By Caragh McKenna
Online Marketing Account Manager
Since the beginning of the year we have seen a refreshing change in the relationships between the major search engines. Unlike last year with its constant fluctuations, we have actually seen stability develop in the search engine world; results are consistent, updates are regular and ownership is clear.
For Irish search engine marketers it was welcome relief in May to finally see Overture listings appear on Yahoo.com. They had been visible on a global basis but were not visible in Ireland. MSN followed suit in July/August displaying Overture sponsored listings consistently on their network.
These changes were further to Yahoo!'s purchase of Overture and the renewed partnership agreement with MSN. Overture.com now provides results to AltaVista, Yahoo!, MSN, CNN, Excite and InfoSpace. Overture UK, also owned by Yahoo!, provides results to 99% of the key UK search engines, the only exception being Google.co.uk. In other European countries Overture's market reach is also as large.
Following the Overture acquisition, Yahoo! attempted to further increase revenue by introducing the Site Match program - essentially a paid inclusion program. This program was introduced through Yahoo!, Overture and PositionTech. However, Site Match received a lukewarm reception from the public, following which several search engines involved in the program, namely Ask.com and MSN, subsequently dropped Site Match.
Other more successful products introduced by Overture this year include Local Match and Content Match. Local Match, as with Google Adwords, enables the advertiser to target specific areas. At the moment this product is best suited to the US market as advertisers can target states and regions specifically.
Content Match means when a user visits a site like Yahoo! and views its content, Overture provides one or more relevant listings on the same page. Users are targeted based on their interests and actions, so a user who reads three articles a day on sports topics on a partner site may be provided with sports-related sponsored listings. Essentially Yahoo! at this point of the year controls 50% of the popular search engine market.
The remaining market is still Google territory with its Adwords program and organic results being syndicated on many of the top global engines. At present Google's main partners include Netscape, AOL Search, iWon and Ask.com.
Google's organic results still appear on most of these partner sites while Adwords appear on all the partner sites together with additional industry-specific sites.
Google also introduced a Content Targeted program which increased Adwords reach to other search engines and industry-specific websites. A sample of those in the program includes Compuserve, AT&T Worldnet, Earthlink, Blogger and HowstuffWorks. However you may notice that not all the syndication partner sites are high quality or highly trafficked sites.
The big news of course this year was that Google successfully floated in August with an opening share price of $85 which reached a high of $114.23. Yahoo! is currently trading at just $32.79.
At this time next year we suspect the share prices will more accurately reflect the search engine market share of these two companies.
Back to September's Newsletter
