mil2k - 11:11 am on Jul 13, 2007 (gmt 0)

In India (as with some other countries), Google practically owns search. It's market share is in high nineties.

Whereas their competitors (Yahoo and MSN) are too busy selling Banner ads on their portals, talking to them makes one realize that they are not even interested in selling Paid search.

I think Google is doing a lot of research and development on Search and is the most aggressive among all 3 companies. They are following a policy of Build, Buy or Outsource.

They built their Adwords program from scratch, bought Urchin and renamed it as Google Analytics (the latest interface and reports will give most commercial analytics a run for their money) and outsourced their ad quality review program to their Hyderabad office in India.

Two years back lot of people said Google does not have Mindshare as Yahoo or MSN has. Gtalk, Orkut, Youtube and a host of other services have taken care of this.

Google has the largest number of tools and applications under development focussed on search. And this is a frightening thought as they are increasingly becoming Microsoft of the nineties.