Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Will Search Become Google’s Forgotten Child?

Everyone’s jumping on the “Google dominating the advertising universe” bandwagon.  BusinessWeek ran a article today speculating on Google’s omnipresent domination with their acquisition of DoubleClick plus some recently announced deals with EchoStar’s Dish satellite TV network and Clear Channel’s radio network.  The primal fear even has its own acronym now, FOG, or “Fear of Google”.  But in BusinessWeek’s article there’s one telling quote (emphasis mine):

“To date, Google has had one gargantuan advertising success. It developed an online auction platform enabling businesses, even those with little marketing experience, to easily bid for space to serve tiny text ads related to information Web surfers wanted at a particular moment. Most of these ads—which exist primarily to drive traffic to Web pages and, ultimately, generate sales—run on Google’s own search results pages.”

And there you have Google’s dilemma in a nutshell.  The more aggressive they are extending their network reach into new channels, the more they come to rely on what, for them, has been the golden egg, their search engine.  The “gargantuan advertising success” has actually been search engine marketing’s success.  Google has been riding a consumer initiated wave as buyers have found an incredibly effective new channel to do their research on.  The success that Google has enjoyed by riding that wave has more to do with the concept of search then it has to do with any particularly brilliant Google strategy.  Google has keyed into that success by providing a very effective search tool.  And if you’re looking anywhere for the secret to Google’s success, look no further than their obsession about user experience on their search engine.  They’ve kept it clean, they’ve kept it relevant, and they’ve kept it a favorite choice of millions and millions of search users.  That has given them the ability to monetize a tremendous amount of traffic and flow that money straight into the corporate coffers, enabling them to go on a shopping spree of unprecedented proportion.

I don’t begrudge Google for thinking big and planning to dominate the universe.  It’s really the only direction they can go.  But I would like to hear more people acknowledge the fact that Google success is built completely on the emergence of search as an essential online activity.  And the emergence of that activity is due to a lot of pioneers in the area, not just Google.  In its present form, search is best represented on Google but the very act of searching owes a huge debt to dozens of other companies, including current also-rans like Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Overture, and the historic footnotes like Infoseek, AltaVista and All the Web.

Because of that I get a little frustrated when search does not get its proper due.  Personally, I believe there is huge untapped potential still in search.  But everyone is so focused on Google’s extension of its empire that I don’t believe search is getting the respect it’s due.  It’s not getting respect from advertisers, it’s not getting respect from agencies and lately, it’s not even getting respect from Google.

I know that Google has some exciting plans for search, primarily wrapped around personalization and I look forward to hearing more about this.  I hope that Google search team remains engaged pursuing the potential of this tremendously effective channel and doesn’t become diverted from this goal by the glitz and glamour of Google’s new marketing channels.  I know the sales teams at Google are very much focused on the network and the other opportunities, seeming to take the power of search, which is currently buying all the lava lamps and free lunches at Google, for granted.

Telltale Signs of a Chasm Crossing from NY

It was an incredibly packed week (and hotel) at SES NY. As you’ve probably noticed, I didn’t get a chance to do any blog posts while I was there. But the good news I had a chance to sort through my inbox and set aside some post worthy tidbits that I’ll try to catch up with in the next week, so I’ll try to make up for lost time.

One of the things I chatted with a few friends about was a strong undercurrent of change in the industry. On the last day of the show I had lunch with Greg Jarboe and followed that up with a Guiness or two in the lounge with Chris Sherman and Matt Bailey. Besides the obvious (Google’s purchase of DoubleClick, IPG’s purchase of Reprise and the recent purchase of Global Strategies by WPP) there’s just a feeling of transition to a new stage for the SEM biz. Jarboe referred to it as the “gentrification” of the business (Greg is so erudite!).

After, in a quick chat with Shari Thurow (yes, we ironed out the wrinkles of our spat) and Anne Kennedy, Anne nailed it for me. We’re crossing the chasm. Isn’t it funny. I’ve written at least one column saying this was the case and did a series for MediaPost indicating we were in for sea level change, but I had to be reminded about it.

