Search Engine Wars: Google Thumps Yahoo, MSN

Well the score is in: Google has resoundingly thumped Yahoo and MSN in the ongoing search engine wars. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t read it myself; Google continues to grow in size and popularity while Yahoo and MSN continue to firm up their “also ran” positions. What does this mean for you? Plenty, especially if you are wasting your time with the other search engines.

Yes, I am surprised. My previous statistics were evidently a bit outdated as I had the search engine war between the Big 3 Providers -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN -- running a tight 1-2-3. Indeed, it must have been early in 2005 the last time I bothered to look at the statistics, but at that time my stats showed that Google controlled 36% while Yahoo and MSN were running at 33% and 32% respectively. Yes, the statistics total to more than 100% since they include those people who use more than one search engine [in this case they are counted twice].

According to the Neilsen//NetRatings and as republished in the October 20, 2005, issue of USAToday, Google’s share is as follows:

Google is the Internet's most-used search engine, with a 45.1% share of searches in September, according to market tracker Nielsen/NetRatings. Yahoo (YHOO) had 23.3% and MSN 11.7%, says Nielsen.

To put it bluntly, only Yahoo is in the game and MSN is quickly fading to irrelevancy. How can I say this? Because when I do searches of key words that I frequently check up on including, Corporate Flight Attendant Community, I find some vastly different results.

With MSN, the search results yielded 3117 results, with Yahoo 326, and with Google 9850. What is apparent to me is that Google is doing the best job of indexing pages while the other two are way behind. I will give MSN credit for the recent leap in the number of results for Corporate Flight Attendant Community, but several of the results were for pages I deleted months, even years ago! Overall, I believe Yahoo harnesses their popular Yahoo Groups, Hotjobs, and other key features to give them a search engine edge over MSN.

I am betting my money on Google. While it isn’t good for one search engine to dominate, when it comes to building my business I want to go with a winner. Clearly, Google has a leg up on the competition, so every page that I create is optimized for my buddy Googlebot to index!

Do you, Yahoo? I don't... now you understand why.