Barstool Racing and Search Engine Races

Barstool Racing, Bar Stool Racing, Bar Stool Races, and Search Engine Races

I admit that I had not heard of barstool racing before hearing a commercial on the radio for Ask.com. In the commercial, the woman speaking is in customer support and talks about how popular Ask is getting and that she is getting more emails. Then she reads one and her voice changes to that of a young man. Yeah, somewhat surreal.

Anyway, his letter is to say how awesome Ask is, because he told his friend about something called "barstool racing" and his friend bet that it didn't exist. When his friend did a search on "his" search engine, all he found was some links. When the young man searched in Ask, he found listings, photos, blogs, and other things.

In my search for "barstool racing" in MSN. Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask.com, Hotbot, Excite, Alltheweb, and SplatSearch.com, only SplatSearch failed to list www.barstoolracing.net is the first listing. Even SplatSearch had two listings for the search.

So does Ask really think their results are all that much better? After sucking for so many years and killing off the popular butler (The butler always did it for me...!), they suddenly seem to want our attention, but having a quality search product is not enough. No we have to endure misleading commercials like this one, garish and annoying ones like "Chicks with swords", and I think there was some other that I have successfully blocked from memory.

Ask may be succeeding, I don't know. All I can tell you is that I find their marketing either insulting or repulsive. They don't seem to realize that doing some more realistic and practical marketing would go much farther than what they are doing now. Getting people to try or switch search engines is easy, the hard thing would be getting them to stay. But if they have good results then that would not be that hard.

By the way, when are search engines going to start rotating their results? You and I both know that the same site as the top listing across all search engines is bogus. I'm sure that even for barstool racing there are several very good results that would deserve a turn in the top position, but for some reason, there is only room for one at the top. Until this changes, they will not best serve the needs of searchers or site owners, and will not help reduce the fight by everyone to be at the "top".

(hris