Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Semel Says So Long – Yang’s Back

Well, the other shoe dropped. Terry Semel’s stepped down and Yahoo is dusting off co-founder Jerry Yang and bringing him back as CEO. Sue Decker steps in as President.

There’s a whiff of desperation here. I’ve often said that one of the reasons Google has excelled in search is the hands on involvement of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They had an intimate interest in the Google user experience and made it a sacred cow at Google, closely watched by Marissa Mayer. The entire Google empire has been financing solely by the strength of that user experience, so don’t ever underestimate the power of it.

The Yahoo or MSN (Live..etc) user just never had as highly a placed champion (or champions). The fact that Jerry Yang and David Filo cashed in relatively early at Yahoo and watched from the sidelines allowed the search also-ran to drift and be run into the ground by bean counters and those who had dreams of an online media empire. The waffling back and forth came close to killing Yahoo, and may yet.

Sue Decker is a fiscally responsible executive (a.k.a. bean counter) and Jerry Yang, who still has a garage full of Yahoo stock, is probably a little worried about slipping down the Forbes list if the share price continues to erode. So he’s stepping back into the ring, full time.

Will this have much of an impact on the Google/Yahoo rivalry? No, I don’t think so. Jerry cashed in and eased back, where Sergey and Larry would have never dreamed of it. The motivations are different. And Sergey and Larry take an engineer’s proprietary interest into the nitty gritty minutiae of Google, where Yahoo was never really an engineering brain child. It was a collection of links, the manifestation of a online community. It embraced technology because it had too.

To me, this seems like it’s buying time, to keep share prices propped up until a deal can be inked, nothing more. The faces have changed, but the look of desperation remains the same.

Coincidentally, I was just in Toronto last week and talked on Bloomberg TV about the need for leadership and focus at Yahoo.

Canada, It’s Time to Clue into Search!

First published June 14, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve never hid the fact that I’m Canadian. I’m fervently proud of that fact, and more than willing to take the good-natured ribbing I often get on the road from my American friends. I usually bear the brunt of some Canadian joke on a panel (often, I’m the one telling it) and I’m more than happy to act as a one-person tourism bureau. But this week, at SES Toronto, I’ve got to say that when it comes to search marketing, Canadian advertisers have their heads up their ass.

Being a Canadian, I’ve pondered long and hard about whether to soften that comment. After all, heaven forbid it comes off sounding rude. Saying someone, anyone, especially your fellow countrymen, have their heads up their ass sounds so, well, American. It’s unequivocal, to the point, in your face, aggressive: everything that Canadians generally aren’t. We’ve had it bred and/or frozen out of us.

But after looking at the facts, I couldn’t come to any other conclusion. The irony is that Canadians (I hope myself included) have played a major role in shaping the North American search industry. People like Barbara Coll, Todd Friesen, Andrew Goodman, Ian McAnerin, Ken Jurina and Jim Hedger are considered world-class in the game. But most of us are shaping the industry working with American clients. It’s because Canadian advertisers haven’t woken up to search yet, and there’s just no excuse for that, because Canadian customers are light years ahead of them.

Canada’s wired!

Canadians use the Internet more than anyone else in the world. According to comScore (responsible for all the stats in this paragraph), we spend more time online, have more wired households, are more sophisticated in our online behavior, do more searches. Pick your metric, Canada is ahead of the pack when it comes to online usage. For example, when we look at average hours spent online per month, Canadians are top with 40 hours, followed by Israel with 37.4 and South Korea with 34. The U.S. is in 8th place with 29.4. Canada also leads the pack in online reach, with 70% of households wired. This time, the U.S. comes in second with 59%. Average pages viewed per visitor? Canada comes in tops with 3800. The U.K. is second with 3300 and the U.S. clicks in with 2500.

See a pattern emerging? We spend a hell of a lot of time online up here. And much of that time is looking for something to buy. Canadians are the world’s best shoppers. We research every purchase down to the nitty-gritty detail. The Internet was created for shoppers just like us.

But what about the advertisers?

I’m writing this at SES Toronto. By common consensus with most Canadian search marketers I’ve talked to, Toronto seems to be the epicenter of the orifice that Canadian advertisers have lodged their collective heads in. The city doesn’t get it, the province doesn’t get it, the country doesn’t get it. When it comes to search, Canada (with a few exceptions) is clueless.

I remember my first SES in Toronto. I had been attending the U.S. shows for a few years previously, and it was with more than a hint of nationalistic pride that I attended the first Canadian show. But my jaw soon dropped at the questions I was fielding from the audience. This group was at least three years behind the U.S. market. That was four years ago. Since then, the U.S. has dramatically outpaced Canadian growth in search savviness. And if you look elsewhere, almost every market I’m familiar with, including the U.K, France, Italy, Germany and even China is rapidly gaining on the U.S. But Canada still seems to be blundering its way forward, overlooking the fact that Canadians spend a huge amount of time online using search engines. It’s to the point where it’s unforgivable.

Show us the money!

Here are just a few of the stats I pulled from comScore, Yahoo Canada and other sources:

  • Canadians spend $28.05 in online advertising per Internet user. The US spends $71.43.
  • 21% of Canadians media usage is online, but it gets 6% of the budget.
  • In contrast, newspapers and magazines get a 7% share of total media usage, but capture 42% of Canadian ad budgets,
  • The U.S. spends almost twice as Canada per capita on search marketing.

