Lately, you can't seem to get on the web and not hear about how Yahoo! And MSN have beefed up their search capabilities to compete against our resident Leviathan, Google.
Why some of these pronunciations come from credible sources, those of us who run global portals, and a background in basic statistics don't seem to be seeing the so-called "the British are coming" – just to borrow an expression. Sure, Yahoo! And MSN have powerful and probably up-to-date search technologies, one has to be very careful how one uses that to arrive at certain conclusions.

Case in Point

We, at www.businessjeeves.com have 22 country-specific portals under that brand, but our experiences with crawlers and eventually the number of pages served seems to point to the fact that, Google is still the dominant search engine, and worse (or better, depending which side you are on), it might actually be gaining ground!
We have been judiciously monitoring the crawls on our portals from the Three (3) big search engines, but all we have seen is the continuously (and dare I say) aggressive improvements Google has done for its search technology, and the delivery of that information to the public. We are constantly told by the media about how Yahoo! Now has about 40% (or something like that), of the search market, yet our portals tell a different story. Don't get me wrong, all the 3 big search engines have sent their crawlers to our portals, but we have noticed that only Google has a 48 hours turnaround in making some of our new improvements available to the public. Secondly, we have noticed that, some sites that have been supposedly crawled by Yahoo! and MSN haven't even made it to their databases – all you have to do is search "businessjeeves", or any other major portal, and then click on the pervasive "more from this search" sub-sections of all these search engines, and you will see what I am talking about. An example is our continuous monitoring of BusinessJeeves China. Why Yahoo! will show you less than 30 other pages from this same portal that have crawled so many times. Google, on the other hand, will deliver over 130 pages! – And they have been doing this 48 hours after we launched the portal! Now, don't get me wrong, we are surprised by the results in that, Yahoo! has our main portal, BusinessJeeves.com listed in their "business directories" section (we hope they don't get rid of us after this article), and yet seem to be awfully slow in aggregating our expanding brood. We have also looked at "site references" data on our portals, and the conclusions seem to always agree with us.
This article might be viewed as ramblings of a slighted web developer/founder. However, before you dismiss these observations, you have to understand that the Stock price of Google is more than twice that of Yahoo! – and as an Economist, you always have to follow the market – but this is another article in another journal .