Search Engine Year in Review
Host | 12 January 2005 | Comments Off
SEARCH ENGINE YEAR IN REVIEW
Heather Austin, Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
The year 2004 brought in a lot of changes for search engines….changes we feel warrant some review:
February 2004
Yahoo unveils a brand new search algorithm, dropping the formerly Google-powered results that had dominated its search results for the previous year. Yahoo now uses its own index and ranking system. The switchover was nearly a year in the making and resulted from Yahoo’s earlier acquisitions of Overture Services, Inc. and Inktomi Corp. For more details, please see our article from the February 2004 Blizzard Newsletter.
March 2004
Yahoo announces their new paid inclusion program known as Site Match. At first launch, Yahoo does nothing in the way of answering questions, and the whole process appears to be extremely disorganized. Read the full story from Blizzard’s Newsletter.
April 2004
Online retail king Amazon enters into the search engine industry with A9.com. Many experts think this is a very intriguing move by Amazon and like the service which will focus on e-commerce. A9 also uses Google’s AdWords to provide advertising.
Google releases their FREE e-mail service called "Gmail" in beta test version. They announce that the service offers one gigabyte of e-mail storage capacity that will allow users to maintain a permanent archive of all of their messages. Other free e-mail services offer far less storage capacity and require subscribers to pay for expanded capacity. Some think Gmail is a way for Google—known mainly for its popular Web search engine—to draw new subscribers away from their existing e-mail service providers. The company plans to electronically scan messages sent through Gmail so that it can link advertising to message content. Google believes this is a necessary tradeoff for the free service. The service drew fire immediately from privacy advocates alarmed by the concept of computers scanning message text so that the service could link advertising to message content. Nicole Wong from Google states, "Privacy isn’t violated if the mail is only scanned to support advertising programs. Personal information isn’t extracted or shared in any other way." We can expect to hear more on this topic in 2005.
May 2004
Google files for an IPO!
July 2004
MSN unveils the beta version for their new search results!
August 19, 2004
Google officially and finally goes public! The most anticipated new stock offering in years came and went with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) going public at $85 a share and bringing in $1.7 billion. As of December 31, 2004, the stock is priced at $196.89 per share! The Mountain View, California company almost immediately put its newfound riches to use with the launch of a raft of new services and applications.
October 2004
Google announces their Desktop Search.
November 2004
Yahoo continues to play catch up to Google.
MSN releases an updated beta version of their new search results powered with its own crawler and algorithm. With Inktomi merging into Yahoo’s search-engine technology and powering Microsoft’s MSN Search site, it appears that Bill Gates isn’t about to be left relying on his top Internet competitor for MSN’s search future.
Google astonishes universities by creating a search engine for scholarly materials only with Google Scholar.
December 2004
More on MSN’s beta version for search. Also released is the new MSN Toolbar Suite Beta which includes their Desktop Search Tool. Some experts already like it better than Google’s Desktop Search. What will 2005 hold for MSN?
Google announces plans to work with top libraries to digitize book collections.
What can we expect in 2005?
Clearly, the war to win the hearts and minds of Web searchers has only just begun, as search queries now yield much more than Web-page results. Early 2005 is expected to bring another major search-engine flip, once MSN drops Yahoo (Inktomi) and switches to its own technology. Striving to provide products for personalization remains aggressive with such products as desktop searches and local searches. Staying relevant also requires that search engines continue to consider new approaches to retrieving results. Whether expanding services to better target users or to make results more relevant, all search engines do have one goal in common – making more money. The search industry has grown into its own profit-wise, thanks to the rapid rise of search-based advertising programs such as Yahoo’s Overture Services and Google’s AdWords. To continue to meet advertiser demand and to keep the profits flowing, we can expect to see an expansion of the placements of pay-per-click ads. More Web searches help in a big way, whether they originate on a search engine, through a desktop application, or through partners.
As always, Blizzard will stay on top of these issues and continue to bring the most current search engine news to you via our monthly newsletter! Stay tuned…
