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Microsoft hasn’t done much in search

by Darren

For a company with an awful lot of promise, Microsoft really hasn’t done much as far as search is concerned up to this point. Their results are still ridiculously bad, and they’re the easiest of all search engines to game. Any rankings you get from them will yield a tiny trickle of traffic, rather than a mighty stream like you get from Google. And all of this seems surprising considering it seems like people at the company “get” what needs to be done.

Google allowed to run roughshod over global marketplace. I’m not saying that Google isn’t a remarkable company. They are. But what I’ve been amazed by as an observer is how they’ve been able to totally dominate the search engine industry with barely a whimper of competition from Microsoft. Yahoo has been extremely active in setting up strong competition for Google, but Microsoft lags.

Even Bill Gates has decided to step down from daily operations. It seems like Microsoft is going to concede the game to Google. But none of this seems realistic in the least. Microsoft of course will come into the game at some point with a strong offering, or at least some sort of offering. It’s surprising they haven’t even been able to launch a publisher network like YPN or Adsense.

Even Barry Diller seems to be more active than Microsoft lately with his IAC spending big to promote Ask.com. Whether they’ll actually take market share from Google is debatable though. To me, Yahoo is positioned the best in the overall battle, but based on my logs, Google isn’t losing much traction at all.

Time will tell what happens in the search engine wars, but it looks like the field is heating up a bit. Maybe we’ll see strong players emerge later this year.