Google.com
In America alone, there were about 14 billion web searches
performed in December of 2009. Google.com serviced more that 9 billion
of those 14 billion requests maintaining a 65% search engine market
share. Obviously, with 9 billion people requesting your services each
month, the future of Google looks pretty stable. Currently, their place
in the top 10 search engines is stable for the foreseeable future.
Yahoo.com
When Google first came on the scene back in the late 90’s, the
number one search engine was Yahoo. However, by providing better search
results using their PageRank algorithm, Google bested Yahoo at their
game. In fact, as chronicled in a great article entitled The Rise of
Google: Beating Yahoo at Its Own Game, Google triumphed over Yahoo just
two years after their incorporation. At number 2 on the list of top
search engines, Yahoo.com currently maintains about 17% of the search
engine market servicing approximately 2.5 billion requests per month as
of December 2009.
Bing.com
Microsoft currently holds third place on the list of the most
popular search engines with roughly 10% of the market share. Microsoft
has tried endlessly to have success in this arena by coupling their IE
browser—not known as the best web browser—with a built in search engine.
Having changed names many times—MSN, LIVE, LiveSearch, and now Bing,
Microsoft continues to struggle to achieve growth in the search engine
sector. On an upnote, Microsoft inked a deal to provide all search
services to Yahoo in July of 2009.
Ask.com
Remember the search engine service butler? Initially created as
AskJeeves.com 1997, this search engine first used human editors to find
relevant results. By 2005, like the others, AskJeeves had lost a
significant amount of marketshare and was purchased by Barry Diller’s
Group IAC, which then renamed AskJeeves to Ask.com in 2006. The site
continues to rank 4th in the list of top 10 search engines servicing
about 4% of search engine requests.
AOL.com
Once a high-flying Internet behometh, AOL now is ranked
numbered 5 in the list of top ten search engines servicing slightly less
than 3% of search requests. AOL was once the number one ranked ISP with
a subscriber base of more than 30 million, most of whom accessed the
web through AOL property. Nearly immediately after their purchase of
Time Warner in 2001, the decline of AOL began as people realized that
they did not need AOL to have the Internet. AOL has tried to reposition
itself as a web property similar to Yahoo.com but faces a significantly
uphill battle. In May of 2009, Time Warner spun off AOL into a different
company.
The top 5 search engines garner so much of the search engine
traffic that there is less than 1% remaining for the other search
engines. Their position on the list of top search changes on a monthly
basis.
That said, we will provide them numerically with the realization that this data changes very frequently.
AltaVista.com
Like many others, AltaVista was once extremely popular but its
fortunes diminished and now they are owned by Yahoo. Like many of the
once thriving search engines, the ownership of AltaVista has ping-ponged
across many companies. Today, they serve a small portion of Internet
requests and their biggest go-to product is Babel Fish translation
services.
AlltheWeb.com
AlltheWeb.com debuted in 1999 and sought to be a third party to
outward facing search engines like Yahoo.com, very similar to the
practices of Inktomi at the time. AlltheWeb was highly praised during
its debut with many services that were thought to have exceeded
Google.com’s search engine. However, just like AltaVista, marketshare
was lost overtime and ownership fell into the hands of Yahoo.com.
Lycos.com
Lycos.com was once the most visited online destination in the
world. That was 1999. At the peak of the Internet bubble in 2000, Lycos
was purchased for $5.4 billion dollars by the Spanish company Telefonica
and sold three years later for a fraction of that at $95.4 million
dollars to the Korean company Daum Communications. Nice investment, huh?
Lycos has now been repositioned to find results for broadband content.
Excite.com
Like the others, Excite was formerly one of the best known
brands on the Internet. In one of the biggest Internet mergers at the
time valued at $6.7 billion dollars, the Excite.com web portal merged
with the cable Internet provider @Home. Within just two years, the
combined company declared bankruptcy. Excite is currently owned by the
same company as Ask.com, Barry Diller’s IAC media group and they are
trying to revamp the Excite brand.
HotBot.com
Like the others, HotBot.com was one of the earliest search
engines and had a lot of promise. Launched in 1996, HotBot claimed
distinct advantages over its competition while also offering free
webpage hosting for a time. While it was once very competitive, HotBot
now primarily serves its result to other search engine companies.
