The more things change, the more they seem the same. The battle-dance for dominance between Google, Yahoo and MSN continued through the first quarter of 2004 with all three making fairly significant changes in their operations. Webmasters and search engine optimization professionals have seen a Google algo update named Austin, struggled to understand the new Byzantine submission policies introduced by Yahoo, and have read about the once-navel gazing - now chest thumping 900lb gorilla, Microsoft's inability to deal with being skunked at search several years ago. Search engine users have seen new looks at all three search tools and are (hopefully) enjoying a bevy of new features and services each player has introduced. A closer look at Google, MSN and Yahoo shows that each is offering extremely similar services to consumers as the next big-guy, only they are each doing it in slightly different ways. It also appears the Big3 are each trying to take a bit of the wind out of the sales at other commercial sites such as EBay, Priceline and ABE Books. The prize is the lion's share of a pot-o-gold representing over $10Billion in revenues and control over the flow of commercial information on the Internet.

If 2003 is considered the year SEARCH matured as an advertising medium , 2004 will be the year search engines grow into their roles as an advertising medium. Hence the most recent change in the world of search, Google's new interface.

Google 2004
Google has changed a lot over the past year. The former Rebel leader appears to have joined the Empire, or at least is toying with the dark side of The Force in a bid to make a great deal of money. Rumoured to be issuing an initial public stock offering, Google's new look seems to be designed to promote services such as AdWords and Froogle, two of Google's major revenue generators while demoting the Google Directory run by the beleaguered volunteer-driving Open Directory Project. Google's new front-page has dropped the tabs that used to run across the top of the search-text window and replaced these tabs with straight text-links. The new links lead to (web) (images) (groups) (news) (froogle) and (more>>), with the Froogle link accentuated by a "new" image. Froogle is Google's catalogue shopping index, listing product catalogues from companies around the world. While it is still currently free to submit a data-feed of your product catalog to Google, AdWords advertisements are posted to the right of the page on Froogle, making paying for an advert the best way to differentiate a business or product from the others. Another change Google has made is in the number of AdWords listings that are displayed when a keyword phrase is searched. Most searches for commercially popular keywords will produce a page with about twice as many AdWords adverts. The colour and tone of how AdWords advertisements are shown has also changed with the removal of the coloured boxes that graphically separated the various ads. This move makes the ads seem less distinct from the traditional listings and may serve to increase click-through rates. Perhaps the biggest change behind the scenes is that Google is obviously backing away from the Open Directory Project as listings at the volunteer run directory are not being updated as frequently as they had in the past. Google used to give a slight ranking bonus to sites that were listed in the Open Directory Project as the ODP is a live-human edited directory and the site in question had to be reviewed by a trained ODP editor. The Google directory was extremely useful to SEOs as a means of seeing if a site was banned by Google or had simply been demoted in the rankings. The Directory displayed an indication of the PageRank Google had assigned a site. If that PageRank (as shown in the Directory) was zero, it was often assumed the site had been de-indexed on the main search engine. If the PageRank displayed at the Directory was visible, it was often safe to assume the site remained in the index and would eventually move up again.

The bottom line with Google is that it is becoming more visibly commercial then any other time in its history. In order to draw extra attention to a listing and to compete against the big players who tend to have large enough link-densities to drive smaller players out of the Top20, many small businesses will feel the need to turn to AdWords. Google is hoping to take a portion of the online-shopping market with Froogle and is poised to threaten sites such as EBay and Priceline.

This SEO Article is Continued Here: Where Jim covers Yahoo!, MSN and an overall SE Review