Microsoft has a commercial for the new Bing Search Engine which is quite entertaining if you understand the context. Basically, someone mentions a topic and another person starts babbling about things scarcely related to it. I happened to watch this commercial with someone not as immersed in the field of search as I am, and to that person, the ad didn’t make any sense at all.
In the same way, we see data in Google Analytics and the Google Keyword tool that tell us how people are using search engines. Many people would be surprised with the results. For one thing, quite a few people are using the search engine as a “browser bar” and typing URLs directly into the search box. As long as someone already knows about your site, and you are the #1 listing on Google (or Yahoo and the aforementioned Bing) they you are still in luck. If you’re a direct competitor of a known brand, you can take advantage of this by buying your competitor’s URL as a sponsored keyword. People type complex questions into search engines, after the fashion of the old AskJeeves.com model. The results for complex questions can be disappointing because search engines still like to parse keywords into matches that are most similar to the query, so in lots of cases you can ask a question and get forum posts which contain the same question, and the top results won’t always be questions that got answered. In the future, semantic search engine technology may be good enough to solve this problem, but there is definitely a gap between queries and highly relevant answers.
It might be interesting to see a commercial that actually tells people how to use a search engine. Even in the field of Search Engine Optimization we get questions from people who could have gotten the answer by typing two words into Google. We all have tales of friends and family members who wanted information, and were shown how to use the search engine to retrieve it. In many cases people can still be amazed (and alarmed) that you can get a picture of their back yard from space, or show their front yard from the street. Given the large amount of anecdotal evidence, it would appear that a few commercials disguised as public service announcements might open up the world of search to millions of new searchers.
Beyond the standard search features, there are a lot of things our potential clients don’t know about when it comes to search engines. For instance, the map feature was less well known until it was integrated into local search results, but now anyone with a local presence wants to be found on Google Maps. The shopping feature ( primarily Google Shopping/Froogle) has helped a number of our clients make sales by getting product searches to show above the regular results. We have found that many of our best customers are more likely to renew if they are making money from some aspect of search engine traffic, even if it isn’t mainly from the natural results that appear under the search button. Exposure in places like Google News, Video, and Image search opens our customers up to new possibilities, and services that we can fulfill for them.
Considering the number of people who didn’t know about these features, it may be time for a public refresher course on everything a search engine can do, and how to do it. Back in 1999, the Lycos Search Engine had a commercial which showed a Labrador Retriever getting whatever was written on a piece of paper, then it showed someone typing in a search engine query. The idea was simple, and it showed uninitiated people how to search. Apple has an approach with its Iphone which shows people what they can do (“there’s an app for that”) by actually demonstrating the phone’s features in a series of commercials. For people who make their money in the field of search, it would appear that there is a tremendous opportunity to re-educate the general public about all the things that are now available on search engines. In an economy that may be stagnant for some time, more customer knowledge can still create growth in the search sector, which will in turn allow people in the online marketing field to survive and thrive.
