I attended the launch of “Gold Sift – Leveraging Online and Search Engine Marketing”, a book authored by Mosaic Services Founder Vikas Malhotra, and published by Exchange4Media yesterday. The panel discussion on “Internet in India - the role of search” was moderated by Rajesh Lalwani, Founder of Blogworks, and the following are some comments based on his Q&A:
Speaking on trends, Vikas Malhotra mentioned that search will differentiate into various subsets, go local, and expand it’s ambit to include more of what he called the invisible web. He also mentioned that search will also be a machine driven, database-to-database phenomenon by 2010…
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO of Info Edge feels that search is an indicator of intent, and monetizes services like emails, which one can’t charge for anymore. The fact that online advertising prices are going high means that demand is increasing.
Alok Mittal, Executive Director of Canaan Partners made an interesting point about how RSS aggregation, though still in its infancy, can impact models, since it offers higher relevance; the current business models will not last, though he’s also not too bullish on human driven search. People consume much less information on the mobile, and hence mobile search has to be different. Responding to my question on viability of multiple search engines being developed, he said that of the 200 there, 20 will survive: advertisers will make decisions on spends, from among these.
Advertisers and media planners are trying to understand search and Internet, added Anurag Batra, Editor-in-Chief of Exchange4Media, but most of it is still tokenism.
Dinesh Wadhawan, MD & CEO of Indiatimes added that once you have content, you need search. Search has relevancy built into the system, and it will move to other domains like IPTV. The issue is, that for a query, you need 10 results, not 10 million.
Niti Batra, Founder & Director of travelotravel.com pointed out that search marketing is not as intrusive as banner ads, and search engine optimization is not effective in building a brand, search is more efficent than spends on outdoors.
A biryani shop in Delhi puts up an ad on search every evening at around 6pm, with a landing page with home delivery numbers listed, said Sidharth Rao, CEO of Webchutney; that’s what search has done – 85 percent of Google’s clients are small advertisers. What worries clients, however, is that search often throws up results from disgruntled customers, which affect purchase decisions. Clients’ obsession for rich media content is reducing – they’re looking for more search friendly content.