Search Engine Shakeup

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