Search Engines Try to Gain on Google with New Features
In August 2007, Google accounted for 56.5 percent of all searches in the United States, a gain of nearly 10 percentage points from a year earlier, according to the Web audience measuring firm ComScore. Yahoo was a distant second with 23.3 percent of the market, followed by Microsoft with 11.3 percent, and Ask.com and AOL with 4.5 percent each. AOL’s searches are performed by Google’s technology.
Ask.com is offering innovative Ask3D which displays results in three panels that combine standard search results with suggestions for related queries, blog items, videos, photos, news articles and shopping information. Yahoo has quietly introduced a similar set of features, calling them shortcuts, and is expected to deliver more updates soon.
Over the next month, Microsoft will deliver more than "10 blue links" for searches related to products, local businesses, health information and entertainment. It will be interesting to see if they can make inroads to Google's increasing market share. See the full NYTimes article.