For the first few months after Yahoo decided to go their own way
with natural search (and MSN decided to get serious about the search
business), the search results provided by those two could only be
described as bizarre. Enough time has now passed that the dust has
somewhat settled and there are three main (from a traffic
standpoint) sites for quality natural searches.
The term "natural search" is to distinguish true searches, as
opposed to paid advertisements which appear in the search results
for many search engines these days. I guess you can't really fault
the search engine companies from wanting to make some money
(actually, BIG money) selling ad space, but the debate over the
virtues of natural search versus paid advertising search is
something that could take up a very large book and still have no
clear resolution...much like arguments revolving around religion or
politics.
Like most people that have been working as online home business
entrepreneurs for a few years, I was strongly conditioned to the
need to "feed the 800 pound gorilla" of the search engine world.
Basically, "if Google didn't love you", it was very difficult to get
any meaningful natural search traffic to your website. Since Google
was actually the search engine that was serving up the results for
most of the popular search portals, if Google didn't look kindly
upon your site and rank you well, you would not be ranked well for
most of the high traffic search sites on the Internet.
However, the search landscape changed dramatically early in 2004
and things have been very fluid and interesting since that time. Its
not that Google has stumbled, or become ineffective as a search
vehicle, its just that major players like Yahoo and Microsoft (via
MSN) have decided to make a major thrust into the search business.
Having been firmly conditioned (since shortly after 1998) that
Google was the "supreme deity of search engines", I took the highly
publicized search entries of Yahoo and MSN with more than the
proverbial "grain of salt".
Throughout a very recent two month period, one of my websites
occupied the #5 position on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for a very
popular and important (at least in my line of business) three word
search term. This situation provided an opportunity to measure the
current popularity of each of these three search providers.
If asked "before the fact", I would have guessed that Google
would still be the overwhelming #1 search choice and that Yahoo and
MSN would be distant #2 and #3 choices. Therefore, I was somewhat
surprised by the results that were tabulated during this recent 60
day period.
For the period in question, the search popularity results were as
follows:
Google: 34% Yahoo: 31% MSN: 20% All others: 15%
Granted, the above results are for a single search term over a
particular 60 day time period, but the results clearly show that
Yahoo and MSN are already important players in the search business.
Webmasters that stick to the old ways and focus entirely on
Google are missing out on a lot of search traffic these days if they
are not also well ranked by Yahoo and MSN.