• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, October 5, 2007

On Tuesday, the BBC reported that Yahoo and Microsoft are adding new features as part of their ongoing attempts to convince the world that they are serious contenders to the Google throne. Yahoo will provide on-the-fly query suggestions, while Microsoft is quadrupling the size of its index. Both companies are touting the fact that they will soon include links to photos and video on the results pages.

Hmmm... where have I heard this before? In addition to Google's own Universal Search, I mean. Oh, yeah! Ask.com did this back in June! And, despite rave reviews of Ask3D, comScore shows them slipping ever since, from a 5.0% market share in June to 4.7% in July to 4.5% in August.

Yet Yahoo and Microsoft insist on trying to woo searchers away from Google by launching new features. Unfortunately, they're in a bit of a lose-lose situation right now. If they upgrade, they're only playing catch-up. If they don't upgrade, they fall even further behind.

They should have called me first. Me or Jeremy Kaplan, the editor of PC Magazine. Kaplan was interviewed on MarketWatch for his thoughts on the matter, and he had this to say:

It seems like it's really a mindshare thing more than anything. I think most of the search engines seem to be able to cull the same information. It's just a question of getting the brand out and transforming the way people search, and that's definitely an uphill battle.

It's likely that Jeremy Kaplan has access to a broader dataset than I do; even so, I surveyed myself and found his observation to be true.

For example, I have absolutely no inclination or disinclination toward Microsoft search. In fact, I'm quite confident that it delivers similarly useful results to Google. In addition, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I have MSN as my home page because it came with the browser, and I'm doubly ashamed to admit that I'm too lazy to spend the three seconds it would take to make Google my home page. Nonetheless, every time I have to run a search, I launch Explorer and type Google into the address bar.

Thank you in advance for your many words of advice on how to change my inefficient habits. I realize I need help. My point here, however, is not about my own loss of street cred; it is that Google's hold on the market, or at least on that share of the market sitting at my desk, is so strong that I invest effort to bypass the Microsoft search bar on my home page.

I invite you to think about your own habits when you search, and whether the promise of a couple of new features would be sufficient to entice you to change your behavior. What would it take?

Whatever the answer to that question may be, I don't think it's accessible to Microsoft and Yahoo. They've never achieved escape velocity, the minimum speed necessary to bust out of the Earth's atmosphere, and now it's too late: they've begun to decelerate.

No, there are only two possibilities for another search engine to unseat Google, and they would pretty much have to happen simultaneously:

1. A new search engine, or coalition of search engines, will have to offer both the novelty to capture the imagination of early adopters and the substance to cross the chasm, and
2. Google will have to make a major misstep.

Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines understands this, which is why he's fighting for alternative search engines to collaborate. He realizes that, combined, they have a lot more momentum than they do individually, and a much greater chance of reaching escape velocity.

Within a few years, the Universal Interface that he champions could be in outer space- while Microsoft and Yahoo watch from the ground and fiddle with features.