While Google is by far and away the most popular of the many search engines available on the internet, is it possible to make a living of search results from MSN and Yahoo!?

Like any market which Google seem to enter, their dominance of the search engine market is as strong as ever. However, many people seem to forget that the like of MSN and Yahoo! also receive decent traffic, even if no where near Google. On the surface it may seem as though Google is the be all and end all but this is not quite the case.

Yahoo! have a very strong position in the US market, and while it is still coming under pressure from Google, there is sufficient traffic from the US to actually make a living. Lets not forget that we are still talking about billions of searches on Yahoo a year - not a small figure by anyone’s standards!

MSN is in a slightly different situation as it has no main bias, and more of a general exposure across the world. While not as useful as Yahoo! might be to your online business, if you add the possible exposure via MSN and Yahoo! it can add up to substantial traffic.

However, in order to be massive on the internet it is vital that you are well ranked on Google, as the traffic which it can bring in is enormous. Google v Yahoo! and MSN is the real difference between a popular site and a potentially massive site, the difference between a few thousand dollars and millions of dollars.

Unfortunately at this moment in time there is no competitor in sight for Google, and it seems highly unlikely that a threat will materialise in the short term, although never say never on the internet. Google have been ruthless and spent billions to get where they are, and even if a competitor appeared they could buy out just about any company in the world with their fire power.