Tech Sizzler:...In a Haystack

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Over the past few months, search engines are doing more than just parse links and display the content that surrounds them; they instead are becoming more intuitive, understand content so they can display information from multiple sites together in useful blocks.

Most online search websites are focusing on search engine optimisation and search engine marketing.

Therefore, they have made a conscious effort in integrating various elements such as pictures, videos into their search websites, and have launched special products catering specifically to the advertising community.

According to Nielsen online, Google has a 56 per cent share of the search market in the US, compared to 18 per cent for Yahoo and 14 per cent for Microsoft's Live facility.

In India too the order of the market share between the top 3 prominent players is similar to that of US.

JuxtConsult’s Indiaonline report states that 81 per cent of all internet users in India prefer Google English for information search and 65 per cent of the users prefer Google local language search for looking up local information.

This clearly shows the dominance Google has in India as far as Internet search is concerned.

Search revamped

Google has recently unveiled some opt-in experimental search features such as Alternate view for search results, Keyword suggestions, Keyboard shortcuts, Left-hand search navigation, and Right-hand contextual search navigation that allow users to find and reorganize more kinds of search results.

Google has also revealed in a blog post that they are working on a new Internet encyclopedia project codenamed Knol, which could possibly become a challenger to the non-profit Wikipedia project that is hugely popular amongst the web users.

This year, Google also moved to its own statistical translation system and launched the Google Translate translation service for Hindi, to tap the large non-English literate audience in India.

Creating a whole new search experience, Yahoo! India has also launched a new search product called Glue that yields results with visual information.

Glue Pages Beta slaps together normal search results, Google Blog Search results, Yahoo Answers results, HowStuffWorks articles, Wikipedia entries, Flickr images, and YouTube videos all in one place.

The third largest player, MSN has also made significant improvements to its Windows Live Search platform and has localized content in about 6 languages.

Rediff.com has introduced a new toolbar for Firefox 3 that also allows users to use the search bar as an address bar, where the toolbar intelligently identifies the 'url' keywords and directs the user to the website instead of displaying search results.

In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com, the fifth largest player in the search space, is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google and has also bought a stable of Internet reference sites that includes Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com to distinguish itself from Google.

Apart from Google’s local language search services, local Indian websites such as Webdunia, 123 Khoj, Raftaar have made significant inroads as far as regional language information search and localization of content is concerned. For the moment, these search sites produce very few results as not many websites are built in regional languages.

Mobile Search market

The Indian budding mobile market is the next one that search engine service providers are eyeing for. The latest development is the ‘OneSearch SMS’ service from Yahoo and recent additions to its OneSearch WAP product.

Recently, Google too launched a SMS Search service offering local info like restaurant location, movie timings, business listing etc. Microsoft has also added new features to its Live Search for Windows Mobile and the BlackBerry.

Tapping the ad community

Google Custom Search Engine recently announced that they would now power AdSense (ad-serving programme) for Search.

Besides, Google also has AdWords (ad purchase and budgeting service) that are displayed along with search results on Google, as well as on content sites. Not far behind, Yahoo! India has also launched its new Yahoo! Search Marketing platform, enabling advertisers to get more from their search marketing campaigns.