Member Article

A search engine for all seasons?

Google recently launched its own flight search service (www.google.com/flights), enabling travellers to search for cheap air fares (and spawning a thousand bad ‘takeoff’ and ‘touchdown’ puns). The move follows its purchase of flight data company ITA software just under six months ago.

At present the service is only available for a selection of cities in the US. But if successful, the search giant will no doubt seek to roll it out globally. In a blog post announcing the services’ launch, Google said: “this is just an early look: the takeoff not the final destination.” (Groans all round for the puns…)

For air travellers this could make it a lot easier in the future to find airline schedules quickly and book cheap flights. Online travel agencies are less happy, because the new search only links direct to airline booking websites.

Narrowing the search for relevance

But what does it mean for your business? Well, unless you’re involved in the travel industry, very little. But it may be seen as a further indication of how in the future web users may be able to select a ‘micro’ search engine relevant to a specific industry in order to get more relevant and up to date results. This is already happening to a degree, with Google and other search engines enabling users to search specifically for ‘shopping’.

In the next 10 years it may well be possible for consumers to simply click on a tab labelled ‘used cars’, ‘furniture’ or ‘taxis’ to find what they want in a much more streamlined manner. And when that is the case, the businesses that succeed online will be those who have ensured that their websites are properly optimised to provide the greatest relevance to their target customers.

Everything the search engines do is aimed at returning the most relevant results to web users, right down to their geographical location. With this in mind, the best way to ensure that your business is listed near the top is to follow suit. Hire an SEO copywriter and do the same.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .