Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

Well the search landscape is getting awfully hot these days my friends. Apparently, Microsoft has been getting back some of their lost market share with the advent of Vista and mandatory installs of IE7. Not content with that though, they have spun off their own A-Team of search developers in Silicon Valley to compete with the “Big G“.

Yahoo has also been busy bees with Panama and their new API functionality to let people tap into their search data. My biggest hope, from an SEO standpoint, is that they allow people to start accessing and writing more robust queries of Overture keyword data.

Ask.com just released a newly designed site. I like the theme stuff, but am I really going to spend that much time on the homepage to enjoy a “theme”? I guess it’s a fun little feature of differentiation. They have a new 3 column layout called Ask 3D, which I kind of like as opposed to Google’s universal search in which everything is tossed in together.

And finally, we have Mahalo, which bills itself as the human powered search engine. Isn’t that technically every search engine though, as somebody has to build the infrastructure? I like this website, mostly for the nostalgic value of working at BeautifulIsland.com back in the day. Very islandy and tropical color scheme and layout. We’ll see how this goes. We’ve seen other examples of what human powered can do: Jyve and ChaCha.com, which are not that impressive. I just don’t think the “human powered search” platform is robust enough to keep up with the ever changing internet data landscape, except for the rare niche of “I’m too damn lazy to search for myself”, which I don’t think is that substantial.

What do you think is going to be the next hot thing in search?