I did a few searches from my hotel in Toronto to see if the big brands show for common searches. They don’t. The quality of sponsored ads up here is abysmal. If you were planning a vacation in Ontario, don’t expect to see the official tourism site for the Ontario government in the top sponsored ads. They don’t do search. If there’s anything our research has shown, it’s that you need relevance in top sponsored to encourage interaction with this real estate. Until you get quality advertisers, sponsored is No Man’s Land.

So, in an atypical move for a Canadian, I’m railing against the cluelessness of our advertising community. Next time I come to Toronto, you’d better have your act together. Canadian shoppers get it, why don’t you?

By the way, sorry if this sounds harsh. Must be all the time I’m spending out of the country. Hopefully my passport won’t get revoked.

Planning for Personalization

First published June 7, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I should have known as soon as I saw the speaker roster. Google’s Matt Cutts, Yahoo’s Tim Mayer, Atlas Web Service’s Michael Gray and myself on the same panel. Guess who got the lion’s share of attention in the Q&A and after-session scrum? Michael and I might as well have checked out early and hit the Google Dance before the crowds.

The title of the panel at the inaugural SMX in Seattle was “Search Personalization: Fear or Fear Not.” (Discussed from an attendee’s point-of-view in yesterday’s Search Insider.) As moderator Danny Sullivan often does, he set the panel up to generate a little debate: Michael Gray vs. Google, Yahoo vs. Google. I was like Switzerland, in neutral territory. Danny did get his conflict, with Michael taking a few shots at Google and Tim Mayer throwing down the gauntlet about the lack of transparency on Google’s personalized search results.

Guess What? SEOs are not your Average Search User!

To be honest, I was a little taken aback that the audience didn’t jump all over how personalization was going to change SEO. Most of the questions from the crowd centered on how you opt out of personalized search and why personalization wasn’t good for them. I have some issues with that, which of course I’ll share in this column:

  • First, this crowd was trying to argue from a user’s point of view. Okay, they’re SEOs (this was the organic track) and most of them have been using search since Lycos was a little baby spider. Just how typical do you think these users are?
  • Second, I question their motives. Do they hate personalization as a user, or as an organic optimizer? My guess is the latter, but it doesn’t seem very noble to joust with Google because the company is making your job harder. Far better to cry foul as a user than as a PO’d organic optimizer. As somebody said to me after the session, do you really think Marissa Mayer is losing sleep because the Google user experience for SEOs isn’t all the SEOs want it to be?
  • This was a perfect opportunity to start planning for the new world of SEO, post-personalization. There’s a ton of value we can add, as smart, proactive practitioners, but I didn’t see anyone take the opportunity to delve into this. Perhaps the really smart ones were keeping their mouths shut, content to let their competitors bitch about the inevitable while they plotted their takeover.
  • I found everyone fixated on the current threshold of personalization on the page, taking comfort in the fact that it’s only impacting a small number of searches. I reminded them that this threshold is a totally arbitrary one set by Google, and could (and will) change at any time.
  • Everyone is taking a siloed view of personalization, looking at the organic results in isolation. It’s almost as if they’re assessing the amount of damage control required. I’m not sure they realize the import of personalization. This is a rule changer, a paradigm-shifter. This is the new generation of search functionality. It changes the game dramatically. Whatever happens on the organic side will roll over to the sponsored side. It will drive universal search. It will drive everything.
  • Finally, this is not happening just on Google. Microsoft’s recent comments made it very clear its strategists are thinking long and hard about personalization. Tim Mayer cautioned me not to make the mistaken assumption that just because Google was first out with personalization, it’s the only one working on it. In fact, Matt was quite delighted when he found an article in Times Online discussing how Yahoo Vice President Tapan Bhat confessed at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam that personalization was the future of the Web, including search. You can define personalization in a number of different ways, but however you do it, it dramatically changes our online experience.

So, I leave you with this. I went into the SMX session ready to discuss four fundamental changes I see emerging from personalization that SEOs and SEMs have to think about, right now. No one asked me for the slide deck after the session. There was not one question about strategies for leveraging personalization. Everyone was more interested in grilling Matt on why the opt-out link had disappeared from the results page.

Although I’m tempted to join the smart and silent search marketers, I think I’ll make one last attempt to share this information with the SEM/SEO community — perhaps in a white paper, perhaps a future column. But I’m only going to do it if you’re serious about pushing the envelope into this new opportunity. Reply to the blog below and let me know. Otherwise, I’ll just shut up and nod my head while you bitch about the fact that it’s too hard to opt out of personalized search. You’ll excuse me if I don’t answer; you see, my mind is on something else.

China is so Last Week: Welcome to Seattle!

This is my first post since returning from China. I have to say that it was good to be home. In the plane flying over British Columbia, I had a new appreciation for the vast amounts of land with nary a human in sight.

So now I’m in Seattle, attending the first SMX, and it’s fair to say it’s a hit. I’m at the end of day one, the show is a complete sell out and everybody I’ve talked to seems to be generally pleased with the content and quality. It’s always tough programming the first show of it’s kind, but there’s been a lot more hits than misses. I think it may take a couple of cycles for the level of content and the level of expertise of attendees to completely mesh, but it’s a hell of a good start.

I’m particularly enjoying the size of the show. I’ve got to chat and meet more people here than any show I’ve attended previously, including many of my favorite people in the industry. There’s a great showing from all the engines, and everyone is very accessible. If you choose to work this show (not just in the sessions, but in the networking events) you can walk away with a lot of valuable take aways. One of the problems with many search shows is they outgrow their original appeal and loose a lot of their value in the process. I hope Danny, Chris and the Third Door crew keep the show size about where it is.

