The recent news that Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to team up to take on Google will have raised quite a few eyebrows in the search world. It's no secret that Yahoo has been looking for a way to be much more competitive within search, and even wanted to partner with Google last year to display Google's ad products. Microsoft has been itching to tap into Yahoo's userbase for some time, and even offered to buy Yahoo, an offer which was quickly declined.
But what will this merger mean for search marketing? Well, Google has been the dominating force within search for a long time, and most websites see the majority of their search traffic being provided by Google. Often, the traffic from Google will outstrip the combined traffic from Yahoo and Bing/MSN.
Challenging user loyalty
So does the merger change anything? Not really. In the world of search, moving from one engine to another requires two stimuli:
- a new feature, or improved results, to encourage the re-use of the engine - this pushes searchers to re-evaluate an engine all over again because the new features promises to make searching more fun/effective/quicker.
- good quality results to keep that newly acquired user coming back. If the results are deemed to be poor quality, then no amount of gadgets and gizmos will keep that user on the line. They will revert back to their old habits.
The big problem lies with point 2. Google is the benchmark for search quality results, and because most searchers don't really know how to tell if an array of results is good quality, they will naturally compare these results to Google. Bing and Yahoo need to be different, and for most searchers these differences are seen as weaknesses. Bing and Yahoo have some good results, but because they're different to Google they're labelled as inferior. Actually they're just different.
Time to rethink the search strategy?
From a marketing perspective it would be great to have two big players, rather than one giant player and two smaller ones. Competition is fierce within SEO for those top 10 positions for any keyword and being able to generate good volumes of traffic across two engines would be a welcome scenario. As the engines are different, it would be more difficult for any single entity to dominate across both engines, meaning a better sharing of potential traffic.
As search marketers we need to follow the crowd, and if Bing itself couldn't unseat Google then a Bing powered Yahoo won't fare much better. Yahoo and Bing just can't send the same volume of traffic since they don't have the same size userbase. So, for now, Google will remain the center of our efforts, but we
will keep a close eye on those Bing/Yahoo referrals.
