Judging from the intellectually stimulating discussion I had with 30+ alternative search engines at the recent AltSearchEngines-sponsored meet-up in San Francisco, there is no question that a renaissance of innovation is coming from the Alts. Many founders of Alts seem to be motivated by the idea that “they can do it better than Google.” This is a great motivation during the stealth-R&D phase. But when it comes time to go to market and get site traffic, we at UpTake believe the Alts should follow this maxim, inspired by Madonna’s classic “Material Girl“:

“Living in a Google World

Some Alts kiss me, some Alts hug me

I think they’re o.k.

If they don’t give me proper traffic

I just walk away”

link to album image: http://www.madonna.com/bin/galImg/siteFiles/4820374586.

So Alts, don’t kiss and hug me with your advanced technology and buzzwords. Just deliver the goods: traffic!

Four Tips on how you can better live in a Google World

We at UpTake (formerly known as Kango), know that we are living in a Google world. As an AltSearchEngine, that means you need to play by the rules Google has set for the game, if you want to be found, and you want to compete. Here are four tips on how you can get more traffic in a Google World:

TIP ONE: Focus on crafting rich “search engine results pages” (SERPs) that look like category pages, not SERPs.

Does Google index Yahoo! and MSN SERP pages? Enough said. They have been crystal clear on this point: they don’t want to index your SERP pages either! So the solution is to provide rich, crawlable landing pages that don’t look like SERP pages. Here’s how we did it for San Francisco Hotels and Things to Do in New York. In addition to the typical search engine “blue links”, we added images, copy, and other useful information for our users. Focus on looking like Amazon or another e-commerce player that has successfully indexed pages in Google.

TIP TWO: Provide a browseable catalog that is organized in some sort of semantically logical fashion, so that other crawlers can crawl your site!

Chances are your search engine doesn’t create easily crawlable pages. This is not unique to search engines; it is also the problem of most dynamically generated Websites like e-commerce sites. Solve this problem by creating an accessible “browse-tree” [sitemap] of your pages, categorized in a semantically logical fashion. For example, we organize by states like Florida and New York, and cities like Orlando and Chicago. We also created category pages like Lodging and Things to Do. Don’t do a laundry list of alphabetically organized deep searches. Instead, look to e-commerce sites in your vertical to see how to organize your browse tree. Hint: just using a sitemap.xml is not enough!

TIP THREE: Get lots of links to your site! Be willing to talk about things that are interesting but not focused on your search engine.

We set out to create a great travel search application. But then we discovered that in order to rank in Google you need lots of inbound links! One of our founders applied his snarky sense of humor toward this with a satire “what if Google had to design for Google“. Then it got Sphunn. Then it got Dugg 4822 times! Then Battelle mentioned it. This blog post was our most popular, and most linked to post in the company’s history.

TIP FOUR: Have original content.

Have original content. One way to do that is simple-blogging. It may be strange to think that a SearchEngine should have a blog, but it should. A blog is an excellent way of putting your personality on the web, and attracting new customers through a more traditional method: subscription and word of mouth. Also Google will not crawl pages of content that are not original. If you are just displaying web content from other Websites (just like Google), Google will not want to show more intermediate navigational pages beyond their own SERPs. They want to actually take users to the rich content they seek. Therefore, you must also create rich content that address the keywords that people are using in order to attract them to your search engine through ranking on Google search results.

Summary

To be successful as an Alt these days, not only do you need a great search experience with unique technology, but also pursue a lot of other traffic strategies not really related to building that search experience to attract customers. Google has defined the rules. Our policy at UpTake is to learn them, love them, and give ourselves a great shot at success by living well in the Google world!