In the tech world, innovation is often based on imitation. If a technique or formula works for one company you can be fairly certain that several other companies will quickly follow suit, especially if that technique is the only profitable game in town. Throughout January and February, most major search engines announced new looks and new search algorithms, all of which appear to be inspired by Google or Overture. Google and Overture are currently the only search tools that consistently return profits, a unique situation that makes their design and business models extremely interesting to the rest of the players in the search-business. The latest to jump off the portal-bandwagon and onto the pure-search bandwagon is industry behemoth MSN. On Tuesday, MSN introduced a test-site for the revamped (or de-vamped) MSN Search tool. The test site does not display banners or the standard MSN Network navigation column, thus providing more room on each page to show search results and providing search results much faster than the previous version.

MSN made the announcement mere days before Yahoo is scheduled to announce major changes to its search service. This is one of the most interesting times in the search engine industry. For many players in the industry, the battle for search dominance is a fight for survival. Other search firms announcing changes in the past month include Yahoo’s most recent acquisition Inktomi, AltaVista, HotBot, FAST Search & Transfer and Ask Jeeves. Lycos revamped their service in November. The common factor among all these changes is the simple fact that the other search tools are following in the footsteps of Google and Overture. Many of these changes have produced search tools that are as good or better than Google, however the path to prosperity also involves reaching out to the search engine users to let them know there are alternatives to Google. That will prove more difficult as Google has become synonymous with the concept of search. You can build a better mousetrap but it won’t sell if the consumer doesn’t know it exists. Beating Google at what has literally become “their own game” will likely be as challenging as beating Kasparov at chess.

AltaVista's Multimedia Frenzy
AltaVista just increased its library of indexed multimedia (images, videos, mp3, etc.) to 240 million unique files. AVista also upgraded its news search to 4 million articles from over 3000 sources internationally. This is yet another move from a major search engine trying to outmaneuver Google's prominence.

The new technology from AltaVista includes an enhanced search algorithm that filters out 'noise' images such as buttons and other such clutter.

Google Brand Beats Coca-Cola & Even Starbucks!
In a global poll of 1315 "above averagely intelligent" respondents identified Google as the brand which had the most impact on their lives in 2002.

Teoma Takes its Fair Share
It appears that the Teoma technology that is used on Ask Jeeves and the Teoma search engine is taking the market a little bit faster than anyone had imagined. According to Nielsen Netratings, this formidable search technology is now 3rd behind Google and Inktomi with a 25% share in North America.

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Lately Google has been uncharacteristically (disgustingly) slack on penalties for spamming. This puts search engine placement in an all new light: Should you follow suit if your competitor begins to surpass your placements by implementing spamming techniques?

Lets look at this logically. If you were to try to trick search engines using techniques that they have already claimed to know, do you think you might be taking an overt risk?

It is our recommendation that despite the current glitch in Google's ethical algorithms you should stay the course and continue to optimize your site ethically. If there is one thing that we have experienced with Google, it is that the sites which stay true to Google's guidelines tend to win in the end.

In a bid to stay ahead of competitors in helping search engine users find health information, Ask Jeeves has signed a deal with pharmaceutical giant Novartis. Ask Jeeves will extract information from Novartis to help find answers to users' questions while also providing stronger search technology for the Novartis internal website.

Internet watchers wonder why the Dell guy bothered with a street corner pusher when he simply could have Asked Jeeves.