Online Public Relations Thoughts

This report is a lesson to me -- one I knew but forgot out of laziness. It reports that "only 3.6 percent of the No. 1 ranked non-sponsored search results were the same across all search engines for a given query, down from 7.0 percent in the July 2005 overlap study." In other words, use two search engines and get two results. In the early days of the internet, I used to pound this lesson home to readers, but along came Google and I got lazy. Google was good enough for much of what I was doing, so I began to use one search engine more often and then, always. Well, I'm back to using two search engines again with a red-tinged face.

It's not that I didn't have access to multiple search engines. Online-pr.com has 94 of them listed because I knew when I started the site 10 years ago that one had to look in multiple locations. I've always had the right solution. I chose the convenient path. So, it's back to what I was doing and should have kept doing all along.

I hope no one followed my bad example.