The experience of the attendees is also coming through in the Q&A. There’s a lot of experience sitting in the room and it’s coming across in some very savvy questions. Generally, I find the attendees to be high level practitioners, and as more of a strategy guy, I’m finding the show a little tactical for my taste, but I really believe that’s what the audience is looking for. The personalization panel I was on was more of a strategic look at the future, and the number of questions was noticeably less than some of the other more tactical sessions (i.e. dupe content or social media optimization) but it was interesting none the less.

The experience of the Third Door team has come through with a very smooth show there. So far, everything has gone off with almost no hitches (save for a little trouble with internet access earlier today) and no box lunches! A hot meal for lunch..imagine!

Notes from China

First published May 31, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I let Chris Sherman convince me that if I had to choose one overseas show this year, it should be SES China in Xiamen. Part of me is thanking Chris, and part of me is cursing the hell out of him. To be fair, he warned me that this is a cultural shock of significant magnitude. He was right.

I’ll leave the personal observations for my blog. One of the reasons I came was that I knew this was the most important online market in the world, and I had to dip my toe in for myself. For that, I do have to thank Chris. A few weeks ago I was in Florida for the Search Insider Summit, and made a note of some advice Esther Dyson passed in the keynote presentation to the ersatz “Bill Gates” (played by David Vise): “Make sure your kids learn Mandarin.” Xie Xie (thank you), Esther. You’re absolutely right.

Big, But Just Beginning

Let me give you some sense of the magnitude of this market. Right now, the Chinese Internet market is the second largest in the world, only a whisker behind the U.S.: 150 million users to the U.S.’154 million. But the U.S has 68% penetration. That 150 million represents only about 10% of the Chinese market. At full saturation, the Chinese market will be almost seven times as large as that of the U.S.

But don’t make the mistake of projecting the U.S. experience onto the emerging Chinese market. Chinese culture is vastly different from ours, and their online community reflects this difference. For one thing, much of the Chinese online experience will likely happen through mobile devices, since the mobile market is much more mature here. While the number of Internet subscribers is 150 million, the number of cell phone subscribers is significantly higher, nearly 500 million (as of October, 2006) and is growing at the rate of 5.5 million subscribers per month. For another, the Sino mind just clicks at a different speed than ours.

Hot and Noisy Online

One of my favorite phrases I’ve learned while here was renao, which loosely translates into “hot and noisy.” It was explained to me by Deborah Fallows from the PEW Internet Group, an U.S. ex-pat living in Shanghai for two years with her husband, author and journalist Jim Fallows. It sums up so much of what I’ve seen here. The Chinese like to be bombarded by visual stimuli. They operate at a frenetic pace, juggling several things at once, each loudly demanding attention. Some look at this as a lack of maturity in the Asian market. Western eyes see Chinese Web sites as garish, and we think this is because the designers aren’t very sophisticated yet. Perhaps it’s just designers catering to their audience, who like it “hot and noisy.”

Savoring Information

The other difference is how Western cultures treat information, compared to the Chinese. In the West, information is in no short supply, and for the most part, we inherently trust the source of that information. We believe most things we read online to be true. Our biggest challenge is to wade through the mountain of information available to us and to eliminate the irrelevant. The Chinese treasure information yet have a healthy skepticism as to its veracity. While Western Web users are ruthless in their filtering of information, particularly on a search page, the Chinese are more apt to gather and consider, taking time to digest and choose. They often have multiple windows open at the same time, both as a way to keep busy with the slower load times typical in China, and also because they like their desktop “hot and noisy.”

Keeping an Eye on the Market

One of the reasons I was here was to share preliminary findings from an eye-tracking study we did with Chinese users on the two main Chinese search properties, Baidu and Google.cn. This difference in user behavior became very apparent in the study. In North America, the average interaction with a search results page, from launch to first click, is generally less than 10 seconds. In the Chinese study, we saw averages of 30 seconds on Google and up to a minute on Baidu. While North American scan activity is condensed in the Golden Triangle, in China, it’s spread around the page.

It’s fascinating to watch an individual session. The eye zips around the page, picking up information in an apparently haphazard manner. Baidu has been taken to task for the opaque nature of its listings, where you can pay for placement. The results are also much more prone to affiliate spam (on both engines, but particularly Baidu) than we see in North America. But the Chinese don’t mind. Baidu has captured 62% of the search market here, compared to 20% for Google. After all, lack of trust in information is nothing new to the Chinese. Why should it be any different on a search engine?

Everyone I’ve talked to here agrees. This is a market ready to explode. Innovation is happening organically and at an incredibly rapid pace. The development cycle to turn out new functionality on Chinese sites is 30% to 50% as long as their North-American-based rivals. As somebody told me, “In China, you point, shoot and then aim. Deliberation will kill you here.”

This is a lesson Google is learning the hard way. Chris noted that the level of sophistication has increased immensely from the last trade show here, in 2006. The Chinese Internet market is like a Beijing taxi: there may be no logic to its route, but it’s sure getting to wherever it’s going in a hurry!

Logging in from China – Part IV

I’ll soon be on NW 08 back home (well, technically, Seattle, but close enough). Beijing proved to be less frantic that I expected. It was certainly intense by North American standards, but it almost peaceful compared to the chaos of Xiamen.

