The recent decision of Bing to work with Wolfram Alpha has marked the beginning of Microsoft’s chase after Google’s market share. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine by itself but differs from Google and Bing. It’s a computational engine that returns quantitative results rather than links to sources that could have information that matches the search query.

Google has the Google calculator which tries to mimic Wolfram’s product, but isn’t quite the same. For people involved with SEO, this could mean some added work. To service websites who would like their content used for quantitative purposes it might be needed to follow a slightly different approach to what is needed for text based search.

To add to Bing’s aggressive attempt at catching up with Google they have started to return richer results. Results no longer are just links to other websites. Bing actively pulls up media and tools hosted on various sites and return them in the results. For instance, they retrieve videos from Hulu and YouTube, provide airline ticket info and even offer weather updates.

Google has been working secretively on a search engine algorithm called Caffeine. It isn’t slated to be rolled out until 2010 but is said to be a very powerful change Google is looking to bring in. Initial data suggests there won’t be a big shake up in the results retrieved, although many suggest the impact is being downplayed as Google does not want to create a panic among web developers. Caffeine is said to include a real-time search as well as have improved indexing capabilities.

Yahoo has been struggling to break to the forefront in the search engine market. In October, 2009 they stated that they will be ending the paid placements program by the end of 2009. The notable change they are about to offer is the real-time search capability that will be executed in partnership with OneRiot. They will be covering social networking structures like Twitter, an area where Google isn’t in yet. SEO professionals will be watching closely to all these changes to see how they will have to adapt.

All the commotion we are seeing exposes the amount of work that search engine giants need to put in to either maintain their top spot or try and chase down its competitors. Internet users on the other hand can sit back and enjoy exponentially better services from these companies as they battle it out for market share. Currently the search engine market is split up roughly as: 64% Google, 16% Yahoo, 10% Bing, and the remaining 10% between AOL, Ask etc. Though Google has a lion’s share of the market, the competition isn’t willing to give them a free ride. This pretty much ensures that Google doesn’t relax at any point and doesn’t behave like it has monopoly.