- Getting visibility in Google News will become a PR priority in 2004. Google News attracted 3.4 million unique users in July 2003, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. This ranked Google News in the top 20 current events and global news sites. Google News had 2.24 million unique visitors in August, according to comScore's Media Metrix, making it the 17th most popular general news site. In 2004, both Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix will report that Google News has climbed the charts to become one of the top 10 brands or channels in its category. Not bad for a little "beta" project that was launched in September 2002.
- Local search will explode in 2004. According to the Pew Internet Project, 63% of American adults now go online. That translates into approximately 126 million people. According to Pew, 88% of those with internet access use a search engine to find information. That translates into approximately 111 million people. This is why the cost per lead using search is $0.29 while the cost per lead using the Yellow Pages is $1.18, according to Safa Rashtchy, senior analyst at US Bancorp Piper Jaffray. As more and more marketers -- particularly at small and medium businesses -- discover this fact, they will shift a much larger share of their marketing dollars into local search.
- Paid inclusion will become a battleground in 2004. In January 2004, Yahoo is expected to replace Google with Inktomi to power its main search results. Inktomi has a paid inclusion program, which is being combined with the paid inclusion programs of AltaVista and FAST and will be sold by Overture through resellers like Marketleap and Position Technologies. In 2004, this will fuel an ongoing debate between Google, which does not support paid inclusion philosophically, and Yahoo, which does. Google will argue, "Our search results represent our editorial integrity, and we have no plans to alter our automated process, which works very well in gathering information and delivering highly relevant results." Yahoo will argue, "Paid inclusion maximizes your reach by including pages that otherwise might not be crawled." The debate will become heated and watched closely by Microsoft, which plans to build its own crawler-based search engine. The winner will be determined when Microsoft announces which approach it believes provides the most relevant results. This won't happen until late 2004 or early 2005.
Back
|
|
