Search Wars

September/October 2007 Issue: Page 36

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Google shakes things up with a broader way to serve search results, but other engines are banking on Google getting it wrong.

Even though Google would prefer not to be a verb, the search giant is just that and more. To Google is to search for products, maps, healthcare plans, cars for sale, images of Britney Spears, coupon sites, new mobile phones, the population of Moscow, blogs on gardening – the world really. And more so now.

As of last May, Google changed the way it serves results pages. It isn't one of the ongoing tweakings to its famed algorithm to help you find what you are really looking for, but a much more significant change.

Search results pages are no longer sectioned off into categories for more targeted searches – its tabs for news, video, blogs and maps are still there but its main search results now pull all of those categories together into one results display. This is called Google Universal Search.

Google wants to provide more relevant search results by offering not more choices but better choices in the possible niches a user may be searching for. If you type "healthcare" into Google, you don't just get providers of healthcare, but also blogs on healthcare and even local providers by ZIP code. Universal Search is supposed to make it easier to find what you want – a mandate that is the heart of Google's mission.

"With universal search, we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results," writes Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience of Google on the company's blog.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said in the press that Universal Search is the first major revamp of the site and its underlying architecture in several years. He said the work began more than two years ago and that more than half of the company's "search efforts" developed it. He said the changes will give people more exposure to "underutilized" Google services such as Book Search and Video Search, and that they will help raise Google's market share. Brin finished off by saying that "our data says we not only are the best [search engine] but we're widening the gap."

In Google's Shadow

The myriad of niche search engines on the Web, however, take issue with this new feature. Marketers and custom search engine companies believe this reform to the results pages will cut into their business. "There is a lot of money being thrown at the category, and so many players, they are not supportable in the long run," says Chase Norlin, CEO of Pixsy, which hosts custom image search engines for other sites. Marketers are simply afraid that all their SEO efforts will have to change dramatically to retain their hard-won rankings, being pushed lower by popular blogs and YouTube.com videos of cats. Currently, Pixsy gets 60 percent of its traffic through Google.

"I don't think it changes a thing for the top search marketers," says Matt McGee, SEO manager for Marchex at SearchEngineWatch.com. "The best have already been using all these verticals to drive traffic – video optimization, local search, blogs, news and press releases, and so forth. Search marketers who've been sticking to the basics like on-page optimization and simple link building have some catching up to do. I'd say they already had some catching up to do even before the Universal Search announcement."

John Tawadros, COO of iProspect, suggests marketers relax and focus on the opportunity Universal Search presents – a call to diversify your digital content to include more additional media types, adding that a truly good search strategy goes beyond just changing your ways to suit the engines. Kris Jones, CEO of PepperJam, supports that view. "I have watched advertisers double their sales volume via search by focusing on marketing initiatives outside of search. Conversely, I have seen advertisers in just about every vertical space leaving massive dollars on the table by refusing to see the big picture," he says on his blog.

"The moral for search marketers is," says David Berkowitz, director of emerging media at 360i, "they need to take a holistic view of search. For those who get it, this gives them an unprecedented chance to dominate entire search engine results pages and gain sizable competitive advantages. Marketers need to consider every digital asset of theirs as an opportunity to gain more visibility in Google, whether it's an image, video, press release, store listing, blog post or anything else."

Norlin points out that since Pixsy has a large business-to-business component, Universal Search does not largely have an impact on those current customers. In fact, there is a healthy amount of vertical search in the business-to-business space. Research firm Outsell recently stated that the business-to-business vertical search market would probably top $1 billion in revenue by 2009. Also, vertical search engines that use different "contextual crawling methods" or integrate specialized databases that are not routinely interpreted by a Web search crawler may be unaffected by Universal Search.

Finding a Niche

Wil Reynolds, associate at SEER Interactive, thinks niche search engines still have a place and are not going to be crushed by Google. "We don't need to be the biggest SEO company out there, for example. We only need a piece of the pie. [Search companies] go out there fighting for a third of a percent and that can be profitable for them." Mike Solomon, vice president of Search123, says that they do well because "we know who we are and what we do well. We see business that Google and Yahoo have left behind in the second-tier clients. … We are not saying one size fits all. Continued on Page 2...

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