A shift that should have measured 10.0 on the Richter Scale produced barely a tremor.
Last week, Yahoo Search disappeared. While not the first search engine, Yahoo was the granddaddy to almost every major innovation in search. Yahoo was fast and nimble. They were experimental and innovative. And perennially underappreciated.
A long time ago, I worked at Inktomi, a former high-flier in the search space (before the crash in 2000). Yahoo was the major competition. There was Yahoo, and everyone else. Yahoo acquired Inktomi in 2002 and incorporated the best parts of the Inktomi algorithm and technology into Yahoo. So I feel like I owned part of Yahoo’s backbone. And truly, I am sad to see Yahoo’s search engine disappear. But it is being replaced by an equally innovative, laser-focused search engine, Bing.
So there should have been a seismic event last week when Yahoo replaced their natural search experience and replaced it with Bing, but I am not sure that anyone noticed who isn’t in the search game. For marketers, nothing changed, except that instead of considering the potential impact of three major search engine (Google, Yahoo and Bing) now there are only two. Perhaps life got a little easier last week. I don’t really know. But what I do know is that a once great search engine collapsed last week, and it barely kicked up any dust.
What this tells me is that there is no one algorithm that rules the roost. They are all interchangeable. For the marketer, natural search is a channel to maximized regardless of what the underlying technology approach is. The natural search algorithm is there to be understood and engaged with an eye to creating your brand’s unfair advantage.
The name on the engine doesn’t matter. Focus on results and opportunity, not on the logo near the search box.
