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Using Yahoo And MSN For Search
By Max | June 6, 2007
Most of the people who visit this blog are webmasters or aspiring webmasters. I imagine that webmasters tend to use google for 99% of their online searching. They are recognized for having some of the best search results, and they are the industry leader. But being the industry leader, is exactly why you should use MSN and Yahoo at least some of the time.
Being a webmaster it is in your best interests to facilitate healthy competition between the major search engines. You really don’t want to try to work in a world where google accounts for 90% of the search traffic. The current search market shares break down like this.
Google - 63%
Yahoo - 21%
MSN Live - 9%
Others - the rest
If your site is running well and receiving a lot of search traffic, what happens one day if google drops you to the second page? That would be a nightmare scenario for a lot of websites, but it happens everyday. Every time someone manages to get their site into the top 10 listings, that means someone else fell out and they are probably pissed. This effect would be a lot less pronounced if the search volume was split more evenly.
Another reason to share your searches is advertising. It would be great to encourage MSN and Yahoo to compete with google adsense. If they had more search volume, they probably could roll out a competing service. YPN has been in beta for a long time. Hopefully it will get launched soon to everyone. Adsense is probably taking a pretty good chunk off the top of your revenues. If they had a more legitimate competitor, you can bet that percentage would come down. That would be great for all of us.
There is some good news on this front. After months of losing share, it appears that MSN search volume is picking up due to its inclusion as the default search engine in Windows Vista. I am worried about Yahoo. They are losing share every time the numbers come out to google. They don’t have a platform like Windows Vista, to help push their search volumes. I think that Yahoo might be a good takeover target for Microsoft in a year or two. They would instantly increase their search volume and the combination of the two might give them better pull with advertisers to compete with google.
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June 6th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I don’t even know how Yahoo! and MSN get that much of the search market. If I look on Google Analytics, 95% of my traffic is from Google. Most of the people whom I see post about this online have similar results.
I have to wonder if it would even matter for us if Yahoo! were able to launch a competitor. It’s likely that the advertisers are the only ones who would benefit from competition (not the publishers).
Yahoo and MSN are just lousy. Google crawls my site several times a day while Yahoo and MSN have a beer or something.
June 6th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
I have sites that get more traffic from MSN or Yahoo than google. You really can’t draw conclusions from one site. I agree that google seems to have a quality edge, although Yahoo isn’t far behind. MSN search results are often shaky.
I really think the future of search lies with human edited results. There are just too many spammy sites that still make it into top 10 rankings for search phrases.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Its funny how a lot of people just go with whatever search service has been defaulted on their computer when they got it. Then another group uses the one that they ended up downloading a tool bar for that they didn’t realize they were downloading.
As for my sites and my employers Yahoo is third by a long shot. It seems the share that they lose every month is being picked up by Google and Live search.
I agree that competition is good and I want a diversified search group finding me. But I just can’t bring myself to support Yahoo because it is just terrible. I can’t find anything using it.
I think that Yahoo will be bought and Microsoft would be a good fit. Maybe then it would be a two horse race.
June 7th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
I use Opera as my browser of choice. I use Safari and Firefox as secondaries. They all have a built-in search function that defaults to google (I know Mozilla made millions last year from Google this way and I imagine Safari is the same way).