Do users really care that Terry Semel has left the building? Do they care that Jerry Yang and Susan Decker are the next net generation?

Do users really care that ebay has publicly stated that they won’t rely on Google Adwords with quite as much dependence having finished their ten day “test” and realized it’s a risk they can afford to take?

I doubt it.

There’s an interesting article today in Business Week regarding vertical or niche search.

And in watching everything that’s gone on recently regarding Yahoo, MSN, ebay and Google, my first thought was that Google was bullet-proof and had pretty much sewn the game up.

And by degrees I think that have. Not because it comes down to the shareholders or the SEMS or the SEOs. But because it comes down to the users.

It will take a quantum change in the way people use the Internet to change the way they search. It’s ultimately one of the reasons that Google bought YouTube, a more visual experience.

And then it occured to me that Google is about information, ebay is about commerce. I’ve said this time and time again, both are search engines. Google isn’t about commerce. Even as an advertising platform, it isn’t yet about commerce not when 1 in eight users click on organic results over paid results.

One offers a better shopping experience from start to finish. Users know that. And methinks, so too does ebay.

And that in and of itself might make a 10 day experiment just a little more interesting in the long run.

Have a good one.

~The (SEP) Guy

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