Monthly Archives: August 2005

Deep Thoughts from the Googleplex

First published August 18, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It was one year ago that I wrote my first Search Insider column. I remember that by the fact that I wrote about the San Jose Search Engine Strategies Show and now here I am, back in San Jose, going for my semi-regular search marketing total body immersion. Thank goodness this only happens occasionally. It can do strange things to one’s perspective to spend four days with thousands of people who live, breathe, and eat search. Compare this to my other life, where my wife is still not exactly sure what I do for a living.

For those of us privileged to live on the inside of this industry, we gain a glimpse into a fantastic and highly illogical world. It’s a world where empires can grow from mere ideas overnight and where vast territories can disappear just as quickly. Intellectual capital is the currency here, and it can be redeemed only through the acceptance of the masses. The winners in our world are the ones that pull the gem of an idea, nurture it into life, and find it picked up by the world. It’s like throwing little bits of our soul at the public, and hoping one of them sticks.

Case in point: Google. While here in San Jose, I had the opportunity to visit the new Googleplex in Mountain View. I walked through the immense complex (on the morning after the Google Dance, so I was still bleary-eyed) and joined my host for a hot breakfast in Google’s gourmet cafeteria, one of many places to grab a meal. I was surrounded by impossibly young, blue jean- and t-shirt-clad Googlites (Googlians?) that were all searching for the next big idea that will resonate with the public. They bellied up to the counter for a custom-made omelet or fruit smoothie, and then gathered around tables to start discussing the future, built in their terms. As my host said, this was the kingdom of the engineers, and Google is still very much an engineer-driven company.

In our world, this is as close to Camelot as it gets. Our society has switched paradigms. Many of us no longer look to our governments or spiritual organizations to make the world a better place. We’ve put our faith in the raw power of ideas. And if we happen to make a few billion in the process, so be it. Empires like Google no longer need assembly lines or oil wells, smelting plants, or factories to grow and prosper. All you need is people with bright ideas.

It was a telling note that my host told me that the new Google campus was in fact the old Silicon Graphics headquarters. As technology passes on, a new king has come to occupy the castle. The old guard has passed the torch to the new. He acknowledged the irony and said, “Hopefully we’ll be able to stay here awhile.” Meanwhile, the engineers downed their omelets and smoothies, blissfully unaware of the fact that, more often than not, history is doomed to repeat itself.

As I took in the sheer immensity of the complex, with all its high-tech touches and iconic lava lamps, I couldn’t help but think that all this came from one single idea. And it’s not even that defensible an idea. The Google Empire has been built from a clever thought, a shard of the souls of Mr. Page and Mr. Brin that has lodged in our collective bosoms. By making “Googling” a verb, they have built an enormous company. And they’ve done it in seven years. Yet no one seems aware of how ephemeral this all is. The phrase “Castle in the sky” couldn’t help but come to mind.

I felt torn between the father in me and the self-acknowledged tech geek. Part of me loves the idea of a world built on sheer intellectual horsepower. I am excited by the constantly shifting challenges and the persistent question: “What’s the next big idea? Who could be the next Google?” As I often say, working in this industry is like dancing on quicksand. But the dad in me says: “Be careful. This could all come crashing down tomorrow.”

Murthy vs. the Goliaths: The Power of Search at Work

First published August 9th in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the good old days, online was the place where David could beat Goliath. It was the forum where success was decided not just by market cap or the size of your advertising budget, but by nimble strategies and just plain chutzpah. It was the place where the little guy could triumph and slam one in the face of the corporate behemoths. But those days are over, right?

Not quite, at least not in the legal field.

As part of a client project, I was using Hitwise to determine who the category leader was in law firms. Who was grabbing the biggest slice of the potential 100 million visitor-per-month pie? After sorting through record search sites like Intelius, people finders like US Search and directory sites like Lawyers.com, I started looking for those huge firms that you would expect to find on top. Here are the usual suspects:

Baker & McKenzie: 3,246 attorneys, 69 offices around the world
Jones Day: 1,822 Attorneys, 29 offices around the world
Skadden: 1,822 Attorneys, 22 offices around the world
Latham & Watkins: 1,627 Attorneys, 22 offices around the world

(The information on the firms comes from the Internet Legal Research Group and the firm’s own sites.)

And the winner was….

The Law Office of Sheela Murthy.

Who?

Murthy.com is the official online home for a small immigration law firm based in Owings Mill, Md. There are just nine attorneys in an office that’s probably smaller than the executive washroom at Baker and McKenzie. Yet, Ms. Murthy is kicking the big guys around the online block. And we’re not talking a slight edge in traffic. According to Hitwise’s market share report, Murthy.com captures 10 times the market share of these four huge firms combined.

I must admit, I was a little skeptical at first. So, I tried some quick checks on Alexa. Sure enough, the small firm from Owings Mill was decimating the big guys when it came to generating Internet traffic.

