Why Search Engines Aren’t Media Monitoring Tools

Some Social Media  consultants will tell you “hey, just set up Google Alerts and do some occasional checking across search engines, it’s all you need!”. There’s two major flaws to this approach.

1. Regional Result Changes: Google, like other search engines, collects massive amounts of data constantly. To help manage this load, Google, among others, have data centres scattered around the world. If you try a search string in Atlantic Canada you will get different results from New England etc. This effect can be seen with Google Alerts for news and other data as well. The same impact is seen with Bing and Yahoo! While you may get some data, you’ll miss a lot more. Perhaps what is critical.

2. They Don’t Dig Deep: Yes, the search engines dig into a lot of content, but they miss a lot of newsgroups, Bulletin Boards, Usenet, .alt discussions and all of the Social Networks, such as Facebook Groups and Fan Pages. It’s these places where the deeper discussions about your brand, service or organization are often taking place. In fact 95% of the monitoring or “reputation management” solutions out there also miss this critical data.

3.The Context and Sentiment is Missed: Search engines just deliver results, they don’t care if it’s good or bad. That means a human resource needs to read, analyse and place into context all that information. Is that an effective use of time?

4. The Flow of the Conversation: It’s often to also understand the “flow”, “spread” and valleys of a conversation to gain perspective. Search engines don’t provide this. Neither do most reputation management solutions.

5. It’s Getting Too Local for Search Engines: With smart phone usage growing and increased free public Web access, the Web is becoming very local. As this trend continues, consumer search engines will face a challenge in keeping up. Alternative local search engines may help. But reputation management and online brand monitoring solutions have yet to catch up to small and local as well.

6. The Commercial Ecosystem Bias: That’s a fancy way of saying “search engines are more likely to deliver results in Social Media services from applications that they own.” For example, Microsoft owns Bing, and LiveJournal; if the content is “relevant enough” Bing will be biased towards LiveJournal to increase the chances of advertising click through on their ad network. In our analysis of Google, Bing and Yahoo! we found a 46% bias on the same search strings to deliver search providers ecosystem relevant content. We’re just sayin’.

In the end, we’re saying that doing the odd Google or Yahoo! search and not finding anything about yourself or your business is a dangerous way to approach understanding your reputation or leveraging a reputation management service. Food for thought. What do you think?

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Director)