The search engine landscape changed again last month when MSN dropped LookSmart as its technology source and switched to Inktomi.
Andrew Wetzler, president of MoreVisibility.com, a Boca Raton, FL-based search engine marketing firm and consultancy, discussed what that change means for direct marketers.
DIRECT: At press time, the MSN search engine is about to drop LookSmart as its power source and switch to Inktomi. How will that change things?
WETZLER: First of all, it will be hard for LookSmart. When MSN announced the change four months ago, LookSmart's stock plummeted. MSN represented about half of LookSmart's revenue.
DIRECT: How does LookSmart compare with Inktomi?
WETZLER: One difference is that any company that got results had to first go through a review process by a human editor to appear in the LookSmart directory. And LookSmart's database is much, much smaller than Inktomi's.
DIRECT: What difference does that make to a marketer?
WETZLER: If somebody did a search on MSN and the Web site had a LookSmart listing, there is a good chance that the company's site would appear as a first-page result on MSN. That's because LookSmart's universe of results was not that big. So for a marketer, it was a powerful channel to get results. With LookSmart, the likelihood of your getting great traffic and a great position is there. You can theoretically be on the first page when the search engine is powered by Inktomi, but you are in an ocean vs. a pond.
DIRECT: Let's say you do a search for “e-mail lists”…
WETZLER: You do a search for ‘e-mail lists’ and you get 14 LookSmart results, vs. 5.1 million results from Inktomi.
DIRECT: What should marketers do now?
WETZLER: Marketers need to make sure that they have a presence in Inktomi's database. They need to recognize the composition of a search result on any given engine and make sure that they have appropriate coverage in different places. People will still get traffic from Inktomi, but of the 5 million things in Inktomi's database, not that many are in there through paid inclusion.
DIRECT: But don't you get better placement by paying to be in there?
WETZLER: I don't know if you can say they give preferential treatment to people who pay, but I can describe how it works. Paid inclusion is when Inktomi spiders your Web site and you pay for each page they spider.
DIRECT: How do you place high?
WETZLER: You have to pay to be in Inktomi's paid-inclusion XML program, which charges the marketer on a click-by-click basis. This is a more aggressive model whereby the marketer feeds Inktomi keywords and descriptive text [like the text that will show up in the search results]. Inktomi charges you for every click that occurs.
DIRECT: What do they charge?
WETZLER: Inktomi charges different prices depending on the category. Pricing is related to the competitiveness of the keyword. The price ranges from about 15 cents per keyword to $1 per keyword.
