2004 - A Year of Search in Review

The past year will be remembered as the most interesting year in the history of search, that is until this time next year. 2004 witnessed the end of the search engine cold-war and the beginning of what is likely to be an intense rivalry between Google and MSN. It also showed a clear demarcation between who's hot and who's not in the business of search.

IceRocket. The past year was one of announcements, one-ups and positioning as the major search engines struggled to roll out as many improvements and innovations as possible. Items such as search-engine specific toolbars, desktop search applications, local-search features and super-sized Email accounts were introduced to win and retain the loyalty of users. The various battlefronts of the search engine war shifted enormously over the past year, ultimately offering search users 3 unique major search engines, the widest array of independent choices seen in almost four years. At this time last year, Google dominated the organic listings by providing the database for most of its rivals. That changed in first quarter of 2004 when Yahoo introduced its own algorithmic search database. MSN followed with the release of its own Google Desktop gathered the most print-space this year, it wasn't the first of the well known names to introduce a desktop appliance. That bragging right goes to Lycos/Hotbot which released a very good desktop search feature in

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