23 Musings

Good insight here into the rise of the meta search travel sites in the U.S.

I looked at some of these a while back, seems they could do with a new review which I'll get round to soon.

Interestingly, Pricegrabber.co.uk looks like it will be up for sale soon and Mike Butcher at Techcrunch has a good piece looking into a possible shake-out that may happen to UK sites.

In customer satisfaction it would seem.

JD Power has completed a survey of internet users looking at their satisfaction with various online services. In use of search, Dogpile has come top for the second year running with Google coming in second.

The study, now in its fourth year, examines consumer behavior, experiences and satisfaction of Internet service subscribers with the most frequently used online services. These include search engine/functions, web portal, instant messaging, social networking, music downloading services and online console gaming systems.

The search rankings are below:
Dogpile is a meta-search engine which scrapes all the major search providers and presents the results back to the user. This provides a one-stop search experience for it's users. Another factor that helps it is the companies limit they place on advertising next to the results. Paid search adverts are integrated into the results listings and mentioned as sponsored, this isn't particularly obvious so perhaps users just miss the fact that they click on ads.

I think a lot of this is down to misconception by users. I believe they probably think they are getting a better service as Dogpile promises to search all the best engines in one go. What the users probably don't notice is that the relevance suffers as a result of this. There can be pages and pages of similar results, many links to the same websites and definitely more advanced searchers won't get the same valuable results they would from Google. Could this be a case of lower numbers of users and less sophisticated users?

Dogpile beat Google on satisfaction, functionality, ease of use and results quality in the survey. I am going to trial Dogpile for a while to see if it could ever replace Google for me, I reckon it won't but am always willing to give something different a try.