoo! stock at its 52 week high of $43.66, then yesterday's plunge to a near 52 week low in the $25 range, had you red faced and teary. But if you think the company has a future (which it does, of course) and were looking for tech stock, then $25 is a sweet sweet deal. Perhaps a bad quarterly report is what caused the company to get red with a few webmasters trying to piggyback of the Yahoo! Publisher Network by placing clickable webpage images right at the fringe of YPN ad units. A few slipped clicks and your click-through rate just got a whole lot better. And another revenue stream might serve Yahoo! well, too. Paid Content informs us that Yahoo! may get into the MP3 pay-to-play market with unrestricted music downloads (no DRM). About the Author: Jason Lee Miller is a writer covering e-business, search, Internet trends and development. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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