Top Search Engines

I will be researching on the top 5 web service brands.on categories like Search Engines, Web Browsers, Web servers, email, social networking, blogging tools, rss reader, e-commerce and so on. It will only be a secondary research and the purposes are

1. Being an avid internet user, who spends more than 8 hours everyday on internet, I better know what I am using and what to use.
2. Learn the internet analysis tools like alexa.com, comscore.com, hitwise.com and itfacts.biz.
3. When I become an online marketer, I need to know where my target audience are and how to target them.
4. Internet is an industry that has low entry barrier and a behemoth can be toppled overnight. So, it will be interesting to look back upon this research report 5 years later and laugh at it when things have changed completely. Remember netscape and altavista?
   

Starting off with Search Engines. Guessing the leader and follower is a no-brainer. It is Google and Yahoo respectively. I like Yahoo! over Google because of one particular point. That is, my blog comes 5th in Yahoo but only 33rd in Google in the search list for word "keshavaram". For academic purpose, the table below shows the Search Engines and its usage

Ref - Most popular search engines worldwide, Dec. 2007, comScore

The above results have tremendous implications to both internet marketers users. The users know where to get relevant search results from. The marketers know where to concentrate their SEO and SEM efforts. The focus of top search engines have always been on satisfying the user. If the user likes a website the site will come up first irrespective of how much another site pays. The search engine there by pleases the user at the cost of increased short term revenues.

A comprehensive analysis and comparison of Search Engines in in this link.