Author Archives: ghotchkiss

The Strength of Weak Ties and Search

First published August 2, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Mark Granovetter wrote a ground-breaking study in 1973 called the “The Strength of Weak Ties.” It later became one of the foundations for Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” I ran across Granovetter’s work and a later follow up study by Jonathan Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto (Frenzen, Nakamoto: “Structure, Cooperation and the Flow of Market Information,” The Journal of Consumer Research, December 1993) that further explored the fascinating world of word-of-mouth and how it spreads through networks. When we move this into an online paradigm, it has some thought-provoking implications.

No Network is an Island

First, let’s cover Granovetter’s work. In an oversimplified version, it states that social networks are not uniformly dense in their makeup. There are very densely linked nodes. These are families, circles of best friends, immediate co-workers and other very close relationships. These clusters, or islands, are then loosely linked by more fragile ties that span the clusters. They include formal acquaintances, lapsed or dormant friendships, more distant relationships and other “arm’s length” connections. These are Granovetter’s “weak ties.” For a viral spreading of information, we can assume that word will spread quickly within the tightly linked clusters, the “strong ties” — but for it to spread widely, it has to be passed through the “weak ties.” Otherwise, it will never spread outside a cluster. Thus the importance of these “weak ties” in the structure of the social network.

But there is another factor, and that is the cooperativeness of those “weak ties.” Are they motivated to pass on the information? In the words of Frenzen and Nakamoto: “Instead of an array of islands interconnected by a network of fixed bridges, the islands are interconnected by a web of “drawbridges” that are metaphorically raised and lowered by transmitters depending on the moral hazards imposed by the information transmitted by word of mouth.”

The Principles of “Passing it On”

Frenzen and Nakamoto’s study introduced two variables: value of information and moral hazard. In this case, they used the framework of an exclusive sale. The value of information varied with the size of the price discount. And the moral hazard was the scarcity of inventory available at this discounted price. So in the low value/low moral hazard version, it was a smaller discount (20%) and there was plenty of inventory available. There was no danger that close friends and family would “lose out” by sharing this information with a wider circle. In the high value/high moral hazard version, the discount was high (50-70%) and the number of items available at this price was very limited. A scarcity mentality was imposed.

Frenzen and Nakamoto also varied the structure of the network by assigning different “tie strengths” to the linkages within the group. The results were striking. In the low moral hazard scenario, where there was maximal cooperation to pass along information, everyone in a 100 member social network, composed of five loosely linked clusters, received the information in a maximum of seven time periods (the actual period used was not stated), even with a varying link strength of the network. In fact, in the strongest structure, everyone knew by the third time period. But in the high moral hazard situation, transfer of information was much slower and less effective. In the strongest structure, it took eight time periods for 100% spreading of the information. And in the weakest structure, even after 15 time periods, still only 66% of the group had received the information.

WOM Moved Online

So, what does this have to do with search? Simply this. The weak ties are now moving online. If we have great news or a great product story to share, we can now share this information on line. We can blog about it, post a comment or leave a review. But we’re most likely to do this when there’s low moral hazard. We pass information where there’s no “scarcity mentality.” So we’ll happily post about a great travel destination, a restaurant or a piece of software because by doing so, we’re not running the risk of losing out ourselves. We’re much less likely to blog about that exceptional deal on men’s suits at 70% off, when there’s only six suits left. That information is reserved for our closest friends. It only gets passed along through our strong ties.

There’s another factor at play here that was beyond the scope of Frenzen and Nakamoto’s study. We are motivated to pass on information online when it’s remarkable. Product or brand experiences have to earn the right to be passed on. As online mavens, we’re motivated by being “first to know” and by passing on value. Therefore, we carefully consider the trustworthiness of the information and its authenticity before we decide to share it. After all, we’re staking our reputation on it. Although these online posts become Granovetter’s “weak ties” online (because we usually don’t have strong personal relations with all the readers of our various online “footprints”) they only happen when the nature of the information bears passing along.

If we’re depending on the spread of word of mouth for our marketing, we have to start with some basic understanding of how the dynamics of the network works. All too often, we assume that everyone is like our best friend, eager to spread the word about our product or service. In the wired world, this would include leaving footprints online, through blog posts, comments and reviews. There, future customers can connect with them through search. But a successful viral campaign is largely dependent on those weak ties being motivated to pass along the information. It needs to be remarkable in some compelling way (i.e. Godin’s Purple Cow), it has to eliminate a scarcity mentality, it has to feel authentic and, to appeal to the mavens, it has to have the feel of news.

Breaking “Auction Order” Explained

One of the things that raised eyebrows in my interview with Diane Tang and Nick Fox was the following section regarding how Google determines which ads rank first and climb into the all important top sponsored locations:

Nick: Yes, it’s based on two things.  One is the primary element is the quality of the ad. The highest quality ads get shown on the top. The lower quality ads get shown on the right hand side. We block off the top ads from the top of the auction, if you really believe those are truly excellent ads…

Diane: It’s worth pointing out that we never break auction order…

Nick: One of the things that’s sacred here is making sure that the advertiser’s have the incentive. In an auction, you want to make sure that the folks who win the auction are the ones who actually did win the auction. You can’t give the prize away to the person who didn’t win the auction. The primary element in that function is the quality of the ad. Another element of function is what the advertiser’s going to pay for that ad. Which, in some ways, is also a measure of quality. We’ve seen that in most cases, where the advertiser’s willing to pay more, it’s more of a commercial topic. The query itself is more commercial, therefore users are more likely to be interested in ads. So we typically see that queries that have high revenue ads, ads that are likely to generate a lot of revenue for Google are also the queries where the ads are also most relevant to the user, so the user is more likely to be happy as well. So it’s those two factors that go into it. But it is a very high threshold. I don’t’ want to get into specific numbers, but the fraction of queries that actually show these promoted ads is very small.

This seemed a little odd to me in the interview and I made a note to ask further about that, but what can I say, I forgot and went on to other things. But when the article got posted on Searchengineland, Danny jumped on it at Sphinn

“Seriously? I mean, it’s not an auction. If it were an auction, highest amount would win. They break it all the time by factoring in clickrate, quality score, etc. Not saying that’s bad, but it’s not an auction.”

This reminded me to follow up with Nick and Diane. Diana Adair, on the Google PR team, responded with this clarification:

We wanted to follow up with you regarding your question below.  We wanted to clarify that we rank ads based on both quality score and by bid.  Auction order, therefore, is based on the combination of both of those factors.  So that means that it’s entirely possible that an ad with a lower bid could rank higher than an ad with a higher bid if the quality score for the less expensive ad is high enough.

So, it seems it’s the use of the word “auction” that’s throwing everyone off here. Google’s use of the term includes ad quality. The rest of the world thinks of an auction as somewhere where the highest bid (exclusively) determines the winner. Otherwise, like Danny said, “it’s not an auction”. So, with that interpretation, I then assume that Nick and Diane’s (which sounds vaguely like a title of a John Mellencamp song) comment means that Google won’t arbitrarily hijack these positions for other types of packages which may include presence on the SERP, as in the current Bourne Ultimatum promotion.

Interview with Google’s Nick Fox and Diane Tang on Ad Quality Scoring

I had the chance to talk to Nick Fox and Diane Tang from Google’s Ad Quality team about quality scoring and how it impacts the user experience. Excerpts from the article along with additional commentary will be in Friday’s Just Behave column, but here is the full transcript.

