Google Search and Eddie Bauer Merchandise

We marketers continue to give Google ownership of our business. Are we getting the results we deserve? This example shows how far search engines have to go before they are doing an adequate job.

Try this Google search: eddie bauer jeans style # 5318. Which site shows up #1 out of 741 on November 12? Oh, it is The MineThatData Blog. And the person doing the search clicked-thru to my website.

Do you think the customer had my site in mind when s/he searched this phrase?

Eddie Bauer does win the paid search battle. Thing is, I've trained myself to not even look at the paid search results, so I didn't notice this fact until the third time I looked at the results.

As we continue to hand over a portion of our businesses to the folks at Google, Yahoo! and MSN, we need to hold them accountable for producing accurate search results. Or, we need to figure out how to make our website pages search friendly, so that this doesn't happen.