The Month (or so) in Search

By Matt Kluemper
There were quite a few updates in search in the past month – especially with Google. If it seems like I write about Google a lot, well, I do! But I guess there’s a reason for that, which brings me to some of the ever-changing search updates.

According to a HitWise study, Google search market share increased to nearly 66 percent of all searches in January. This just goes to show that Google is going nowhere, and – with updates to some of the Universal Search items, they are getting better. Yahoo! (21 percent) and MSN (7 percent) are still coming up short by a large margin.

Of course, Microsoft put the offer on the table to purchase Yahoo! (which would combine them into a 30 percent market share) earlier this year, but was not able to get the deal done. I highly doubt this is the last we’ll hear of a Yahoo! buyout, however…

Google also rolled out a cool edition to their Google Maps feature with the ‘street view’ – very neat (Feel free to mess around with the street view of PlattForm below!).

View Larger Map

Apparently they pay people to drive around and take pictures - Sounds like fun to me!

But it wasn’t all about Google – Ask.com also had some updates – just not as fun as Google’s. Besides laying off 8 percent of their staff, it looks like they are going to change their search strategy to “focus to better answering search queries posed as questions.” (Sounds familiar, right AskJeeves?)

Keep tabs on all of the search updates for the rest of the year – 2008 is sure to be a good one! I know there’s been way more updates in the past two months – have you seen any updates that sparked your interest?