Bing and Google are the twin gorillas in search engines, but did you know there are large search engines that come with a price-tag?
We’re not talking Robinson Crusoe plunking away on a coconut husk keyboard with a straw mouse pad – No, we’re referring to robust premium search engines, like Swiftype. You’ve probably never heard of that one, have you? That’s because it’s a fee-based search engine.
It may seem like a hard sell to convince a business owner to pay for a search engine, but it could prove to be a new trend and here’s why. Site owners can mine analytics that help a business owner determine not only what are “good” results, but also what is missing in those search results when a visitor lands on a business’s website. What need does the consumer have that you currently don’t offer in your shopping cart?
Are business owners ready to pay for search engines with more bells and whistles? It may prove challenging to move those folks onto these new platforms. Regardless of what new-fangled gadgets are in the pipeline, businesses will continue to need up-to-date data on their SEO.
Perhaps the biggest challenge with a paid search engine is convincing folks to shell out dough for something that currently costs an owner only electricity. (And even that may plunge in cost within the next 10 years, thanks to Google’s efforts to pump up wind power via large-scale projects supported by none other than Uncle Sam.)
Google now owns enough wind energy capacity to juice 170,000 households. If the search engine giant grows sustainable power as rapidly as websites have proliferated, the company’s mega-search engine just may save the world.
