Look Beyond Google: Meta-Search Engines Can Help Online Marketers

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Look Beyond Google: Meta-Search Engines Can Help Online Marketers
By Bill Platt (c) 2008 the Phantom Writers
(http://www.thePhantomWriters.com)

For businesses that market wholly or partially online, it may
seem that three words are the only way to get more customers:
search engine optimization (SEO). Typically, the search engines
being referred to are: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These three
engines have almost become interchangeable with the phrase "do a
search", so much so that the word "Google" has entered the
English lexicon as "find information".

There are actually hundreds of search engines, not just the Big
Three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) that many Internet users think of.
By focusing only on the most well known search engines for your
online marketing strategy, you may be missing out on as much as
30% of the billions of searches being done online every single
day.

While not the oldest search engine on the internet, Google does
have the reputation of being the granddaddy. However, it is worth
investigating alternative search engines - niche engines,
meta-search engines, and human-powered engines.

Niche search engines focus their searches on a particular subject
matter, such as blogs (http://www.blog-search.com) or articles
(http://www.goarticles.com). Meta-search engines compile results
from multiple search engines (http://www.dogpile.com,
http://www.widow.com). Finally, human-powered search engines are
composed of directory pages with link and general information,
put together by humans who search for the most relevant content
(http://www.mahalo.com, http://www.dmoz.org). These alternative
search engines tend to have pretty high page ranks, which give
more credence to the fact that online marketers shouldn't
overlook them.

There is also the fact that some Internet searchers do not want
to use Google because of personal or political views. Because of
Google's popularity, it can (incorrectly) be perceived as having
a monopoly on the search engine market. That perception, combined
with opposition to a seemingly growing "corporate world", turns
off some potential customers and eliminates your potential to
reach them, if you focus only on Google or other big search
engines.

As part of SEO, using keywords to bring in consumers is all the
rage. Businesses spend a great deal of time and money researching
keywords, keyword density, and effects on page rankings in
results lists. Guess what? It's not only a pain for the
businesses to constantly be looking for which words may get them
more hits and higher rankings; it's quickly becoming over done.

Consumers are fatigued with seeing keyword-loaded articles and
websites tagged with anything that could possibly be related to
their search terms. This online marketing strategy may make sense
in the short-term, but chances are good that by the time the
strategy is perfected by your marketers, there will be a
different trend altogether that needs to be learned. Marketing
with the intent to only increase your page rankings, by any means
necessary, is only a quick fix and could be quite expensive.

SEO tactics are starting to turn customers off. If SEO is the
main priority of a marketing campaign and keyword-dense content
was the impetus for the customer finding the website, this hurts
the site's credibility with the consumer. Perhaps they'll buy
from you once because you showed up at the top of the results
page, but will they remember you next time or just do another
search?

Another concern with search engines is the program spiders that
crawl the Internet, looking for relevant pages for search
results. Even the largest of the search engines can only cover a
portion of the internet. According to Wikipedia, no search engine
can search more than 16% of the net!
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spidering)

In addition, the spiders have a massive amount of searching to
do, which can be a slow and taxing process on the sites they are
crawling. By the time a spider finishes crawling the Internet,
the information collected can be outdated - pages and links have
either been deleted or new information added. Spiders are
certainly not a perfect means of finding good results with one
search engine.

Searching just one engine at a time is time-consuming and not
very cost-efficient for searchers looking for the most
appropriate information or businesses to suit their needs. Enter,
meta-search engines. As mentioned earlier, meta-search engines
compile results from multiple engines.

Among these, dogpile.com is probably the most well-known. The
problem with dogpile, as I see it, is that it spits back the top
10 results from each of the Big Three engines. This results in a
lot of sponsored results at the top of the result list, followed
by a mix of "normal" results and more sponsored results. The
truth be known, I simply consider dogpile to be really annoying,
so I avoid it.

In comparison, widow.com uses a different sort of math equation
that sorts through search engine results for the most relevant
information and ranks them in their results pages. In an
unscientific but entertaining comparison I performed, I plugged
in "celebrity gossip" to both dogpile.com and widow.com.

On dogpile.com, I felt like I had to search through commercials
to find the content. The results on widow.com were much more
relevant, giving me results with the desired content. Plus, I
didn't have to look between the annoying sponsored results to
find the information I wanted.

Utilizing meta-search engines can be very time-efficient and
cost-effective for online marketers, especially when doing market
research, even for keywords.

More importantly, if you can also rank in the meta-search and
smaller niche search engines, you have a better chance of
reaching the approximately 30% of searchers who do not use one of
the Big Three engines, as their search tool of choice.

The niche audience may be smaller than the number of consumers
you're exposed to on Google, but if you can gain an audience in
the niche search engines, you are likely to find consumers intent
on buying what you are selling. It's a good general marketing
strategy to remember that "quantity exposure" does not always
equate to "quality exposure". It's also a good general
marketing strategy to never rely on only one advertising platform
to help you reach your target audience.

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