The main reason for this analogy was to discuss ways Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft could improve. Although Google statistics show that they hold between 60-70 percent of search share, the company still has areas it can expand on. A few of these areas include video search, image search, and map spam issues.

According to Danny, Yahoo has shown weakness in the areas of leadership. He points out that the company does have factors working in their favor such as SearchMonkey and Search Pad, but he encourages them to keep innovating. On the subject of Yahoo search, Danny said this in his keynote:

“We know that they [Microsoft] want it [Yahoo] and we know they’re [Microsoft] going to get it [Yahoo].”

Last but not least, Danny discusses Microsoft. He polled the audience and interestingly enough, nearly every hand went up when asked if they wanted Microsoft to succeed. People want to see Google have a competitor and actually, Google needs a competitor to stay on the right path. Danny says that Microsoft needs to pick a brand and let people know that they love search.

Danny also revealed opportunities that all the search engines could capitalize on, which could put them ahead of Google. These opportunities include real-time/Twitter search and mobile applications.

While embracing these areas would offer great advancement to other search engines, Danny does not predict that we’ll see a Google killer within the next three years. He said we could see small “killerettes” but no official Google killer.

Live Search lead program manager Eytan Seidman said Microsoft has been seeing “what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining” through the use of those operators. Until they find a way to stop those requests while keeping advanced operators open for legitimate users, webmasters have been shut off from finding more information about their sites on the service.

Microsoft may be trading software for usage of its Live Search. Federated Media leader John Battelle said he received a tipoff about the plan for Microsoft’s large enterprise customers. The “Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search” would require usage of the IE 7 browser preset to Live Search. Big firms could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars of software from Microsoft if they join the program.

Research firm ComScore has announced support for a new way to measure how people engage websites. By using a ‘visits’ metric, they can show how many times a unique visitor accessed content on a site. Web programming techniques like Ajax have pushed the older ‘page views’ metric into being less reliable. ComScore’s first report on visits showed Yahoo as the top web property for February, with 128.6 million unique visitors.

Yahoo’s hire of former PubSub CEO Salim Ismail to head Yahoo’s Brickhouse incubator has received some criticism. Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton said on Valleywag that Yahoo needed to hire someone with real power, on the lines of Steve Jobs, instead of “another press-friendly conference-going schmoozer.” Current Brickhouse leader and Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake defended the hire, saying, “Salim is a great catch for us.”