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Top Ranking Search Engine

As the holiday season approaches every market is trying to be ranked number one in their field. Regardless of whether it is a store, a trader or even a search engine, no company wants to come in second. A recent survey at service wrap has given results as to which search engine is number one this Christmas season. Search engine ranking clients agreed that the 3 week period before Christmas 2005 was to be one of their most important sales periods. 75% of those polled declared that 26th December ? 5th January was to be even more important and 100% not surprisingly agreed that ranking top in their own individual fields, if even only for that period, was a number one goal. What is more surprising is that MSN, the leading search engine from the Microsoft network polled top as the number 1 search engine to rank highly in during both periods. With a narrow lead MSN, followed by Google and then Yahoo saw an earlier trend reported by service wrap some months ago not being bucked, which had Yahoo gaining great ground on Google.

The largest percentage believed that MSN, but only in the period of 26th December ? 5th January, would overtake both Google and Yahoo in popularity, through the eyes of consumer?s, only for Google to re-take the lead after this period. Frequent web users perhaps could not have failed to notice the massively increased visibility of MSN through online and offline advertising. Whether it is MSN banner advertisements in their Hotmail email service, the MSN Perfect Christmas Countdown Calendar or recent television advertising campaigns to launch their new search engine service in 2005, the search engine seems to have struck a chord with some online merchants, believing that it holds the real key to exposure over the Yuletide and New Year season.

The reason, on analysis, may however be simple, MSN has been somewhat ?in your face? for some time, TV commercials, online advertising etc etc. hitting hard to the consumer and re-branding its search. It would seem that other big hitters such as Yahoo and Google have not really been seen to do this as much, appearing perhaps only in the News sections of the media with another acquisition, take-over or alliance. No ?direct consumer? mass-market advertising seems to have been taking place, at least in the eyes of the research numbers. MSN it could be saidis perhaps taking a lead by demonstrating that it has a commitment to drive the mass-market to its search engine by advertising to the end-consumer.