Gord: What I wanted to talk about a little bit was just how the  quality, particularly in the top sponsored ads, impacts user experience and talk a little about relevancy. Just to set the stage, one of the things I talked about at SES in Toronto was just the fact that as far as a Canadian user goes, because the Canadian Ad market isn’t as mature as the American one, we’re not seeing the same acceptance of those sponsored ads at the top.  Just because you’re not seeing the brands that you would expect to see for a lot of the queries. You’re not seeing a lot of trusted vendors in that space. They just have not adopted search the same way they have in the States.  What we’ve seen in some of our user studies is a greater tendency to avoid that real estate … or at least to quickly scan it and then move down.  So, that’s the angle I really want to take here.  Just how important it is ad quality and ad relevance to impacting that user experience and then also talking about one thing I’ve always noticed in the number of our user studies. Of all the engines, Google seems to be the most stringent on what it takes to be a qualified ad. To get promoted from the right rails to the top sponsored ads. So that sets a broad framework of what I wanted to talk about today.

Nick: Let me give you a quick overview of who I am and who Diane is and what we work on and then we’ll jump into the topics that you’ve raised.  So what Diane and I work on is called Ad Quality and it is essentially everything about how we decide which ads to show on Google and our partners and what they should look like, how much we charge for them and all those types of things. How the auction works…everything from soup to nuts.  If you ask us what our goal is…our goals is to make sure our users love our ads. If you ask Larry Page what our goal is…it’s to make our ads as good as our search results. So it’s a heavy focus on making sure that our users are happy and that our users are getting back what they want out of our ads.  We sort of think of ourselves as among the first that work on the average product for Google. We represent the user, to make sure the user is getting what they really need.  We’re very similar to what we do on the search quality side, making sure that search results are very good.

I think a lot of the things you’ve picked up on are very accurate. In terms of the focus on top ad quality..in general, the focus on quality..I think what you picked up on in your various  reports as well as the study in Canada are pretty accurate and pretty much what drives what we are working on here.  The big concern that I would have, the main motivation for why I think ad quality is important is as a company we need to make sure users continue to trust our ads.  If users don’t trust our ads, they will stop looking at the ads, and once they stop looking at the ads they’ll stop clicking on the ads and all is lost. So what we need to make sure we are doing in long run  is that the users believe that the ads will provide them what they are looking for and they will continue looking at the ads as valuable real estate and to continue to trust that.
So that is what we are going for. I think as we look at the competitors landscape as well, we see a lot of what you see. We certainly have historically, and continue to do so, have much more of a focus on the quality of the ads. Making sure we’re not doing things where we trade off the user experience against revenue. We all have the ability to show more ads or worse ads, but we take a very stringent approach, as you’ve noticed, to making sure we only show the best ads that we believe the user will actually get something out of. If the user’s not going to get something out of the ad, we don’t show the ad. Otherwise the user is going to be less likely to consider ads in the future.

Diane: It’s worth pointing out that basically what we’re saying is that we are taking a very long term view towards making sure our users are happy with our ads and it’s really about making them trust what we give them.

Gord: One thing I’ve noticed in all my conversations whether they’re with Marissa or Matt or you, the first thing that everyone always says at Google is the focus around the user experience. The fact that the user needs to walk away satisfied with their experience. When we’re talking about the search results page, that focuses very specifically on what we’ve called in our reports the “area of greatest promise”. That upper left orientation on the search results page and making sure that whatever is appearing in that area had better be the most relevant result possible for the user.  In conversations with other engines I hear things like balanced ecosystems and communities that include both users and advertisers. I’ve always been struck by the focus at Google and I’ve always been a strong believer that corporations need sacred cows, these untouchable driving principles that everyone can rally around.  Is that what we’re talking about here with Google?

Nick: I think it is.  I think it comes from the top and it comes from the roots. If we were doing a proposal to Larry and Sergey and Eric where we’re saying, “Hey, let’s show a bunch of low quality ads”  the first question they’re going to ask is “Is this the right thing for the user?”  And if the answer is no, we get kicked out of the room and that’s the end of conversation. So you get that from the top and it permeates all the way through. You hear it when you speak to Marissa and Matt and us. It permeates the conversations we have here as well.  It’s not just external when we talk about the user; it’s what the conversation is internally as well. It just exudes through the company because it’s just part of what we think. I wouldn’t say that there isn’t a focus on the advertiser too, it’s just that our belief is that the way you get that balance is by focusing on the user, and as long as the user’s happy, the user’s clicking on the ad, and as long as the user’s clicking on the ad, the advertiser’s getting leads and everything works. If you focus on the advertiser’s in the short term, maybe the advertisers will be happy in the short term, but in the long term that doesn’t work. That used to be a hard message to get across. It used to be the case that advertiser’s didn’t really get that. And one of the most rewarding things for me is that the advertisers see that, they get that. Some of the stuff we do in the world of ad quality is frustrating to advertisers because in some cases we’re preventing their ads from running in cases where they’d like it to run. We’ve seen that the advertiser community is actually more receptive to that recently because they understand why we’re doing it and they understand that in the long term, they’re benefiting from it as well. I think that you are seeing that there is a difference in approach between us and our competitors. That we believe the ecosystem thrives if you focus on the users first.

Gord: I’d like to focus on what, to me, what’s a pretty significant performance delta between right rail and top sponsored. We’ve seen the scan patterns put top sponsored directly in the primary scanning path of users where right rail is more of a side bar that may be considered after the primary results are scanned. With whatever you can share, can you tell me a little about what’s behind that promotion from right rail to top sponsored?

Nick: Yes, it’s based on two things.  One is the primary element is the quality of the ad. The highest quality ads get shown on the top. The lower quality ads get shown on the right hand side. We block off the top ads from the top of the auction, if you really believe those are truly excellent ads…

Diane: It’s worth pointing out that we never break auction order…

Nick: One of the things that’s sacred here is making sure that the advertiser’s have the incentive. In an auction, you want to make sure that the folks who win the auction are the ones who actually did win the auction. You can’t give the prize away to the person who didn’t win the auction. The primary element in that function is the quality of the ad. Another element of function is what the advertiser’s going to pay for that ad. Which, in some ways, is also a measure of quality. We’ve seen that in most cases, where the advertiser’s willing to pay more, it’s more of a commercial topic. The query itself is more commercial, therefore users are more likely to be interested in ads. So we typically see that queries that have high revenue ads, ads that are likely to generate a lot of revenue for Google are also the queries where the ads are also most relevant to the user, so the user is more likely to be happy as well. So it’s those two factors that go into it. But it is a very high threshold. I don’t’ want to get into specific numbers, but the fraction of queries that actually show these promoted ads is very small.

Gord: One thing we’ve noticed is, actually in an eye tracking study we did on Google China, there where the search market is far less mature, you very, very seldom see those ads being promoted to top sponsored. So I would imagine that that’s got to be a factor. Is the same threshold applied across all the markets or does it vary, does the quality threshold vary from market to market?

