Statistics released by comScore show that Yahoo! MSN and Ask Jeeves are definitely forces to reckon with. Each of them had over 40 million searches carried out on them last month, in the US alone:
Top US Search Engines in October 2005
Top US search engines in October 2005 | |
Search engine | Audience (thousands) |
---|---|
Google Web Search | 75,281 |
Yahoo! Search | 68,031 |
MSN Search | 49,748 |
Ask Jeeves | 43,705 |
AOL Search | 36,092 |
Yahoo! Local Search | 20,270 |
MySpace Search | 8,083 |
Infospace Search | 5,942 |
LookSmart | 4,402 |
Lycos Network | 5,249 |
Source: comScore Media Metrix |
It is still worth it to optimise for MSN and Yahoo!
Google’s market leadership is definitely not a given fact. Yahoo! and MSN Search are hot on the heels of Google, and Microsoft seem to be hell-bent on dethroning Google. Taking that into consideration, and the fact that Yahoo! and MSN’s combined search total is well above that of Google it is a must for all webmasters to optimise their sites for the MSN and Yahoo! search engines too.
Note that search engine optimisation for MSN and Yahoo! is a significantly different process and involves attention to different factors than when optimising for Google.