SEO is the process of increasing the amount of traffic a website receives through a technical, analytical and creative process to increase improve the visibility of the website on search engines. It’s intended function is to drive as much unpaid traffic as possible to the website by placing it as high as possible on the list of results when a search is done.
The main players in the search engine game are Google, Bing and Yahoo, each with their own algorithms for ranking for websites. Each of them wanting for a piece of the 1.5 trillion searches per year pie.
So how do each of them try and lure the user onto their search platform?
- Googles search engine is more competent at displaying more relevant information when confronted with longer search queries.
- While google as a search engine is fantastic, it’s integration with the google platform as a whole, gmail, docs etc, presents the user with a very fluid and simple to use ecosystem. Google understand the importance of speed and by providing such an ecosystem they are able to make the user experience as a fast and efficient as possible. This in turn give the company an opportunity to show ads to users at a greater rate.
- Understand that search is about quality, not quantity and showing the user what is more important than showing more results
- Bing offers a very effective and high quality image search feature as well as making it more effective efficient when boarding the search criteria and the image criteria
- Video search is another bright point of Bing. The service presents the video results in a grid format showing thumbnails of the videos which show a preview of the video on mouse over. The videos can be watched through the search page without leaving Bing.
- Bing rewards is an initiative by google similar to a Cafe’s loyalty program. By using Bing enough Microsoft gives points that can be redeemed at a variety of stores.
- Bings social media integration, thanks to it’s association with Facebook and Twitter, allow the engine to produce results from trending news from social media in the news search results. This rewards social media interactions among companies.
- Yahoo offers Yahoo mail offers a standard service but is 100% encrypted while offering 1TB of cloud storage. They also offer a paid, ad-free service as a way to differentiate themselves from their competition
- Yahoo offers a messaging ecosystem which integrates messaging and call functions into their messaging application
- Yahoo has aimed at a more profession user with their offerings.
- Yahoo is still very much behind in the search engine game, however, as they still provide results based on the age of the link as a sign of authenticity over well established, quality links.
I personally use Bing because of the reward system they offer and I like free things. Which do you prefer?
Lachlans Digital Marketing Blog 
Interesting blog post about different search engines! never knew that Bing offer rewards when using it enough to be redeemed at several stores. I personally love using Google search engine even though there is no rewards, but I found that there are more quality information and trusted source out there. Also it is relevant to my search queries and quick just as when I need the information. But Bing strategy is quite interesting and I might start to look at it. I also wrote a blog about google Ads, maybe you can check it out too! https://thedigitalspace.home.blog/2019/05/12/google-adwords-should-we-be-bidding/
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Good information on the comparison of engines. How do you think smaller search engines should approach the space with a competing service?
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Hey thanks for the comment! Like we’ve seen with Bing, reward and incentives are a good way to get people to try your service but unless your search is up to the standard of google it’ll be hard to hold consumers. Google offers so much past simply search and has been making strides in ways to keep users on their site past the initial search that they are so far ahead in the market that a competitor will need to provide the same amount of value. Maybe a competitor will arise that can do just search better and start taking market share
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Good comparisons for how different search engines offer value to their users. I’m not sure how many companies can compete with Google on this, however. They’re so far ahead in the space and their name is synonymous with ‘Search Something’ that they’d have to make a monumental miss-step for their competitors to start taking any significant market share.
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I agree that they’d have to take a huge miss step for them to give their competition an edge. Maybe altering how their search ranks websites with regard to anti-consumer policies. They could definitely incorporate some of the benefits that Bing does for their website to stay further ahead and take the competitions best advantage away.
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I’m not sure of anyone who doesn’t use Google honestly. I read that these search engines pay big money to phone companies to have their search engine set as the default. Do you think people would really notice if their phone used bing etc rather than google for search?
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I never knew about Bing offering incentives and rewards either! I think it’s a great strategy, however it seems that they may need to promote this in a more far-reaching way as judging from the comments I’m not the only one who didn’t about it. Ive always used Google, I hadn’t considered trying a different search engine, however I might give Bing a try now after your comment about it being really good for high quality image searching.
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While they may not offer the same level of high quality search both their image and video search is second to none. On Google video search the only results you’ll find are links to Youtube videos. On Bing, however, the videos are sourced from an array of video sharing platforms that can all be viewed on the Bing search page and recommendations are provided based on the video currently being watched.
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