Last year In the
confidential we ran a series of articles discussing the up
coming search engine wars. News this past week from
Microsoft, Google and Yahoo has industry experts chiming
that the search engine wars are indeed heating up. Microsoft
launched its first ever homegrown search engine, Yahoo!
released a more intuitive search service known as Y!Q, and
Google upped the ante in local search by making Google
local, a production service available via the homepage.
https://www.lynxtrack.com/signup.php
Each of these services
is seeking to enhance the consumer experience in some way,
something that may or may not work out well for each major
search engine.
The challenge for each
search company is to get the consumer to change their habits
and use these new tools. A consumer is likely to try them
once, but less likely to continue to use them without an
incentive. This incentive should come in the form of the
tool that actually makes their search experience better.
However, if we can learn anything from web trends (which we
may not be able too) we must also understand that while the
Internet is young the users have already formed hard to
relearn habits. Good luck to the search companies in their
endeavor to change our habits!
Each of the search
engines has its strengths. Microsoft’s ‘question answering”
is currently the best, according to industry experts, while
Yahoo!’s local search is currently the most powerful and
accurate. As a result, nobody should be surprised by the
recent announcements from Yahoo and Google, designed to
reinforce their users’ existing surfing habits.
We have certainly seen a
change in the Search Engine. This is the infancy, or even
pre-infancy, of search engines becoming answer engines for
certain types of factual questions.
The online advertising
market is growing rapidly, driven primarily by paid search
over the last several years. According to market researcher
JupiterResearch, advertisers are expected to spend $13.8
billion online in 2007, with paid search forecast to grow 30
percent, compounded annually from now until then.
Hopefully the Internet
marketing community can take steps to continually monetize
the opportunities that abound in the search market. Don’t be
afraid to try the new tools being developed by each search
company and companion. Good luck In 2005!
David Fishman
dfishman@wrpmedia.com