Nick:  I don’t want to get too much into the specifics of that kind of detail. We do certainly take an approach in market that we believe is most effective for that market. Handling everything at a global level doesn’t really make a lot of sense because in some cases you have micro markets that, or, in the case of China, a large market, where it makes sense to tailor our approach to what makes sense for that market…what users from that market are looking for, what the maturity of that market is. A market that has a different level of search quality, for example, it might make sense to take a different approach in how we think about ads as well. So that’s what I want to say there. But you’re right, in a market like China that’s less mature and at the early stage of it’s development, you do see fewer ads at the top of the page, there are just fewer ads there that we believe are good enough to show at the top of the page. Contrast that with a country like the U.S. or the U.K., where these markets are very mature and have the high quality ads we feel comfortable showing at the top, we show top ads.

Diane: But market maturity is just one area we look at. There’s also user sophistication with the internet and other key factors. We have to take all this into account to really decide what the approach is on a market basis.

Gord: One of the questions that always comes up every time I sit on a panel that has anything to do with quality scoring is what’s in an ad that might generate a click through is not necessarily what will generate a quality visitor when you carry it forward into conversion. For instance you can entice someone to click through but they may not convert and, of course, if you’re enticing them to click through you’re going to benefit from the quality scoring algorithm.  How do we correct that in the future?

Nick:  I think there are two things. One is, in general, an ad’s that’s being honest, and gets a high click rate from being honest,  is essentially a very relevant ad and therefore gets a high click through rate. We’ll typically see that that ad also has a high conversion rate. In cases where the advertiser’s not being dishonest, the high click through rate is generally correlated with a high conversion rate. And it’s simply because that ad is more relevant, it’s more relevant in terms of getting the user to click on that ad in the first place, it’s also more relevant in delivering what that user is looking for once they actually got to the landing page. So you see a good correlation there.

There are cases where advertisers can do things where they’re misleading in their ad text and create an incentive for a user to click on their ad and then not be able to deliver, so the advertiser could say “great deals on iPods” and then they sell iPod cases or something. In that case, the high click through rate is unlikely to be correlated with a high conversion rate because the users are going to be disappointed when they actually end up on the page. The good thing for us is that the conversion rate typically gets reflected in the amount that the advertiser’s actually willing to pay, so that’s one of the reasons why the advertiser’s bid is a relatively decent metric of the quality, for example in this ipod cases case, because that conversion rates likely to be low, the advertiser’s not likely to bid as much for that. The click just isn’t worth as much to them, therefore they’ll bid less and end up getting a lower rank as a result of that. So, in many cases, this doesn’t end up being a problem because that just sort of falls out of the ranking formula. It’s a little bit convoluted.

Gord: Just to restate it to make sure I’ve got it here. You’re saying that if somebody is being dishonest, ultimately the return they’re getting on that will dictate that they have to drop their bid amount, so it will correct itself. If they’re not getting the returns on the back end, they’re not going to pay the same on the front end and ultimately it will just find it will just find it’s proper place.

Nick: What an advertiser should probably be thinking most about is mostly ROI per click…it’s actually ROI per impression. From the ad that’s likely to generate the most value for the user, and therefore the most value to Google as well as the most value to the advertiser, all aligned in a very nice way, is the ad that’s the most likely to generate the most ROI per impression. And because of our ranking formula, those are the ads that are most likely to show up at the top of the auction. And the ones that aren’t fall out. So the advertiser should care click through rate, but they shouldn’t care about click through rate exclusively to the extent that that results in a low conversion rate and a low ROI per click for them.

Gord: We talked a little bit about ads being promoted to the top sponsored and over the past three or four years, you have experimented a little bit with the number of ads that you show up there. When we did our first eye tracking study, usually we didn’t see any more than two ads, and that increased to three shortly after. Have you found the right balance with what appears above organic results as far as sponsored results?

Diane: I would say that it’s one of those things where the user base is
constantly shifting, the market is constantly shifting. It’s something that we definitely reevaluate frequently. It was definitely a very thought through decision to move to three, and we show three actually very rarely. We seriously consider that when we show three, is it in the best interest for the user? There’s a lot of evaluation of the entire page at that point and not even just the ads, whether or not it was the right thing. We’re very careful to make sure that we’re constantly at the right balance. It’s definitely something that we look at.

Gord: One of the things we’ve noticed in our eye tracking studies is that there’s a tendency on the part of users to “break off” results in consideration sets and the magic number seems to be around four, so what we’ve seen is even if they’re open to looking at sponsored ads, they want to include at least the number one organic result as well, as kind of a baseline for reference. They want to be able to flip back and forth and say, “Okay, that’s the organic result, that how relevant I feel that is. If one of the sponsored ads is more relevant, than fine, I’ll click on it.” It seems like that’s a good number for the user to be able to concentrate on at one time, quickly and then make their decision based on that consideration set that would usually include one or two sponsored ads and at least one organic listing, and where the highest relevancy is. Does that match what you guys have found as well?

Nick: I don’t think we’ve looked at it in the way of consideration sets, along those lines. I think that’s consistent with the outcomes that we’ve had and maybe some of the thought process that lead us to our outcome. The net effect is the same outcome. One of the things that we are careful about is trying to make sure that you don’t want to create an experience where you show no organic results on the page, you know, or at least above the fold on the page. You want to make sure that the user is going to be able to make that decision, regarding what they want to click on and if you just serve the user with one type of result you’re not really helping the user make that type of decision. What we care more about is what the user sees in the above the fold real estate, not quite so much the full result. And probably relatively consistent on certain sets of screen resolutions.

Gord: One of the things that Marissa said when I talked to her a few days ago was that as Google moves into Universal Search results and we’re starting to see different types of results appear on the page, including in some cases images or videos, that opens the door to potentially looking at different presentations of advertising content as well. How does that impact your quality scoring and ultimately how does that impact the user?

Nick: We need to see. I don’t think we know yet. Ultimately it would be our team deciding whether to do that or not, so fortunately we don’t have to worry too much about hooking up the quality score because we would design a quality score that would make sense for it. The team that focuses on what we call Ad UI, that’s the team that’s looking at …it’s sub group within that, that’s the team that essentially thinks about what should the ads actually look like?

Diane: And what information can we present that’s most useful to the user?

Nick: So in some cases, that information may be an image, in some cases that information may be a video. We need to make sure in doing this that we’re not just showing video ads, because video happens to be catchy. We want to make sure that we’re showing video ads because the video is what actually contains the content that’s actually useful for the user. With Universal Search we found that video search results, for example, can contain that information, so it’s likely that their paid results set could be the same as well. Again, just as in text ads, we’d need to make sure that whatever we do there is user driven rather than anything else and that the users are actually happy with it. There would be a lot of user experimentation that would happen before anything was launched along those lines.

Diane: You can track our blogs as well. All of our experiments show up at some point there.

Gord: Right. Talking a little bit about personalization, you started off by saying that Larry and Sergey have dictated that the ads should be more relevant than the organic results in an ideal situation and just as a point of interest, in our second eye tracking study, when we looked at the success rate of click throughs as far as people actually clicking through to a site that appeared to deliver what they were looking for, for commercial tasks, it was in fact the top sponsored ads that had the highest average success rate of all the links on the page. When we’re looking at Personalization, one of the things that, again, Marissa said is we don’t want our organic results and our sponsored results to be too far out of sync. Although personalization is rolling out on the organic side right now, it would make sense, if that can significantly improve the relevancy to the user, for that to eventually fold into the sponsored results as well. So again, that might be something that would potentially impact quality scoring in the future, right?

