Redefining the Search Scenery

As expected, the roll out of change in the world of search is proving to be highly disruptive. Though the year is only three weeks old, noticeable shifts are occurring among the largest search entities and throughout the search marketing sector, making the scenery much different this month than it was just a few short weeks ago. These are among the most interesting times on the Internet as the largest players are positioning themselves to take their unique and collaborative runs through the year of global convergence. For those interested in search marketing, a number of things will soon be different, most notably, our assumptions about the state of competition in the search sector. The three-way race between Google, Yahoo and MSN is, for all intents and purposes, over. Yesterday, Yahoo's chief financial officer, Susan Decker, suffered the embarrassment of producing a poorly paraphrased quote. She made a simple, clear and brutally honest statement agreeing with a reality everybody else already perceived. It wasn't as much what she said. Decker acknowledged in an