• Compete, Wednesday, October 3, 2007 11:45 AM

Web traffic and analytics firm Compete has been keeping tabs on the most "attention-getting" sites for the past seven years -- so a recent blog post about the Top 50 Web sites in 2001 revealed just how much the search landscape has changed since then.

For example, as portals with search capabilities, MSN and Yahoo were almost neck and neck for the #1 spot, with 10.9% and 10.7% of the total online attention. In contrast, Google didn't even crack the Top 10, garnering just 0.54% of the attention in August of 2001.

The post also shows that none of the search engines had created a dominant blend of speed and relevancy-and the portals weren't helping people find things as well as they do now, as 10 of the Top 25 sites were either engines like Goto, Lycos and AltaVista or portal hybrids like Netscape and Yahoo. Fast-forward to 2007, and with the exception of the big three (Google, Yahoo and MSN) the rest of the bunch have fallen off the map.

Read the whole story at Compete »