Future Search Engines
Microsoft’s recent desire to purchase Yahoo (which was just “spurned” by Yahoo) has brought up a lot of interesting questions about the future of search engines. Given the size of the two companies a successful merger of the two could be very unlikely – AOL Time Warner always comes to mind. However, one thing interesting about the merger is all the talk and brainstorming about where search is heading. For users Google is still by far and away the best (and most widely used) search engine when looking for information. However, for internet startups like myself Google has become very ineffective in sending us traffic. When using Google I can find the information I want however a lot of that information comes from major corporations who have the clout to be #1 organically and the money to be the #1 pay per click (PPC) ad. As small entrepreneur I have ventured away from using Google for traffic and have instead focused more on niche players/blogs/directories which send me a very focused target audience. For example I advertise Bizak on Go2Web20.net which sends me a lot more traffic then Google.
Google search results have become overcrowded for websites looking for traffic and we’re looking for something else. The estimate is that somewhere between 15-20% of websites are optimized for Google. What happens when half of all websites are optimized for Google? At that point it’s going to be virtually impossible to receive any sort of traffic from Google. Users won’t notice the difference but websites will and they’ll want an alternative. If you’ve noticed it seems like almost every company on the internet does search engine optimization. This could be a tell tale sign that a change is coming. When everyone starts talking about a particular stock it’s usually time to sell. This could be the same theory for search with many losing a lot of money for a process that no longer generates results.
TechCrunch wrote an interesting article on how Yahoo needs to take a radical approach to beat Google – and I agree. Yahoo (and even a combined Yahoo/MSN) cannot beat Google at its own game. Yahoo needs to take an entirely new radical approach to search. As I mentioned previously Yahoo needs to create a new search brand but also consider the “radical approach.” As TechCrunch mentioned Yahoo needs to consider search engines geared towards a particular niche (similar to my movement away from Google to niche websites) and giving away search KPIs to developers who can build whatever type of search engine they can conjure up. This would indeed be a radical approach to search and an impressive gamble for Yahoo. It’s not that far from Facebook allowing developers to create their own applications – the trick for both is figuring out how to monetize this development.