Perhaps it was the validation of being surrounded by a bunch of other SEMs. For most of the time, I’m somewhat isolated from the SEM community here in Kelowna. From this vantage point, I speculated that we were ready to cross the chasm but I had the comfort of being somewhat removed from the day to day machinations of the industry. But last week, I was in the thick of it and in the flurry of activity, I was wondering what was going on. It took Anne to point out to me that it was just what I had postulated on a few months earlier. Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees!

There are a few symptomatic indicators that seem to indicate a chasm crossing is ready to happen:

The mainstream is adopting search, but they’re not sure where it should live. More and more companies are testing the search waters, but they’re hesitant to partner with an outside firm. Their answer, at least in the short term, is to build an in-house team to handle the campaigns. I’m getting this from all sides.

The major agency holding companies have all acquired search expertise. In order to try to stem the in-house tide, the IPG’s, WPP’s and Omnicoms of the world have all gone shopping for SEM expertise.

Awareness of search has moved up the C Level. For the first time, SEMPO’s Market Survey found that the executive team is not only aware of search, but keenly interested in it. This has been an ongoing frustration in the past for search marketers.

With all of the above happening, it’s going to be an interesting time in the search biz. Ironically, just as we’re waiting for the 800 pound gorilla to be crowned, another interesting observation I made last week was for the established search players to be rushing towards the next big thing. Google is stumbling over itself to rush past search, moving a lot of its focus to display, video and every other channel under the sun. I’m not so sure it’s wise to turn the spotlight from search. My gut feeling is it’s finally search’s time to shine.

Anyway, more posts to come this week..finally!

Hello, My Name is Gord and I’ve Been Behaviorally Targeted

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

I was forcefully fit into the proverbial “other shoes” last week, and it was a disconcerting experience. I was behaviorally targeted in an unmistakable way, and I had to come to personal terms with the new reality of marketing.

I’ve written about behavioral targeting a number of times in the past, but always from a marketer’s perspective. From that viewpoint, there’s a lot I like about behavioral targeting. But last week, the crosshairs drew a bead on my forehead and I became the hunted, not the hunter.

I’m not naïve. I know I’ve been targeted before, but this was the first time that it was obvious enough to register on my consciousness. And I have to tell you, I’m having mixed feelings about it.

Leaving Footprints and Collecting Cookies

In the past two weeks, I’ve been making my travel plans to head to China for SES in May. I’ve been merrily hopscotching around the Web, booking flights, checking hotels and frequenting the typical online travel haunts: Expedia, Orbitz and TripAdvisor. All the time, these sites were jamming my browser with cookies galore. As I went on my way in blissful ignorance, I was definitely leaving a trail (I’m picturing virtual droppings, probably from too many cookies) that obviously caught one advertiser’s attention. Late last week, I went to About.com on a totally unrelated quest (the topic of which escapes me at this time), and there in the top bar was an ad urging me to book my hotel in Xiamen in the next three days on Orbitz or miss out on a $25 discount.

Now, Xiamen obviously caught my attention. It’s just not a destination you see all that often in the typical display ad on a Web site — not Paris, or London, or even Beijing, all of which I might just have chalked up to coincidence. But it does happen to be where SES China is taking place, and  where I’ll be spending three or three days in May. And I haven’t booked my hotel yet. So from a targeting perspective, I had a red laser dot on my forehead. Well done, Orbitz!

Is Ignorance Bliss?

I don’t consider myself a neophyte when it comes to online marketing. I obviously knew what was going on. I understood the mechanics behind it. But this was the first time that it was obvious that I was being targeted, and I’ve got to tell you, it creeped me out a little.

Now, I’m not sure if my level of sophistication here, such as it is, was a good thing or not. Would the average user, less aware of the inner workings of behavior targeting, be more apprehensive or less so? Would they just say, “Wow, how did Orbitz know?” or would they quickly wrap their monitor in tinfoil, certain that there was some unhealthy spying going on, either by aliens or the government?  I’m not sure, but I know that losing my BT virginity has left me feeling a little queasy.

Did Orbitz Bag Its Prey?

