My take on the main SE Players

Common knowledge or not heres my take on how things stand atm.

Google changes its algo end of last year which knocks alot of sites off the top ten listing and replace which crap online shopes ie kelkoo.

Yahoo buyout alot of smaller search engines inktomi, altavista, alltheweb. making it a good contender for the top spot, plus stopping MSN getting their hands on them.

Google strangely rejig their algo again to bring some kind of balance back.

And lastly just off the grape vine I found out that MSN have just gone into partnership with the kellys business search engine and will be rolling this out with the new win2003.

So I think weve got a bumpy ride ahead. I truly believe google may have had its day especially with some true competition arriving. So if your gonna spend some dosh on marketing just go with google, yahoo and Kellys business search.

Ofcourse these are just my thoughts but i thought id share them. I will continue to watch as the battle has begun.

 

2004 will be an interesting year in the SE battle. I'm with ya, I'm anxious to see how things shake out.

 

I make no bones about it I like the recent developments. It's great if some big guns fight it out as it opens lots of opportunities specifically with everyone fixated on GYM.

By the way kellysearch has and is powered by http://www.semanticdiscovery.com

Nice testbed to see what semantics can and may do.

The best thing presently is that good content is rewarded twice.
It helps positioning and the "lookers" pay for it by clicking Google ad's.

So I sit back enjoy the show whilst developing new and exiting content (paid for by clients or Google) and like Shawn develop some unique content that brings in the links.

M

 

I think it's all hype. Expect search engines to keep their relative share of the market.

2c.

 

I would really like to agree that things will "stay the same", but I'm a little hesitant to fully buy in to that idea. History has shown (at least for the most part) that today's latest and greatest is tomorrow's "whatever happened to that company/product".

With billions of $'s on the line I really think this year SE's will do their best to pull out all the stops and shake things up. Will anyone's best be good enough to edge in on Google...who knows. To date, no one's even come close.

Years ago I was Netscape fan though, so what the hell do I know

 

Well I still use Netscape. I just happen to think their email is the best damn email client out there. But back to the search engines.

I don't know what MSN may or may not do. Certainly Billy has the money to do the job if he wants to. But as for Yahoo I'm surprised that everyone is so quiet about the paid submission.

Sure they will crawl and index pages without charge. They have to if they want any decent size database, but how can you read about Overture's Site Match without suspecting that the only way to rank in Yahoo will be to buy your way in and pay 30 cents per click once you get listed in the SERPs.

I don't find this exciting. I find this a pure raw money grab.

 

I had a few URLs included through Inktomi that I paid for. Just three to see what would happen and because witha datafeed, my content was always changing. I was pleased with teh results in that I was getting an average 350 hits a month for my about 60$ annual investment, or call it 4000 a year. That worls out to 1.5 cents a click, much cheaper than any pay per click program out there.

Once my Inktomi runs out, I'm supposed to sign up with SiteMatch? Right off the bat its $49 for the 1st and 29 for each additional for the year. Call it $110. And then .30 per click on top of that? Say I get the same average clicks, that comes to $105 a month. So I've gone from 4000 clicks for $60 a year to 4000 clicks for $1,370 a year.

What a rip off. I guess Yahoo isn't too interested in micro business participation in their SiteMatch program.

LIke anything else, money is starting to rule the SE world.

Googel claims they will always have organic searches, but to get the top rankings you have to have mega ranked inbound links. Who gets megaranked inbound links in the ecommerce area? Mostly big business sites. And how are you supposed to get a new site ranked well since a new site won't have any inbound at all.

Pretty tough for a guy who, until Google's recent spasms cost me 70% of my traffic, was clearing just over $1000 month in affiliate commissions, and is now down to less than half that.

And to think I was hoping to be my own boss in couple of years....

TampaDave