My friend Dr. Jim Jansen from Penn State is flying in to meet with the gang at Enquiro today. I’m thrilled! Jim has been spending his time of late slicing and dicing a huge data set of a major search marketer. He’s found a number of interesting things, including behaviors that tend to call the concept of a search funnel into question, and also that “gender neutral” queries convert better than “male” or “female” ones. I did an extensive interview with Jim a few weeks ago, which resulted in three articles for Search Engine Land, some background on Jim, one on the Search Buying Funnel and one on this idea of Search “Sex” and Personalization. You can also read the complete transcript here on Out of My Gord.

For my money, Jim is one of the few academics doing really interesting and relevant research into search. I’m usually aghast at how far behind the profs teaching internet marketing are compared to their students. Jim has proven the exception by rolling both sleeves up and diving deep into mounds of campaign and click stream data.

It will also be good to share with Jim the results of some of the research we’ve been doing here at Enquiro. A number of our studies have highlighted some very interesting behaviors. Because I tend to view research with a decidedly qualitative bias, it would be good to get Jim’s quantitative slant on things.

It’s going to be a great day!