Yahoo!:
Near Competitor of Google
The founder of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, who were the Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University started Yahoo! as a guide to keep track of the web sites they were interested in. Their favorite links became so long, they categorized and sub-categorized the list and ultimately the concept of Yahoo crop up. They noticed that hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford Trailer, so in 1994, they decided to make their guide a general purpose index for anyone who wanted to use it.
Yahoo actually stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but the founder insisted that they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo started as a student hobby but now it has turned to a brand name that has changed the way people communicate with each other, search and receive information and make quality purchases online.
David Filo and Jerry Yang analyzed the response of their work and foreseen the potential business that lie in their hand. In March, 1995, they approached Silicon Valley venture capitalist and ultimately joined hands with Sequoia Capital who become ready to fund Yahoo with an initial investment of $2 million.
In 2001, considering the rapid growth in World Wide Web, Yahoo! decided to take up charges from businesses for listing their websites in their directory. This approach was taken in order to control the number of website being submitted and make some profit from the market. In 2003, Yahoo owned Inktomi search database, then Overture pay-per-click service which already owned AltaVista and Alltheweb.
Today, Yahoo! Inc. has turned to an efficient tool for global Internet communication; online marketing and it supply information to more than 345 million individuals each month across the world. With additional classy database and pay-per-click technology, Yahoo! has taken the lead and become a major player in search engine marketing. In a short span of time Yahoo! Inc. acquired wide global Web network that includes 25 World properties. Yahoo! has it's headquarter in Sunnyvale, California and other developmental offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the United States.
MSN: Nascent but Potent Search Engine
Among the major search engines, MSN is the youngest one and liked by fraction of Web searchers. Microsoft started to provide search services since 2003 but, it does not have its own search index and uses Inktomi search database owned by Yahoo. Interesting fact is that Microsoft does not purchase the databse from others but they developed their search index at their own and started using it since the beginning of 2005.
Though the process of Web searches seems quite old, MSN has lately taken their steps forward for the process. At the beginning of 2006, they launched their own pay-per-click advertising service rather than sharing paid advertising service with Overture. All this approaches have made MSN search engine far more compatible to other top ranked search engines like Google and Yahoo!
The new search engine powered by web crawler msnbot has incorporated innovative features like ability to view additional search results on the same page delimiting the need to click through the search result pages. In addition, it allows users to dynamically adjust the amount of information displayed for each search like just the title, short description or long description depending upon their need.
Focusing the intense competition with Google and Yahoo!, MSN has finally acquired a new name Windows Live Search on September 11th, 2006. It can be assumed that MSN can be a real challenger for Google and Yahoo in near future. |
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