Why Lost n Austin?

Because Lost in Austin was taken. :) No seriously, what the point of this blog will be is the feeling of being lost on the Internet, and since I log onto the 'net in beautiful Austin, Texas, USA, I decided to call it "Lost n Austin".

Most people can probably remember the first few times they logged onto the Internet, that feeling of Holy #$%#%^#! How am I ever going to find what I need here? You know something you need is out there in (to use a hackneyed term) cyberspace, but how in the world do you find it?

Fortunately, at about the same time the Internet was starting to take off, some very bright minds realized that people would have a hard time finding what they needed, so the concept of search engines was born. And order was slowly brought to chaos.

Where the lost are found

If you have a favorite search engine that you use all the time, you might not realize how many other search engines people use. Some search engines operate in just one country or one region, and others do nothing but help people shop for products. But, for all practical purposes, the number of major search engines are really not that many. According to comScore Media Matrix July 2005 study, the share of searches on the Internet was broken down thusly:

Google - 37.6%
Yahoo! - 30.4%
MSN - 15.6%
AOL - 9.2%
Ask Jeeves - 6.1%
Other - 1.1%

We'll take a look at the top two engines. Obviously, the Google search engine (www.google.com) is the proverbial 800 lbs. gorilla of search engines. And this really doesn't give you the complete picture, because Google also licenses its technology to AOL, and until 2004, Yahoo!

Speaking of Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) they take a slightly different approach to search. First of all, they look at search as only a part of what they offer. They really look at themselves more as a portal, offering news, email, shopping, and many other functions to people who register for their services.