So, the collective marketing audience is wondering, did Orbitz succeed in getting my booking? Well, yes, and no. The ad certainly caught my attention. In fact, it totally derailed my train of thought, which could be why I forget why I went to About.com in the first place. But I didn’t book — at least, not yet. I’m still sorting out whether I want to or not. It’s really strange. Intellectually I have totally accepted behavioral targeting and even welcome it as an advertiser, but emotionally and as a prospect, I’m still not sure. I had no idea I would be so prudish about this until it actually happened. I admire Orbitz’ marketing prowess, but I do feel a little violated. Maybe it will just take some getting used to. Until then, I’m sniffing the wind when I frequent my online watering holes and being a little more cautious about the trail I’m leaving behind. After all, you can’t be too careful nowadays. The trees have eyes and ears.

 

Google’s Gargantuan Footprint

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

A recent blog post by Anil Batra, formerly from Revenue Science, speculates that Google will soon be getting into behavioral targeting.  Another post by A-list blogger Robert Scoble indicates that Google may be dialing down the presentation of sponsored ads for certain queries.  Combine this with a few conversations I’ve had recently with Googlers,  and it seems the company is already setting its sights beyond the search results page when it comes to revenue generation.  One starts to get a sense of the footprint that Google is planning to put down on the future online landscape.

Getting Personal, One User at a Time

To me, the glue that holds all this together is Google’s move towards personalization.  If the company can get that piece of the puzzle right, everything else falls into place behind it.  And personalization moves Google beyond search into a lot of other applicable areas: the Google homepage, G-mail, Google News, desktop gadgets, to name just a few.

One of the issues I have with Google’s move towards personalization is that it stops short of really providing additional value to the average user.  If personalization works well, it significantly enhances our search experience by providing relevancy unique to us.  The signals that Google is watching to power the personalization algorithm are very much the same ones it would need to watch to introduce behavioral targeting of advertising messages.  It’s all about the sites that people visit, the search results that they click on and the path they take online.  If Google can use all these signals to help enhance the search results, it’s not that big a leap to be able to target messaging through its AdSense network on the sites you visit.

Google Everywhere You Turn

The key to all this for Google is ubiquity online.  It need to be everywhere and it’s rapidly approaching that goal.  While the pick-up on things like Gmail may not have been the runaway success that everyone was expecting, Google is beginning to offer enough online touch points to provide continuous interaction opportunities for any given individual prospect.  Consider the touch points Google already controls.  First, three out of every five searches that are launched online, anywhere, happen on Google, according to Hitwise.  That’s 60% of hundreds of millions of searches daily, and that alone gives Google a virtual vice grip on the traffic channels of the Internet.

Next is Google’s AdSense network.  Although it has not publicly disclosed how many sites are in this network, it’s estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

And then there’s Google’s toolbar.  In a recent survey we found that about 42% of the participants we interviewed had the Google toolbar installed.  In its full implementation, it tracks every single site you visit and streams this information back to Google servers somewhere.

Add to this the various other Google properties and tools you may interact with.  This could include Gmail or a Google personal homepage, Google gadgets installed on your desktop, Google Checkout, Google Blog Reader, to name just a few. And that list keeps growing.

Finally, there’s Google analytics.  One of the smartest moves that Google has done is introduce Google Analytics as a backend tool, free to Webmasters.  The question is, why would Google offer a fairly robust analytics package free?  The answer is that it gives the company a tremendous amount of data on the backend to supplement what it’s already collecting on the front end through click stream tracking.  This closes the loop, giving Google two views of a massive dataset and allowing extrapolation from those two views.

BT High on Advertisers’ Wish List

When you add all these touch points together, you have the capability of driving the largest consumer-centric behavioral network in existence.  And there’s an appetite for this ability to pinpoint precisely.  In the last SEMPO market survey, advertisers indicated that behavioral targeting was their preferred option, with 78% of them willing to pay a premium for it. If you could offer advertisers the ability to present progressive messaging, tied to consumers’ movement through the buying cycle, with the ability to intercept them not just at the search results page but at various information sites where they would be gathering more information, you would have an extremely effective net in which to capture prospects.

