Digitally Refreshing

I visited Information-Revolution.org with all the excitement of surfing in the nineties, only to be disappointed at the end result. At first glance I thought that some company had spent a great deal of cash creating a ‘revolutionary’ ad campaign (as seen on the television and all over the tubes) for the sake of pointing out that people use Google quite a lot.It’s an interesting idea, if web users request information through one source, that source could manipulate said information to their advantage. Interested, I read on.

After the propaganda style intro text (which you had to irritatingly scroll through within an iFrame) I was drawn the ‘alternate search engine’ area. Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo were listed – in that order. Ask was selected by default – but I’ll get to that.

Through further research via semi-hidden links at the bottom of the page I found out that it is, in fact, Ask who is behind the site. Then it dawned on me, it’s not that they’re want an information revolution, rather they want a larger piece of the search engine market.

How saddened I was. Probably more irritated that I had allowed myself to be taken in by just another ad campaign.

I’m not going to review the effectiveness of the search engine here, you can look elsewhere for that. But I would like to say that this attempt at changing the way people use the web has got to be one of the most ineffective campaigns out there. I would love to peer over the shoulders of Ask’s marketing department to see the actual ROI of this exercise.

I know people who don’t even know they are using Google to visit websites, Through my experience with user testing I’ve seen many people actually type URLs into Google’s search field to visit sites. They are not even aware of the ‘address‘ bar in their browser. If Ask want people to use their search engine to find information they are going to have to move far, far away form the subversive marketing strategies they employ today.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Marketing, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.