This is definitely a city that’s preparing to welcome the world. That becomes apparent even upon landing. Two huge new terminals are being built at the airport. These are massive buildings that run forever along the existing runway.

My visit to Beijing was limited to what could be seen in one day. Chris (Sherman) and I had planned to spend a rather full day seeing as much as we could. We got to the hotel in the evening and both agreed that we weren’t prepared to hit the town quite yet. We opted instead for the hotel’s own uninspiring but adequate buffet. The consolation was that included unlimited, serve yourself draught beer. Now, this is an idea that should be adopted by the west!

Our hotel was the Prime, about a 20 minute walk from Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City. The western chain hotels in the area were more than twice the price and the Prime was rated fairly well in TripAdvisor, so I thought it should be adequate for a couple of nights. It was no Sheraton. Even when I cranked the air conditioning to full, the barest whisper of air could be felt coming out of the crate. The air in the room was about a dead as the Ming dynasty. The place was inundated with German tourists and the service was decidedly indifferent, after the almost fawning approach I found at the Sheraton in Xiamen. It wasn’t a disaster, but this is probably the first time that I found a TripAdvisor rating perhaps a little too high. I’ll try to remember to post a comment to this effect.

Early the next morning, after a picturesque sunrise that unfortunately was made more colorful due to the thick layer of smog perpetually hanging over Beijing, we negotiated with a taxi to take us to the Great Wall at Badaling and then back into the city to drop us off at the Forbidden city. We got to the Great Wall in good time and missed the worst of the crowds. Word of advice. Don’t go to this location of the Great Wall in the middle of the day. You’ll be fighting crowds the whole way.

From the parking lot, we had two choices. We could go explore the Wall to the east or west. On the west side, the Wall climbed at a near vertical angle up the Jungdo pass high to the mountain above. On the other side, the Wall climbed at a much more leisurely angle up the other side of the pass. Chris and I are two middle aged guys that are letting youth go reluctantly, so of course we chose the more vertical of the two options. Beside, we reasoned, the view at the top will be better.

First, let me say the Wall was amazing. As we climbed, the views were spectacular in every direction, with terraced mountain sides towering over the river and temples below, with small lookout towers and temples dotting the mountain side above us. But this is no westernized tourist experience. This is slogging up uneven stone steps, some a few inches in height, some over a foot, sometimes with no handrails, squeezing past picture takers and those that just need to catch their breath. In each watchtower, there were treacherously narrow steps leading to the top lookout. In some cases, the steps were so warn you had to precariously try to find a foothold on either side. This would never be open to the public in the west, the liability exposure would just be too great.

We made it to the top, after climbing up well over a 1000 feet, step by step, and were rewarded with a spectacular view. Another group reached the top at about the same time and we asked one of the group if they could take a picture of Chris and I. They in turn asked us to take a picture of them. They asked where we were from and what we did. Every time I’m asked what I do, I never know exactly what to answer. Search engine marketer is too obscure for most people’s frame of reference. So when Chris mentioned he was a search marketing consultant, I expected the typical glazed over response and polite nod, indicating the person was thinking, “I don’t know what the hell that is and I really don’t want to know.” Therefore, I was surprised when the group grinned and one of them said, “Do you know who this group is?” We had climbed up the wall with a group of Google engineers from Mountain View, who were in China for a joint workshop with a bunch of their Chinese counterparts. What the hell are the chances?

After the Great Wall and a quick visit to the temples at the foot of the pass, we met up again with our taxi driver and headed back into Beijing to the Forbidden City. The immense scale of the place defies imagination. The palace is in full restoration mode for the Olympics, and the difference between the weathered and grime encrusted non restored buildings and the freshly restored ones were amazing. Two of the bigger palaces were completely shrouded in scaffolding, so we couldn’t see them. Just as well, because the day and the previous climb was starting to catch up with both of us by this point anyway. We exited into Tiananmen square, were suitably impressed by the vast expanse of the space and the monolithic architecture of the surrounding public buildings(why is it that the more repressive the regime, the less imaginative their architecture?) and then decided to try to find our way back to the hotel.

Our hotel was on Wangfujing Road, which Chris assured me just one year ago was a major thoroughfare. Today, it’s being transformed into a pedestrian mall. This served as an example of how Beijing, and China at large, is being transformed for 2008. There was an army of workers, basically ripping up the old road top and replacing it with tiles. There was almost no equipment in sight, other than the odd ancient air compressor and portable generator wheezing away. The work had been done by pick axe, shovel and sweat. You throw enough people at a project and it’s amazing what can get done. The coincidence of the historic tie to the Great Wall and the amazing work that went into it two thousand years ago was not lost on us.

After our own “long march” we made it back to the hotel and both collapsed for a couple of hours. Then, we rendezvoused and headed to out to dinner at Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant, the home of the original Peking Duck. This restaurant is famous in Beijing and is on the “must stop” list of many visiting celebrities and dignitaries. We fit into neither of these categories and so were ushered to the fourth floor, which I suspect was reserved for all the westerners who don’t know what they’re doing. We ordered the Masterwork, a full duck, along with some accompanying soup, rice and greens.

The duck emerged on a cart and was brought to our table, accompanied by a skilled carver who soon masterfully sliced off every scrap of meat, leaving nothing but a picked clean carcass. The thinly sliced duck was given to us, accompanied by thin pancakes (almost resembling a tortilla) and condiments. We were given a quick lesson on how to wrap the duck into small little bundles. Our instructor used chopsticks and made it look much too easy. After the first attempt we both gave up and used our hands. This is probably why we were sent to the fourth floor, reserved for the “Peking Duck” challenged. Saves embarrassing yourself in front of the locals. Despite the awkward preparation, the food was amazing, washed down with the ubiquitous and very cheap Chinese beer. A cultural experience and a great dinner, for less than $50 US for the two of us. A bargain!

