Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Andy hit the nail on the head with his comments about Ballmer's recent statement that MSN Search will match Google's relevancy within 6 months. Besides the fact that relevancy is so difficult to measure, the search engines have reached a point where relevancy isn't really the issue anymore. All three major search engines give a set of results that are essentially of equal relevance. At this point, it's just a matter of marketing. It's a matter of either delivering something to your search engine users that differentiates you from the other guys. It's a matter of some kind of perceived advantage that your search engine has over the others. Everybody uses Google because they're in the habit. If you ask a typical Google user, they'll say it's the best search engine, but they probably don't use the others enough to really compare. The barrier that MSN needs to break isn't one of relevance, it's one of percieved relevance and quality that exceeds the other available choices. I think that's why Microsoft keeps making public statements like this. Even though nobody believes them, they're hoping that if they keep saying they are going to "catch" Google in terms of relevancy, index size, or whatever, one day people will give them a try and realize that their search engine's not so bad after all. A few might even like it so much it becomes their new favorite. It's all just PR and marketing. The irony is that MSN tries so hard to be cool, and they probably never will be. Google's become cool without even trying (or at least without looking like they were trying).

Dominic made a great comment over on ThreadWatch that a big part of MSN's branding problem lies in the fact that MSN Search is a stale, boring name. Why not rebrand it as something cooler? Nobody had heard of a Google until a few years ago, but now it's one of he world's strongest brands. Why not make up a cool sounding word for their search, how about MSN Zuppyzip? Or SqiggleSearch? Or PowerSocket? Or Zinger? Or Xenozip? O.k. those are pretty bad, but given some time and brainstorming, I'm sure they could come up with something more interesting than MSN Search.