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Founded in 1996 as a “natural language” search engine, Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) allows searchers to ask the Jeeves character a question (“What is the population of India?”) and get an answer, not just a list of documents containing the words. This approach yields good answers to popular questions; because it depends on human editors selecting the best answers, however, it does not work well for more esoteric subjects the editors did not handle. In recent years, Ask Jeeves has acquired several organic search engine companies and built a search engine many believe is the closest rival to Google in quality. Figure 1-8 shows a sample results page from Ask Jeeves that melds question answering with strong organic search results.
Figure 1-8 Ask Jeeves search. Ask Jeeves treats Katmandu as a location, returning links to related topics in addition to regular search results.
To gain market share, Ask Jeeves also acquired Excite, one of the original Internet portals and still a popular search site. Today, Ask Jeeves attracts more than 6 percent of all searches, when you add up the visits to all of its properties. Worldwide search marketers can reach Ask Jeeves searchers through Google’s paid search (which Ask Jeeves uses), but need to pay attention to Ask Jeeves organic search results, too. Ask Jeeves has been growing in popularity; so although it has a relatively small share of searches today, it bears watching.
Metasearch engines provide a way of searching multiple search engines, with the expectation that searching several different engines will provide better results than any one alone. Unfortunately, it does not, and relatively few searchers use metasearch engines.
Some metasearch engines, such as HotBot (www.hotbot.com), merely show a search input box and ask the searcher to choose which engine to search with. HotBot has its own search engine (using Yahoo! search technology), but also provides results from Google and Ask Jeeves.
More complex metasearch engines actually search multiple search engines at the same time and mix the results together on the same results page. InfoSpace (www.infospace.com) searches Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, and several other search engines. InfoSpace actually owns several metasearch engines that work this way, including WebCrawler (www.webcrawler.com) and Dogpile (www.dogpile.com), but none of these metasearch engines draw many searchers.
Search marketers do not need to concern themselves with metasearch engines—if you are listed in the worldwide search engines, the few searchers who use metasearch engines will find your site, too.
Until now, this discussion has focused on search engines that cover the whole world, but many popular search engines attract searchers from a local area—just one country or region. If your site attracts visitors from several countries, you might want to include local search engines in you plans. But before we look at a few local search engines, keep in mind that often a worldwide search engine is also the local search engine leader. For example, Google is the #1 search engine in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and Australia. Figure l-9 show two typical local search engines, Onet.pl (www.onet.pl), Poland’s leading Internet portal, and Seekport (seekport.co.uk), a new search engine popping up in several European countries.
Figure 1-9 Local search engines. Onet and Seekport are just two of the many local search engines that search marketers need to know.
Beyond search engines that operate in just one country or region, local search also refers to searches that operate within a geographic area—even inside a city. Yellow Pages sites, such as Verizon SuperPages, are the most common U.S. examples of local search engines. But worldwide search engines, including Yahoo! and Google, also use local search technology that detects the use of geographic terms in searches and finds results related to that area. So, a search for “Newark electrician” might find contractors in that city. But because not all searchers use geographic terms, and because those terms are frequently ambiguous (Newark, New Jersey or Newark, Delaware?), search engines are beginning to automatically detect the physical location of the searcher (using knowledge of the Internet’s physical layout) and use that information in the searches.
One of the fastest-growing areas of search marketing is shopping search. Shopping search engines allow comparison of features and prices for a wide variety of products, and customers are flocking to them. Just 9 percent of all Internet users worldwide used a shopping search in 2002, but that grew to 15 percent in 2003 and continues to rise.
Consumers like comparison shopping search engines because they allow simultaneous comparison of similar products across many purchasing factors, such as price, reviews, and availability, as shown in Figure 1-10. Shopping search engines cover a wide range of consumer products, including electronics, office supplies, DVDs, toys, and many others. Internet users who visit shopping sites already have a good idea of what they are looking for, with price and availability often determining from whom they buy.
Figure 1-10 Shopping search engines. PriceGrabber, like any shopping search engine, has a product comparison page searchers can sort multiple ways.
To take advantage of shopping search engines, search marketers should ensure that no data is missing for products. For example, make sure you provide availability data (in stock, ship within two weeks, and so on) for your products. If you do not, when shoppers sort the product list by availability, your products will fall to the bottom of the list. Figure 1-11 shows the leading shopping search engines. If your site sells products available in shopping search engines, do not ignore this opportunity. We review specific strategies in more detail in Chapter 14, “Optimize Your Paid Search Program.”
Figure 1-11 Shopping search market share. Yahoo! Shopping and Shopping.com are the leaders.
Source: Hitwise Research (October 2003)
This content is excerpted from Chapter 1 of the new book, "Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site", by permission of Prentice Hall PTR. ISBN 0131852922, copyright 2005. All rights reserved. To learn more, please visit: http://www.phptr.com/title/0131852922.
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Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: August 05, 2005
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