Google has won the search engine wars – at least for the foreseeable future. Many of us will be saddened to see that Yahoo! appears to have admitted as such - see
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/256748_yahoo24.html
and MSN has certainly not made any significant inroads into Google’s market share in the past year or so since it started using its own engine.

This confirms what we all knew anyway, that as far as attracting visitors from natural search is concerned, Google is king!

But other players are not standing still, of course. Yahoo! may have more or less accepted defeat in its battle with Google but it is now moving sideways and developing its publishing products. This includes the acquisition of del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us/. If you haven’t met it, del.icio.us is a bookmarking service. There are a growing number of similar sites, but this is one of the best established. When you find a page on the net you want to bookmark, instead of adding it to your own bookmarks or favourites on your own computer, you add it to
your del.icio.us account. By adding tags to your page and notes, del.icio.us allows you to build up a well organised resource library without cluttering up your own machine. It also has the advantage that you can share your library with colleagues and friends, which I think will be hugely beneficial to lots of people, myself and Sally included!

So what is its relevance to search? Quite a lot if you think about it. If you feel that a page is so worthwhile that you want to add it to your del.icio.us account, then that is a very big vote for that page, and Yahoo! will be aware of that vote. What better parameter to put into the search algorithm than votes from bookmarking sites? After all, using this bookmarking data gives the search engine up-to-date information on what is popular right at this very minute. One problem with all current algorithms is that they inevitably use slightly out of date information.

Yahoo! has been very good at seeing a good idea and running with it, Hotmail being a prime example. Del.icio.us could well prove to be another!

Our next Search Engine Marketing Workshop scheduled for 15th and 16th February in Richmond upon Thames is already 75% full so why not stop putting it off and make 2006 the year to get your SEO and SEM skills really up to date. You can register right away @
http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk or call Marie on 01406-351556 to discuss your individual requirements.