During the first half of 2004, online ad spending was just close to $5 billion and 40% of it was in search engine marketing. That's pretty significant number and that is why the search marketing space is getting over-crowded. Apart from the usual suspects in search engine advertising, Google, Overture, and FindWhat, there is a whole new group of companies entering this space and we saw a few of them (Findology, GenieKnows, Kanoodle, etc.) at AdTech 2004 in New York City.
But let us review how things are heating up at the top. Google, the king of search engines, is now being challenged by Yahoo Search and MSN Search. Of course size is everything in search and that is why only yesterday Google claimed that its index is now over 8 billion pages and MSN has launched its beta website claiming to have 5 billion pages.
Here are a few thoughts that iProceed has on the current battle in search engine marketing:
But let us review how things are heating up at the top. Google, the king of search engines, is now being challenged by Yahoo Search and MSN Search. Of course size is everything in search and that is why only yesterday Google claimed that its index is now over 8 billion pages and MSN has launched its beta website claiming to have 5 billion pages.
Here are a few thoughts that iProceed has on the current battle in search engine marketing:
- Why are they all trying to be the same? Both Yahoo and MSN have launched search pages that mimic the Google home page. It would have been nice to see some creativity there particularly from Yahoo and MSN that have otherwise very crowded and packed templates for their web pages as opposed to Google templates that emphasize lots of white space.
- Until Microsoft comes up with its own version of Inktomi, the results that you get on Yahoo and Microsoft are almost identical (though we have seen increasing activity by the MSNBOT on iProceed during recent months).
- Microsoft is in the unique position of being able to make search part of its operating system and softwares that the whole world seems to use. If it can be even half as good as Google, most of the time we might just be happy not to launch the browser at all and search right from Word or Excel.
Related article: Developing a search advertising strategy