Microsoft overtakes Google and Yahoo as the number 1 search engine!

No, you haven’t misread the headline, Microsoft has overtaken Google and Yahoo as the number 1 search engine in the world.

Hmmm, ok, so maybe that’s stretching the truth a little bit and maybe it’s something that’ll never come to pass. But what if it does happen?

What would it take for Microsoft to become number one in Search and why does Google currently have such a strangle hold?

Google as a brand is incredibly powerful, ‘Google Equals Search‘ in many people’s eyes. But why? What is it exactly that makes Google so much better for the average searcher?

If you ran an experiment, with three virgin searchers (hard to find nowadays!) to see which search engine from the big three they preferred , what would you find?

Let’s say the three virgins are in the UK and you ask them to search using the term ‘adverising agency‘.

What’s the first thing they’ll notice when they navigate to Google.co.uk, Yahoo.co.uk and msn.co.uk?

They go to Google.com, what do they see?

Very simple interface, completely idiot proof. It’s clear what the user has to do and it’s also clear what the focus on Google is - Search

Now, lets take a look at Yahoo, what do you see on Yahoo.co.uk?

There’s a lot going on here, a user can easily get distracted with what’s on the page, and I guess the theory is so can Yahoo. What is there core business? Search? Being a portal?

And what of MSN?

Again, very cluttered, the focus is definetly not on search. I appreciate that live.com (this is the seach website for MSN) has a focus on search, but here you come back to branding and what company comes to mind when you think search?

So, that’s the homepages, but what about the user experience in terms of search results and relevance?

Remember we’re looking for ‘advertising agency’ and we’re searching in the UK, let’s compare the set of results returned on Google.co.uk, msn.co.uk and yahoo.co.uk:

[Note: we are taking results from 'Search the Web' and not 'pages from UK']

Yahoo has 40% match rate with Google and over 42% of MSN listings match Google, but MSN is only showing 7 results on it’s SERP.

What about relevance?

Are Google’s results really better than Yahoo or MSN’s? How would you know? Is this really a subjective answer, what I find relevant someone else may not. From the above set of results, there isn’t much to seperate the three engines in terms of relevance.

Our three volunteers would be hard pushed to pick the most relevant set of results and what criteria would they use? Location, company experience, current client list? Point is, agareeing what is relevant and what is not is part of the user experience.

When you look at the SERP for each of the engines you’ll notice that you get

• 1 and 1/2 organic listings above the fold on MSN,
• 2 and 1/2 on Yahoo
• 3 on Google, so Google is giving less real estate on its SERP to sponsored listings on top of the SERP. Again the focus is on Search in Google.

So, with Microsoft not giving up on acquiring Yahoo , and buying up smaller players in Search like Semantic Indexing specilaists ‘Powerset’, it looks like they have set their goal on overtaking both Yahoo and Google as number 1 in search.

The biggest challenge for them is changing how people think about search, getting from Google = Search to MSN (Live) = Search isn’t going to be easy.

What do you think?

Are Microsoft heading towards the number one spot? Or is Google’s brand just too powerful?