What is a search engine, anyway?
1st March, 2024
It’s easy to forget that there’s a landscape beyond Google, where SEO might still be relevant and worthwhile. Google’s 90% market share in most countries means that other search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo and Baidu barely get considered, and rarely get their own strategies and resources.
But as the landscape continues to shift and evolve, and as user behaviour shifts away from conventional search, it’s worth asking if we’re focusing in the right places.
An increasingly large share of users don’t go to a search engine when they want to pick a restaurant, learn how to change a tyre, buy artisanal homeware, get recommendations on laptops, or have questions about how mortgage repayments work. Instead, they turn to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other (often video-centric) platforms to find authentic, trustworthy, human recommendations and expertise – something Google’s search format has struggled to provide, even whilst they double down on EEAT and on promoting ‘discussion forum’ content.
And now those platforms are starting to look and behave increasingly like search engines – and the market is reacting. Strategies are changing, advertising budgets are shifting, and consumers are becoming customers in research and recommendation journeys that never involve a conventional search engine.
So understandably, there’s a lot of debate as to whether these are ‘search engines’. By extension, we might ask, is performing influencer marketing on TikTok, or improving the quality of your product photography on Etsy, a form of SEO?
Conversely, we’ve seen massive growth in the visibility of user-generated content from TikTok, Etsy, Amazon, LinkedIn, and others in Google’s search results. So we might well ask, is Google a search engine, if it’s just an index of TikTok videos and Reddit threads?
I don’t think it matters what we call these kinds of things. What’s important is that users search, and the results they see influence what happens next. That gives brands and influencers an opportunity to build awareness and preference, and maybe even to drive conversions. The tools, flows and systems may be different, but the same core principles of SEO apply. There’s an addressable audience with questions, and it’s up to us to help our content or clients to be visible and influential.
These changes might make “doing SEO” a lot more complicated in the coming years. We’ll certainly need to think about how we use SEO methodologies and content to influence, rather than to convert. Our opportunities in these new landscapes will tend to be ‘higher up the funnel’ than we’re used to, and we’ll need to adapt accordingly.
So how do we describe this new frontier and the challenges of optimising across multiple platforms and formats? I think all of this gets a lot easier if we just drop the word ‘engine’, and just focus on ‘search optimization’. People search, and it’s our job (and unique ability) to shape the experiences they have, wherever that may be.
