Monday, August 9, 2010

A search engine that could compete with Google

We've all seen the publicity for Bing.  I've seen a lot of product placements for it in movies and TV shows.  Remember, search engines make most of their money from inexperienced searchers.  Inexperienced searchers will go for what's cool rather than what's the best.  Bing may be worse than Google, but as long as they target noobs who spend a lot more money than internet savvy people and are a lot less demanding they will be okay in the long run.  If Google has 99% of the market share but Bing has the 1% that spends all the money then Bing will be better off.  The 1% that can be influenced by seeing celebrities use Bing in their favorite movies and TV shows.

If Bing winds up being the favorite search engine for noobs, then why not have a search engine targeted for the intelligent?  Lord knows that people are sick of seeing all the wikipedia results on page one.

The search engine results for noobs and the elite should be totally different.  When noobs type in weight loss they really want info on fat loss.  They want info on fat loss right now and don't want to click on:  Did you mean to search for fat loss?  They don't want scientific journals.  They don't want articles about all the possibilities of losing weight like cutting your own limbs off or slicing off your skin(both of which are valid answers to "weight loss").  They just want straight up fat loss info.

An internet savvy individual searching for fat loss would want info from medical journals and possibly forums(where mavens tend to congregate).  An internet savvy individual would know not to use the search term weight loss unless they already had a saw out.

The ideal search engine results for savvy individuals and noobs don't intersect so if a search engine wants to compete they need to target the savvy individuals(who unfortunately to companies don't spend money like noobs).  Internet savvy individuals don't want dumbed down wikipedia information and noobs don't want to see anything that's not on Oprah.

How to build a search engine that targets the savvy audience?  The search engine doesn't have to be as hard as google is to game as savvy people don't spend money and the potential isn't there.  The search engine would have to make it's money based on an impression based advertising system.  Although the search engine could make money on things like selling homework help or experts.  Students doing a report need to use search engines to find info and they could use one to filter through the crap.  Let's call our search engine "Find What You're Looking For".  Student goes to www.fwylf.com looking for information on his report on the dating rituals of the Mayan Empire, and over to the side he sees an ad for a professor on all things Mayan who's willing to answer questions about the Mayan Empire on his 1-800-number.  Click!  The professor makes a profit.  The search engine makes a profit.  And the student writes a good paper because no search engine can beat the human mind.

What algorithim should this search engine use?  Don't know.

2 comments:

  1. It is very hard for bing to pass google in the search engine market because google has a monopoly but if they want to have a chance then they need to include as much social real-time results as possible.

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  2. PPC marketing
    i will say that its not impossible but its very hard for Bing, or some other search engines to compete Google, with the passage of time its going up and up

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