Nick: Yes. So we have been looking at some.. I’m not sure if the right word is personalization or some sort of user based or task based…what the right word is..changes to how we think about ads. We have made changes to try to get a sense of what the user’s trying to do right now. Whether they’re, for example, in a commercial mind set and alter how we do ads somewhat based on that type of an understanding of the user’s current task. We’ve done much less with trying to..we’ve done nothing really…with trying to build profiles of the user and trying to understand who the user is and whether the user is a man or woman or a 45 year old or a 25 year old. We haven’t seen that that’s particularly useful for us. You don’t want to personalize users into a corner, you don’t want to create a profile of them that’s not actually reflective of whom they are. We don’t want to freak the user out. If you have a qualified user you could risk alienating that user. So we’ve been very hesitant to move in that direction and in general, we think that there’s a lot more we can that doesn’t require profiles down that path.

Diane: You can think of personalization in a couple of different ways, right? It can manifest itself in regards to the results you actually show. It can also be more about how many ads or even the presentation of those ads with regards to actual information. Those sorts of things. There are many possible directions that can be more fruitful than, like Nick points out, profiling.

Gord: Right, right.

Nick: For example, one of the things that you could theoretically do is, as you know, we changed the background color of our top ads from blue to yellow, because we found that yellow works better in general. You might find that for certain users, green is better, you might find that for certain users, blue is actually better. Those types of things, where you’re able to change things based on what users are responding to, is more appealing to us than these broad user classification types of things. It seems somewhat sketchy.

Gord: It was funny. Just before those interview, I was actually talking to Michael Ferguson at Ask.com and one of the things he mentioned that I thought was quite interesting was a different take on personalization. It may get to the point where it’s not just using personalization for the sake of disambiguating intent and improving relevancy, it might actually be using personalization to present results or advertising messages in the form that’s most preferred by the user. So some may prefer video ads. Some may prefer text ads and they may prefer shorter text ads or longer text ads. And I just thought that that was really interesting. Looking at personalization to actually customize how the results are being presented to you. In what format.

Nick: Yes.

Gord. One last question. You’ve talked before about quality scoring and how it impacts two different things. Whether it’s the minimum bid price or whether it’s actually position on the page. And the fact that there’s more factors, generally, in the “softer” or “fuzzier” minimum bid algorithm than there is in the “hard” algorithm that determines position on the page. And ideally you would like to see more factors included in all of it. Where is Google at on that line right now?

Nick: There are probably two things. One is that when setting the minimum bid, we have much less information available to us. We don’t know what the specific query is that the user issued. We don’t know what time of day it is. We know very little about the context of what the user is actually trying to do. We don’t know what property that user’s on. There’s a whole lot that we don’t know. What we need to do when we set a minimum bid is much coarser. We just need to be able to say, what do we think this keyword is, what do we think the quality of the ad is, does the keyword meet the objective of the landing page and make a judgment based on that. But we don’t have the ability to be more nuanced in terms of actually taking into account the context of how the ad is likely to actually show up. There’s always going to be a difference in terms of what we can actually use when we set the minimum bid versus what we use at auction time to set the position. The other piece of it though is there are certain pieces that only affect the minimum bid. Let me give you an example. Landing page quality normally impacts the minimum bid but it doesn’t impact your ranking. The reason for that is mostly from the standpoint of our decision to launch the product and what we thought was the most expedient way to improve the landing page quality of our ads rather than what we think will be the long term design of the system. So I’d expect things like that, where signals like landing page quality should impact not only the minimum CPC but also rank which ads show at the top of the page and things like that as well. That’s where you’ll see more convergence. But there’s always going to be context that we can get at query time to use for the auction than we can for minimum CPC.

Don’t Put Search on Your Site if it Sucks

I just spent 15 minutes wrestling with the internal search tool on AdWeek trying to track down an article. I had the title, what the article was about and the month it ran and still I was unable to track it down. I was getting hundreds of results, supposedly ranked by relevance, and I was unable to filter it down. Then, I searched on Google, with just the name of the article and of the publication and bang, got it in 0.03 seconds. I don’t know how much AdWeek spent for their enterprise search tool but it was too much.

Search Engines Innovate, Why Not SEMs?

First published July 26, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The future of search has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve just done a series of interviews with some of the top influencers and observers in the space — Marissa Mayer, Danny Sullivan, Greg Sterling, Michael Ferguson, Steven Marder, Jakob Nielsen and others — talking about what the search results page may look like in 2010. I’ll try to corral this into a white paper this fall. I’ve also chatted with a few people about the future of search marketing. And here’s the sum of it all. “Hang on, because you ain’t seen nothing yet!”

Change is the Constant

I have remarked to a number of people in the last week or two that I’ve seen more change in the past six months in the search results page than I have in the last 10 years. And all my interviewees seem to agree: We’re just at the beginning of that change. Whether its personalization, universal results, Web 2.0 functionality or mobile, our search experience is about to change drastically. Search will become more relevant, more functional, more ubiquitous and more integrated. It will come with us (via our mobile devices) more often and in more useful ways. It will expand our entertainment options. It will change forever our local shopping trips. And it will all happen quickly.

As Search Goes, So Goes SEM

The question is, what does this do for search marketing? In a recent conversation, I was asked where the major innovation in the search marketing space was coming from. This was prefaced by the remark that when a well-known industry analyst was asked the same question, they (I’ll keep the gender neutral, as there really aren’t that many industry analysts out there) said there was almost no innovation coming from search marketers. They were “living off the fat.” My first inclination was to jump to the defense of the industry, but this proved harder than I thought.

I realized I haven’t seen a lot of innovation lately. Certainly, the engines themselves are innovating. And I’m seeing innovation in adjacent areas (Web analytics, competitive intelligence). But I’m not seeing a lot happen in the search-marketing space. After a raft of proprietary bid management tools hit a few years ago, there’s been little happening to move the industry forward. In fact, I’ve noticed a lot of SEM heads buried in the sand. We are not encouraging change; we are actively fighting it.

There are probably a lot of reasons why. First and foremost, I think a number of companies that have been in the space for a while are tired. I’ve touched on this in a previous three-part series in Search Insider. Secondly, it’s tough to develop new tools or technologies when you’re completely dependent on APIs or (worse still) scraping information from the search engines.

It’s a very risky call to spend time and resources developing new tools or technologies that can be rendered useless by an arbitrary change at Google or Yahoo — or made obsolete by the rapidly increasing pace of innovation.

Either Help Push Or Get Off!

Whatever the reason (and I’m sure the Search Insider blog will be getting a number of posts refuting my observation), the fact is that if search marketers are, in fact, riding the wave, it’s coming to a crashing halt very soon. The need for innovation and changing your strategic paradigm is greater than ever. As the search engines change rules, those search marketers that want to survive must change. Innovation will become a necessity.

And, in the end, this will be a good thing.

The change that’s happening in the search space is reflective of the change that is happening throughout marketing and advertising. It’s the continuing evolution of a much more efficient marketplace, where connections between customers and vendors are made tremendously more effective through access to information on both sides.

