week 8

In this weeks blog I will be assessing search engines and where hmv.com appears for particular searches. The most popular search engine on the web is arguably google. This will be the main engine i will use.

Obviously if i search for HMV with google the results will display hmv.com at the top of the list. The highlighed link at the very top is a sponsored link, which means hmv.com pay google for this ad to appear there. Below this sponsored link begins the list of results returned from the search, hmv.com at the top again.

search results

This search is quite specific which is fine if the website address isn’t known. If however some one is searching for a product that hmv sell, say dvd’s, this changes the search results quite a bit.

If i searched for dvds for instance, which is where hmv.com generates a lot of its revenue, the first sponsored link is to one of its main competitors, zavvi.co.uk. Forgetting about the sponsored links and looking through the results, hmv.com doesnt appear in the 1st three pages. By this point i had lost interest looking for it. Most user would probably only look as far as the 2nd page at a push. In the first page alone both hmv’s main competitors, zavvi.co.uk and play.com, appear. These findings are almost exactly the same when “cds” and “games consoles” are searched for on google. Though with these last two searches hmv.com doesn’t even appear as a sponsored link.

When searching with various other engines, yahoo and ask.com, hmv appears again as a sponsored link but is not returned as a result in the 1st three pages. This prob doesnt effect hmv.com too much as they are sponsoring their links but if for some reason this was prevetned they would struggle to be recognised a head of their competitors when customers are searching for general goods which aren’t exclusive to hmv.