Since Overture is already supported by WebPosition Gold, maintaining separate rank reporting for Excite is now redundant. Therefore, although visitors will still be broken out separately in the WebPosition Traffic Analyzer, Excite.com has been dropped from the Reporter module.

The good news is that this should speed up your WebPosition missions and allow you to focus more effort on the remaining major search engines. You should use the extra time-savings to create additional optimized pages for the other major engines and thus increase your traffic from those sites. If other engines grow in popularity, we'll look at adding them to WebPosition Gold. However, as always, it's important that you do not waste your time on engines that are not large enough to bring reasonable amounts of traffic to your Web site.

Many of you may be wondering whether Overture (formerly Goto.com) will eventually replace all the major search engines? Don't worry. Although their influence may continue to grow, they will not replace major search engines like Google. Although the pay per bid (PPC) model on Overture makes their stockholders money, it is not a model that fulfills the needs of many Web surfers. Many types of searches do not yield good results on a PPC based engine.

Therefore, as we have seen with Go/Infoseek and NBCi when they converted to an Overture clone, many regular visitors will go elsewhere to meet their search needs. This can make some of the remaining players like Google, Lycos, AllTheWeb, and others more popular. However, it might also help open the door for new engines to rise in popularity if market gaps are left open. The search engine landscape changes continually as it has since day one. The key is to stay educated so you can use the current environment to your advantage.

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