Do you use Google or MSN as your primary search engine? If yes, what would it take to get you to switch to Yahoo? This is the question Yahoo is trying to answer through a poll of their email users according to a story
late last week from CNET.
Incentives seem to be valued at approximately $5 per month and range from discounts on other Yahoo services to premium upgrades including ad-free email accounts. Michael Arrington considers this tactic a bribe while explaining the predicament search engines find themselves in trying to
peel users away from Google:
Getting people to switch is not easy. It can't just be about catching up, or being marginally better -- but about being so overwhelmingly better that people can't afford not to switch. Or, failing that, it's good enough and it has kickbacks.
Flashing back to the Internet party that was 1999, a search engine by the name of iWon.com took a similar approach but with higher stakes, giving away, "$10,000 every day, $1 million every month and $10 million on Tax Day" to site users who earned entries through search activity. They spent $40,000,000 in addition to the incentives to build awareness and traffic and actually managed to become a fairly popular site for a while.
iWon was acquired in 2005 by IAC as part of the Ask Jeeves deal and lives on to this day but never managed to provide a product close enough to what's provided by the major portals to make it portal choice a question of incentives. iWon.com's tag line played against the commodity status of search engines in with, "Why wouldn't you?" Of course, that was 1999, search was largely being ignored by Yahoo, MSN, and AOL, and
Google had just eight employees.
Jeremy Zawodny
tackles the commodity issue on his blog by explaining that it's what makes frequent flier miles such powerful incentives in air travel. He goes on to suggest that search may be returning to a commodity status:
You might not think that web search is a commodity service, but I've seen
public and private data that suggests we're headed that way. It was only a matter of time, right?
Will history repeat itself by search once again becoming the commodity is was perceived to be in 1999? With search playing such a vital role in how people use the web today, I have a hard time believing it will. If top search companies today are somehow lulled into believing that search is not the core driver of repeat traffic to their sites, the next Google will certainly be ready to step up to prove them wrong. TDavid offers
the best advice I've seen for Yahoo's marketing department:
Make your search the best.
It never hurts to be the best at what you do.
