The Rabbit, the Tortoise and the King

a trilogy

[caine]

Back to the good ol' days when bread was white and yahoo woz king!

Nowadays G is everything, and all is G. Certainly the last couple of hundred conversations that i have had - have ended up going south that way.

But, G maybe the rabbit, and Yahoo is the mother of all search engines -> and maybe still the king, but the tortoise has to be MSN, a new kiddie on the block from an SE point of view, but from a pure search traffic point of view the king of kings, there ain't nothing bigger, and second too it is AOL, though - G is the back door on that.

Personally i don't know who's going to win the race, but i would like to see MSN stand up with its own SE, G doing what it's doing, and yahoo use all its resources - overture, alltheweb, altavista, etc - and tear everything up.

Transition is good, its good for search, good for results, and great for SEO, stagnation is bad. Come on Y! show us what you've got.

[ScottM]

Nah...I'm looking forward to MSN being the winner.

You have no idea how many computers I see that have MSN as their default. That even includes my favorite radio station....and I try to tell them otherwise..but alas, habits are hard to break.

[caine]

Scott.

> but from a pure search traffic point of view the king of kings, there ain't nothing bigger

I agree MSN are bigger in the search world than Google.

[biz.yahoo.com...]

Only U.S. based but not a bad indicator.

I personally think Yahoo and it's underling's have got a whole lot of lov'en to give over the next couple of years at least!

[Chris_R]

I wouldn't put too much faith in those figures as I think they are counting hotmail as part of msn - and if it was broken down - I don't think MSN SEARCH is anywhere near as big as hotmail.

[alexa.com...]

Is one place that breaks it down. Not sure how accurate it is.

[2_much]

Nice analogy Caine. Yahoo still has more brand recognition and resources, I think they're going to continue catching up. Even 1 year ago they still had more traffic than Google, that's dropped over the last year, but as they actively implement new strategies, I think they'll continue to close the gap.
MSN will probably end up ahead in the long run, they have the resources, cash, market recognition, etc - everything they need to leave the others behind (as soon as they launch something ;-)