After dinner, we hit Wangfujing Road again for the walk back to the hotel, just a few blocks away. Our construction crew was still hard at it, at 11 at night. In fact, the pace in the street was more frenetic that it had been that afternoon when we were there.

The visit to Beijing was a perfect end cap to an unforgettable trip. I won’t bore you anymore with how amazed/dumbfounded/assaulted I was with China. It was important to be here. It’s important for anyone from the West to make their way here. It’s the emerging Yin to the western Yang and will form a very powerful counterpart to the historic western world dominance. I will never understand the market, the people or the culture, nor should I. It’s not really for me to understand. I was glad to experience it, even just for a week. In chatting with Chris over our decimated duck, as little as I know, I’m probably still ahead of 99% of other westerners. You can’t get a sense of China unless you’re here. There’s no way you can do this at arm’s length. It’s an immersive experience.

I know I’ll be back. And it’s not the romantic return I envision to Europe, where the culture beckons on a very emotional level. It’s an inevitability. The market is too important, the tide is irresistible. No matter what you choose to do or where you choose to do it, to be successful, your path and China must inevitability cross. And on my return, I’ll have all the mixed feelings I currently do about the country and its people.

Logging in from China – Part III

“How did you like China?”

Knowing I have less than 48 hours left in the country, I’m just beginning to prepare my answer to the inevitable question. But there is no easy answer. You see, you can’t “like” China. Like implies a relatively calm and detached, non-committal response, a distant discernment that you have some control over. You can experience China or survive China. You can be amazed by, immersed in, assaulted or befuddled by China. You can be bemused, disgusted or delighted by China. Often, you can experience all of these things at the same time. China is a tidal wave, a sensory explosion, a cultural monsoon. You don’t just “like” it. You live it, and try to figure out the impact afterwards.

I knew participating in SES China would be interesting. It proved to be more than I ever imagined. One of my favorite things was meeting Deb and Jim Fallows, two US ex-pats who are making Shanghai home for two years. Jim is a noted author and journalist for The Atlantic. Deb works with the PEW Internet Project. Together they decided to dive into the incredibly deep pool that is China and try to provide some perspective for their US audience. I naively asked how they were finding the experience. Each, independently, gave the same answer. “Some days I don’t think I’ll make it through to lunch, and some days I think two years won’t be nearly long enough”. Check out Deb’s one week journal she wrote for Slate and Jim’s website. It will give you a tiny glimpse of China, through worldly but still western eyes.

There’s a lot here to digest. Part of me (admittedly a very small part of me) is intrigued by taking the dive myself and following in the Fallow’s footsteps. There is an incredible market emerging, and one feels that you have to try to get your bearings relative to it or you may be missing something of tremendous importance. But I fear that once you started down this path, it would be all consuming. I’m not sure I’d emerge intact. Most of me wants to run for home and try to digest all that I’ve heard, seen and experienced.

One of the stats I quoted in my presentation was that China is now the second largest internet market in the world, at 150 million users, just slightly behind the US at 154 million. But that represents 68% market penetration for the US, and slightly more than 10% for China. I was here presenting the results of an eye tracking study we did on Chinese users interacting with Baidu.com and Google.cn. The results were puzzling, but I found that permanent puzzlement is the norm here, at least as far as westerners go. By the standards we would apply to North American engines, Google offered a significantly better user experience, but Baidu’s market share is 62%, compared to Google’s 20%. And the trends are not moving in Google’s favor. China has chosen Baidu, even though Google may be the more logical choice. Logic is only one of the factors at play here, and it’s a relatively minor one at that. Searching in China is a totally different experience than it is in the US. We use search as a tool. China uses it as a window to the online world. They spend more time on the search results page. Way more time. The average time on a search results page in North America before a click is less than 10 seconds. The average time we saw on Google China was 30 seconds, and on Baidu, almost a full minute. In North America, we tend to very quickly scan a few results, looking for signs of relevance. In China, the entire listing is scanned, and in Baidu’s case, the entire page is scanned. I interpreted this as a less successful user experience. One person who came up to me after the presentation offered another interpretation: this was how the Chinese spend their time online. In North America, information is something to be begrudgingly waded through. In China, information is treasured. We tend to scan and discard the irrelevant quickly. The Chinese like to savor information, to digest it more slowly, to take the time to judge the relevance for themselves. Remember, in the west, we have a lot more trust (sometimes that trust may be misguided, ironically the topic of one of Jim Fallow’s books) in our information sources. The Chinese have learned differently through experience.

Also, in North America our interactions with the search results page are linear, logical and efficient. We zero in on what we’re looking for quickly. The Chinese tend to pick up the information in a pattern that would seem haphazard to us. Eyes dart around the page, scanning here and there. This didn’t make sense to me until I went to China. Now, in the appropriate cultural context, it makes perfect sense. Deb Fallows told me there’s a phrase in China, renao, that, loosely translated, means “hot and noisy”. That’s how the Chinese like it. Explosions of stimuli, amounting to what we in the West would consider an assault on our senses. When you translate this to a search experience, it’s a frenetic scanning of the page. Sure, Baidu’s page is loaded with affiliate spam and pay for placement links. Sure you have to dig deeper and take twice as long to find what you’re looking for. But that’s okay, because time on the internet is valued highly here. Maybe, just maybe, Google is too efficient for its own good in this market. We’ll be publishing the full study soon (mid June is the optimistic date).

