(Continued)

In other news, the majority of North Americans use search engines for consumer research. A focus group research project undertaken by the search marketing firm Enquiro said results showed that 65% of North Americans use search engines to come to a purchasing decision.

On Tuesday, Yahoo launched an Internet radio and other new services around its instant messaging (IM) software. Meanwhile, Microsoft is leveraging IM as a subscription gaming hub, while America Online is packaging weather.

"They are becoming much more of a destination as opposed to just a communications front-end," Rob Enderle, an independent analyst in San Jose, Calif., said of instant-messaging services. "They want to own the user experience."

In other news, with its release of the Google Search Appliance last year, the long-time leader of consumer Web search turned its attention to the needs of complex, data-intensive enterprises.

"People buy our product [because] our search results are better," Google Enterprise general manager Dave Girouard told the E-Commerce Times. "For the IT person, their customer is the employee. If it's an e-business, then their client is the visitor to the Web site. We really speak to the benefits of the end user, which is really how Google got started."

The search appliance -- which includes hardware, software and support -- interacts with an organization's datacenter to search either an intranet or a business' external Web site. Companies as diverse as Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kansas, PBS, USA Today, the U.S. Army and Sun Microsystems already have adopted Google's offering.

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