Is Google The Best Search Engine?

With more and more people frustrated by the difficulties in getting good listings in Google, Nikki Pilkington tells us more about the 3 other major search engines and the advantages they have:

Every customer I get wants to be number 1 in Google. FACT

Every person with a website that knows about search engine listings wants to be number 1 in Google. FACT

Google is the only search engine that matters. FICTION!

It’s easy to be browbeaten into the fact that Google is the only search engine that matters, and it is true that it has a certain importance. However, with recent uncertainties in ranking algorithms, let’s look at 3 other search facilities that bring traffic and sales, and the reasons for working on your rankings in them:

AOL: www.aol.co.uk
In an independent study of millions of shopper referrals from search engines, WebSideStory found that AOLs search service had the best visitor-to-order conversion ratio among major search engines in 2003. AOL’s search service topped the list with a conversion ratio of 3.03%. Google, the largest search engine in terms of actual world (but not UK) traffic volume, ranked a mere 10 th in the conversion study.

Why is this so? Most AOL users (and they’re the largest ISP in the UK) have the AOL search as their default search, and they’re the people that AOL has been educating for the past 8 years that buying online with your credit card is a good thing. AOL has worked hard at providing secure environments and lots of articles on buying online, and the users from AOL trust in the advice they’re given.

If you sell a product or service, whether B2B or B2C get listed in AOL as soon as possible.

Yahoo: www.yahoo.co.uk
Ranking third in the amount of UK visitors and searches it receives, Yahoo is somewhat of the forgotten search engine these days. Way back in the annals of time, Yahoo was the preferred search facility of choice – and is still near the top with Google and MSN, so definitely good to have your site listed here.

Primarily a directory, and receiving some search results from Google, Yahoo is the first port of call for many people, as it provides a multitude of peripheral services – news, stocks and shares, weather, email on the go, newsgroups and more. It’s a natural extension for people to use it as their preferred search engine. With 26% of the market share fo visitors, ignore it at your peril!

MSN: www.msn.co.uk
The default home page in Internet Explorer and also the default search engine for those that use the ‘search’ button in their browser rather than navigating to a search engine, MSN updates its database more regularly than Google (average 4 weeks to Google’s 10 weeks) and is powered by the Inktomi database.

The Inktomi database also powers a number of other search engines, and features less dead links (websites that no longer exist but clog up the search listings) than Google – showing just 1.7% dead links compared to Google’s 4.8%.

In addition to this, a survey done in September 2003 of UK search engine traffic found that MSN had the larger share of UK traffic, beating even Google!! (Survey carried out by Search Engine Watch)

A great example of global domination, MSN should be on your e-marketing list, having 41.9% of UK traffic and searches in a survey conducted in September 2003.

It would take forever to go into all of the search engines that are available, and even longer to explain their advantages and disadvantages, but I hope this has shown some people that there is life without needing to be top of Google.

The table below shows the reach of the search engines/directories in the UK detailed above and may help you to make up your mind on your next E-Marketing strategy.

Engine/Directory

Reach

MSN

41.9%

Google

32.3%

Yahoo!

26.0%

AOL

12.6%

(Neilsen Netratings May 2004)

Nikki Pilkington is owner of Milton Keynes based Internet Marketing company NikkiPilkington.com, and writes articles, hints and tips to help people looking to promote their website for free. For more of her articles visit www.nikkipilkington.com and sign up to the newsletter.

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