The challenge for Google is to present behaviorally targeted advertising in a way that doesn’t impact the user experience.  And this is likely the only sticking point standing between the search engine and the more aggressive rollout of behavioral targeting for advertisers.  My suspicion is that work is currently underway on the technologies that would allow Google to always present the right message at the right time to the right person.  There is a distinct danger in trying to push that too soon.  It’s one of those things you have to get at least 70% right out of the gate.  But if Google can do this, it’s a distinct win both for advertisers and consumers.  We don’t mind advertising when it’s relevant to our needs.  We only hate the stuff that gets in our way and keeps us from doing what it is we want to do.

Why Google Can Afford to Dial Back Search Ads

And this brings us to why Google can afford to experiment with dialing back the presentation of sponsored ads on the search results page.  A few conversations with different Googlers seem to indicate that its future focus is definitely on the advertising network, rather than the search results page.  If it can get the right message/right place/right time/right person equation nailed down, it can monetize traffic much more efficiently and further improve the user experience.

The key for Google, at least on the search results page, is keeping that top-of-page real estate highly relevant.  The fact is, over 50% of all the clicks on the page are going to happen on the first three or four listings, whether they’re sponsored or organic.  Another fact is that we don’t mind a mix of highly relevant sponsored and organic links at the top of the page, but we do mind having nothing but sponsored ads in the top four Golden Triangle locations.  Our tolerance for this advertising drops like a rock with the lessening of relevance in the ads presented.  If personalization and behavioral targeting would allow Google to further tweak the relevance of these ads and get it right more often, the monetization naturally jumps dramatically.

In our last eye tracking study we found that Google was the most efficient at monetizing traffic to the search results page in the long term.  Although Microsoft and Yahoo were more aggressive in presenting ads in the top real estate, Google managed to maintain its click-through rates on both first time and subsequent visits to the same page of results.

Given the possible paths that Google could pursue (and the huge revenue-producing opportunities that lie down those paths) perhaps its mission statement should change from organizing the world’s information to always presenting prospects with the right marketing message at the right time. This certainly aligns better with its recent moves into every marketing channel imaginable.

 

It’s Not about Control – It’s About Connections!

Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen Buzz Metrics wrote an interesting column this week talking about the fact that CMO’s still have control.  He railed against the absolution of responsibility on the part of marketers, using the new buzzwords of consumer empowerment to justify the fact that they can throw more spam at the average user now because, after all, the user is in control.

“First, the overheated rhetoric acts as a deceptive rationalization. Remember the theory of cognitive dissonance, that testy tension emanating from two conflicting thoughts at the same time. I worry all this talk about consumers being in control relieves dissonance. It allows us to absolve ourselves of treating consumers with respect. Hey, if they have control and, hence, the power, what possible harm could our junk mail, spam intrusiveness, and recklessness do?”

Pete touches on a very interesting point that I’ve talked about in the number of columns and post before.  It’s the idea of brand messaging going beyond the carefully manufactured advertising and marketing channels and being baked right into the DNA of the company.  Now, brand messaging is as much about customer experience and customer service as it is about the message we see in the typical 30 second television spot.  It brings up an interesting question about consumer control.  Is it so much about control as it is about the ability to connect with information in a new way?  As Pete rightly points out, marketers still have control over a number of aspects of the relationship.  It’s impossible to have a two-way relationship with one side being in total control.  The fact is that consumers control part of that relationship and marketers control part of that relationship.  The success of the relationship lies in the ability for the two sides to connect in a mutually beneficial way.  It’s not so much the consumers have taken control from marketers as it is that what was typically much more a one-way relationship has evolved into a two-way relationship.

“At the end of the day, we still control the message and the business processes that shape it, but we may need an alterative path to get there. Product quality, customer service, accurate claims, and employee empowerment are all within our control. And these are the input types that really matter, and always have.”

