Orange Keeps Fighting Google in France<< Battelle on How Social Marketing Can Create Value for Consumers | Main | New Research: Over One Quarter of European Internet Users are Green Shoppers >> Nate Elliott | December 11, 2007, 11:03 AM In an announcement that slipped somewhat under the radar, Orange announced last week that they have upgraded their search engine. They've increased the size of their index, improved their response speed, added new features to their toolbar, and introduced desktop search. The problem, of course, is that all of these things are table stakes, rather than differentiators. And in a market where Google is crushing everyone (with nearly 90 percent search share, according to one firm), you need to differentiate, and fast. Not just from Google -- because according to the numbers above, stealing even two percentage points out of Google's huge share would double Orange's search traffic -- but also against the other also-ran search engines (which, in France, appear to include Yahoo and MSN) as well. My first big report of 2008 is going to be a review of consumer search behavior across Europe -- frequency of search, loyalty to search engines, opinions on the quality of organic results, usage of paid search links, use of speciality search, and more -- with a focus on helping MSN, and Yahoo, and Ask, and Orange, and everyone else compete with Google. Look for that near the end of January. |
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