My first week in the editor’s chair at Revolution has been all about online search. As Yahoo! crawls from the wreckage of a failed $47.5bn merger with Microsoft, I was interested to find out how all the major search engines were faring. On the day I filed my copy, the Financial Times declared Google triumphant in the battle of the search wars. The FT article however, fails to speak to Microsoft or even Yahoo! for that matter, before declaring that war is over.It’s true that by next year, half of the world’s online advertising – set to reach £28bn in total - is expected to flow through Google’s systems. And that Google has 87% of the UK’s search share compared with Yahoo’s 4% and MSN’s 3.7%. But for Microsoft, the fight is a long way from concluded. It now has a mulit-billion dollar war chest and new armies could be recruited from AOL or social networking tie-ups with Facebook.
Since the doomed merger treaty, MSN has already made huge improvements to Live Search including a really cool video search mechanic that plays the clips whenever you scroll over them.
A Yahoo! insider promised me that it’s search results will start to look completely different in the coming months. Digital agencies are split between fearing the writing may be on the wall for Yahoo! or predicting a return to the negotiating table.
Meanwhile, Chris Dobson, Microsoft acting general manager, Consumer and Online International UK told me that Microsoft has a history of playing the long game to win. Whilst Google has become the ‘search verb’, Microsoft has achieved verb status in Instant Messenger. I predict that the search battle lines will now be redrawn around chat and video.
“This is still an early dawn in the search world and the fight is by no means over,” says Dobson. I agree.
The full article appears in the June issue of Revolution
No comments:
Post a Comment