Customer Acquisition through Satisfaction

Customers rely on search engines and Search engines have been very influential in providing them relevant and up to date information. The process of customer acquisition through satisfaction goes through a sequence of steps that is defined as below:

• Providing free and relevant information depending upon user’s query and preference.
• Search engines typically focused on search and never diverted from their model.
• Trusted information and quality of the data
• Regular update of information database
• Frequent review of content on websites

Google

The king of search engines Google was founded in 1998 by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The name Googol came from a mathematical term for a 1 digit followed by one hundred 0s, and served as the inspiration for the Google search engine name, signifying the immense size of the search index it searches.

Like many Web businesses of the 1990s, Google started small and grew as the Web exploded. Unlike many of the dotcom companies of that era, Google resisted going public until 2004, and eschewed advertising, preferring to grow through word of mouth.

The most striking feature of Google was relevant organic results that the Web had ever seen; this was one of the major reasons for the immense popularity of Google. Google has a huge number of pages in its search index—more than four billion—but seems to find the right one for each search.

Unlike some competitors, Google has kept its business focused on search, never straying too far into the territory of a portal, the way Yahoo! and others have offered news, weather, shopping, and other services. Google has always made its money through forms of paid search, allowing advertisers to purchase space on the results page based on what search words were entered. Over the years, Google has grown into one of the largest paid search companies in the world.

For the search marketer, Google is the 800-pound gorilla of the industry. You cannot ignore Google in your search strategy for organic or paid campaigns. But Google is not the only search engine in town. Although Google is the most popular search engine in the world, it receives fewer than 40 percent of all searches. You must include other search engines in your plan to maximize the benefits of search marketing.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, but its visitors do a lot more than search. Yahoo! is a leading portal, offering news, e-mail, shopping, and many other functions to visitors who register. The Yahoo! search engine is the #2 search engine in the world, with more than one fourth of all searches.
Yahoo! has more than three billion pages indexed, but trails Google. More significantly, Google leads Yahoo! in total searches each month, especially outside the United States. Yahoo! Search is offered in fewer languages and lags far behind Google in countries where they go head to head.

Yahoo! is a very popular in United States but its share of searches varies widely in other countries. U.S. search marketers must target Yahoo! as part of their plans, but marketers elsewhere should analyze the leading search engines in their country before finalizing their plans. Yahoo! should be targeted in countries where it handles a high percentage of total queries, but that needs to be decided on a country-by-country basis.

Although Google and Yahoo! get the lion’s share of attention, other excellent worldwide search engines should also be targeted by search marketers in their plans. Although you will get less traffic from these engines than from Google and Yahoo!, it all adds up.

MSN Search

MSN Search (http://www.msn.com) is the third most popular search engine, with about 14 percent of all searches worldwide, but Microsoft has long tried to increase its share of searches. Microsoft introduced new technology for MSN Search in early 2005, and is rumored to be developing a new search facility built in to a future version of the Windows operating system. Like most competitors, MSN returns both organic results as well as variations of paid listings.

MSN currently uses its own search technology for organic search and syndicates Yahoo’s Precision Match technology for its paid search.

Branding of Search Engines through consistent customer satisfaction and efficient service

Search engines have been able to build a brand for themselves over the past few years by virtue of customer satisfaction, improved, efficient and quality search services. The overall branding concept has changed considering the diversity of different industry around the world. Search engines follow completely different model of business. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN have different branding strategy and they all had set different criteria to build a brand but the benchmark was satisfaction among online searchers.

Google has been successful enough to cash on its image of a trusted search engine by branding itself as a “Brand Google”.

How search engines improved market share?

With increased customer satisfaction and better user results, the search engines have been able to improve their market share with major competitors competing for top notch position.

However, Google still remains the leader in the market share. ComScore Networks this week released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines.  In January 2006, Google reinforced its status as market leader of the US search market with a 41.4 percent share of all searches submitted, up more than 6 share points versus year ago.

Yahoo! maintained the second-place spot in the ranking with 28.7 percent share of all searches, while MSN ranked third capturing 13.7 percent of all online searches.

Americans conducted 5.48 billion searches online in January, up 11 percent from the previous year.  While this growth is still strong, it reflects a substantial slowdown from the 42 percent surge seen in January 2005 versus the previous year.

Google Sites once again led the group with 2.3 billion searches followed by Yahoo! Sites (1.6 billion searches), MSN-Microsoft Sites (752.5 million searches), Time Warner (432.6 million searches), and Ask Jeeves (307.3 million searches).  Ask Jeeves recently was renamed as Ask.com.

Google Sites won top honors in share of tool bar search, capturing 49.5 percent of all tool bar searches, while Yahoo! Sites secured 45.5 percent.

“This report provides evidence that the growth in the US Search market is slowing,” commented Dr. Magid Abraham, President and CEO of comScore Networks.  “The good news for search companies is that the utilization of search queries for advertising purposes continues to increase. In December 2005, 57.2 percent of search query results included a sponsored advertisement, up from 49.1 percent a year earlier.”

“Additionally, the international search market continues to be strong, with a growth rate of 34 percent based on comScore’s December 2005 international data,” Dr. Abraham said.  “As a result, search revenue growth will significantly outpace search query growth.  At the same time the slowdown in the overall growth rates is unmistakable.