SEO Guru

The idea of doing something yourself if you want it done right doesn’t, we’ll admit, deserve to get tossed out the window. But there are smart ways to involve other people in certain projects, and your company’s marketing efforts may get a big boost if you decide to hold a related contest.

To launch its new search engine, Bing, Microsoft reportedly gave one advertising agency something in the neighborhood of $100 million. And in fairness to the value of professionalism, the resulting TV commercials no doubt reached a lot of people that the newest Bing promotion hasn’t.

Still, when Microsoft held a “Bing Jingle” contest - asking people to create songs about Bing - it received a fair amount of buzz, and now that the winner’s been declared, folks are really chattering away.

Jonathan Mann’s “Bing Goes the Internet” tune has won both fans and detractors (we’ll let you judge for yourselves which it deserves more). It tends to grab your attention and stick in your head, at least.

So consider holding a comparable contest of your own like sulumits retsambew SEO Contest. You might get a fantastic idea for free. If not, you can at least try to highlight something so odd that it’ll attract a lot of attention, anyway.

Google:
Right from the establishment in 1999, till date, Google is the most popular search engine on the net. Since its beta release, it has had phrase searching for NOT, it did not add an OR operation until Oct. 2000. In Dec. 2000, it added title searching. In June 2000 it announced a database of over 560 million pages, which grew to 4 billion by February 2004. Its biggest strength is its size and scope. Google includes PDF, DOC, PS and many other file type indexing. It also has additional databases in the form of Google Groups, News, Directory, etc.

Yahoo!:
Yahoo! is one of the best known and most popular internet portals. Originally just a subject directory, now Yahoo! is a search engine, directory and portal. It includes cached copies of pages and also includes links to the Yahoo! directory. It supports full Boolean searching, but it lacks in providing some advanced search features such as truncation. It indexes the first 500KB of a web page and link searches require inclusion of http://

MSN:
MSN Search is the search engine for the MSN portal site. For years it had used databases from other vendors including Inktomi, LookSmart, and Direct Hit. As of February 1, 2005, it began using its own, unique database including separate News, Images, and Local databases along with links into Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia content. Text ads are currently from Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions (formerly known as Overture). Its large and unique database, query building Search Builder and Boolean searching, cached copies of web pages including date cached and automatic local search options are its strengths. However, limited advanced features, inconsistent availability of truncation and no title search are its weaknesses.

Ask Jeeves / Teoma:
Debuting in spring 2001 and re-launching in April 2002, this new search engine has built its own database and offers some unique search features. It was bought by AskJeeves in September 2001. It lacks full Boolean and other advanced search features, but it has more recently expanded and improved its search capabilities and added an advanced search. While Teoma results can show up in three separate sections, there is only the one single database of indexed Web pages. It may also include paid ad results (from Google’s AdWords database) under the heading of ‘Sponsored Links.’ No additional databases or portal features are directly available. AskJeeves switched to Teoma instead of Direct Hit in January 2002 for the search engine results after its question and answer matches. Identifying Metasites and Refine feature to focus on web  communities are the strengths while a smaller database, no free URL submissions, no cached copies of pages are its weaknesses.