Search Engines v Comparison Websites in the Hotel Industry

Search engines such as Google are failing on 2 fronts: 1. They are failing users because they struggle to deliver high quality search results for people looking to purchase goods and services. 2. They are failing businesses because the pay-per-click advertising model is outdated; as a consequence a large part of a company's advertising budget is wasted. A new generation of comparison websites are emerging that give users a level of sophistication to searches for goods and services. They also use the pay-per-sale advertising model which improves efficiency for businesses. I will use the hotel industry to demonstrate these claims. BUSINESS-RELATED AND INFORMATION SEARCHES Google searches can be categorised into two types; information searches and business-related searches. Information searches Information searches don't normally end in a sale. They will have very few or no sponsored links in the search results. The results obtained are of a good quality and the user will usually find what they want within the first few sites viewed. This aspect of Google will not change. Google will always be excellent for information searches. Business-related searches Business-related searches are ones that usually end with a sale. They will have a large number of sponsored links in the results. The user can be overwhelmed by the number of relevant sites returned and spend a long time viewing each site to see which one has the cheapest prices. The results may be distorted by unscrupulous webmasters who have used underhand tricks to manipulate their site to the top of the list. ADWORDS AND SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) There are 2 ways in which a commercial website owner can get their web pages into the Google search results. The first is by bidding for "search keywords" in Google Adwords and appearing as a "sponsored link". The second is by performing search engine optimisation (SEO) on the website and hope that this will improve your position in the general search results. Adwords Adwords use the pay-per-click advertising model. Adwords can be an expensive way to market a website. Many companies will bid on the same "search keywords" pushing up the price. The company that bids the highest price will appear as the top sponsored link. The next highest bidder will appear as the second sponsored link, and so on. The pay-per-click model is far from perfect. There is "click fraud" where automated website software generate bogus clicks to run up large advertising bills. Just because a user clicks through it doesn't mean that they make a purchase. Quite often the click to sale ratio can be as low as 2-5%. SEO SEO can also be expensive. It takes time and requires specialised knowledge that does not come cheap when contracted in. SEO, when performed to the maximum requires that every word and every link on a page be analysed and positioned correctly. A large part of SEO is also in the effort in acquiring inbound links; links from other sites to your own. To obtain high quality links from high quality sites takes a huge amount of time if done properly. EXAMPLE: HOTEL INDUSTRY Taking the hotel booking industry as an example we can show the ineffectiveness of Google. If you are looking to book a hotel in Paris then you may type "Paris Hotels" into Google to see what websites are available. Users now know that they have a wide choice of sites when booking hotels and the rates can vary enormously between the hotel booking companies. The sponsored links returned with this search seem to offer the user a good choice of reputable hotel booking companies. What the user probably doesn't know or care is that the cost to the booking company from just clicking on one of these sponsored links is as much as