So what do these information intensive industries do to take advantage of all their data rather than be flooded by it? There are industry specific software applications to tag and categorize documents and even cross reference emails with phone calls and court documents. There are also a few solutions from Google search for business, Google Mini, the Google Search Appliance and Google Site Search.

Internal and intranet relevant search results - The Google Search Appliance (GSA)

For a company intranet and internal network the Google’s search Appliance aggregates all data and indexes it for  relevant and familiar search results.  Their description states, “Search across websites, intranets, portals, fileshares, content management systems, and business applications to deliver true “universal” search for your organization.”  The ability to uniformly present data across all your internal resources, including multiple Sharepoint sites,  is something we’ve seen needed at several client locations.  The larger enterprise Google Search Appliance 6.0 can easily handle 1 million documents while the Google mini is marketed towards the firms with approximately 300,000 documents.

We’ll definitely hear more about corporate and company wide search in the future from industry specific vendor offerings as well as from some of the search giants like Google.  Information is coming from more and more diverse platforms, such as twitter, blogs and online publications, and the ability to present a unified search result of that data is essential for businesses to succeed.

With Google already dominating the search engine traffic at or over 60% of global search, this new Google search may be more bad news for Microsoft and their latest foray into search and online advertising, Bing.  Google is touting significantly faster indexing, increased database size and better search results.  As I mentioned in a previous post, Bing has secured a search partnership with Yahoo search and Yahoo marketing to run the background search technology for the popular web portal.  It seems Google is not resting on its laurels as the number 1 search provider and online marketing advertiser.  I don’t think anyone would expect to see Google lagging in technology competition and it appears they are not.  Not only is Google pushing the envelope on search and search marketing but they have also been busy working on online collaboration, document sharing and next generation social networking with Google Wave (we’ve previously tweeted about Google Wave).

Google Wave - Google enters social media, document sharing and collaboration.

So Google is still the leader in search and pushing hard to continue their dominate market share.  Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine to replace Microsoft Live, appears to be struggling a little although it still is technically in beta.  Bing is still having a significant number of posts in their online forum about issues with home pages or index.html (index.htm) not being indexed by the search engine spiders or bots.  Along with sites not being indexed, some sites that were ranked successfully, many for years, are being dropped from the index while still maintaining their high page ranks and search results on Yahoo and Google search.  Another issue facing Bing and their assault on Google is many pages that are indexed by Bing have meta robots entries for noindex and nofollow.  I’m sure these basic issues will be resolved as the Bing search engine evolves and emerges from Beta, but Google was, is and for the foreseeable future will remain the top search engine for users.  And with their new search engine, Google Caffeine, it appears everyone will be chasing them for a long time to come.  ;)

So, to most “normal” people who likely missed the news story entirely or saw it and said to themselves who cares, why does this matter. It matters if you are a small business owner because it may help you target new customers using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines. Online marketing is easily the most effective way to reach new customers, build your brand and generate leads for your business. Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo search together, though, only have about 30% of the search engine market. Google search has around 60% and everyone else combined makes up the last 10%. Google is quickly running away with ppc search engine advertising market on the Internet. As with any competition in the tech industry, the new push by Bing and Yahoo search should help bring new advances to Internet marketing and search advertising. In this case the benefits should come most significantly to the small business consumers who get the most from online advertising. If nothing else it should keep Google focused on providing the best tools, value and prices for it adwords search results PPC advertising.

There really is a better way to attract new customers to your business: online advertising and search engine listing placements. The great thing about the Internet, such as reading today’s news today, rather than waiting for the newspaper tomorrow to read today’s news. Just like the newspaper, your ad may be out of date before anyone sees it (if anyone does actually see it) in the phone book. What if you add a new service or product, or want to let people know about a new promotion? You can wait until next year to add it to your new yellow pages ad in the phone book. Or if you have an effective website using search engine optimization (seo) and online marketing campaign you can make changes which potential customers will see immediately.

It really is pretty amazing how easy it is to attract new business for your company by using the Internet rather than relying on traditional marketing channels such as the yellow page ads in your local phone book.