Yesterday, while I was on Google searching for a keyword “translate”, I’ve realized that Google Translate was ranked first and it’s not under the “Sponsored Links”. I was curious and continued to make queries related to several Google services/products. Some of the keywords includes “mail”, “images”, “video”, “news”, “mobile” and “desktop”. Surprisingly, all of them are ranked first in the search results page except for “news” which was tailing closing behind CNN and BBC. I did the same for Yahoo! and I was pretty amazed that the United States search engine giant also put their own services/products at the top of the results. However, for Windows Live, it was totally a different case.
As I input the keyword “mail” in the search bar, I was thinking that the top result will be Hotmail (Microsoft’s Mail service) after trying out for both Google and Yahoo! which show Gmail and Yahoo Mail respectively. To my amazement, it was actually Mail.com and I wasn’t even expecting it to appear higher than its Hotmail. It was also the same for searches related to its other products.
Back to Google, its Google Video was ranked so much higher than YouTube for the keyword “video” even though the amount of traffic that YouTube attracts was at least few hundred or probably a thousand times more than the so-called unpopular Google Video.
From the above observations, I can conclude that both Google and Yahoo rank their products highly on their own search engines but Microsoft’s Windows Live does not do so. So why do the folks at the two most popular search engines in the United States does that. I can fully understand that not all of their services which they have “cheated” as maybe they are genuine because of the high amount of traffic it receives. The reason of why they resulted in this act is pretty clear. Of course, the engineers and technology experts want to make use of the highly searched keywords by Internet users to attract them to use their products because of the stiff competition between the giants.
On the other hand for Windows Live, I just can’t think of a reason of why the search engine doesn’t implements this idea. So what are your thoughts and opinions towards this situation? Post your comments below…