Here’s a preview of a slide from my Search Engine Landscape Presentation for Search Engine Strategies – San Jose (11:00am on Monday). Each time I present on this panel , I look forward to showing everyone some fresh perspective on the search/portal landscape. While I’ve posted several times on the issue of whether Google is a search engine or a portal, I’ve usually done so from the traffic perspective (over 80% of Google’s visits are search related).
I thought it would be interesting to see consumer’s association with the three properties. Utilizing the Hitwise Search Term Suggestion tool, I pulled the top twenty search queries across all engines that contained “Google,” “Yahoo!” and “MSN.” as a way of gauging the brand attributes.

As I put on my brand marketer hat, the table above shows some clear distinctions between the top properties.
Google’s queries center on finding things, be that information, geographical location or multimedia content. This confirms what we’ve seen with our breakdown post, that Google, despite building some very attractive “portal-like” tools, maintains in consumers minds as a brand that helps you locate things.
Yahoo! in contrast, demonstrates a clear portal identity with well rounded interest on a variety of their channels or portal offerings. There is a clear difference when we compare Google’s terms with Yahoo’s… search versus engage in an activity or consume a specific type of content.
MSN queries are clearly distinct from both Google and Yahoo!, with their queries dominated by specific tools such as the new Messenger download, but also showing some portal characteristics with Music, Games and Money.
If you plan on being at SES, and attend the Search Engine Landscape Panel, please stop by and say hello.