The battle between Yahoo, MSN and Google continues to heat up and Google is now finding itself on the losing end of the stick more often than not. Over the past few weeks we've covered acquisitions, mergers and buy-outs. This week, we're looking at some of the new strategies being used by Yahoo and MSN or companies associated with them to go after Google.

Yahoo/Overture:
The fastest way to topple someone in business is to take their clients away from them. Google has been the primary distributor of search-listings to other search tools and ISPs serving over half of the Internet users around the world over the past two years. Search tools such as Yahoo, Netscape and AOL continue to display results drawn directly from Google's database. Massive ISPs, (AOL is also an Internet Service Provider), such as Earthlink and Freeservers use Google as their default search engine as do many magazines, newspapers and corporate websites. There is a great deal of money and investment in the business of helping people find stuff on the Internet or within corporate or academic Intranets. Recently, Overture has busied itself negotiating with one of Google's major media clients, Knight Ridder News Service. Knight Ridder is one of the largest newspaper publishers and news-wires in the United States. While Google will continue to provide contextual advertisements through the AdSense program, Overture will provide all traditional search engine results through its recently acquired algorithmic search tool, AlltheWeb.Com. While financial details of the deal have not been announced, the loss of Knight Ridder is a considerable blow to Google.

MSN:
Microsoft continues to produce its own search engine to compete directly with Google. While MSN does not expect to have a fully functional search tool ready until early next year, most webmasters will have seen MSN's new spider, MSN-Bot appearing in their server logs over the past few weeks. MSN is working on the assumption they will dominate the search world by next summer and, given their tools and strategies, that might be a feasible goal. Currently, MSN is displaying results drawn from the Inktomi database. Inktomi was purchased by Yahoo earlier this year. While MSN is gearing up to go after Google, they are continuing their marriage of convenience with Yahoo properties in order to weaken Google over time.

In order to combat these rivals, Google has introduced new ranking algorithms and seems to have modified its traditional method of updating its database in the hopes of displaying more relevant results than its two major competitors. Barring any major developments, next week, we'll look at what appears to be Google's new updating and spidering methods.

HotBot made a major change earlier this year when it morphed itself into a multiple-tool search provider. A search on www.hotbot.com allows the searcher to use one of four major databases, Inktomi, Google, Teoma, and FAST. While this range of options presents an excellent tool for search engine users, many site visitors had problems with the relatively unknown names, FAST, INKTOMI, and Teoma. The confusion comes because FAST is actually AlltheWeb, Inktomi is a database owned by Yahoo that provides results for HotBot, and Teoma is the search tool that powers Ask Jeeves. Search engine users know the names, AlltheWeb, HotBot and Ask Jeeves but, for the most part do not recognize the names of the engines that power these properties. In order to clear any confusion, HotBot now offers searches from:

HotBot (Inktomi) | Google | Lycos (AlltheWeb - Overture) | Ask Jeeves (Teoma)

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Google again leaps ahead of the rest of the pack in its development of a search engine that reads and records information from standard print catalogs. Google is testing this new feature and is inviting catalog publishers and retailers to submit their catalogs in one of two ways. The first and easiest is to simply package a copy of the catalog and mail it to Google at, Google Catalogs -171 Main St. #280A - Los Altos, CA 94022, or to fill in a short web-form.

Once scanned and categorized, results will appear in this format: Google Catalog Example (Lawn Mowers)