While there is much comment and speculation about the proposed $44 billion acquisition of Yahoo! by bitter rival MSN, many are starting to ask whether the merger of these two may open up the door for Wikipedia to slip in “unnoticed” with their new user controlled search engine project. Could it really happen?

If you ask any webmaster or surfer for their views on Google, MSN and Yahoo! you will get a whole variety of answer and comments. The bottom line is that while Google are the most powerful search engine (and possibly company) on the internet, they have their critics, as do the likes of MSN and Yahoo! If we were to end up with just two major search engines on the internet there are fears that competition would be stifled to say the least, with many believing that at least three unconnected parties are required to make a “free” market.  So what can Wikipedia offer?

Wikipedia are best known for their enormous online “encyclopaedia” which is monitored by and edited by the billions of users who visit the site every year. It is a site for the people, which is edited and controlled by the people.  They hope to use the very same philosophy for their search engine, allowing users to vote for and suggest web sites, but with sufficient protection to ensure that there is no spamming of sites to move them up the rankings.  While there are concerns about how they would ensure no corruption within the system, the idea seems to have caught the eyes of many. When will it be available?

The search engine is actually online and live now, but it is not yet “loaded” with the masses of information which are required to make it useful to webmasters and surfers. The company say that it could take anything up to a couple of years to create an information database which will give decent searchable results.  However, once the site reaches critical mass and the various security / spamming issues are sorted, will it be a success?

There is no doubt that if we end up with two major search engine groups then there is space for a third, whether this is Wikipedia or another third party yet to come to the fore.  It will be interesting to see how this one unravels.

Yesterday I wrote about Microsofts bid on Yahoo and started thinking about all search engines we’ve seen over the 10-15 years. Do you remember them all? Well, here’s a flashback for you (I know there are many more search engines, but I can’t write about them all ).

Altavista

Altavista was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and saw the daylight in December 1995. In the beginning altavista.digital.com was used as domain name for the search engine. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC’s 64-bit Alpha processor. Each machine had 130 GB of RAM, 500 GB of hard disk space and received 13 million queries per day. During this time Altavista was the biggest and only search engine worthy the name Eveyone (with a few exceptions of course) used Altavista. In 1999 when Digital was acquired by Compaq the name www.altavista.com was purchased from AltaVista Technology Incorporated for amazing 3.3.million dollar (it was an amazing amount in 1999). In February 2003 Altavista was purchased by Overture Services, Inc and in October the same year Overture (including Altavista) was acquired by Yahoo.

Yahoo!

One of the first and biggest directories (and later also search engines) was founded in 1994 (the domain name www.yahoo.com was registered in January 1995). In the beginning Yahoo was only a simple directory of links categorized in categories (very similar to DMOZ) while the search engine results was provided by Altavista since 1996. During the year 1997-1999 Yahoo and other directories grow rapidly and new services was released almost daily. Yahoo acquired Rocketmail in 1997 from Four11 (now Yahoo! Mail), web hosting provider GeoCities in 2000 and eGroups in mid 2000 (now Yahoo Groups). In 2005 photo sharing service Flickr, blo.gs, online social event calendar Upcoming.org and social bookmark site del.icio.us joined the Yahoo family of services.

Excite

In 1994 International Data Group a group of students at Stanford University $100 000 to develop an online service and in December 1995 Excite was born. In 1996 Magellan and WebCrawler was bought, and Excite signed a distribution deal with Netscape, Microsoft, Apple, and some other companies. Later that year Excite went public. Yahoo negotiated to purchase Excite in 1998, but @Home Network took control over Excite in early 1999 instead. In 2001 Excite@Home collapsed and the company had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. During the cllapse iWon.com started developing a new Excite portal and was able to get their hands on excite.com. iWon.com later changed it’s corporate name to Excite Networks.

Lycos

Lycos stared its days in 1994 as a search engine research project by Dr. Michael Loren Mauldin (the domain name www.lycos.com was registered in 1995). In 1999 Lycos was the most visited online destination in the world and had a local presence in 40 countries world-wide. Lycos merged with Spanish Terra Networks in 2000, but that wasn’t a happy “marrige” so in 2004 they went separate ways. Lycos became once again Lycos, Inc. when it was acquired by Korean Daum Communications Corporation after the split with Terra. During the year Lycos acquired a couple of popular web services like web hosting companies Angelfire and Tripod.com, search engine HotBot and people search engine WhoWhere.com.

