It's a global battle whose foot soldiers will be engineering teams working inside a few square miles of Sunnyvale and Mountain View, with billions of dollars in advertising at stake.
Almost a decade after Google became a household name, Microsoft's launch of its Bing search engine, followed by Microsoft and Yahoo's deal to collaborate on search, could give the world's dominant Internet search engine its first serious challenge in years, as search becomes a key front in the looming competition between Google and Microsoft.
But regardless of who wins this competition, the beneficiaries are everyone who uses search engines, as quickening innovation improves the quality of information and delivers it in more useful packets. This year for the first time, a majority of the roughly 180 million U.S. adult Internet users typed a query into a search engine on a typical day, and search is gaining on e-mail as the most common online task.
Thanks to new technology, users will get their answers faster, from more than just text, and if the companies are successful, may find search engines are better at understanding what they are looking for.
"Search is going to change more in the next year than it has in the past five years," said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, who believes the pace of search innovation is the greatest in at least a decade.
Deluge of innovation
The pace of new features rolled out by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft has been furious in recent weeks.
At the Oct. 20-22 Web 2.0 industry conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced a deal that allows Bing to search up-to-the-minute postings on Twitter, with much of the software engineering done at Microsoft's Mountain View campus. Google scrambled to announce its own real-time search deal with Twitter several hours later.
Not to be outdone, Google last week unveiled a new service that allows people to search for a specific song title and see a link to that song on MySpace or Lala in their search results — a service Google described as yet another way to speed users to results.
Within minutes of Google's music launch, Yahoo posted a company blog reminding that its search engine has had the ability to show links to free audio files in a partnership with Rhapsody since 2008.
Google has been unveiling so many search changes — even tweaking the size of the search box on its sacrosanct home page and pinching advertising on the results page slightly toward its center— that it has begun a "This Week in Search" item on its company blog to track new features.
Yahoo, which has been working aggressively to make sure the look and feel of its search engine remains distinct, even though its underlying results eventually will be generated by Bing, announced a new "Search Experience" in September. Among the changes: Yahoo allows users to bundle their search results from an array of topical providers they can select. A search for a restaurant would allow a user to click on a link to Yelp results; a sports search would offer bundles of results from ESPN, or a local newspaper.
"Now the real competitors have emerged, and it's mainly Google and Microsoft, with Yahoo in there because of its brand identity," said Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence.
Beyond the blue links
On each of the three biggest search sites, the basic 10 blue hyperlinks that have been the essential product of an Internet search are rapidly being augmented or replaced by deeper, richer and more detailed nuggets of data — for example, a map, photos, restaurant reviews embedded in Yahoo search results for "San Jose sushi," not just the basic links to restaurant Web sites.
Since Microsoft launched Bing in June — calling it a "decision engine" for its ability to filter out unimportant information — the new search engine has gained more than 156 million monthly searches, while Google has seen a slight decline, according to comScore.
While Google and Yahoo say Bing is not driving the innovation surge, some analysts are not convinced. "I do think Bing has put some pressure on Google," Sterling said.
Microsoft, Yahoo and Google say they are innovating because people's expectations for a search engine are far higher than they were even five years ago. People no longer search for a Web site; now they expect to find a specific piece of information, like the cheapest airfare to Chicago.
"We increasingly find that people think about search the way they think about a public utility," said Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which compiled the search data. "When you turn on a tap you expect clean water to come out, and when you do a search you expect good information to come out."
The big three search engines also search more than words. Bing offers visual searches, allowing users to browse and filter images of politicians, celebrities, album covers, or even yoga poses, as they search for information.
Clicks that count
Increasingly, a successful search is about an engine's ability to reveal a "Web of objects" — images, videos, audio files, or blog posts — rather than just a web of pages, said Larry Cornett, Yahoo's vice president for consumer products and search.
"We kicked off this huge innovation in search engines well over a year ago," Cornett said, "before anyone was doing anything else but the 10 blue links."
The new Yahoo page offers a "Search Pad" where users can note their searches. In an effort to make the results more relevant to an individual by tracking their search history, Yahoo is reading it, too.
"Every search engine looks at clicks," Cornett said. "We tried to be very open about that and say, not only is that going on, but, hey, do you want to use this for your benefit?"
At Google, speed remains king, said Johanna Wright, Google's director of product management for search.
In a recent experiment, it slowed its Web site by 0.4 seconds. The result, Wright said: People searched less.
Among the changes Google rolled out in the past three weeks are a "Jump to" link in the search results that allow a user to go directly to a keyword buried deep within a document, saving the user time, like the music search Google rolled out this week.
"Speed is something we take almost manically seriously," said Jack Menzel, group product manager for search. "We obsess about tens of milliseconds."
Microsoft, which has its Search Technology Center in Mountain View, says its philosophy boils down to helping people make a choice, sometimes limiting results when Bing decides a person knows what he is looking for.
A search for "UPS", for example, produces little on the results page but a box to enter your package tracking number, and the customer service number for UPS.
"What it amounts to is trying to build a mind-reader, to understand people," said Qi Lu, head of online services for Microsoft.
Microsoft also realized that its old search identity, called "Live Search,'' wasn't exactly hip, said Stefan Weitz, director of Bing Search.
"We wanted to make sure you could use it as a verb," Weitz said. "You want people to be able to say, 'I Binged that.' "
