• by Jim Meskauskas , March 24, 2005

Starting Monday afternoon and going well into Tuesday morning, the wires were hot with the news of Barry Diller's acquisition of AskJeeves for the price of nearly $2 billion. You all remember AskJeeves, don't you?

It's the search engine that in the late '90s made much of its natural language search tool. It was going to revolutionize search as we knew it then, which, admittedly, wasn't all that well. At the time AskJeeves came online in 1997, the online media industry was still very much in its infancy. And search marketing? Search marketing at the time largely consisted of buying keyword-triggered banners. Bill Gross' GoTo.com was still over a year away from launching the novel concept of cost-per-click keyword buys.

My, how far we have come.

Search marketing is now THE focal point of most mainstream media press regarding online advertising and it continues to be the darling of the trade press. Estimates of the amount advertisers will spend on search marketing alone have ranged between ¬1.4 billion for the European marketing in 2005 to some $3 billion spent on paid search in 2005 for the U.S. (This information is from VNU and a March 3, 2005 Business 2.0 article, respectively).

eMarketer's recent search report released in February predicts a 22.5 percent increase in search marketing spending for 2005. I think there might even be another report out there somewhere that predicts that search marketing will reach $1 gazillion by the end of the decade.

Needless to say, there is a great deal of ebullient press and conference speakers and PR personnel circling around search marketing. There is an unfettered enthusiasm that is in no small part fueling the drive towards all things search. And some of the data out there, like those mentioned, suggest there are reasons to be excited.

But just how much "search" is there to go around? When unfettered enthusiasm starts to look like irrational exuberance, it is time to take stock of the search marketing landscape, see how vast and wide it is spread, and ask ourselves, "are there enough audiences out there to inhabit this expanse?" Just how much searching are people going to do?

Well, for the time being, they are going to do A LOT of searching. By some accounts, there are over 1.5 billion searches a month on the Web. And as there are more things on the Web to look for, which there are every day, there will be more searching from those already searching, not to mention those who've never yet searched for anything then searching for something when they do finally come online.

But there is a point where search as a marketing device isn't going to go much further. Of the 1.5 billion or so searches going on now every month, how many of those are done against terms that are commercially exploitable? It might be an interesting thing for Aer Lingus to test out terms like "James Joyce" or "Adam's Curse," but how many kids doing their homework are good prospects for trips to Ireland?

The plethora of search tools is also something to consider. Just how many different places are people going to go to do their searching?

Barry Diller is a very smart man and has demonstrated time and again how his intelligence and acumen can be converted into successful businesses and fortunes beyond the dreams of Avarice and the coach of Vanity, which she pulls. His purchase of AskJeeves is another sign that Internet businesses have moved out of mainstream business' scornful stare and into its loving gaze. But let's temper some of that love with realism.

Why am I not as sanguine as most of my erstwhile compatriots in the online advertising industry, you might ask?

My answer is this: Do you know what the most searched term on AskJeeves is? According to Hitwise, it's "Google." The second most common query on Google is "Yahoo."

This could signify that people aren't satisfied in all cases with their results from one search engine so they go somewhere else to fill their needs. This would mean that there is plenty of room for all sizes and shapes and types of search tools and the market can grow far, far into the future.

But if, as a user of a search tool, you knew enough to decide whether the search engine you were at was inadequate to your needs, would you also be the type of person that would need to do a search for "Yahoo" on Google?