Hitwise released their latest stats for search engine enquiries this week, it includes the last months data -
1. www.google.co.uk – 78.39%
2. www.google.com – 12.19%
3. uk.search.yahoo.com – 2.91%
4. www.bing.com – 2.36%
5. www.uk.ask.com – 1.71%
With the worlds biggest search engine Google scooping up 90.58% of all search queries, its hard to see how any of the other places will catch up.
With this weeks tie in with Yahoo and Microsoft it would only pull 5.27% of all search queries.
I think over the coming months as seen with the new deployment of Jeeves over at ask.com and Bing aka Microsoft have seen with deployments of new search engines/result engines/decision engines and leap of faith taken into the new search engines its going to be a long but productive change for yahoo/bing.
Where the likes of ask and bing differ is the new services they offer –
Ask in the UK offer an answers service, fronted by the modernised Jeeves. They have a daily Q&A and works well with the marketing champaign that works with it. Jeeves on twitter offers daily pointers and shows how using twitter can push your professional service, its a shame they do not actually have more visitors.
Bing on the other hand now sell themselves as discovery engine, the traffic has increased and think that anyone is willing to give new versions/alternatives a try. I personally like the look of bing but the search engine is not that tight, maybe with the yahoo tie in it will really help improve the algorithms and get search right, the bing look definitely makes up for the lack of constant results.
Personally until a search engine delivers the best search results and can take full human style questions (which no search truly does) its google who will dominate the search market.
The only way big players or a new search player can compete is by using their search engines as the main section on their portals and offer out their search facilities on other big sites or tie in their search with other sites, blogs and even work with the likes of wordpress, typepad etc to have their search engine as the default search.
Danny Denhard