By the end of the year 2005, Google will see its market share of consumer-oriented searches drop significantly, while Microsoft and Yahoo! battle for the consumer and retail-related searches. Google decides that its best hope of increasing revenues is to turn itself into a non-commercial search engine, either by offering a subscription model for scientific and literary researchers or by expanding its reach into enterprise search services. Microsoft will buy out BidClix or some other ad network to compete with Overture, and will effectively stamp out Adwords/Adsense. One of the startup 2nd-tier cluster-based search engines will gain ground and threaten to overtake Ask Jeeves for market share, but will remain far behind Microsoft and Yahoo! for consumer eyeballs.
2005 Search Engine Predictions