The traditional uncertainty of advertising is being leeched out of the system, due, in large part, to the tremendous effectiveness of search. And as search becomes more relevant and useful, it will make those connections more reliable, less intrusive and more successful for both parties. The opportunity is there for search marketers to help advertisers successfully negotiate this more efficient marketplace. It remains to be seen if we’re up for the challenge.

Personalization Doesn’t Have to Make Search Perfect – Just Better

First published July 19, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

For the first time in a long time, I’ve been consistently frustrated with the result that Google’s been returning for several of my searches. It’s not that Google’s getting worse, it’s that the nature of my searches has changed significantly. My searches are getting fuzzier as I’m stepping into territory I don’t know very well. Google is not functioning terribly well as my “discovery” engine.

Aaron’s Ambient Findability

Aaron Goldman wrote an absolutely fascinating column last week about ambient findability, based on Peter Morville’s book. I’ll definitely be taking Aaron’s advice and ordering my copy from Amazon soon. The interesting thing was that I read Aaron’s column shortly after I did an interview with Jakob Nielsen where he expressed similar cynicism about the practicality of search personalization. To sum up, both instances pointed to the fact that doing personalization is very difficult to do right. It’s probably impossible to do perfectly. But then again, personalization shouldn’t be perfect because humans aren’t. There will always be the human element of variability and unpredictability.

Google’s limits as a discovery engine

As much as the topic of ambient findability fascinates me (I explored the territory myself in a previous Search Insider ) I won’t steal Aaron’s thunder because I know he’s doing a follow-up column this week. I’ll take a more mundane path and talk about my increasing level of frustration with Google.

As I mentioned in last week’s column, I’m currently doing research for a book. Right now, what I’m researching is the nitty-gritty of why and how we make purchase decisions. By the way, Aaron suggested an interesting book, so I’ll do the same. Please do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Clotaire Rapaille’s “The Culture Code .” This is one of the most fascinating marketing books I’ve read in some time. Rapaille talks about the challenge of doing traditional market research in trying to uncover people’s attitudes towards brands or other aspects of our culture, like food, healthcare and even the American presidency. The problem is that in most traditional market research vehicles (focus groups & surveys) we’re stuck with what people say. It’s almost impossible to uncover what people really feel. What people say comes directly from their cerebral cortex, the logical and rational part of their brain. But what they feel comes from the limbic and reptilian part of the brain, the dark, shadowy corners of our personas. The minute you ask them a question, no matter what the format, you immediately get the cortex in gear. This got me thinking about neural marketing and the actual mechanisms in our mind that click over when we make the decision to buy or not.

Rapaille’s book simply served to whet my appetite. I voraciously started looking for more of the same but books, research or articles that explore the primal reasons why we buy seem to be few and far between (hint: if you know of any, please pass them along in the Search Insider blog so we can all share). I turned to Google and tried a number of queries to try to dig up academic research or Web sites on the subject matter. I was definitely venturing into new territory and while Google usually acts as a reliable guide, it was leaving me stranded high and dry in these particular quests.

Personalization is an idea, not an algorithm

So, let’s get back to personalization. Would personalization in the form (Kamvar’s algorithm) that is currently being envisioned and rolled out by Google help me in this matter? Probably not. The signals (search and Web history) would be too few to help me zero in on the content I’m looking for. It wouldn’t really improve Google’s utility as a “discovery” engine. It would run into the same road blocks that Aaron and others consistently point out.

But here’s the thing. Google is making a huge bet on personalization. But personalization is not the only thing Google is working on. Personalization simply acts as a hub. MIT’s Technology Review recently did an interview with Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research. Norvig is, quite literally, a rocket scientist (he was head of computational sciences at NASA in a previous life) who is taking Google’s research in some interesting new directions. Speech recognition and machine translation are two notable areas. Speech recognition can overcome some major input obstacles not only on the desktop, but, more notably, on mobile devices and on a convergent home screen that fully integrates our online world and entertainment options. And machine translation can enable a number of automated systems that can power further online functionality. Both are very much aligned with Google’s engineering view of the universe, where introducing people into the equation just introduces friction in an otherwise perfect world.

But the really telling part of the interview came when the conversation turned to search. Norvig talks about the current imbalance of search, where there is an avalanche of data available but the only gate to that data is the few words the searcher chooses to share with the search engine. We’re trying to paint personalization into a corner based on Google’s current implementation of it. And that’s absolutely the wrong thing to do. Personalization is not a currently implemented algorithm, or even some future version of the same algorithm. It’s is an area of development that will encompass many new technologies, some of which are under development right now in some corner of Google’s labs.

Personalization, in its simplest form, is simply knowing more about you as an individual and using that knowledge to better connect you to content and functionality on the Web. There are many paths you can take to that same end goal. Sep Kamvar’s algorithm is just one of them. By the way, Norvig’s particular area of expertise is artificial intelligence. Let’s for an moment stop talking about personalization and start talking instead about what the inclusion of true artificial intelligence could do for the search experience. But artificial intelligence requires signals, and personalization is a good bet to provide those signals. It doesn’t have to get it perfect every time, it just has to make it better.

Just as a last point, Marissa Mayer said in an interview that Google’s current forays into personalization serve no other purpose than to give Kamvar some data to play with to improve his algorithms. We’ve all quickly jumped on personalization (and yes, I’m probably the most guilty of this) as the new direction of search, but many of us (and I believe my guilt ends here) are making the assumption that personalization means a form of what we’re seeing today. It doesn’t. Not by a long shot. And, at the end of the day, what we’re looking for is a jump ahead in matching our needs with what the Web has to offer. To win, Google doesn’t have to do it perfectly. It just has to do it better than everyone else.

Ask: The Reasoning Behind Ask 3D

Last week in my interview with Jakob Nielsen, he called Ask’s 3D label “stupid”. Just to refresh your memory, here’s how the exchange went:

Gord: Like Ask is experimenting with right now with their 3D search. They’re actually breaking it up into 3 columns, and using the right rail and the left rail to show non-web based results.

Jakob: Exactly, except I really want to say that it’s 2 dimensional, it’s not 3 dimensional.

Gord: But that’s what they’re calling it.

Jakob: Yes I know, but that’s a stupid word. I don’t want to give them any credit for that. It’s 2 dimensional. It’s evolutionary in the sense that search results have been 1 dimensional, which is linear, just scroll down the page, and so potentially 2 dimensional (they can call it three but it is two) that is the big step, doing something differently and that may take off and more search engines may do that if it turns out to work well.

My friend Michael Ferguson at Ask (who has his own interview coming up soon) sent me a quick email with the reasoning behind the label:

The 3D label came from the 3 dimensions of search we folded onto one page: query expression in the left rail, results in the center, and content on the right (vs. the one dimension of returning solely results).

Interview with Jakob Nielsen on the Future of the SERP (and other stuff)

jakob-nielsen_cropped.jpg.400x400_q95_crop_upscaleI recently had the opportunity to talk to Jakob Nielsen for a series I’m doing for Search Engine Land about what the search results page will look like in 2010.  Jakob is called a “controversial guru of Web design” in Wikipedia (Jakob gets his own shots in at Wikipedia in this interview) because of his strongly held views on the use of graphics and flash in web design. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Jakob, even though we don’t agree on everything, because of his no frills, common sense approach to the user experience. And so I thought it was quite appropriate I sound him out on his feelings about the evolution of the search interface, now that with Universal search and Ask’s 3D Search we seem to be seeing more innovation in this area in the last 6 months than we’ve seen for the last 10 years. Jakob is not as optimistic about the pace of change as I am, but the conversation was fascinating. We touched on Universal Search, personalization, banner blindness on the SERP and scanning of the web in China, amongst other things. Usability geeks..enjoy!

