Is 2009 the Year Search Engine Marketing Changes?

It’s amazing how fast things are moving now. First there is the incredible volume of traffic and content that has moved and is moving to Facebook. Then Twitter took the world by storm and everyone now is scrambling to “Tweet.” Now we’re getting one new “search” engine after another. First there was http://www.cuil.com, then http://www.wolframalpha.com, then http://www.bing.com (Microsoft’s revamped and rebranded Live.com search), and in the last week we have http://www.hunch.com and two new engines, http://www.collecta.com and http://www.crowdeye.com. I’m probably missing a few, and it’s not even the end of June.

We now can search web pages, news sites, blogs, and social media sites. We can search Twitter, we can make decisions, we can search through indexed sites or we can search through the web in real time. We can search, decide, make hunches, compute knowledge, and who knows what else?

Google is still the undisputed king for search engine marketers, but all of these other options present potentially significant niche markets – each part of SEM’s long tail. Not all of them yet offer platforms for marketers to take advantage of their traffic, but it’s only a matter of time before one or more of them becomes successful enough to do so. The second half of 2009 should be interesting indeed.

As a full-service marketing communications agency, Domus is monitoring carefully the trends and announcements in internet usage, search, and marketing. All online marketers would be well advised to do so also.

Footnote: – After writing the above early this morning, I just found out about yet another entry. It’s http://www.search3.com.