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Category: Articles » Internet & Online Businesses » Webmasters » Article » Article Code

Dear Bill Gates, You Clever Fox

Dear Bill Gates. You did it. You casually left a live grenade at the Grand Charity Gala and walked out of the room to see if anybody, especially Google, will notice. Once again, you have created an innovation in marketing that is poised to take the world by storm. What I love about it is how you have just tossed it out into the public for all to see, and yet nobody seems to be noticing it. Flitting from forum to forum, everyone is talking about your new MSN beta search engine , but nobody seems to have ... read more

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Dear Bill Gates.

You did it. You casually left a live grenade at the Grand 
Charity Gala and walked out of the room to see if anybody, 
especially Google, will notice.

Once again, you have created an innovation in marketing that is 
poised to take the world by storm. What I love about it is how 
you have just tossed it out into the public for all to see, and 
yet nobody seems to be noticing it. 

Flitting from forum to forum, everyone is talking about your new 
<a href=http://beta.search.msn.com/>MSN beta search engine</a>, 
but nobody seems to have discovered the secret marketing bomb you 
left ticking there.

Google sure was clever with its PageRank gimmick. In fairness, 
PageRank is not just a gimmick, but it was marketed as much more 
than it is -- the big ka-boom that sets Google apart, despite 
being only a small part of its algorithm.

But your ka-boom will be bigger. You have actually given 
searchers like me control over my own rankings. While other 
search engines are talking about "personalized search", you've 
given us the levers to incrementally change rankings in searches 
themselves.

You are probably aware that webmasters are kicking the tires on 
your new search engine to see how high they rank. Those who are 
more adventuresome or who earn their living understanding (or 
trying to understand) search engines are taking some of your 
special features for a spin. Most of those features are fairly 
mundane. Like "links to" (although it might just be the most 
comprehensive listing on the Internet - hint to webmasters) and 
"language".

But what's this at the very bottom, almost falling off my screen?

Results Ranking.

Hey, this is cool. I can control the results myself. I can give 
more weight to recently-updated sites, which is great when I am 
following a breaking story (After the America's Cup, I do not 
want to find all the pre-race predictions, for example.). Or I 
can weight the results in favor of static pages if I am trying to 
find again the health information I had read last time my 
daughter broke out in blue and green splotches all over her body.

And you let me decide whether to weigh heavily exact matches, if 
I know exactly what I am looking for, or approximate matches if I 
know only that the itchy splotches come from some rare Polar 
virus transmitted by stampeding trans-Atlantic penguins.

I even get to choose to boost rankings for popular sites or, if 
I'm feeling like a rebel, for less popular sites. Yes, you have 
even appealed to my deepest psychological mood swings. This is 
really cool.

But what really counts is this: I control MSN!

I can just imagine the TV ads you have already planned: The ad 
character (a student, a construction worker, a nurse?) says, 
"Move over Bill Gates, I'm in charge now." The voiceover says, 
"Search MSN" PageRank will taste like yesterday's chewing gum.

I decided to find out if I really do control MSN, using 
one of my client sites. I chose <a href=http://www.dotcom-
monitor.com>Dotcom-Monitor Web Site Monitoring</a> and the search 
term "website monitoring". As I write, the site sits at #3 for 
that search term.

I turbo charged the popularity lever to 100%. Whoa. Dotcom-
Monitor lost a spot. What does that mean? Somebody who does not 
rank as highly as my client got a boost by weighing link 
popularity higher (and, by extension, on-page content lower). 

This tells me that my client's on-page content is in good shape. 
It also tells me which competitor has the best backlinks to check 
out.

PageRank was an effective gimmick for wrapping webmasters and SEO 
consultants around Google's fingers. But this results ranking 
thingy could wrap both the public and webmasters around MSN's 
fingers.

Just one word of advice, Bill. Results Ranking? Is that the 
catchiest moniker you could give it?

Bill, you are to be congratulated for devising such a clever 
marketing tool, and for purposefully leaving it right out in the 
open like a live grenade without even a hint that it is there. 
That is what you did, isn't it? You did do it on purpose, didn't 
you?

If not, please let me know, so I can send you my invoice for your 
next great marketing idea.

Author Bio:

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