Do Search Engines Really Need Games?
Internet marketing is a funny old thing. Social gaming company Sibblingz have announced that they are integrating their Happy Island application into Bing, alongside the pretence that anybody can play games where there is a large enough network of people.
Bing’s network is indeed getting larger, but isn’t the point of a search engine to supply searchers with information as quickly as possible, with the minimum of fuss? The Yahoo story is one we’d highlight – the amount of clutter on their page has inevitably weighed it down over the years and helped its users jump to its competitors’ sites.
But the Sibblingz idea seems to be different and will apparently offer a cloud-based form of gaming. Users won’t have to trudge through sign-up processes any more to access Happy Island, instead using their account to access the game across a range of platforms including Facebook, the iPhone and others.
The Bing version will have an exclusive mini-game, and the game’s conversion to the search engine took very little time because of Sibblingz’ experience programming games for cross-platform purposes.
If people visit Bing and get hooked on a couple of these mini-games whilst staying true to their regular searching behaviour, then Microsoft will be vindicated and it might start a new populace of those who want more from their search engines. If it doesn’t take off then it may look something of a poor move on Microsoft’s part.
Sibblingz think it’ll work, though. Ben Savage, chief executive said, “With this partnership, we’re really thinking outside the Facebook canvas.” Being pally with Facebook can’t be a bad thing, surely? Maybe Bing have found a niche that they can exploit to differentiate themselves from the competition.
The one thing that sits there, niggling at the back of our minds? We can’t ever imagine there being games plastered all over Google alongside a PPC management campaign. Can you?