Google

Students from Stanford University seems to like searching because Google is also a product by students from SU . Google started as a research project in 1996 and was incorporated in 1998. In the beginning the search engine used google.stanford.edu as domain name but in 1997 they finally got www.google.com instead. In 2001 Google started acquiring several small companies with innovative technology. One of them where Pyra Labs (Blogger.com) and another where Upstartle, the creators of Writely (now Google Docs & Spreadsheets). The two most famous acquisitions must be YouTube.com that Google got in 2006 for the small sum of US$1.65 billion and DoubleClick in 2007 for US$3.1 billion.

DMOZ - Open Directory Project

DMOZ actually not a search engine but only a directory. It was founded in 1998 under the name Gnuhoo, but had to change to NewHoo. After complaints from Yahoo! the directory had to change name again, and again before they finally settled for the Open Directory Project. Netscape acquired the directory project in October 1998 and Netscape itself was acquired by AOL shortly thereafter. According to unofficial estimates the number of URLs in the directory project surpassed the Yahoo! Directory in April 2000. The lack of advertisements on the site is one of the things that makes Dmoz so fantastic. One other thing is the number of volunteering editors that helps making the directory what it is.

A big thanks to Wikipedia.org and WayBack Machine for all the information used in this post.

Unlike when Are Google too powerful? was written it’s no longer just a rumor, it’s a fact that Microsoft want to take over Yahoo. The bid of 44.6 billion USD Microsoft placed on Yahoo yesterday shows that they are dead serious in buying Yahoo. So how will this effect the normal users life and not to mention us bloggers? Me myself I prefer to use Google, but I use some Yahoo services and unfortunately they may now become MSN services . I don’t like that!

The article If Microsoft Buys Yahoo: What We’d Love–and Hate is absolutely correct about the thing that Microsoft is making things way too complicated. Like when they’re naming their services:

It’s the year 2010. Microsoft owns Yahoo and has just changed the name of Flickr to Microsoft Flickr Live Photo-Sharing Service for Digital Camera Enthusiasts. The service is still free, but Windows Vista users will have to validate their copy of Vista as “genuine” first to use it. What has Microsoft wrought?

Why can’t Microsoft do like Yahoo and Google when they make up new names for their services. Why use Windows Live Hotmail as name for your mail service when Gmail and Yahoo Mail are so much shorter and easier names! I really hope Flickr will be left as-is and not merged with the horrible Windows Live Spaces and end up at a horrible web address like home.services.spaces.live.com.

If you’re a user of Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, or Yahoo Groups like me you may have to accept the fact that the services may be closed permanently and replaced by MSN services instead (have a look at Microsoft and Yahoo: Will Your Favorite Service Disappear?). Or they may become MSNitized and be called stuff like Windows Live Yahoo Mail packed with ads and useless features you don’t really want delivered to you by a horrible interface.

The history tells us that Microsoft prefer it’s own brands and therefore may abandon the Yahoo brand completely over time. Just have a look at what Microsoft did with LinkExchange.com and ClickTrade.com. Both services where ruined and destroyed. This is a quote from Microsoft and Yahoo: Will Your Favorite Service Disappear?:

But history gives some hints. In the past, Microsoft has been far more likely to buy technology, user bases, and traffic, but not brands. In other words, Microsoft likes to promote its own homegrown brands , like Microsoft Office or Windows Live, not brands that it has acquired.

Since I’m a blogger I’m concerned about MyBlogLog.com! What will happen to the widget I have at the right column of this site? Will it turn into Windows Live MyBlogLog or will it be left alone as the fantastic service it currently is?

My suggestion to Microsoft is to abandon the MSN/Live brand and go completely with Yahoo. Give Yahoo the resources they need to fight Google and convert all MSN/Live users to Yahoo’s platform. There’s a reason why Google is number one, Yahoo number two and Microsoft not even mentioned in the top: Easy to use and innovative services!