Dear Bill Gates.You did it. You
casually left a live grenade at the Grand Charity
Gala and walked out of the room to see if anybody,
especially Google, will notice.
Once again, you have created an innovation in
marketing that is poised to take the world by
storm. What I love about it is how you have just
tossed it out into the public for all to see,
and yet nobody seems to be noticing it.
Flitting from forum to forum, everyone is talking
about your new MSN beta search engine ( http://beta.search.msn.com/
), but nobody seems to have discovered the secret
marketing bomb you left ticking there.
Google sure was clever with its PageRank gimmick.
In fairness, PageRank is not just a gimmick, but
it was marketed as much more than it is -- the
big ka-boom that sets Google apart, despite being
only a small part of its algorithm.
But your ka-boom will be bigger. You have actually
given searchers like me control over my own rankings.
While other search engines are talking about "personalized
search", you've given us the levers to incrementally
change rankings in searches themselves.
You are probably aware that webmasters are kicking
the tires on your new search engine to see how
high they rank. Those who are more adventuresome
or who earn their living understanding (or trying
to understand) search engines are taking some
of your special features for a spin. Most of those
features are fairly mundane. Like "links to" (although
it might just be the most comprehensive listing
on the Internet – hint to webmasters) and "language".
But what's this at the very bottom, almost falling
off my screen?
Results Ranking.
Hey, this is cool. I can control the results myself.
I can give more weight to recently-updated sites,
which is great when I am following a breaking
story (After the America's Cup, I do not want
to find all the pre-race predictions, for example.).
Or I can weight the results in favor of static
pages if I am trying to find again the health
information I had read last time my daughter broke
out in blue and green splotches all over her body.
And you let me decide whether to weigh heavily
exact matches, if I know exactly what
I am looking for, or approximate matches if I
know only that the itchy splotches come from some
rare Polar virus transmitted by stampeding trans-Atlantic
penguins.
I even get to choose to boost rankings for popular
sites or, if I'm feeling like a rebel, for less
popular sites. Yes, you have even appealed to
my deepest psychological mood swings. This is
really cool.
But what really counts is this: I control MSN!
I can just imagine the TV ads you have already
planned: The ad character (a student, a construction
worker, a nurse?) says, "Move over Bill Gates,
I'm in charge now." The voiceover says, "Search
MSN" PageRank will taste like yesterday's chewing
gum.
I decided to find out if I really do control MSN,
using one of my client sites. I chose Dotcom-Monitor
Web Site Monitoring ( http://www.dotcom-monitor.com
) and the search term "website monitoring". As
I write, the site sits at #3 for that search term.
I turbo charged the popularity lever to 100%.
Whoa. Dotcom-Monitor lost a spot. What does that
mean? Somebody who does not rank as highly as
my client got a boost by weighing link popularity
higher (and, by extension, on-page content lower).
This tells me that my client's on-page content
is in good shape. It also tells me which competitor
has the best backlinks to check out.
PageRank was an effective gimmick for wrapping
webmasters and SEO consultants around Google's
fingers. But this results ranking thingy could
wrap both the public and webmasters around MSN's
fingers.
Just one word of advice, Bill. Results Ranking?
Is that the catchiest moniker you could give it?
Bill, you are to be congratulated for devising
such a clever marketing tool, and for purposefully
leaving it right out in the open like a live grenade
without even a hint that it is there. That is
what you did, isn't it? You did do it on purpose,
didn't you?
If not, please let me know, so I can send you
my invoice for your next great marketing idea.
