While doing my monthly review of the search terms that led people to our sites, I came to the same conclusion I’ve come to since the MSN search came out. People using MSN search are mostly newbie’s with little idea of how to search effectively. For example our most popular search term from MSN last month was “registry fixit” which sent us about 500 users looking to fix their windows registry (I assume). And every one of the top ten MSN search terms contained the words “fixit” like “Dell fixit”, “dell support fixit”, the word “fixit” itself and so on. As a result we’ve recently been inundated by people asking support questions about Windows and Dell PC’s, all because we have the word Fixit in our domain name, (which says something about the effectiveness of MSN’s search algorithm).
This all got me thinking. If the search terms we get are any indication of the majority of MSN users, then we can safely assume that most of them are not experienced searchers and that leads you to think perhaps they are using MSN because it was the default home page of the default web browser for Windows, (Internet Explorer). Considering the overall search statistics that put Google with a pretty decent lead over Yahoo which has a similar lead over MSN in third place, it seems self evident that as people become more experienced in search, they are switching to Google or Yahoo instead of sticking with MSN. So what can we conclude from all this? As it stands now, MSN search’s market share is directly tied into Internet Explorers. Firefox now has a conservative 8.6% of the worldwide browser market share, and growing month over month and Firefox uses a custom Google page as it’s home page. It will be interesting to see what the search engine statistics are when Firefox has 20-30% of the browser market. Fortune have just released an article describing the search battle from MSN’s perspective and it makes for fascinating reading. The only part I think is not underscored enough, is that Microsoft are not an innovator as much as they are a mass marketer and copier. Remember that Gates didn’t think the Internet would go anywhere either. Microsoft’s power is to make “good enough” software, and then integrate it with all their other “good enough” software and market the hell out if it with huge PR campaigns. To the best of my knowledge, they have yet to introduce any world changing innovation in their 20 plus years of existence. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) wasn’t their invention, neither were the spreadsheet, word processor, multitasking/multi-user operating systems, network infrastructure, the web, e-mail and so on. Microsoft are where they are because they can usually recognise when somebody else has innovated something and they jump on the bandwagon with much better marketing and usually take the best part of the market as a result. Search is something else they didn’t see the power of until it was already in someone else’s hand.
Oh, and for any MSN users looking for REGISTRY FIXIT, take a look near the bottom of the right hand menu. For people looking for help with Dell computers, you would be better off asking your question at the Dell community forum.
