Google’s influence on the internet is so powerful that we tend to forget that there are other search engines. People don’t just search for things online any more, they ‘Google’ them. As well as donating it’s company name to the English language, Google has spawned other, unusual words such as Googlewhack. A Googlewhack is a search query which returns only one result – a rare thing given the size of the internet now.
Google is a lot simpler than many of the other portal style search sites such as Yahoo! or msn.com, with it’s plain white page featuring only a few links and a box to enter your search query in. Sites such as Yahoo! or msn.com offer the user snippets of news, weather, links to their own shopping sites and chat forums, while Google has instead focussed on perfecting it’s search engine. While it does offer email accounts and an online map, these are very subtly displayed in one word links at the top of the page. It is a style that is unique to Google and has become instantly recognisable to the majority of internet users.
The predecessor of modern search, Yahoo! still serves around 20% of all internet search queries, but as Google has 70%, Yahoo!’s share looks pretty small. The Yahoo! search engines seem to be preferred by many female web users, as well as some parts of the business community, so if this is the market you are targeting, it might be worth focussing on moving up Yahoo!’s rankings, or even using them for your pay per click campaigns.
