American Politics

American Politics  » Google Slavery...Old Habits Die Hard

Google Slavery...Old Habits Die Hard

For the first few months after Yahoo decided to go their own way

with natural search (and MSN decided to get serious about the

search business), the search results provided by those two could

only be described as bizarre. Enough time has now passed that

the dust has somewhat settled and there are three main (from a

traffic standpoint) sites for quality natural searches.

The term "natural search" is to distinguish true searches, as

opposed to paid advertisements which appear in the search results

for many search engines these days. I guess you can't really

fault the search engine companies from wanting to make some money

(actually, BIG money) selling ad space, but the debate over the

virtues of natural search versus paid advertising search is

something that could take up a very large book and still have no

clear resolution...much like arguments revolving around religion

or politics.

Like most people that have been working as online home business

entrepreneurs for a few years, I was strongly conditioned to the

need to "feed the 800 pound gorilla" of the search engine world.

Basically, "if Google didn't love you", it was very difficult to

get any meaningful natural search traffic to your website. Since

Google was actually the search engine that was serving up the

results for most of the popular search portals, if Google didn't

look kindly upon your site and rank you well, you would not be

ranked well for most of the high traffic search sites on the

Internet.

However, the search landscape changed dramatically early in 2004

and things have been very fluid and interesting since that time.

Its not that Google has stumbled, or become ineffective as a

search vehicle, its just that major players like Yahoo and

Microsoft (via MSN) have decided to make a major thrust into the

search business.

Having been firmly conditioned (since shortly after 1998) that

Google was the "supreme deity of search engines", I took the

highly publicized search entries of Yahoo and MSN with more than

the proverbial "grain of salt".

Throughout a very recent two month period, one of my websites

occupied the #5 position on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for a very

popular and important (at least in my line of business) three

word search term. This situation provided an opportunity to

measure the current popularity of each of these three search

providers.

If asked "before the fact", I would have guessed that Google

Today's Popular Articles

• Jackie Kennedy was the Perfect Introvert

• Government Overregulation of Broadcast Content Could Backfire

would still be the overwhelming #1 search choice and that

Yahoo and MSN would be distant #2 and #3 choices. Therefore,

I was somewhat surprised by the results that were tabulated

during this recent 60 day period.

For the period in question, the search popularity results were

as follows:

Google: 34%

Yahoo: 31%

MSN: 20%

All others: 15%

Granted, the above results are for a single search term over a

particular 60 day time period, but the results clearly show

that Yahoo and MSN are already important players in the search

business.

Webmasters that stick to the old ways and focus entirely on

Google are missing out on a lot of search traffic these days if

they are not also well ranked by Yahoo and MSN.

About the Author

Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and

coaches others seeking to start their own home based business.

Visit his website at

Legitimate Home Based Business for more details.