The JKB Marketing Blog

The search engine competition is really heating up. As Google prepares for life as a publicly traded company with a whole slew of new concerns, a couple other major search players stand ready to gain share if the leader should begin to slip up.

Yahoo is currently testing a new interface. It may look somewhat familiar to you. I like the simple, uncluttered new design.

Microsoft is about to enter the fray. Currently MSN serves results from third party vendors Yahoo and Overture. However, MSN has been aggressivley conducting its own crawl and is testing its own algorithm. You can try the new MSN Search for yourslef. When I briefly tried it out, I found it gives relevant results, but often repeats the same site over and over again. Their algorithm seems to favor the clean style of coding we use for our sites, and places high weight on the text in the title bar. We'll see where it goes from here.

It's been a long time, but search engine companies have found a model that finally allows them to post a profit. If there's money to be made, you can expect greater competition. As search engines learn to juggle the needs of searchers, advertisiers and webmasters against those of spammers, we will see a continually improving product.