Why SEOs Shouldn’t Ignore The Small Players in Search

As we noted in our previous article, personalization in the major search engines is changing the SERP landscape. Indeed, each individual is getting a search landscape uniquely shaped to meet their needs. Google is spending incredible amounts of money on research and development in order to bring relevant search results to its users. They have more or less bet the farm on socially directed, personalized search results. Some people find this to be a wonderful advance, and Google’s recent iteration for search on mobile — Google Now — is  the logical extension of this approach, and has found favor in many corners.

However, not everyone is quite so pleased with the direction search is moving. A significant proportion of users are none too happy with the enormous amount of personal information that it is necessary for Google to collect in order to provide their personalized services. In short, they don’t trust Google and the other search engines providers with the level of intimate detail that personalization requires.

Additionally, many users are complaining that personalized / social search is actually throwing up less relevant results, a situation which will hopefully improve as Google becomes more adept at processing semantic and social signals, but for the moment, it’s an annoyance for users. A third complaint we’re  hearing is that the new Google interface is far too cluttered; some users mourn for the old days of ten blue links that were the same for everyone.

While it’s unlikely that, in the short and medium term, Google’s dominance of the search market is likely to be threatened, in light of the present dissatisfaction, it behooves us to take a look at where disgruntled users are turning for their search needs.

DuckDuckGo bills itself as a search engine that puts privacy and presentation at that heart of its strategy. It doesn’t keep a search history and has no truck with personalization. Many users feel that DuckDuckGo does information presentation the right way, and although still small in comparison to Google it has picked up quite a momentum, increasing traffic by 227% in the last quarter of 2011. Some prominent voices have endorsed DDG as a way of reducing Google’s intrusion into their lives. A similar service, although somewhat less slick, is Gibiru, which offers “uncensored”  and anonymous search.

Blekko takes a slightly different tack, emphasizing spam-free curated search results, which are focused more on authoritative sources than incoming links as a quality filter. Blekko also adds a slashtag feature, with user and system curated search filters for subjects.

Whether these search engines eventually succeed, or go the way of Cuil, remains to be seen, but competition in the search space is a good thing, both offering choice and putting pressure on the bigger search engines to improve their product.