Interesting video from Google on the evolution of search, from Larry Page & Sergey Brin’s initial graduate project at Stanford to where it’s headed in the future.

Last month, Bing and Yahoo increased their share of total US searches, at the expense of Google.

Google now accounts for 64% of searches, Bing powered search  accounts for 30%. Both Bing and Yahoo are powered by Bing now; Yahoo gets 16% of searches and Bing gets 14%. All the remaining search engines split the remaining 6% of US searches.

Google’s share is down  by 3% last month, Bing’s share is up 6% and Yahoo’s share is up by 5%, continuing the improving trend for the Bing-powered search engines.

The Yahoo/Bing “merger” has happened within the past two weeks in the US and Canada. Searches on both Yahoo and Bing are now powered by Bing’s index and pay per click (PPC) results on both will be combined soon. Both companies see this as a big deal, especially in terms of helping them compete with search goliath Google, which still gets about 70% of all searches.

This doesn’t, however, mean that results on Bing and Yahoo will be identical. While both are using the same index (the list of pages on the web with information about their content and linking), the two search engines maintain different algorithms. That means that different ranking factors are being weighed more or less heavily by each of them.

We can expect rankings in Bing and Yahoo to resemble one another more closely than they used to, but our client rank checking shows they’re still quite different.

Web Pro News has a video news report that goes into more detail on this and some of the implications for SEO.

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in June with 62.6 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (up 0.6 percentage points to 18.9 percent), and Microsoft Sites (up 0.6 percentage points to 12.7 percent).

Both Yahoo! Sites and Microsoft Sites have experienced gains due in part to the continued utilization of contextual search approaches that tie content and related search results together. For more detail on contextual searches, please read this post on the comScore Voices blog.

Ask Network captured 3.6 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.2 percent. More from comScore here.

At Rank Magic, we’re changing our keyword ranking reports to focus on Google, Yahoo! and Bing alone. We’ve found that including other search engines tends to confuse our clients, and since the three top search engines account for more than 94% of all searches it makes little sense to worry about tracking the others.

No matter how good your company is, someone may still write something negative about you, even if you tried your best to help them.

A customer might write negative comments about your company in their blog or one of your competitors might try to damage your reputation by creating false comments about you. One of our clients turned down a job applicant who then retaliated by writing negative, false reviews about them in several places on the web.

What can you do if web pages with negative comments appear on the first page of a major search engine?

1. Fix the problem (if there is a problem)
If people write negative reviews about your company, the first thing that you should do (if the allegations are true) is to fix the problem that caused the negative review in the first place.

2. It never hurts to ask
Send the webmaster of the web page with the negative review a polite email and ask for removal of the negative comments. Many webmasters will cooperate if you explain the issue, especially if the negative review is false or libelous.

3. Give web pages with positive reviews a bump
If the webmaster does not want to remove the negative review, find websites that contain positive comments about your site. Link to these pages from your own website to increase the link popularity of these pages. The more links the pages with the positive reviews have, the higher they will be ranking in the search results.

If appropriate, bookmark web pages with positive remarks about your website on social bookmark sites such as Digg, Delicious and Faves.

4. Request testimonials from delighted customers
If you receive positive feedback from customers, ask them to write a review on ConsumerReview.com, Epinions.com, Yelp, Angie’s List, Judy’s Book or similar sites.

5. Add your website to company wiki pages
Websites like AboutUs.org allow you to create an article about your company. If your company is large enough, you might even create an entry in Wikipedia. These Wiki pages will also appear in the search results when someone searches for your company name.

6. Make sure that your own website tops the search results
If your own website comes first for your company name then many people will click on your link and not look further. Rank Magic can help you achieve that.

Not surprisingly, Google and its affiliated sites maintained their position at the top of the 2009 search market. We reported on that graphically in December. A bit more unexpected was the overall growth in the number of searches, at 46%.

“The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president, who authored the report. “Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among Internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks. If you equate the advancement of search with the ability of humans to cultivate information, then the world is rapidly becoming a more knowledgeable ecosystem.”

The US constitutes the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches, comScore found, or or approximately 17 percent of all searches worldwide.

About 88 million searches originated on the Google network, a 58 percent increase from 2008. A bit over 9 million were made on  Yahoo, which saw its own total jump 14 percent over the previous year. Chinese search engine Baidu finished third. But it was Microsoft, spurred by Bing, which showed the second-strongest growth out of the sites comScore measured, jumping 70 percent to 4.09 million searches. Russian search engine Yandex achieved the most considerable gains, growing 91 percent to 1.9 billion searches.

You can read the full report here.

Clearly, the three main search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing, and Google serves far more searches than the others (see the post below). But which is actually best? In other words, which gives you the results you’re actually looking for?

Now you can find out.

Conduct a blind test. Just go to BlindSearch, enter your search query, and review three sets of results, side by side. Mark the best one, and then BlindSearch will reveal which sets of results came from which search engine.

How important is Google, really? We all know that Google gets more searches than the other search engines. But how much more does it get? Check out this chart from Pole Position Marketing, based on the Nielsen ratings. Pretty impressive.

Search engine traffic rankings, October 2009

Windows Secrets recently reported that the ads served by Bing and Google along with your search results are linking more and more often to sites trying to infect your machine. For example, if you recently have used either Google or Microsoft’s new Bing search engine to find the popular Malwarebytes Anti-Malware utility, chances are good that the sponsored ads alongside your search results contained links to the very malware that the security tool is designed to remove.

Such “malvertisements” are showing up as paid ads on non-search engine web sites, too.

The article from Windows Secrets offers some suggestions on how to avoid such sites, and how to report them if you get stung. But, sadly, their recommendations are neither foolproof nor convenient.

As for your own searches, It’s best to be somewhat wary of sponsored links until the search engines address the problem.

March search engine share was recently reported by Cnet, and Google has expanded its dominance.

Out of 9.5 billion searches, Google handles 64% , Yahoo! gets 26%, and MSN/Live search (now Bing) gets 10%. Google’s share is up 28% from a year prior and Yahoo’s share is up 2%, and MSN’s share is up only 0.3%. Coming in at #4 is AOL Search (powered by Google) at 4%, and Ask is at 2%.  The share of all of these was up from last year, which means that it’s come out of the share of smaller search engines.