The world of search engines is changing at a fast rate... what we saw in the past few months was consolidation of several search engines... major players like Yahoo acquiring the smaller ones with a view to improve their own search engine technology and capture more of the market share.

A year back we had Yahoo using Google's results, while Inktomi was the provider for MSN. Google also had AOL using its results. Search engines like Overture used Inktomi as their free results provider. Lycos used results provided by FAST (Alltheweb.com), and Altavista had its own engine.

The first phase of consolidation started with Altavista and Alltheweb being bought over by Overture. At this point Overture seemed to be in a very dominant position, being the market leader in Pay per click advertising and just having bought over 2 major natural search engine technology providers.

The scenario suddenly changed again, when Overture itself was bought over by Yahoo. With Overture, what Yahoo got was not only the worlds leading Pay per click engine but also the search technology of Altavista and Alltheweb. And to add icing to the cake, Yahoo went ahead and acquired Inktomi.

This complicated the picture from Microsoft's perspective. With Microsoft's own search engine technology still in the development phase and not yet ready for rollout, it was still completely dependant on Inktomi to provide results on MSN... and Inktomi now belonged to MSN's major rival Yahoo.
To top it all... even Overture, MSN's partner for sponsored results was now owned by Yahoo.

So at present what is the scenario?
We have Google providing results on google.com and AOL. Yahoo using its own search technology, which seems to be a mixture of Inktomi, FAST and Altavista and MSN still using Inktomi's database. With the search market share split nearly equally among MSN, Yahoo and Google, 2/3rd of the searches are directly of indirectly affected by the Yahoo/ Inktomi database, with only around 1/3rd affected by Google.

This is in sharp contrast to the recent past when Google served about 2/3rd of the market (being the search engine technology provider to Yahoo) and Inktomi had only 1/3rd (MSN's share) of the search engine market.

So what is the future going to look like? Well, its an open secret that Microsoft is pushing really hard to roll out its search engine quickly, and knowing them I believe its going to give a really good fight to the existing Yahoo and Google search technologies.

With MSN shifting to the Microsoft search engine, Yahoo consolidating its Alltheweb and Altavista brands into 1 flagship yahoo brand (again a personal opinion) and Google using its own highly innovative and ever improving technology, we are going to be left with a very mature search engine market with 3 HUGE players with nearly equal share of the market.

The result? A high level of competition ensuring that we the users are going to have ever improving search results with each company trying to outpace and outperform the other two.

An interesting time indeed.

Author - Vishal Sampat

Convonix Inc is a search engine optimization firm that offers customized SEO optimization and PPC campaign management solutions. We manage hundreds of SEO and PPC campaigns. Our clients include Web design firms, adveritising agencies, fortune 500 companies and SMEs. Other internet marketing companies can also Outsource SEO to us in India.

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