In its first study on worldwide search activity, Comscore noted that more than 750 million people age 15 or older--or 95% of the worldwide audience--conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August 2007, an average of more than 80 searches per user. It is an understatement to say that the Web is now global.
Yahoo and Google have dominated the search market. Yahoo's approach is to deliver search results based largely on their "officious hierarchy--results deemed relevant by Yahoo itself, and many coming from their Directory Submit program. Meanwhile, Google places great importance on equations to determine relevance.
Google made its mark in the industry with search but is securing its future spot in business history by slapping advertising on every technology that rears its head. Yahoo, once the reigning king of new media has slipped, and is now in a desperate fight to just stay in second place. Microsoft has officially set its sights on search and is employing its expertise in technology to compete not just with Yahoo but Google itself in a variety of capacities.
While these search engines drive the majority of search traffic, what's happening now is an influx of more focused providers entering the market. Social shopping engines and vertical search providers have their sights set on consumers seeking more refined information than is available in all the worlds' information.
Another big push in search has been the adoption of a more universal approach to indexing and providing multiple types of content to end users. All major search engines provide some model (whether directly integrated or not) of video, weblog and image search and it plays an important role now as it will in the future.
Source: WWW.WEBSITEMAGAZINE.COM , November 2007