A new round of search engine competition is coming soon

New and old rivals

It was reported last week that Microsoft will launch a new search engine service this week. Its development code is Kumo, officially named Bing. Yahoo search also adjusted the returned content of the search results. Furthermore, the new search engine service wolframalpha was officially launched last week. In the wolframalpha service, after you type the question to be queried in the search box, the search engine returns the answer directly to the user, instead of returning a lot of web links.

According to previous statistics released by ComScore, an Internet traffic monitoring agency in the United States, during the April this year s, Google's search market share in the United States was 64.2%, Yahoo and Microsoft respectively 20.4% and 8.2%. Obviously, Google remains dominant in the U.S. search market. New and Old competitors, such as Microsoft, Yahoo and wolframalpha, must takeOthersRoundabout tactics.

Carl Howe, a technology analyst at the American market research company Yankee Group, said: If you want to compete with Google, the positive attack method is not feasible.

Microsoft has been negotiating with Yahoo for many times since last February, hoping to merge the search businesses of the two companies to jointly challenge Google. At the D7 Technology Conference hosted on wed7 On The Wall Street Journal blog website D: All things digital, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said, yahoo has made some progress in negotiations with Microsoft, but the two sides have not yet reached any substantive agreement.

　Strong

Sandeep Aggarwal, analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart, expects Microsoft and Yahoo to reach a deal on the merger of search businesses by the end of July this year.

Agawal believes that after Google's dominant position in the U.S. search market, its market share will grow further based on the current development trend. Most of Google's search traffic comes from its search homepage. The search traffic of Microsoft and Yahoo is mainly from their respective portal networks and corresponding content service pages. In this way, if Microsoft and Yahoo want to challenge Google, the market difficulty will increase significantly. In the current situation, Google has become synonymous with search.

Susan Feldman, an analyst at a well-known U.S. market research firm, said: everyone is used to inertia. The most important thing about increasing the search market share is not to increase the technology, but to persuade users to switch to your search engine.

　Bing Performance

For the new search engine Bing, which Microsoft is about to launch, Alibaba Cloud has already tried Bing. According to the preliminary use results, the relevance of Bing search results has been greatly improved, the returned results are not only different from those of Google and Yahoo search, but also different from those of Microsoft's current Live Search.

After you type a keyword, Bing divides the search results into different groups. The results in each group are highly correlated. For example, if you type a flight to New York City, some reference information such as New York hotels and tourist sites will appear in the corresponding return group. The search results have been roughly classified, making it easier for users to use.

Agawal believes that Bing's search technology itself has indeed greatly improved. If properly operated, Bing will also have the opportunity to become a destination for netizens to perform search activities like Google's search homepage in the future. Agawal said: Microsoft's live search was not successful, mainly because its technology was not mature enough. Microsoft currently believes that Bing technology is already very good.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the above statement. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was also invited to attend the D7 conference. He will speak at the conference on Thursday (local time in the United States, at that time, he will probably reveal more information about Bing.

　Yahoo adjustments

Yahoo has also made several functional changes to its search engine in recent times. The adjustment principle is to make the return result page provide more information, that is, to return text, images and answers to users at the same time, not just some website links. For example, if you type a keyword of Star Trek on the Yahoo homepage, the production notes and comments of the film will be displayed in the returned results.

Yahoo has begun to apply the latest adjustments to pages such as Yahoo.com. Industry insiders believe that this method may increase the number of Yahoo search users, thereby consuming some of Google's market share.

Fairman of IDC said: the Internet provides a lot of information. To win users, search engines must provide users with the most satisfactory results in the first 10 returned links. If Yahoo search can do a good job in this areaWorkThe number of its users is bound to increase significantly. Yahoo declined to comment on this view.

　Wolframalpha shot

Wolframalpha was developed by Stephen Wolfram, a British-born computer scientist. At the beginning of March this year, wolfrham disclosed the development progress of wolframalpha for the first time, and said that wolframalpha works in a different way than Google's Web search. The service was officially launched last week.

Although wolframalpha has always been called a Google killer, John ekizian, spokesman for wolframalpha, said that wolframalpha itself is not a search engine, and wolframalpha is only a supplement to the search engine service, rather than competitors of major search engines. We are committed to providing users with answers to the questions they have queried, which is also the biggest difference between wolframalpha and other search engines.

However, industry insiders pointed out that although wolframalpha is not enough to pose a substantial threat to Google, the development trend of wolframalpha deserves the attention of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other search engines.

Andrew lipsman, ComScore head of industry analysis, said: in traditional search engines, users have to find the right answers in a bunch of return links, so it takes a long time. Wolframalpha directly returns the answer to the user. Therefore, wolframalpha has the advantage that traditional search engines do not possess in querying specific questions.

　　Google Countermeasures

Google has taken more active measures against the challenges posed by Microsoft, Yahoo, and wolframalpha.

Yankee's Karl Hao said: the search market structure is far from finalized, and Google does not have the strength to compete with other competitors. Because of this, Google is also actively strengthening research and development of new search technologies.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google's search products, said in an interview that during last year, Google made over 30 adjustments to its search products, the goal is to further enhance the performance of Google search, and the competition in the search market is still fierce. Therefore, Google is facing a lot of pressure and we will turn these pressures into motivation.

Even so, some people in the industry believe that Google's competitors are actively preparing and want to take part of the market share from Google.

In terms of the search technology itself, Microsoft and Yahoo have shortened the gap with Google, and the next thing depends on whether Microsoft and Yahoo can win enough users. In the search business field, diversified products are more conducive to users.

From: http://www.51testing.com/html/56/n-130756.html