What does Google have in common with Archie & Jughead ?

 If I mentioned the names Archie, Veronica and Jughead what am I talking about?

Archie, Jughead, Veronica and crew

Now, before you answer cartoon characters let me add  vLib and Exite. Nothing?

How about Infoseek and AltaVista? All becoming clearer?

Yes, we’re talking about the original web search engines, extremely primitive at the beginning but improving at break-neck speed.

It wasn’t until 1996 that the all-conquering Google came into being and before we knew it, the contest was over.

There have been new additions, like Bing and MSN, but Google stands supreme. It’s even gone into the lexicon. “Hang on I’ll Google it.”

Google has an estimated 1,100,000,000 Unique Monthly Visitors leaving the next best search engine, Bing with 350,000,000 UMV in its wake.

But, believe it or not Google will soon be overtaken. Not by a traditional search engine but by Youtube.

YouTube processes more than 3 billion searches a month. 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute. It’s bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, Ask and AOL combined.

The clever people at Google saw this coming years ago, in fact they bought Youtube back in 2006 for $1.65 Billion, in hindsight, a steal.

But why are we turning to Youtube as a search engine? Well in simple terms, people are saying “I don’t want to read about it, Show me.”

Instead of wading through a sea of words when we want to research a new fridge or car, we want to see it in action, see how it works or how it performs.

Research tells us if a picture is worth a thousand words then a video is worth a million.

Websites are catching on and more and more feature a video on their landing page and further videos showing the history of the business, how it operates, and their products.

A video can present the human face of a business while viewers can assess the worth of a product without the hard sell.

A website without video is losing ground to its competition who have.

It’s a most cost effective way of staying ahead of the game and it’ll give your page a higher ranking on search engines, which is, I think, where we came in.

Graeme Goodings is a website video producer with Good Innings Media