Search Engine as a Powerful Marketing Engine

I was curious the other day to find out my long lost friend from college. It has been years that I lost in touch with her. I tried all means to contact her- through old friends, old phone numbers, old addresses, Emails, Common friends, College scrapbooks, Emails and every other means. I don’t think so!!!! I left the one big sea of information i.e. search engine. Yes and with a very little effort I found her.

Invention of Search Engines had led to a U-turn in the Internet usage. These search engines became synonyms to availability of structured data overthrown in a sea of information overload. This is the most sort after way to search, explore and zero down on required data. This data further can be used for a variety of purposes from gathering information, to researching, to finding consumer patters, to data analysis. There is a google wave which swept the internet and people famously ask “Did you google it” rather than “Did you search it in google”. The widespread usage of search engine has shifted the gears of information extraction to a large extent. Gone are the days where information search was permitted to libraries, schools, colleges or to Educational institutions. Now it is contained in the virtual pages of RSS feeds, Java Scripts, HTML web pages and a host of web applications. This contained information can thus be retrieved for our purpose within a click of a second. These search engines use iterative algorithms to process and produce the search data from millions of records.

Google, Baidu, MSN, Ask, BING, Yahoo, AOL ,Goodsearch and Yandex are the few of the lakhs of search engines available on the internet. Worlds most used search engine Google has taken the lion’s share in the market of search engines. Google’s extensive research and innovative driven searching techniques has made life easier. Search Engines on a bigger picture changed the perspective of information gathering. To make things even better search engines are equipped with:

• Filter bubble which are used in websites to selectively guess data a customer is seeking.
• Search Engines are also designed for making a predictive analysis. Most famously google.
• Search Engines are also provisioned for faith based search where certain data isbarred from search in conventionally religious countries in order to maintain the peace.

Thus to get exposed on a search engine is most sort after task for companies. In order to be the top of the search pages or top of information retrievals some companies exclusively employ social networking services which venture into search engine optimization techniques and tools to synchronize the search with companies/organizational results.Further to this search engines emerged as powerful marketing channel for the companies. Search Engines are used for:

•  Marketing services & products.
• Create awareness of the products/services.
• Helps expose the innovation or the product differentiation.
• Consciously spread socio-economic issues.
• Diffuses common man’s opinions which help organizations get consumer pattern.
• Helps Innovative marketing techniques.

Search Engine popularity gained an international degree of recognition in terms of most searched actors, most searched actress, most searched news etc.On a broader spectrum, I cannot revisit my life back to no-google days or rather no-search engine days. Each one of you reading this can honestly say that our first destination page in our computer would be a search engine homepage.

So on behalf of all the internet users a bow of admiration to the search engine inventors whose brain child is most dear to all of us.