Search Engines We Like, Sort Of, Some Days
Activity among the major search engine companies is… well, active.
Yahoo! has redesigned the home page and added a nice feature to local search, by including phone numbers in results. Bill Gates is talking about integrating Internet search into the Windows operating system. (Which, given some of the new features in the upcoming Windows Vista release, Microsoft may well do.) And Google is… doing everything under the sun, as usual.
All this, and more, is part of each of The Big 3’s vow to — let’s be nice now — compete strongly.
Normally, I stay away from recommending one over the other. One major reason is that they all do a great job or a hideous job, depending on your goals.
As a user, Google often provides results I find useful in research. As an affiliate marketer they — let’s be nice again — fall a bit short of being ideal. The same could be said of MSN and Yahoo!. Usually. But today is unusual.
Search on “affiliate marketing” and Affiliate Classroom will come up first in the organic results on MSN and second on Yahoo! We like that. On Google, we fall down at the end of the third page. We, er, like that a lot less. (Of course, all those results could change tomorrow or an hour from now.)
Search on “learn affiliate marketing” and we come up #3 on Google and #2 on, drum roll please, Ask.com. We like that a lot. Ask.com’s CEO Jim Lanzone is promising to make Ask.com a lot better. If Affiliate Classroom’s ranking there is any indication, he’s on the right track as far as we’re concerned.
He’s not aiming to knock Google off the top of the hill (for which we salute his realism), but simply to be better for users (for which we applaud his idealism).
In the recent interview, he said:
“We don’t want to climb Everest right now. We’re not planning on knocking out Google. Our goal is to take our 20 million users, who are currently using us twice a month, and bump that up to four times a month. That doubles our market share.”
We could quarrel with his terminology, but the idea is sound. That’s not just idealism or realism, that’s good business strategy, since it involves a reachable goal using current resources.
Like a child’s swing, sometimes a modest push at the input side — applied at the right time, in the right way — leads to a large increase in output. Good luck with that, Mr. Lanzone. Sincerely. We’d definitely like to see search engine marketers have another viable alternative.