It’s a global battle whose foot soldiers will be engineering teams working inside a few square miles of Sunnyvale and Mountain View, with billions of dollars in advertising at stake.
Almost a decade after Google became a household name, Microsoft’s launch of its Bing search engine, followed by Microsoft and Yahoo’s deal to collaborate on search, could give the world’s dominant Internet search engine its first serious challenge in years, as search becomes a key front in the looming competition between Google and Microsoft.
But regardless of who wins this competition, the beneficiaries are everyone who uses search engines, as quickening innovation improves the quality of information and delivers it in more useful packets. This year for the first time, a majority of the roughly 180 million U.S. adult Internet users typed a query into a search engine on a typical day, and search is gaining on e-mail as the most common online task.
Thanks to new technology, users will get their answers faster, from more than just text, and if the companies are successful, may find search engines are better at understanding what they are looking for.
“Search is going to change more in the next year than it has in the past five years,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, who believes the pace of search innovation is the greatest in at least a decade.