The Search Engine Market Competition

Lately, the search engine market got large scales and became very profitable, so the big IT player ( Microsoft ) wants in, but here’s a leader that seems to be invincible.
Currently, Google leads the battle with over 50 percent of the search engine market and after it it comes Yahoo, with 23.9 percent and Microsoft, with 8.8 percent, Thus Ask states that it owns about 10 percents, counting it’s partners too ( Lycos, Excite, iWon and more ).

But this market becomes more and more profitable and Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask don’t like to stay behind, so they have to do something to catch Google, the leader. Until now, it seems their efforts to defeat it by themselves have been in vain, Google staying up and invincible. So Yahoo and Microsoft prepare for a big fight, that seems to come in 2007, Yahoo working at the Panama advertising project and Microsoft hoping to gain a bigger piece of the cake with Windows Live and Vista.

Though, there’s not much hope for them, if they keep fighting alone, especially if in the end of 2007, Google keeps Ask it’s partner. But there’s another possibility that Shoemoney posted in detail today, that Microsoft would buy Yahoo. If it does that and also takes Google’s contract with Ask, it could become fishy for Google and Microsoft could raise it’s head and get a big part of the market.

This would be good, being a good competition for Google, which still has a Joker, it’s relevant search results, which haven’t been beaten yet and there’s no hope for others to achieve it.

This wouldn’t probably be happening if there wasn’t the advertising systems that work so great with the search engines and Google wouldn’t be such a power without it’s Adwords/Adsense systems, that bring it’s biggest part of money. Now Yahoo created YPN ( Yahoo Publisher Network ), Microsoft created Adcenter and need searchers to click the ads.
There’s much to consider in this fight and we will see what happens and who will rule at the end of 2007.