Search News: How are Search Engines like Blowing Your Nose?
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 12, 2009 | Share This
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You know that a product has reached market domination when it becomes a verb. It’s an age-old maxim that has held true from the days of Thomas Crapper (early British plumbing mogul) through to Kleenex tissues, Jeep SUVs and Xerox copy machines.
Did I mention Google’s search engine? Googling has been a verb for some time now, Webster’s Dictionary (among others) says so.
Recently Microsoft announced that Live Search is going to be pre-loaded as the default search engine in most new Dell computers and on Verizon’s wireless phones. This got us to thinking – how can you fight a Google-like verb? How do you knock off the dominant player in a market, especially when their name is synonymous with their main offering?
We know it’s possible. No-one uses Crapper toilets today, Xerox has plenty of competition in their traditional copy-machine space from the likes of Canon and Kyocera and others, and Jeep is hardly alone in the SUV marketplace.
The first step is getting your alternative out in front of the potential user – distribution if you will. When it comes to search engines this is a tricky proposition (Oh Cuil, will we ever stop using you as our example of wrongness?) Here the idea of pre-loading clearly makes sense.
The next step is simple, but it’s so simple that it seems to have escaped many who have tried. Make your product a better alternative than the verb you are fighting against. After all, that’s often how the verb got that way.
Google was hardly the first search engine. Yet we don’t sit around today and talk about Alta Vista’ing a potential employee or Yahoo-ing that blind date. Google earned it’s verbness by being better. Similarly, though many think Thomas Crapper invented the toilet he actually was dominant in his market by synthesizing others advances – inventing a few improvements here and there like the floating ballcock (I can’t make this stuff up).
Though Google may seem invincible there are a couple of ways to do what they do better.
1) Build a better algorithm – No-one’s cracked it yet but this is the backbone of their whole operation. Break it and you’re in.
2) Deliver better value – We called out social media sites in our 2009 predictions post as the new search engine incubator. One reason why is that they can be more cost-effective for the number of views (and even click-throughs in some cases) they deliver.
3) Create a unique experience – Another area that social media based search platforms excel in is delivering a very specific search experience. A user searching for news on Twitter using Twitter search will gte a more up-to-date set of breaking news than they will on Google News.
4) Supply better metrics – One of Google’s strengths has been their ability to slice and dice their rich data pool and deliver it to advertisers and the general public. Still for every level of transparency Google provides, another veil is draped over figures like actual search volume in Google Insights for Search. Achieve better reporting and you take away a key pillar of Google’s success.
Thoughts or comments? Leave them in the comments section or send me a message on Twitter at @nmallin.
Topics: Google, Google: AdWords, Microsoft, SEM: Paid Search, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Technology, Twitter, YouTube |