Gord: For today I only really have one question, although I’m sure there be lots of branch offs from it. It revolves around what the search engine results page may look like in 2010.  I thought you would be a great person to lend your insight on that.

Jakob: Ok, sure.

Gord: So why don’t we just start? Obviously there are some things that are happening now with personalization and universal search results. Let’s just open this up. What do you think we’ll be seeing on a search results page in 3 years?

Jakob: I don’t think there will be that big a change because 3 years is not that long a time. I think if you look back three years at 2004, there was not really that much difference from what there is today.  I think if you look back ten years there still isn’t that much difference.  I actually just took a look at some old screen shots in preparation before this call at some various search engines like Infoseek and Excite and those guys that were around at that time, and Google’s Beta release, and the truth is that they were pretty similar to what we have today as well.  The main difference, the main innovation seems to have been to abandon banner ads, which we all know now really do not work, and replace them with the text ads, and of course that affected the appearance of the page.  And of course now the text ads are driven by the key words, but in terms of the appearance of the page, they have been very static, very similar for 10 years.  I think that’s quite likely to continue. You could speculate the possible changes. Then I think there are three different big things that could happen.

One of them that will not make any difference to the appearance and that is a different prioritization scheme. Of course, the big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

But of course from the user perspective, that’s not going to look any different. It’s just going to be that the top one is going to be the one that the various search engines, by what ever means they think of, will judge to be the best and that’s what people will tend to click first, and then the second one and so on. That behavior will stay the same, and the appearance will be the same, but the sorting might be different. That I think is actually very likely to happen

Gord: So, as you say, those will be the relevancy changes at the back end. You’re not seeing the paradigm of the primarily text based interface with 10 organic results and  8-9 sponsored results where they are, you don’t see that changing much in the next 3 years?

Jakob: No.  I think you can speculate on possible changes to this as well. There could be small changes, there could be big changes.  I don’t think big changes. The small changes are, potentially, a change from the one dimensional linear layout to more of a two dimensional layout with different types of information, presented in different parts of the page so you could have more of a newspaper metaphor in terms of the layout. I’m not sure if that’s going to happen.  It’s a huge dominant user behavior to scan a linear list and so this attempt to put other things on the side, to tamper with the true layout, the true design of the page, to move from it being just a list, it’s going to be difficult, but I think it’s a possibility.  There’s a lot of things, types of information that the search engines are crunching on, and one approach is to unify them all into one list based on it’s best guess as to relevance or importance or whatever, and that is what I think is most likely to happen.  But it could also be that they decide to split it up, and say, well, out here to the right we’ll put shopping results, and out here to the left we’ll put news results, and down here at the bottom we’ll put pictures, and so forth, and I think that’s a possibility.

Gord: Like Ask is experimenting with right now with their 3D search. They’re actually breaking it up into 3 columns, and using the right rail and the left rail to show non-web based results.

Jakob: Exactly, except I really want to say that it’s 2 dimensional, it’s not 3 dimensional.

Gord: But that’s what they’re calling it.

Jakob: Yes I know, but that’s a stupid word. I don’t want to give them any credit for that. It’s 2 dimensional. It’s evolutionary in the sense that search results have been 1 dimensional, which is linear, just scroll down the page, and so potentially 2 dimensional (they can call it three but it is two) that is the big step, doing something differently and that may take off and more search engines may do that if it turns out to work well.  But I think it’s more likely that they will work on ways on integrating all these different sources into a linear list. But those are two alternative possibilities, and it depends on how well they are able to produce a single sorted list of all these different data sources.  Can they really guess people’s intent that well?

All this stuff..all this talk about personalization, that is incredibly hard to do. Partly because it’s not just personalization, based on a user model, which is hard enough already. You have to guess that this person prefers this style of content and so on.  But furthermore, you have to guess as to what this person’s “in this minute” interest is and that is almost impossible to do. I’m not too optimistic on the ability to do that.  In many ways I think the web provides self personalization, you know, self service personalization. I show you my navigational scheme of things you can do on my site and you pick the one you want today, and the job of the web designer is to, first of all, design choices that adequately meet common user needs, and secondly, simply explain these choices so people can make the right ones for them.  And that’s what most sites do very poorly. Both of those two steps are done very poorly on most corporate websites. But when it’s done well, that leads to people being able to click – click and they have what they want, because they know what they want, and its very difficult for the computer to guess what they want in this minute.

Gord:  When we bring it back to the search paradigm, giving people that kind of control to be able to determine the type of content that’s most relevant to them requires them interacting with the page in some way.

Jakob: Yes, exactly, and that’s actually my third possible change. My first one was changing to the ranking scheme; the second one was the potentially changing to two dimensional layouts. The third one is to add more tools to the search interface to provide query reformulation and query refinement options. I’m also very skeptical about this, because this has been tried a lot of times and it has always failed.  If you go back and look at old screen shots (you probably have more than I have) of all of the different search engines that have been out there over the last 15 years or so, there have been a lot of attempts to do things like this. I think Microsoft had one where you could prioritize one thing more, prioritize another thing more. There was another slider paradigm. I know that Infoseek, many, many years ago, had alternative query terms you could do just one click and you could search on them, which was very simple. Yet most people didn’t even do that.

People are basically lazy, and this makes sense.  The basic information foraging theory, which is, I think, the one theory that basically explains why the web is the way it is, says that people want to expend minimal effort to gain their benefits.  And this is an evolutionary point that has come about because the people, or the creatures, who don’t exert themselves, are the ones most likely to survive when there are bad times or a crisis of some kind. So people are inherently lazy and don’t want to exert themselves. Picking from a set of choices is one of the least effortful interaction styles which is why this point and click interaction in general seems to work very well. Where as tweaking sliders, operating pull down menus and all that stuff, that is just more work.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: But of course, this depends on whether we can make these tools useful enough, because it’s not that people will never exert themselves.  People do, after all, still get out of bed in the morning, so people will do something if the effort is deemed worthwhile.  But it just has to be the case that if you tweak the slider you get remarkably better results for your current needs.  And it has to be really easy to understand. I think this has been a problem for many of these ideas. They made sense to the search engine experts, but for the average user they had no idea about what would happen if they tweaked these various search settings and so people tended to not do them.

Gord: Right. When you look at where Google appears to be going, it seems like they’ve made the decision, “we’ll keep the functionality transparent in the background, we’ll use our algorithms and our science to try to improve the relevancy”, where as someone like Ask might be more likely to offer more functionality and more controls on the page. So if Google is going the other way, they seem to be saying that personalization is what they’re betting on to make that search experience better.  You’re not too optimistic that that will happen without some sort of interaction on the part of the user?

