Why does it suck? It really is not good. Google is not perfect, but no algorithim, no matter how advanced and smart is going to be perfect. (Well maybe one day). 

Live Search is just not good. It has outdated websites, it seems to have no logical order on page one, and the font is just eeky and kind of hard to read. Even bribing people to use search doesn’t make people use it.

This post doesn’t really have any logical merit to it, I’m just wondering why it isn’t better? Well it is from Microsoft so maybe that answers the question…

Has anyone heard Yahoo!’s new radio spot? (Here’s their release from a few weeks ago)

Its kind of good/ really desparate. I’ve heard some statistics (mostly from ad reps) that radio is the #1 place for URL recall, but more importantly, why am I going to change something that I am perfectly happy with because of a radio spot. Microsoft tried bribing users and that didn’t work, so what makes Yahoo! think this will work.  

As someone who spends quite a bit of their time learning and studying search engines and their results, its interesting to note that Yahoo really does deliver lower quality results in general. It sometimes shows websites that haven’t been updated in months/years and often brings you to sites that are just overloading themselves with keywords, gaming the system. Google is by no means perfect, and I think Yahoo could make itself better if it focused, but for now they seem lost - as their ads imply you will be on Google.

My take on the Yahoo/Microsoft deal remains the same. It was a very good deal for Microsoft, and I believe ultimately would have been a good thing for consumers. Microsoft needs to come up with some new technologies to keep their brand relevant in the long term, and purchasing all of Yahoo’s was an easy way to do that.

What I am afraid of now is a Google/Yahoo relationship. If Yahoo hands Google the reins to the second largest search engine, then what happens? Microsoft online becomes irrelevant (live.com might as well be now), and as a marketer I know have little choice where to spend my search marketing dollars. If Google is controlling Yahoo’s search budget, that essentially makes them irrelevant as well. So now Google essentially controls the entire search market and they can do whatever they want.

I don’t really know what this means, but it doesn’t sound good to me. Now Jerry Yang says Yahoo wants to focus on display ads. Did he forget that Google just completed its integration with DoubleClick and Tim Armstrong wants “to have advertisers load their entire ad budgets into Google’s system, which would allocate spending across media whether online or offline.” Judging by how well Google has dominated the search market and stolen millions of users from yahoo.com to gmail.com, I would be concerned if I was Yahoo.

Google already controls enough of the internet, and if they control Yahoo’s search advertising they will essentially be drinking Yahoo’s milkshake.

How do large search networks gain their local insight into the real world? Syndication of content from various internet providers, yellowpages, superpages, ultrapages, all kinds of pages. But mostly, out of date pages. Businesses that no longer exist, phone numbers that are no longer valid and addresses that have changed.

How can I the local consumer place my trust in these large companies having up to date, local information on what I am looking for? That is an excellent question, and one that I as a local business man, believe is a question that these jumbo portals don’t have the right answer to.

Smaller, local search companies can monetize their wealth of small business information by expanding paid syndication through these larger outlets. Building a better database of small and local businesses is what these local companies do, and is exactly what they can do for these larger national and international portals.

In these new days of local search, and local information, more and more small business are transitioning their marketing and their budgets online. As this market grows, more information will be available online, and search engines in particular will hold a lot of power over this information. So how can the consumer get the best information infront of them as quickly as possible? Rely on locally based portals who actually operate in the cities they represent.

If there were a way to capitalize on the huge power and reach of these large portals, by incorporating the value of this local information together in a Search Engine Friendly site, giving searching consumers quick and easy access to up to date, accurate and relevant information, this new model would be very valuable indeed.

Now if only I knew someone who could code like a champion…