“Targeting Search Engine Rankings” by Jonathon Love from Internet Retailer (www.InternetRetailer.com) not only aims to shine some light on the stepchild of search (i.e., organic search,not paid search) but it actually stumbles upon something very interesting that inspired a letter from AU to Jon and IR.
Good morning Jon
Interesting article. Thanks.
However, the other important story here seems to be… How ineffective search engines are at delivering the expected results (i.e., Wikipedia would looks to be the #1 “retailer” based on this study). At the very least a side bar article discussing this “shocking” find would have been nice. Also, to round out the topic some insight in how to adjusting marketing and other efforts to get to customers before they resort to what appears to be random searching.
Finally, how about some talk on the coming decline of search as the first step in the shopping process? As soc-nets grow it would seem only natural that we humans do what we used to do, ask our “friends” for recommendations. So unless the search engines can make major improvements, answers to questions such as “Where can I buy…” are going to best answered in the crowd-cloud. (Yeah, crowd-cloud, I said it first!)
Yes, there have been attempts at this (e.g., Yahoo! Answers) but none, that I know of, within the context of a MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Who needs Google when one’s Twitter followers can return the right answer faster?
Regards,
Mark Simchock
Chief Alchemist
Alchemy United
Princeton NJ
