One of the things that has happened in the last few weeks is a new wave of search engines is beginning to emerge. Google controls over 57% of American online search and close to 66% of world wide searches in a market that really doesn’t have any other major player.  Yahoo has a dwindling share and there is even rumors that they will outsource search to Google as they cut jobs. AOL already uses Google for search results. MSN/Live and Ask are the only two other large players out there. Here’s some of the newest entrants and soon to come:

• ChaCha is a search engine that is powered by humans who are all supposedly experts in certain areas and answer your questions. ChaCha’s claims of strengths are it’s abilty to answer questions instead of just doing keyword searches. Because you ask a literal question and a human responds you can ask very complicated questions. Also it promises a mobile ability that will allow you to get answers texted to your mobile phone. If you want here is a video promo.
• Mahalo is another new search engine that is completely powered and sorted by humans. Mahalo’s biggest claim is that it provides uncluttered results low on spam.
• Earthfrisk.org is another entrant that is run by a community that vote and comment on results to get better results. Earthfrisk says that they take the best of the other search engines and social bookmarking sites, like Digg and StumbleUpon, and weed out the spam.  Essentially it’s a social search engine on some levels.
• Wikia is the most hyped new entry.  It launched a few weeks ago and is by far the most famous of the new search engines. Wikia is the latest project of Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia. Wikia is an open source search engine and relies on the trust of a growing user community and the feedback that they provide.
• Even Rich Skrenta, co-founder of the Open Directory Project and Topix is attempting to join the mix by creating his own search engine, Blekko.  Little is known at this point, but I’m sure we will hear more in the coming months.

For Google to continue to dominate it’s going to have to continue to change and adapt especially against the onslaught of user created data in Social Networks and bookmarking sites. This new form of constantly changing and adapting data will continue to pose a challenge until it is figured out how to comfortably index and update it all. I see meta data becoming an invaluable way to keep up with all this data and the company that can do it the best promises to be greatly rewarded.

It looks like we are at the beginning of an extremely interesting period in the history of search as many companies attempt to tackle this giant beast of an issue.

I’ll close with this powerful video created by Michael Wesch at Kansas State that attempts to put into context how vast and varied the collection of internet data is and the need to be able to sort and search it. It’s actually sort of a cult classic in some higher education circles.

Related posts:

1. Which Search Engines Really Matter – The Followup
2. Which search engines really matter?
3. Need a quick Usability Test? Have you looked at Google Site Search?

November 2007
Google 80.35%
Yahoo 9.69%
MSN/Live 5.69%
AOL 2.81%
Search 0.74%
Ask 0.40%

December 2007
Google 81.09%
Yahoo 9.80%
MSN/Live 5.30%
AOL 2.72%
Search 0.45%
Ask 0.28%

So universially Google accounted for close to 70% of internet searches, but for people that are come to Wofford College from search sites Google’s market share is over 80%. Also the big three stay at the top but Wofford get’s less than half a percent from Ask and AOL and Search both beat it out. So out of ten searchers eight use Google, one uses Yahoo and the last picks from something else.

So if we play by the 80/20 rule then the only thing that I need to do is make sure that the site is optimized for Google, but that’s just one way of looking at it. (and this is the point where I have a eurka moment that changed the rest of the post) Maybe we are getting better than normal results from Google because we optimize for Google using their search on our site and have a sitemap that is submitted to Google through Webmaster Tools. So maybe there is 10% in searches that we could get from Yahoo and five percent from MSN/Live that we aren’t even tapping yet! Doing a little search it looks like Yahoo and Live both have Webmaster tools that you can submit sitemaps to help those search engines crawl your site.

• Live/MSN Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Webmaster Tools

It looks like AOL pulls all their results from Google so that might explain why we get such good results from them. Search.com also pulls from other sites like Google so maybe that helps? One big negative about Search is they claim to be a meta search engine which is funny because we don’t use meta tags at all. I think it could be helpful to use meta tags and maybe that would help get more hits, but the debate is still out if meta tags are worth using or not (I know I read somewhere that Google doesn’t use them anymore). You can find plenty of articles on the net about this. Finally we have Ask. It looks like they sort of support a sitemap tool, but I could find very little on it. Here’s all I could really find.

Well what started out as an inquiry of comparing organic search traffic turned into a full assessment of how I use sitemaps and hopefully will lead to better returns with MSN/Live, Yahoo, and maybe Ask in the future. Pretty cool stuff all in all! I’ll definitely have to revisit this subject in a few months to see if the results change any.

If your wondering what a sitemap is and don’t know how to create one, xml-sitemaps.com is a good place to start.

Related posts:

1. Which Search Engines Really Matter – The Followup
2. 5 new search engines that hope to challenge Google’s dominance
3. Page Titles and Meta Descriptions: Your Search Calls to Action