Google lead in search is narrowing

[geekerati]

By Saul Hansell The New York Times

Monday, January 31, 2005

Last Monday, Google representatives called analysts and reporters to trumpet a new service that searches transcripts of television broadcasts. Yahoo, Google's archrival, got wind of the announcement, and within hours, Yahoo's publicity machine had bolted into action to say it had a similar service in the works.
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Hardly a week passes without an announcement heralding an Internet search innovation by one of the big sites - Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, which is testing the search engine that it will soon promote on its MSN service. Even the smaller players, like Acoona.com and A9, the search engine run by Amazon.com, are trying to get in on the act.
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So far, the fruits of thousands of computer scientists' labor have not seemed to shake Google from its perch at the top of the search market.
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Google, which is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter earnings on Monday, and is expected to report that revenue doubled from a year earlier, has continued to increase its share of searches conducted over the past year, according to research by comScore Networks. In November, 51.9 percent of searches were on sites owned by Google, up from 46.6 percent a year earlier. Searches on Yahoo sites rose more slowly, to 29.3 percent in November from 28.2 percent a year earlier.
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But behind those numbers, Yahoo is making significant gains, particularly in the United States with features that it has yet to introduce to international users. And while Google has stalled in getting new products to the market, Yahoo has been methodically working on a master list of projects: first, core Internet search, then shopping search, local search and then travel search, according to Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, an Internet news site.
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"Yahoo says, 'Where is the mountain? Let's climb it,"' Sullivan said. "Google says, 'Maybe we want to go up the mountain, and maybe we want to go surfing."'
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The market for search advertising has been growing so rapidly that every company involved is profiting. Search revenue at Yahoo increased 72 percent in the fourth quarter, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs. And even Microsoft is making money from MSN after a decade of losses, in no small part because of search.
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Yahoo also is receiving acclaim for some of its innovations, like local search, which lets people see a map that pinpoints the location of whatever they are searching for - say, dry cleaners in their town.
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"Each one of our new products can bring in new users who rediscover the core product we offer," Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president for search, said. A study of consumer behavior by Keynote Systems, a company that tracks Internet performance, shows that while Google remains the top search engine, ranked by the perceived quality of customer experience, both Yahoo and MSN are closing the gap.
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Sullivan of Search Engine Watch said he believed that over the past year, Yahoo was more focused on improving its core search service while Google's management was preoccupied with its elaborate initial stock offering.
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"The biggest thing that slowed them down was the IPO, which took a lot of energy from the top," Sullivan said. And even before the stock offering, Google appeared to be distracted and erratic in its product development plans, he said.
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"The bigger problem with Google is that they will pick some idea, deliver a first version of the product and move on," Sullivan said. He noted that most of their highly trumpeted new services, like Google news, its Froogle shopping service and Gmail, its e-mail offering, were still "beta" services, the industry term for preliminary test offerings. Gmail, in fact, is still only available to users by invitation, nearly a year after its introduction.
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Marissa Mayer, the Google director for consumer Web products, said Google's services had kept the beta label because there were important features that the company had not yet been able to add. Even so, each of its major services has been improved several times, she said.
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"It's hard to argue that we have dropped the ball on any of the major services we have released," she said. "They just move at different paces."
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Moreover, Mayer said, Google users have come to expect the unexpected. "There is more creativity involved in our process here," she said. "And isn't that more fun and more interesting? We respond not only to competitive pressures but also to internal ideas."

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[darrenstraight]

Thank you for that article.

[geekerati]

Hey Darren, you are welcome. I'm glad you found it useful and I really enjoyed the feedback.

Dang, I should have put this topic 'other google news". I'll be careful.