• Jakob Nielson Clueless About Search

  Filed under Uncategorized
  Jan 9

  I just finished reading Jakob Nielson’s article ‘Search Engines as Leeches on the Web’.

  First he says that search takes too much away from sites — which indicates to me he doesn’t get search at all. He states

  Paid search confiscates too much of a website’s value.

  Mr. Nielson, have you seen how much it costs to do other offline advertising promotions such as tradeshows, billboards, magazine ads and tv ads? PPC is a drop in the bucket comparitively. I can always bring leads in the door using web search for far far less than any of those, usually for about half the price per lead as any one of those other mediums combined. And that’s just with paid search. That says nothing about organic search positions, which can bring in hundreds or thousands of leads for next to nothing.

  When you’re in web usability, you watch how people use the web and make your web sites work within people’s set behavior. You don’t try to change how people use the web because that is futile.

  Nielson says nothing about the fact that people use search to find web sites and they probably will for some time. He says nothing about the fact that it is a defacto standard in many people’s minds. Instead of working with how people use the web, he seems to want to want businesses to get away from it to do other things.

  Now, I’ve always thought of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing as part of the “marketing” bucket. It is *part* of a bigger picture. Obviously Jakob believes that most people in the world don’t understand that concept, and that he needs to inform them of it. He states — and this just makes me laugh:

  In the long run, every time companies increase the value of their online businesses, they end up handing over all that added value to the search engines. Any gain is temporary; once competing sites improve their profit-per-visitor enough to increase their search bids, they’ll drive up everybody’s cost of traffic.

  Obviously Neilson doesn’t understand how to budget your money in a campaign in a way to best optimize your ROI. That may mean you bid on a top spot. It may mean you don’t bid on a top spot. All of advertising is like this from newspaper ads to tv spots. It is part of the game, and search is no different.

  And if you just inprove your web site enough to ‘hand over value to a search engine”, you didn’t improve your site at all. The name of the game has *always* been to make a web site people want to come back to, and if you’re just realizing that, Mr. Neilson, you’ve been paid too much.

One Response to “Jakob Nielson Clueless About Search”

1. 

   MatthewHSE said on January 10th, 2006 at 10:32 am

   On the whole, I agree with your analysis. But, I do see the point of this:

   > Recently, however, people have begun using search engines
   > as answer engines to directly access what they want — often
   > without truly engaging with the websites that provide (and
   > pay for) the services.

   I’ve done that myself quite frequently - there’s no point in visiting a site if you get what you need right from the SERPS. But I would say that’s the exception, not the rule, and every marketing plan has to account for “waste” like this anyway.

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