Newsweek has run a cover story on Google, saying ‘Once hailed as a world beater, the internet colossus now has real rivals all over the world’ (Searching for the Best Engine, Nov. 5, 2007).
Real rivals? A curious statement, more like wishful thinking, just at a time when Google is transforming into a truly omnipresent giant with no serious competitors.
New, upcoming search engines seem to be more about self-hyped technological twists smartly sold to investors and easily swayed journalists than about being useful search alternatives. If only the same smartness showed in selling their services to the public.
One idea that somehow never ocurred to any of them is promoting a general purpose search engine on the back of free, thorough, up-to-date site search.
Many sites use Google as an internal search results provider even though this is a less than perfect solution because most websites are not fully included in Google’s index. In other words, those sites willingly integrate a site search solution that may or may not bring up a certain page.
When there is a niche like that, any aspiring new search engines should offer webmasters an “Add our search box” option with the following guarantee:
If you add our search box to your site, we will regularly crawl and index all of your pages, so your site can have a 100% reliable, constantly updated site search function and will also be fully represented in our general index.
This would be a marketing move that could not be neutralized by Google. They just wouldn’t be able to offer the same deal as they’d perceive it as an all-too-easy way into their sacrosanct index, in return for something they almost take for granted. After all, Google already has its search box on hundreds of thousands of sites.
But for a new player, whose main objective should be building awareness, such a guarantee would constitute a fairly cheap marketing tool. (And the chance to give us something useful instead of fancy features mainstream users don’t give a damn about.)
[I was wrong. Google did manage to find a middle road to offer a usable site search without providing an easy way into their index, called On-Demand Indexing:
"This feature allows site owners to update search results on their website On-Demand, by adding them to a special, separate index for their own site. Pages indexed with On-Demand Indexing do not impact the ranking or indexing of pages on Google.com."]
Tags: indexing, search box, search engines, site search