Jakob: Not, at least, in a small number of years. I think if you look very far ahead, you know 10, 20, 30 years or whatever, then I think there can be a lot of things happening in terms of natural language understanding and making the computer more clever than it is now. If we get to that level then it may be possible to have the computer better guess at what each person needs without the person having to say anything, but I think right now, it is very difficult.  The main attempt at personalization so far on the web is Amazon.com. They know so much about the user because they know what you’ve bought which is a stronger signal of interest than if you had just searched for something.  You search for a lot of things that you may never actually want, but actually paying money; that’s a very, very strong signal of interest.  Take myself, for example. I’m a very loyal shopper of Amazon. I’ve bought several hundred things from them and despite that they rarely recommend (successfully)…sometimes they actually recommend things I like but things I already have. I just didn’t buy it from them so they don’t know I have it. But it’s very, very rare that they recommend something where I say, “Oh yes, I really want that”. So I actually buy it from them.  And that’s despite the (fact that the) economic incentive is extreme, recommending things that people will buy. And they know what people have bought. Despite that and despite their work on this now for already 10 years (it’s always been one of their main dreams is to personalize shopping) they still don’t have it very well done. What they have done very well is this “just in time” relevance or “cross sell” as it’s normally called. So when you are on one book on one page, or one product in general, they will say, here are 5 other ones that are very similar to the one you’re looking at now. But that’s not saying, in general, I’m predicting that these 5 books will be of interest to you. They’re saying, “Given that you’re looking at this book, here are 5 other books that are similar, and therefore, the lead that you’re interested in these 5 books comes from your looking at that first book, not from them predicting or having a more elaborate theory about what I like.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: What “I like” tends not to be very useful.

Gord: Interesting. Jakob, I want to be considerate of your time but I do have one more question I’d love to run by you.  As the search results move towards more types of images, we’re already seeing more images showing up on the actual search results page for a lot of searches. Soon we could be seeing video and different types of information presented on the page. First of all, how will that impact our scanning patterns?  We’ve both done eye scanning research on search engine results, so we know there is very distinct patterns that we see.  Second of all, Marissa Mayer in a statement not that long ago seemed to backpedal a bit about the fact that Google would never put display ads back on a search results page, seeming to open a door for non text ads.  Would you mind commenting on those two things?

Jakob: Well they’re actually quite related.  If they put up display ads, then they will start training people to exhibit more banner blindness, which will also cause them to not look at other types of multimedia on the page. So as long as the page is very clean and the only ads are the text ads that are keyword driven, then I think that putting pictures and probably even videos on there actually work well.  The problem of course is they are inherently a more two dimensional media form, and video is 3 dimensional, because it’s two dimensional – graphic, and the third dimension is time, so they become more difficult to process in this linear type of scanned document “down the page” type of pattern.  But on the other hand people can process images faster, with just one fixation and you can “grok” a lot of what’s in an image, so I think that if they can keep the pages clean, then it will be incorporated in peoples scanning pattern a little bit more. “Oh this can give me a quick idea of what this is all about and what type of information I can expect”.  This of course assumes as well one more thing which is that they can actually select good pictures.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: I would be kind of conservative until higher tweaking with these algorithms, you know, what threshold should you cross before you put an image up.  I would really say tweak it such so that you only put it up when you’re really sure that it’s a highly relevant good image.  If there starts becoming that there are too many images, then we start seeing the obstacle course behavior. People scan around the images, as they do on a lot of corporate websites, where the images tend to be stock photos of glamour models that are irrelevant to what the user’s there for.  And then people involve behavior where they look around the images which is very contrary to first principals of perceptual psychology type of predicting which would be that the images would be attractive. Images turn out to be repelling if people start feeling like they are irrelevant. It’s a similar effect to banner blindness. If there’s any type of design element that people start perceiving as being irrelevant to their needs, then they will start to avoid that design element.

Gord: So, they could be running the risk of banner blindness, by incorporating those images if they’re not absolutely relevant…

Jakob: Exactly.

Gord: …to the query. Ok thank you so much.  Just out of interest have you done a lot of usability work with Chinese?

Jakob: Some. I actually read the article you had on your site. We haven’t done eye tracking studies, but we did some studies when we were in Hong Kong recently, and to that level the findings were very much the same. In terms of pdf was bad and how people go though shopping carts. So a lot of the transactional behavior, the interaction behavior, is very, very similar.

Gord: It was interesting to see how they were interacting with the search results page.  We’re still trying to figure out what some of those interactions meant

Jakob: I think it’s interesting. It can possibly be that the alphabet or character set is less scannable, but it is very hard to say because when you’re a foreigner, these characters look very blocky, and it looks very much like a lot of very similar scribbles.  But on the other hand, it could very well be the same, that people who don’t speak English would view a set of English words like a lot of little speck marks on the page, and yet words in English or in European languages are highly scannable because they have these shapes.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: So I think this is where more research is really called for to really find out.  But I think it’s possible, you know the hypothesis is that it’s just less scannable because the actual graphical or visual appearance of the words just don’t make the words pop as much.

Gord: There seems to be some conditioning effects as well and intent plays a huge part.  There’s a lot of moving pieces with that and we’re just trying to sort out. The relevancy of the results is a huge issue because the relevancy in China is really not that good so…

Jakob: It seems like it would have a lot to do with experience and amount of information.  If you compare back with uses of search in the 80’s, for example, before the web started, that was also a much more thorough reading of search results because people didn’t do search very well. Most people never did it actually, and when you did do it you would search through a very small set of information, and you had to carefully consider each probability. Then, as WebCrawler and Excite and AltaVista and people started, users got more used to scanning, they got more used to filtering out lots of junk. So the paradigm has completely changed from “find everything about my question” to “protect myself against overload of information”.  That paradigm shift requires you to have lived in a lot of information for awhile.

Gord: I was actually talking to the Chinese engineering team down at Yahoo! and that’s one thing I said. If you look at how the Chinese are using the internet, it’s very similar to North America in 99 or 2000. There’s a lot of searching for entertainment files and MP3s. They’re not using it for business and completing tasks nearly as much. It’s an entertainment medium for them, and that will impact how their browsing things like search results. It’ll be interesting to watch as that market matures and as users get more experienced, if that scanning pattern condenses and tightens up a lot

Jakob: Exactly. And I would certainly predict it would. There could be a language difference, basically a character set as we just discussed, but I think the basic information foraging theory is still a universal truth. People have to protect themselves against information overload, if you have information overload. As long as you’re not accustomed to that scenario, then you don’t evolve those behaviors. But once you get it… I think a lot of those people have lived in an environment where there’s not a lot of information.  Only one state television channel and so forth and gradually they’re getting satellite television and they’re getting millions of websites. But gradually they are getting many places where they can shop for given things, but that’s going to be an evolution.

Gord: The other thing we saw was that there was a really quick scan right to the bottom of the page, within 5 seconds, just to determine how relevant these results were, were these legitimate results? And then there was a secondary pass though where they went back to the top and then started going through. So they’re very wary of what’s presented on the page, and I think part of it is lack of trust in the information source and part of it is the amount of spam on the results page.

Jakob: Oh, yes, yes.

Gord: Great thanks very much for your time Jakob.

Jakob: Oh and thank you!

