Does Internet Search Results Benefit People?

When you do a search on a product or service you might require, you get a lot of companies sites that offer them, but are you sure that the search engines picked the right ones for you? The search engines use elaborate and secretive algorithm to calculate just that, but after careful analysis, you’ll see that the companies that come up in your search results are mostly the ones that pay a hefty premium to the search engines, and not necessarily the ones that are most beneficial to the consumer or searcher.

To ensure we understand what is most beneficial, I will take a few criteria that I think people are looking for in a service or product they search for.

• Price
• Quality
• Customer Service
• Location Proximity
• Popularity and past history

Most people who are searching for a product or service will like to see the companies that come up have the best prices, provide good quality work and customer service. In addition, for some products and services, the close proximity of the provider is important, and for some it’s irrelevant. You need a plumber in your proximity to take care of your plumbing problem at home, but you don’t care where the item you are buying is shipped from. It can be purchased and shipped from anywhere if it’s what you want and the price is good.

Popularity of the site and its past customer satisfaction history is important and makes you feel that you are dealing with a reputable company and trust can be established quicker.

But here’s the dilemma. Can search engines check and compare the prices of all the sites and bring up the lowest prices for you? Highly impossible for now. Unlike eBay that can sort the results with lowest price, the search engines don’t have the luxury of fixed format and fixed prices of eBay. Ebay has a database fixed field that includes the price, either fixed or highest bid price at that time, but the websites that offer products and services on the web do not follow a fixed format and the search engines cannot scan and compare all of them and show you the lowest prices. The same goes for the quality and customer service. The engines have no way of comparing apples to apples and determine the quality, or customer service provided by that company.

The only one criterion that remains is the popularity of the site and its past history. The popularity is definitely one of the criteria that the search engines put a lot of emphasis on. They have lots of ways of checking the popularity of a site, but some of the ways they are using gets convoluted by themselves. If you search for, let’s say, a Sony MP3 Player, you get 18.6 million results. The problem is that you now have to click on every site that offers this product and determine the lowest cost, quality and customer service. It is proven that you do not go to page 173 and click on those companies, so you click on the companies on the first, second or maybe third page. By clicking on those, the search engines record the clicks and then determine that these companies should be shown on the top pages. That’s the convolution I was talking about. A company that shows up on the 173rd page might offer a brand new, in-the-box product that is cheaper than everyone else, but you never see them, and since you didn’t click on them, their page status will not be increased in the future.

Is that good for the consumer and searchers? No it’s not and until we get there technologically, we, the people need to be diligent and find the right companies that fit our criteria. Take for example, two companies that offer online printing. Vistaprint.com and WYMPrint.com. I compared their prices on ten different print collaterals; WYMPRINT came first with 3 to 34% less in price. The customer service is superb, and the quality of the material and print is much better than material purchased abroad. But can this company compete with millions of dollars advertising budget of the big corporation? When we do search for postcards or business cards, do we get a chance to see companies that provide better value for us such as WYMPrint.com?

The only way to get around this search engine inadequacy is to tell everyone about the sites or companies you found and are happy with, and also write about them anywhere you can. There are many companies out there which sell their products and services online, but they still treat their customers like a local shop and not like robotic multi-million dollar corporations who are all about profit margins.

Remember, small business is the heart of our American economy and small business on the internet is the same as the small business in your home town. It drives the economy and deserves a chance.

By: Jason Fieldberg

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