Search Wars! Battle of the Major Search Engines

So what are these top gun search engines competing over? The answer is
clicks, on the paid advertisements they present every time someone uses
their search engine. If you notice when you use Google for example that
at the very top of the page and on the right hand side it says
sponsored sites. This is where people trying to make money online pay
to advertise for their company. These prices range from nickels and
dimes per click, all the way up to hundreds of dollars per click,
depending on the keyword. So the main objective for a search engine is
to get as many people as possible using them to search the internet.
Just think about it for a second, the more searches they get, the more
chance of people clicking on their paid ads, which is where they make
their money. Now of course not everyone is going to click on the paid
ads, only a small percentage of the searches they receive ever actually
make the search engine money. However, with millions of searches a day
it only takes a small percentage to really make a big monetary
difference.

So who are the warlords going to battle here? And who is in the lead?
The three major competitors are MSN, Google, and Yahoo, and Ask is
fighting its way back into the mix of things with some pretty sweet
search features.

As of right now Google is in the lead, they receive somewhere in the
ballpark of 80% of all search queries on the internet. Google is
estimated to gross around 3 billion dollars in 2006, all from just paid
advertisement. Now you may ask why is it that Google is so far ahead?
Well there are a few reasons. First, Google has the most advanced
algorithm, which is the mind boggling mathematical equation that ranks
and lists sites depending on the keyword. Trying to understand their
algorithm is extremely complicated, Google only hires absolute geniuses
to work for them. Second, is the brilliance of Google.com itself, which
is their homepage.

Take a look at Google's homepage, all you can do is type your keyword
in the search box and hit search. There's really nothing else going on
it's pretty clean cut and user friendly, with absolutely no
distractions from getting people to do what they want.

Now take a look at MSN, or Yahoo's homepage. It is just jam packed with
all sorts of stuff to do from playing games to reading articles about
the news. This stuff is great and all, however it does distract people
from typing into the search box and inevitably clicking on a paid ad
putting money in their pocket. I believe this is a major part in why
Google has such a gigantic lead in the volume of searches they receive
compared to the other top guns. .