This morning, I had my own taste of “hot and noisy”. Chris Sherman and I were to catch the ferry over the Gulangyu, an island highly touted as the favored tourist attraction here (this is a link to a virtual tour that you, like I, will have to be satisfied with for now). But with limited time available (our flight to Beijing was leaving at 1:30 pm) we decided to instead just randomly wander the streets in the vicinity. It proved to be a good choice. The ferry terminal was on the main drag, and on the opposite side was the inevitable stretch of newly erected high rises. Throw in a McDonalds and Pizza Hut for good measure. But just a block further in, we found the real Xiamen. We found ourselves in the middle of a traditional Chinese street market that stretched for blocks. There was not another westerner in sight, as we walked past stall after stall. If it walked, crawled, slithered, hopped, swam or grew anywhere in the vicinity, it could be found here. My wife, Jill, is deathly afraid of frogs. As we were wandering, I saw frogs for sale by the bag. The thing was, they were still alive, packaged in netted bags about the size of a small shopping bag. There were probably 12 or so large frogs in each bag. There was food of every description, live and dead, including a rather large carcass of some kind that was being energetically hacked to bits by a petite woman with a huge cleaver. And there was no refrigeration in sight. Eel and squid lay right next to cookies and biscuits. While it was a sight to see, it did nothing to whet my appetite.

Now, I’m on the plane to Beijing. From everything I’ve been told, my immersion into China has been extraordinarily gentle to this point. Xiamen is, according to one guide book, “the softest of landings into China”. Beijing represents “hot and noisy” at it’s most frenetic. I’m preparing myself. I’ve got somewhere around 40 hours left before I board the plane back home. I’m both treasuring the time left and dreading it. I can sympathize completely with Deb and Jim Fallows. I’m not sure I’ll make it to dinner tonight, but I also hate to leave.

“How did I like China?”

That’s like saying “how do you like being alive?”.  It’s just too big a concept to be adequately covered by such a small question.

Logging in from China – Part II

My first experience in Mainland China was an awe inspiring cab ride from Xiamen airport to my hotel, and I mean awe in it’s archaic sense: the power to inspire dread. It’s not that I hadn’t been warned. But I had exactly one option to get from point a to point b, and that option was an impossibly dilapitated vehicle, painted a brilliant shade of mauve, with matching seat covers, that loudly proclaimed to the world that it was a taxi, in big block letters 2 feet high painted on it’s hood. i admired it’s positive affirmation of it’s profession, even if it looked a little under qualified for the job.

I climbed in, gave the driver my printed sheet of directions (thanks to my friend Pavan Lee at Microsoft. Pavan, your translations have already saved my butt a number of times) and before I had a chance to settle back in my mauve chariot, we had screamed away from the taxi stand and had entered the melee that is Xiamen traffic.

This experience had been described to me, but the description did no justice to the reality. I know my attempt will likewise fall far short, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. First, it was night and pouring rain, so visibility was minimal. There were roads, lane markers and traffic lights, but other than to lend justification to the job of some traffic control bureacrat somewhere, they seemed to serve no other purpose. The traffic lights were a complete puzzle to me, with blinking red, green and blue lights spread in random patterns, with no indicators of what they might mean. The cab weaved back and forth across the entire width of the road, often running down the lane marker itself, cutting in front of vehicles, then being cut off in turn, always accompanied by blast of horn. Bikes appeared out of nowhere, often carrying two passengers and assorted baggage, all wrapped in plastic in a futile attempt to stay dry. And the bikes came from every direction, then took off in every direction. It seems that riding a bike in China makes you invincible, because these riders were obviously not concerned for their safety. It was one gigantic game of chicken, involving everyone in Xiamen, and the loser would be the first to back down. It’s probably a blessing that my senses were dulled from the flight in, otherwise I would have been cowering on the floor. But apparently, it could have been worse. I was chatting with Chris Sherman, and on his ride in from the airport, he got caught in a traffic jam that was irritating the hell of out everyone, and they were making their displeasure known. Obviously, something was obstructing traffic ahead, and drivers were hitting new heights of aggressiveness, trying to get past the blockage. Finally, Chris’s taxi pulled even with the obstruction and he got a chance to see what it was. It was an old man, who had the unmitigated gall to get in the way of a car, which hit him and left him sitting injured in the middle of the road, bleeding profusely from his head. No one was offering assistance to the old man, who just sat and rocked back and forth, holding his head. The biggest concern of all drivers was navigating past the unplanned delay.

I recount this experience, because with some time to reflect on it, I realize my cab ride (hopefully not Chris’s) was somehow symbolic of China itself. It’s an ancient vehicle, going at breakneck pace to an undetermined but vitally important destination, with no apparent plan or directions to guide it. It doesn’t so much matter where you end up, as long as you get there quickly.

I’ve been struggling to put into words my impressions of this place. This is a culture of immense complexity and contradiction that defies the attempts of the western mind to define it. My brain is a linear thing, that tends to value unambiguity and clarity. In China, my brain is on overload. Everywhere I turn, there is contradiction and schizophrenic bipolarity. There is an explosion of stimuli and activity, of signals that are often diametrically opposed, of monumental ambition and dense cultural (and governmental) restriction.

