MIAMI – When launching your own Web site it is important to know the difference between the various crawler-based search engines and the products and services that they provide.
Representatives from Yahoo, Google and PodZinger explained the differences in their services at the “Meet the Search Engines” session yesterday at the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo Latina ’06.
“Yahoo looks at text, title, description accuracy, source and unique document characteristics to analyze the relevancy of your site’s keywords,” said Peter Celeste, regional general manager at Yahoo Search and Search Marketing for the Americas.
Mr. Celeste said that with Yahoo, the higher the ranking the more clicks the page gets.
The top listings in paid search have 10 clicks, on average, and the top listings in organic search have 20 clicks on average. But to have the top listings in both will get your site 60 clicks on average, Mr. Celeste said.
Not only is Yahoo offering its everyday search, it is tapping into the collective knowledge of people around the world with Yahoo Answers. This service is to satisfy the market demand for knowledge. Today 30 percent of all Web search is social search.
Meanwhile, Google has different criteria.
“PageRank is the heart of Google’s software,” said Emerson Calegaretti, sales manager Google Brazil, Sao Paulo.
Like Yahoo, Google stands by the motto: the more clicks, the higher your rank. However, Google also takes into consideration what pages your site is linked to. If the sites you are linked to are important, then your ranking goes up.
For this, a site must be submitted to Google’s index so that it has a chance to be visible in Google’s results. Next, Google’s spiders crawl through the pages to deliver fresh content.
Companies using Google can even get detailed reports on search queries, allowing for pages to be more crawler-friendly.
“Google’s analytics allow you to improve your site and drive ROI with sophisticated analytics that are free and easy to use,” Mr. Calegaretti said.
PodZinger’s got a different twist.
“Audio and video search will soon be the new central organizing pipeline,” said Alex Laats, president of PodZinger, Cambridge, MA.
For the user, PodZinger makes audio and visual search easier. In addition, it does a quick skim of the text, making the results more relevant.
PodZinger allows content creators to be discovered and therefore make more money, Mr. Laats claimed.
Advertisers can benefit from PodZinger, too. Playback ads are more relevant, effective, trackable and they don’t go stale, Mr. Laats said.
