When I first started to come online there were many major search engines - Google was still coming along but back then it was the good old days of Yahoo, Alta Vista (my personal favourite), Lycos, Inktomi, Excite, UK Plus (although as you can guess, pretty UK based) and GoTo. Over time change set in - Ask Jeeves launched, Google got better, Fast / Alltheweb came into the public eye.

But that's a long time ago now. Today we are basically down to two main competitors - Yahoo and Google. Though first I am going to diverse into talking about the minor engines. They do still exist and are always an alternative if you cannot find what you want elsewhere.

Terra Lycos (unsurprisingly a merger between Terra and Lycos) still has it's good old search going including the Lycos 50 which is always a worthwhile read and also owns Hotbot. Most of their efforts are now in content though, running Wired.com, Match Maker, Tripod, Angelfire and others.

Ask Jeeves made some big noise over recent years although has not quietened down. Although they are still developing search technology and their engine, Teoma is gradually rising in popularity.

MSN this month unveiled a preview of their new search engine. With Microsoft finally turning its attention to the search market is unlikely to be long before they are a heavyweight once the world's largest website network begins pumping traffic through its search doors.

As for the rest of the market it is now pretty much owned by Yahoo. They now own Alta Vista, Overture (previously GoTo), Fast / Alltheweb and Inktomi who currently supply results to MSN until they launch their own engine, and used to supply AOL until they switched to Google.

These acquisitions have now led Yahoo to have a lot of technology at their disposal. And their new search engine is looking pretty good. As well as doing not much below the amount of crawling that Google are doing, there is talk that the results are even better than what Google supplies.

On the other side, Google are still going along at normal developing new features and systems. Search boxes and image ads are just some of the new features to be added to Adsense and only a month or two ago Google finally finished several months beta testing of it's slightly changed interface and launched it across it's sites.