Here are just a few of the contradictions I’ve noted in the last 48 hours.

Inside my hotel, which is a beautiful 5 star Sheraton, all glass, polished wood and gleaming tile, the service is deferential and gracious to the point of near embarassement. I walked out of the fitness club yesterday and suddenly the girl at the front desk bolted upright and started running after me. I thought I must have forgotten to do something or had left something behind. I stopped as she shot past me and lunged for the elevator button. She was just sending me on my way back to my room. But should I step foot out the front door, and not pay complete attention on the busy street in front of the hotel, I would be run over without a second thought. There is no consideration for pedestrians here.

Just down the street from my hotel is a huge shopping complex, complete with a WalMart’s, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. Western brands like Levi’s, LaCoste and Esprit are prominently displayed. It’s a temple built to consumerism at it’s extreme, with prices comparable to what I would find back in Canada. In Canada, the average yearly salary is probably around $45,000. In China, in the cities it’s about $1000 and in the country, $300. The gap between the rich and the poor in China is widening every day.

From my hotel, I can’t access sites like Wikipedia, yet Xiamen is a hot bed of domain registration and unabashed online entrepreneurialism that definitely crosses into some pretty grey territory.

Monolithic structures are being erected everywhere, as the government continues a full scale campaign to scrub China’s dirty underbelly and erect a new, gleaming showpiece of affluence and modernism. But the showpieces are being built to cater to an peculiarly eastern view of western ideals, big, glitzy and screamingly commercial. It’s as if somebody Feng Shuied (Feng Shui is officially illegal here, by the way) Las Vegas. And in the process, many reminders of one of the world’s oldest civilizations are being erased.

That’s just a few. Literally, cultural contradictions are everywhere here. But perhaps it’s not a problem. China has lived with complexity for thousands of years. For the Chinese, it’s business as usual. It’s only the western mind that tries to impose clarity where none may be required. China is a vast, dense and vibrant organism, a society of immense ambition and near unlimited resource. For now, they picture the affluent west as the ideal to be obtained at all costs, but in a peculiarly skewed eastern way. But I sense that as China stirs and finds it’s global potential, it will rewrite the definition of success, eliminating the Anglo-American bias that marked the last two centuries.

There are a number of challenges that China has to face. I can’t help feeling that this culture is straddling the tracks, caught between two rushing locomotives that surely must collide. The results will either be catastrophic, or cataclysmic. One thing is for sure. Now that this dragon has been unleashed, there’s no turning back. The world will be a different place.

Logging in from China

I’ve been in China for about 40 hours now, and I’m still trying to decide what my first impression is. It’s a little unfair, because the first 20 of those hours were spent in Hong Kong, which isn’t really China.

I get the sense that China is collectively cleaning the house for a visitor, and they’re determined to impress. Unfortunately, (to me, anyway) it seems the standards they’ve set for impressing are western ones. It’s as if China is trying to embrace all things Western, all at once. But, like I said, those are very early impressions.

Hong Kong perhaps epitomizes this attitude, but it’s nothing new for this city. It’s always had one foot in the west and one in the east. And it’s also been used as a showpiece for over a century. I have to believe the pace of the “spruce up” has picked up in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics though. Entire sections along the Harbour on the Hong Kong side have been razed and are being rebuilt. In 20 hours, many of which I spent sleeping after spending over 24 hours in the air and various airports getting here, it’s pretty tough for me to get a sense of the real Hong Kong. I do believe it wasn’t in the few places I looked, however.

Hong Kong does seem to be built to be efficient. I transfered from the airport to my hotel, the Harbour Plaza in Kowloon, with nary a hiccup. The Airport Express, a high speed training linking the gargantuan airport to Kowloon and Hong Kong, zipped me to the Kowloon station in about 20 minutes. It was fast, antiseptic and terribly efficient. I was a little worried about taking public transit at close to midnight, but I needn’t have been. I’d be in more peril taking my daughter to the mall at home (significantly more, which is why I just won’t go there). I was deposited at the station, a 10 minute drive from the hotel by cab. Thankfully, I had printed out directions in Chinese and gave them to the cab driver. I think he was the only person I met in Hong Kong that didn’t speak English.

If you’re going to Hong Kong, definitely check out the Harbour Plaza by Whampoa. Once again, TripAdvisor doesn’t let me down. The room was a little small but very tasteful. The lobby was spectacular. (A sidenote here..that seems to be common in China, spectacular lobbies to impress the guests, which goes back to my original point. China is out to prove something to the West). The highlight was starting my first morning with a visit to the fitness room and a swim in the rooftop pool, overlooking the harbour. Okay, I’m impressed!

I asked the concierge what I could do in the 4 or 5 hours I had before I had to head back to the airport. He suggested a trip to nearby Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district and the famous Nathan Street. Here, I was the victim of racial profiling. Every single shill man for cheap tand sleezy tailoring shops in a 400 kilometer radius descended on me. I literally had them running across the streets, pushing people out of the way to get to me. Okay, I was one of the few caucasians, and I stood out like a sore thumb with my suit jacket slung over my shoulder and my laptop in a backpack in the stifling humidity (more about this in a minute) but I didn’t see anyone else accosted in this way. I’m pretty sure I served as a source of immense amusement for the Hong Kong natives who were watching me get mauled like a t-bone in a dog pound. Normally I would have just ignored them, but I wasn’t sure what was culturally correct. After saying some polite “no thank you’s”  which led to a much longer conversation that I was looking for, I realized my first plan was better. Ignore..ignore..ignore. I walked several blocks up Nathan, realizing that this was not really the Hong Kong I was looking for.

