Sat Jan 05 20:02:46 PST 2019

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Search is generally dominated by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Ask. In some
smaller markets, some local players are important. Scandinavia has some strong
local players (although I do not know their names
; Russia has Rambler Media and
Yandex; and China has Baidu.
If you are unsure of what local engines are important just take a look at your server
logs to see who is sending you traffic.
Shopping Search Engines
I did not cover shopping search engines extensively, but they usually operate
similarly to how pay-per-click search engines work. They accept product feeds and
charge you a set amount per click. Many of them collect consumer feedback on
items and merchants as well.
Shopping search engines have a limited distribution compared to the larger search
engines, but many of them rank well in global search engines due to their site
authority and heavy ad buying in programs like AdWords.
The major shopping search engines are BizRate, DealTime (owns shopping.com
and Epinions
, Kelkoo (a European shopping search engine purchased by Yahoo!
,
Froogle (free inclusion, powerd by data from Google Base
, Yahoo! Shopping,
MSN Shopping, Price Grabber, and mySimon.
Expect to see many new peer-to-peer, personal/social web recommendation sites
like ThisNext to emerge. Expect significant consolidation in this market. Google
has actively been promoting their Google Base product and Yahoo! bought
Kelkoo toward the end of 2003.
SearchEngineWatch.com has more information about shopping search engines at
http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156331.
Local Search
Local search has the potential to be a rather large market; North America Yellow
Pages bring in 16 billion dollars per year, which is larger than the search ad market.
Various businesses will tell you that is not a big deal, and other businesses will tell
you that it is the best thing since sliced bread. Typically, whoever is funding the
report determines the outcome.
Local search is still somewhat underdeveloped. Google Local allows businesses to
list their local information for free and add coupons to Google Maps. Yahoo!
Local allows sites to be listed for free and charges a sliding scale for premium
placement based on category and location.
If you have a local business, you may also want to look at some of the other local
search properties such as CitySearch, SuperPages, and Switchboard.