Creating Conversations, One Column at a Time

First published July 12, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve been writing this column for almost three years now. In that time, one of the most rewarding and often humbling aspects is when I get to connect with the community that’s formed around the Search Insider column. I applaud MediaPost for introducing the Search Insider blog, allowing us to turn each column into a conversation. As a writer, you get lazy and a little sloppy when you get too far disconnected from your audience. Getting feedback brings you back to earth. It reminds you that your musings are not going out in the great void. You’re connecting with readers, and hopefully engaging them enough with a concept with which you elicit a response. This is one of the most powerful aspects of the Internet.

Rewiring Communities

I’m tremendously intrigued by how the Internet has rewired our concepts of community. I’ve talked about this before, and it formed the basis of my opening remarks at the Search Insider Summit in Florida in May. I love how we can participate in so many communities that are not tied by geography, but form around ideas and concepts. The online manifestations of our communities are the conversations that ensue. Each one of these columns can instantaneously create an ad hoc community that debates a topic.

My column a few weeks ago was a great example. We formed a community around the concept of whether advertisers “get” search advertising in Canada, and together we created content through our conversation. I started the ball rolling, but the 18 of you that chose to leave a comment picked up the momentum and left something of value. You provided different perspectives, and the conversation grew richer for it. Some of you questioned my premise, some questioned my delivery and forced me to defend it. Many of you, while agreeing in principle, went further and added your own vision and expertise.

For as long as MediaPost decides to leave that conversation accessible, anyone who chooses to see if such a community exists can pick up our threads through a search. They can connect our conversations with others that may have happened on the same topic through linking. They can build on the community by starting their own conversation. They can do a little detective work and track down some of us that commented and re-engage us with further dialogue. The community has permanence. It is real, and it is defined both by the concept we shared and by search, which connects the online outposts that make up the community.

Is Anybody Out There?

You know, for as long as I’ve been writing for Search Insider (and I believe David Berkowitz and I are the two remaining original writers) I’ve had no idea how many of you were out there, reading it. At the beginning, I asked MediaPost what the number of readers was; I never did get a reply. At first, this question was important to me because I was looking at the column as a promotional vehicle. But I think one of the reasons I didn’t pursue my inquiry was because I realized that the purpose of my writing each week is more than just getting my name out there. As I travel from search show to search show, this column acts as a way for me to connect with many of you. The connection is more one-sided than I may like, but it’s gratifying when you mention that you read my Search Insiders, or that the topic of one piqued your interest. They’re like little “community seeds” that can in turn sprout into another conversation. And isn’t that what the Internet is all about? Isn’t that where its tremendous power lies? It’s the world’s largest conversation, and it’s most powerful as a reciprocal activity.

Sorry to get all philosophical on you, but I’ve actually been doing research for a book and these concepts are inextricably tied into its topic. I’ve been threatening to do a book for a long time and someone (probably tired of hearing me go on and on about it with no apparent intention of actually doing it) told me that committing publicly is a great way to make it happen. So I’ve gone on record, and I hope each of you when you see me at a show asks me how the book is going. Or just tell me to get my butt in gear! One of the biggest challenges is for me to take the same interactive conversations that happen online and figure out how to incorporate that into the creation of a book. The Internet has changed everything else. Why should writing a book be any different?

But back to the topic at hand. I often wonder about the future of anything that is centered on search, and this column is no exception. I’m an ardent believer that search is such a fundamental online activity, the glue of the Internet, that soon search will disappear as a distinct function. It will go under the hood, powering the new evolution of the Web, connecting us with the very best matches to our intent. I hope this column evolves along with search, and the conversations continue. In my mind, the best ones are yet to come.

Is Personalization the Path to Follow?

First published July 5, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Aaron, Aaron, Aaron. Could I possibly leave you as a lone voice out in the wilderness, prophesizing about personalized search? Of course not.

Last week, fellow Search Insider Aaron Goldman pointed out some loopholes in personalized search nirvana. It’s hard to find fault with his points. They’re all very real flaws in making personalization a credible evolution in search relevancy. Also, somewhere along the line, it appears that I’ve become the cheerleader for personalized search. I do admit I’m somewhat bullish on it, but I think I should clarify why I think personalization is important.

It’s Time to Break Search’s Paradigm

Search has hit the ceiling, at least in its current embodiment. We’ve pushed the paradigm as far as it will go. Search’s nose is smashed up against the window. (I should stop writing these columns late in the evening, after a 15-hour day!). Search needs to go somewhere, and after looking at the alternatives, I believe personalization is the most probable path.

All the improvements in search over the past decade have largely been in the background. The interface you and I use has hardly changed since I first discovered Infoseek and AlltheWeb back in 1995. Sure, the algorithms have been tweaked, but they’ve all been improvements down the same path, and that path is at a dead end. For search to evolve, it needs to move beyond a pure query-initiated, algorithmic-driven exercise. Even universal search, which is the biggest change we’ve seen to the results page in the past few years, is really still a tweak on the existing paradigm. It’s just mixing the bag of results, powered by the same algorithm.

So, when we look at where search can go, there are precious few alternatives. They all aim at the holy grail, disambiguating intent. We can look at human-powered search. The idea behind this is that real, live human beings can deliver greater relevancy than an algorithm ever could. Here tread Jason Calacanis (Mahalo) and Jimbo Wales (Wikia).  Then we have the very close cousin (and in some cases, a stand-in) social search. If we somehow tag results, or implicitly give our vote, even through a click-through, will others who share our interests find the same results more relevant? Finally, we have personalization.

Don’t Expect Perfection Anytime Soon

Each approach has potential flaws. Any time you break a paradigm, iterative failure is almost a given. Nobody is going to get it perfect out of the gate. Getting to the next evolution of search will involve trial and error. That’s why I think it’s particularly brave of Google, given its current market leading position, to be moving aggressively down the personalization path. They’re eating their own lunch. It’s an inevitable move, but one that it takes guts to make. And don’t judge the potential of personalization based on what you’re seeing today. It would be akin to trying to determine the eventual impact of the automobile based on your impression of the first horseless carriage that lurched through town. There’s a reason it’s in beta.

Aaron worries about the search “ruts” that may evolve with personalization. If we tend to go down the same paths again and again, what happens when we want to explore new territory? Will personalization have formed a groove so deep we can’t crawl out of it?

Aaron is also concerned about multiple profiles on the same machine within a household. Or for that matter, multiple profiles with the same person. I search differently at work than I do at home. How will a search engine reconcile this search schizophrenia?

Of course, we haven’t even touched on the biggest challenge facing personalization: the privacy issue. Personalization is powered by mountains of sensitive data. The potential pushback on this is the biggest red flag that personalization has to contend with.

Making the Leap

But no matter which path search chooses to follow, there will be monumental challenges to address. That’s the whole crux of innovation. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But search has no option. For it to evolve into its next stage, which is to take its rightful place as the fundamental glue that connects us all to the highly functional, highly personal semantic Web, search needs to break the current paradigm. And that’s why I’m bullish on personalization. As Google’s Matt Cutts said to me once (about a totally different topic), if I had a dozen eggs, I’d be putting 11 of them in this particular basket. Sure, personalization has some big hurdles to jump. So do the alternatives. And I think the potential wins for personalization are far bigger. I have the suspicion that if personalization works as well as I think it can, we’ll look back five years from now with bemusement at the concerns we had in 2007 around the issue.

That’s the problem when you come to the end of a development path — and fundamental change, rather than incremental change, is required. It’s very difficult to see what lies ahead.