Haven’t test-driven it yet, but reviewing product features, it looks like PodZinger’s ability to use voice recognition to help users search for podcasts is state of the art.
It has more features than some competing engines.
Elsewhere: see SearchDay for my review of Danny Sullivan’s keynote from SES Chicago.
And taking up the issues of media concentration and Internet economies that made this site great in the first place, I follow up on Search Engine Watch forums in a thread that debates Jakob Nielsen’s provocative characterization of search engines as “leeches” extracting too much money from the companies that are “forced” to advertise on them. Of course, Jakob is arguing that you need to wean yourself off SE dependency, which isn’t a new argument, but is an important one to make nonetheless.
I think we can all agree: when average CPC’s go past $10, we’re all really going to love free search referrals. 🙂
It’s an interesting subject, because as we’ve alluded to a couple of times before, we have largely weaned this site off SE dependency. Returning users make up a larger percentage of visitors thanks to RSS, sort of similar to what used to happen when people used to pay attention to our email newsletters. It’s quite nice to see the return of traffic to Traffick, getting about as many visitors as a friend’s ecommerce site that sells $200,000 per year of consumer goods… but we’ll let you know when we’re raking in $200,000 a year on ads, so AOL can buy us. It looks like it may be quite some time before this happens. 😉
All kidding aside, though, the SE traffic to this site is absolutely vital to continued growth in recurring visits, as it is with most sites. Without that, we’d stagnate and visitation would drop off. That goes for just about any business you’re in. You can reduce SE dependency, but it’s still great traffic to grow on if you can get it.
Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.
In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.
