EightBlack.

No surprise here. Google is still climbing, Yahoo! flat (but not bad) and Ask and AOL just hanging in there.

For the life of me, I have no idea how Microsoft Live are going to gain traction in an already crowded market place. They may have deep pockets, they may still have the dominant share of the operating system but they no longer control the browser environment.

And anyway, as “consumers” of search, momentum is well and truly behind the top 2 on this chart (well, behind Google anyway).

When was the last time we heard Microsoft do a deal worth writing about? When was the last time we heard their name and the word “innovation” in the same sentence.

Their latest MS Office product (Windows Vista) has taken longer to build than the pyramids and you ca bet it will be about as reliable as a french made car from the 70’s.

It’s the same with Sensis, Australia’s “local” search engine. I just don’t see it surviving. The head of their bidsmart unit, Mark Armstrong defected to Google back in January of this year. Bidsmart is the Sensis equivalent of Adwords. As a stand alone revenue unit, it’s just not producing the numbers and failing short of giving you a $100 bucks every time you do a search using their platform, I don’t see it making it.

No doubt, search is getting tougher and the gap between the largest and smallest is widening every quarter.

*Numbers courtesy Search Engine Watch, Danny Sullivan.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 7:08 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.