Search Engines Moving Too Fast?

In the race to the top, it appears that the search engines may be innovating too fast for their own good. It seems that these days, each engine is frantically rushing to add features, improve current operations or even completely re-invent itself. The updates are frequent, and often come at the cost of one of the most important aspects of search – real time access to data. Last week there was a day when I was unable to pull up-to-date reports from MSN, and could not log into Google AdWords.

The competition among the engines is fierce, both in terms of gaining share of searches and advertiser approval. This competition has driven a healthy environment that embraces updates and improvement of features and service. This is great for the advertisers and the consumer as it allows for better experience for both. However, the speed at which these features are being sent into the marketplace is a bit too fast for even the engines that are releasing the features to handle, leading to unnecessary problems.

MSN was set to release what was supposed to be a much more user friendly adCenter. It boasted of an easier to use interface and the ability to bulk download. However, when I logged in on Monday morning and it took an hour and a half to pull a simple week report. We were informed that there was a slight delay in the reporting, but it was expected to be repaired by the afternoon. It was not fully resolved until Thursday of that week. This was not the first major issue however, a few months earlier the engine had dropped all of the DMA-targeting for one of our accounts. Needless to say, this was quite a large issue, but was luckily caught and resolved quickly.

MSN is not the only engine experiencing difficulties, however.  It seems that Google has been subject to a number of bugs recently as well. Last week I was unable to use the keyword tool, reports would not run, and all of AdWords moved at a snail’s pace. Earlier a bug between our bid tool and the AdWords Editor resulted in URL updates to actually post as additional creatives. Big Problem. We are told that the problem should be resolved with the next release of AdWords.

It’s not only the Tier 1’s that are affected either. We launched a campaign on a Tier 2 last week only to find that the engine also did a complete site re-launch on the same day. A bug resulted in a user clicking on an ad only to have it appear in a pop-up window with no navigation. Again, we were told that the bug would be resolved shortly.

In the end, the enhanced features and the new marketing opportunities that the engines offer are greatly appreciated. However, it seems that as the engines are caught up in the race to ever improve, they may be losing sight of one of the more important feature of search – the opportunity to understand how the market is moving in real time. For large customers, these periods without access to that valuable data can cost thousands of dollars an hour.