The most interesting thing about the world of search marketing is that the only constant is change. And so today we thought we’d identify a few of the changes in two of the search engines out there.
While Ask.com may be a tiny player in the market with around 4% market share, they are still worth paying attention to. The IAC owned engine is now touting Ask Deals, a service that aggregates coupons and other shopping deals from across the web. There is now a tab on the home page for this, allowing you to sift through the myriad of offers on the web and you can even sort by store, ala Sears, Walmart, Best Buy and a host of other retailers.
Ask’s director of search technology, Ankur Choski, wrote in a blog post that the number of queries for “value-related terms” has increased by 50 percent so far this year and that 60 percent of consumers say they are using coupons more often.
And while this is an interesting consumer search trend, it should be noted that it’s highly unlikely to move Ask’s market share. After all, Bing is running their Bing Cashback program and Yahoo launched Yahoo Deals back in August with little fanfare. CPG marketers, however, need to pay attention to these developments. Search is crucial and constantly evolving to suit the consumer.
It’s interesting to note that Google’s dominance is so entrenched that even innovation by a competing search engine won’t necessarily cut into its market share.
And speaking of Yahoo, allow me to segue here. While the big news has been the search partnership with Microsoft, there is still regulatory approval in the works, as well as a lengthy integration process which begs the question, “Does Yahoo! still care about search?”
Yahoo obviously doesn’t want to be seen as giving up the ghost while in limbo, so Yahoo GM David Pann wrote on Monday about several enhancements coming soon for Yahoo’s search advertisers. Chief among the claims are improved technology to match ads to queries, new rich ads that can include video & images, and an interesting new tool that will allow marketers to run their campaigns offline. It’s a bit dubious to suggest that these are anything but band-aids with the impending advertising partnership with Microsoft on the way, however.
And because I can’t write a post without laying some Google info on you, allow me to leave you with this interesting read from last week’s Business Week Tech Beat: Google’s Scott Huffman: Many More Search Features.
Scott Huffman runs one of the least-known units at Google: the evaluation team that measures the impact of every little proposed change to the leading search engine. And with some 6,000 experiments run annually, he’s pretty busy. Not to mention, he runs mobile search at Google, too.