Frankly, I’m at a bit of a loss to explain this. The only explanation must be that the big guys don’t really care. This is surprising, considering that well over a million people searched for some kind of lawyer on the Yahoo! network in May. And that’s just on Yahoo! Google’s numbers would easily double this. That’s a minimum of 5 million potential clients up for grab every month, and the four largest firms in the United States haven’t even optimized their title tags. You guessed it. Just the name of the firm shows in every case!

As search marketers, we often assume that the whole world knows about the power of search. Sometimes, it takes a blatant example like this to make us realize that a large part of the world is still waking up to the new reality of online marketing. And, as long as the giants are sleeping, there’s still the opportunity for the Sheela Murthy’s of the world to eat their lunch.

Come on, admit it: Aren’t you going to be just a little bit sorry when those days are gone?

The Separation of Church and State in Search

First published August 3, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The people at the major search engines like to talk a lot about the separation of church and state. They use the historical reference to explain the unbreachable divide between their organic listings and the sponsored ones, and the departments that govern each. It represents some ethical buffer zone between the two sides of search.

The History of Church and State

The reference goes back to Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. constitution. It began when “a wall of separation between church and state” was entrenched in the first amendment to the constitution by restricting Congress from passing laws respecting the establishment or prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

In looking at search’s use of the term, a more relevant comparison is the adoption of the term by the newspaper and journalism industry, where it described the division between the editorial and the advertising departments. The idea was that budgets spent on advertising shouldn’t have any influence over the journalistic integrity of the reporters. They should be free to pursue the story without fear of the impact it might have on advertising revenues. Good in theory, but of course, theory often breaks down in the real world.

Church and State Online

Church versus state is often a fiercely guarded concept by the keepers of the editorial content. They cite it often, and usually passionately. Search (especially Google) is no exception. The term is mentioned often when the thorny issue of organic optimization is raised. I heard Google co-founder Larry Page quoted once as saying, “If it’s good for search engine optimization, it’s bad for the user.” The whole church versus state dilemma is at the root of search’s bipolar relationship with search marketing practitioners. They love our money, but hate the fact that we want our clients to appear in the prime section of the search results page, the top three or four organic listings.

As in most things, I find this is all a matter of perspective. Search engines have their perspective, as do advertisers and the agencies that represent them in search. For a different view, let’s look at it from the user’s perspective.

Do Users Separate Sponsored and Algorithmic Search?

When we turn to a newspaper, we can do so with a number of intentions. We can be looking for news, sports scores, the latest weather, how our stock did, or perhaps we just want to do the crossword puzzle. When we find a story that catches our interest, we spend some time on that page and may see an ad that happens to be adjacent to the story. Chances are the relevancy of the advertising message to the news story we were reading is minimal. It’s more a matter of positioning and happenstance than anything. If I’m Charles Schwab and I consistently buy an ad on the stock report page, that’s about as far as my contextual targeting will go.

But what if I could tell when someone was going to the paper to look for the latest share price on one particular stock, and I placed my ad, highly targeted to that stock, right next to the stock price? Is this maintaining the idealistic standard of separating church and state? According to ConsumerReports, Ralph Nader, and many others, the answer is a resounding no!

When we do a search, we’re looking for relevant results. The search engines use the same criteria to serve both organic and sponsored results: keyword relevancy. And the results are presented on the same piece of real estate, the search engine results page. In fact, as we confirmed in our eye-tracking study, the search engines are happy to use our natural scanning behavior to ensure that sponsored ads are placed in the most prominent section of the page. Other than a small label identifying the results as being paid, there is little to distinguish the two results.

Maybe Some SEO Is Good, Mr. Page…

It seems to me that the search engines want to have their cake and eat it too. When it suits them, they’re more than happy to blur the lines between algorithmic content and paid content, using the same rules and real estate to present both. But as soon as a marketer tries to use this “hot zone” created by the engines themselves to effectively market, the search engines cry foul.

I am fully aware that there is a thriving industry that tries to constantly beat the algorithms. I, as a user, am frustrated with the pollution of results by affiliates and other aggressive marketers who use spam tactics to push garbage sites up the ranks. As a user, I want the search engines to do anything they can to clean up black-hat spam.

But the fact is, there are organic optimizers that are doing the search engines a huge favor. We have several clients that are recognized leaders in their industry. They have thousands of pages of useful content that searchers should be able to find. But, for various reasons, they aren’t in that “Golden Triangle” for the right terms. It may be that no one has tried to find out what the right terms are, or it could be a missing title tag, or site architecture that confuses the spiders, or one of a hundred other technical reasons. We’re helping Google, Yahoo!, and MSN do their jobs more effectively. Yet, as soon as I sit down at a table with a representative from an engine and the conversation turns to organic optimization, it turns awkward and within a minute I’m guaranteed to hear the words “separation of church and state.”

The fact is, despite the intentions of Thomas Jefferson, church has never been successfully separated completely from state. The real world lives somewhere in between.