Search engines differing results presents opportunities.

This article in Information Week was very interesting regarding how search engines have very different results. Many people who do search marketing have seen in the past that many of the search engines were very much the same in their results. The reason that happened is that they all had similar relationships and some were borrowing results from other search engines. As a result, you didn't have to optimize content for so many different outlets. Now that is begun to change and we as search marketers must look at the many different ways that online marketing has to be approached. Clearly as a result of the differences in search algorithms from the different engines, it means that content in different web sites has to be search friendly on several different levels. No longer can one assume that good content will be pretty much the same across different search engines. That is just not true anymore. There are enough differences now that a web site must create valid content for a number of different avenues in ways they never had to before.
One of the things that the article talks about is meta search engines like Dogpile. As I stated in previous postings in the past, these meta search engines will probably become more important as variant results continue. It only makes sense that one would go to a place where they could get all the variant results on one page. Because there's enough differentiation in the search engine results page, it means that search engines themselves more or less become a commodity which can be repackaged and resold. It's not unlike any other product out there that becomes a commodity. I believe search results are becoming a commodity that people can use to their own advantage. Of course, search engines will always have revenue because of their advertising, but the natural search results will seem to have the various changes from one to another. So advertising could stay the same across many search engines because that has nothing to do with content, but who wants to pay the most for that spot. It doesn't have much to do with content other than someone editing it for general relevancy.

I think it's a positive step for everyone that search engines all have very different results. Who wants to get the same results across different search engines? So that's why the meta search results are going to be more important than ever. To aggregate those varying results into one place will be a powerful tool for the future.

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