And now, the humidity. It’s a stifling, hot wet blanket that sucks the life blood out through your pores. I live in a semi arid climate, on the northern tip of the Sonoran desert (yes, Canada does have a desert..one) and I don’t do well in humidity. New York constantly throws me into a shirt drenching spasm of perspiration. But New York is bone dry compared to Hong Kong. I had worn what I thought would be a nice light shirt. Within 3 blocks, it was literally soaked everywhere. I might has well thrown it in the harbour and then worn it for my little tour around town. I was drawing stares (polite, but noticeable) and several bemused looks as I left a trail of melted Canadian in the middle of Tsim Sha Tsui . By the time I decided to turn around and head back to the shuttle stop at the foot of Nathan Street, I hesitated to run the gauntlet again, due both to the cascades of perspiration dropping from me, and the phalanx of eager suit hawkers just wating for me to once again cross their paths. I opted to go a few blocks off Nathan and walk back on a side street. It didn’t help with the humidity, but I did miss most of the “really nice custom suit for you” come ons.

I still had a few hours, so I decided to hop on the Star Ferry over to Hong Kong Central. It’s one of those “must dos”.  The harbour is really spectacular. I landed on the other side after a quick but refreshing 8 minute ride. A quick look on the map showed be there was another ferry terminal close to the new massive Convention Hall. I thought this might be a nice walk along the harbour, after which I could catch a ferry back that would drop me a few feet from my hotel. What I wasn’t counting on was that the Chinese Government has decided to rip up that particular stretch of the harbor to rebuild it. So after hitting dead end after dead end, I zigzagged far away from the harbor, trying to find my way to the other ferry terminal. Of course, the exercise brought on another drenching bout of perspiration. People were crossing to the other side of the street, sure that I had some dreaded condition that caused me to expell copious amounts of fluids through my pores.

I finally found the terminal and headed back to the hotel. And it was here that I found my little slice of Hong Kong heaven. There was a nice park and walk way by the harbor, with a breeze blowing in. I found a park bench, put on my headphones and just watched the amazing scene as spectacular cloudscapes blew in over Hong Kong’s mountains while the ships and ferries passed below.

An Intimate View of the World Through Google’s Eyes

First published May 24, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The walls are coming crashing down at Google. They’re in the middle of tearing down silos and aggregating content. But that aggregation will likely come with a very unique viewpoint some day: yours.

Last week at Searchology (an event I couldn’t attend, due to a conflict) Google unveiled universal search, along with a few other assorted tidbits. David Berkowitz covered this in Tuesday’s Search Insider, so forgive me if some of this is redundant, but I think we’re covering unique ground in our approaches.

Mixing up Google’s Buckets

The key for universal search? Results that come from a number of different sources: the Web, blogs, video, news, images, maps, local, product, to name a few, all presented on the same results page. And yes, ads. Because, in the words of Google’s Marissa Mayer, “sometimes an ad is the right answer.” So, in effect, Google is no longer a search engine. It’s an “idea portal,” aggregated from Google’s vast Web reach around a specific query, on the fly and brought together for the user. And Google, in its infinite wisdom, will apply a universal ranking algorithm across disparate content to pull what it feels is the most relevant to the top of the page.

Universal search, in one fell swoop, makes the idea of vertical search irrelevant, because Google is making it all horizontal. The company will assemble a smorgasbord of content from their various buckets, prepared right in front of your eyes in 0.23 seconds.

Does One Score Fit All?

But here’s the challenge. The task of applying a content-agnostic relevancy score is daunting, and according to Google, it’s the reason it’s only now introducing universal search, after a number of years in the lab. In fact, it’s so daunting, you’ll probably only see other types of content creep onto your results page in the most obvious of cases. For example, a search for a specific video that’s suddenly very hot will bring back the video clip near the top. For most searches, the net impact of vertical search will be the appearance of some additional links to other vertical “buckets” near the top of the results set. Like most things that can impact the user experience, Google is treading carefully here.

Just Add Two Dashes of Personalization

So why bother? Because universal search becomes much more interesting when you combine it with personalization. In a recent interview I did with Mayer, she said she didn’t see a strong vertical angle for personalization in the near future. I can’t help but think that personalization will drive universal search. In fact, I don’t think universal search works very well without personalization. In both cases, we’re looking at an on-the-fly algorithm that works over and above the base Google algorithm, reordering results for you. Google will be able to be more confident in offering a much richer and more diverse set of universal results when you can tap into previous search and Web history. It will give them a lot more background to help them put context around your query. With personalization, every search becomes your customized portal, centered on what’s on the top of your mind right now. And that’s pretty interesting, both for the user and the advertiser.

And One Cup of Assorted Advertising

Obviously, Google’s mind is straying down this path as well, because at Searchology, Mayer did a pretty intense backpedal from her previous position that display or rich media ads would never appear on the search results page. The official position is now: “potentially… possibly… probably.” Google’s statements used to be much more unequivocal, but lately, they’re sounding much less adamant and much more political. No door shall remain unopened, even if it’s just a crack, because chances are, Google may have to squeeze through it in the future.

Increasingly, the puzzle pieces of Google’s empire are falling into place. When you take personalization, universal search, enhanced ad serving capabilities and outreach into the most popular Web communities and bring them together, you start to see a pretty compelling network emerge, and it’s all centered on the user, one user at a time.