Let’s explore a little bit closer how this has happened.  It really comes down to the number of channels available for messaging to get from the marketer to the consumer.  It used to be that those channels were tightly controlled and there were only a handful of them.  It goes back to the idea of power constructs.  The last hundred years our society has been all about power constructs.  The paths that lead from the manufacturing of products to the consumption of the products were few and were controlled by the powerful.  This was true in virtually any market you could think of.  With consumer packaged goods the ability of those goods to flow from the manufacturer to the consumer is controlled at various points along that channel by a few powerbrokers.  The same has been true in advertising.  The paths from the advertiser to the consumer were generally controlled by a few very powerful corporations.  Look at how the power construct in advertising typically played itself out:

  • At the top we have the advertiser.
  • Below that we have the advertising agency that was responsible for crafting the message.
  • Next you have the media buyer that takes a message created by the advertising agency and determines the channels to reach the target consumer.
  • Below that you have the channels used to reach the consumer, whether they be broadcast TV, newspaper, magazine or radio stations.
  • Finally, at the bottom, you have the consumer themselves.

All the communication in this channel went one way, from the advertiser down through each of the successive layers until it reached the consumer.  There was no corresponding channel to allow communication from the consumer to flow back through all these gates to the advertiser.  In the case where an advertiser did want to get information from an individual consumer, they would employ a market research company to circumvent the entire power structure of communication and go directly to a handful of representative consumers, determine what they were thinking and report back to the advertiser (or perhaps the advertising agency).  Picture a series of locks on a canal, with all the water flowing one way and with each of the gates of the individual locks designed to let water out and not let water back in.  The only way for water to run back was a small pipeline with a pump on it and the switch to that pump was always in the hands of the advertiser.  They chose when they wanted to listen to the consumer and when they chose to ignore the consumer.  The consumer had virtually no power to push their message back to the advertiser.

Now let’s look at what the Internet did.  The Internet took a highly structured, albeit one way, channel and completely blew it apart.  Now water flows freely back and forth between the advertiser and the consumer.  This not so much took control way from the advertiser and gave it to the consumer as it eliminated (or is in the process of eliminating) the existing structure that information flows through.  It democratized connections.  Rather than a man-made channel with restrictive gates and locks that restrict the flow of information from one place to the other, the Internet has turned the landscape into a vast field during a rainstorm.  Water collects in a thousand tiny pools and flows according to the online landscape.  Advertisers can influence where those flows happened as much as consumers can.  The control of flow is now jointly owned by everyone.  Advertisers have not had their power taken away.  They just have to learn how to share it.  They have to live up to the responsibility that goes with a truly two-way relationship.  Because they can no longer control the channel the message goes through, they have to spend more time controlling the very message itself.  They have to make it bulletproof, capable of withstanding the BS test.  And you have to understand that that message can’t be carefully crafted, it has to be lived.  It encompasses everything they do in the day-to-day operation of their business.  It has to include all the touch points that brand has with the outside world.  Because every touch point is a small puddle in that massive field.  If they manage the information correctly it will flow in the desired direction.  If they abdicate their responsibility of meeting the customer halfway in providing a mutually beneficial proposition, then they have to bear the consequences when the flow goes in the direction they don’t want it to.  And if there is enough momentum in the opposite direction, they will get flooded by a tidal wave of consumer dissent.

All in all, it’s a healthier relationship.  One-way relationships tend not to be sustainable in the long term.  But as with any power shift, there’s a pendulum effect that will likely occur here.  As power finds its natural balancing point, it will likely swing too far in the direction of the consumers before it comes back again.

Scoble Discovers Google’s Secret

Robert Scoble, in a recent blog post, cracked the Google monetization code on the search results page.  In a conversation with an unnamed Googler he found that Google can afford to dial down the presentation of top sponsored ads because they’re just more efficient at monetizing the traffic.  Of course, this shouldn’t come as news to anyone who read our last eye tracking report.  We went into great depth about Google’s ability do more with less when it comes to sponsored advertising on the SERP.

I’m feeling a little blue in the face, but at the risk of repeating myself yet again I’ll make the point.  Relevance at the top of the page is a sacred cow.  The Area of Greatest Promise which occupies a tiny little triangle in the far upper left is the landscape you have to focus on if you want to present the best search user experience.  For an in-depth walk-through of what the Area of Greatest Promise is and how it impacts the user experience, check out last week’s Just Behave column on Searchengineland.  Also check out The Importance of Consideration Sets, the column I wrote the previous week.  If you want to know how Google does more with less, you have to understand the basic fundamentals of user behavior on a search engine.

The fact is, when you look at Google’s ability to monetize the page they are leaps and bounds ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft in this regard, yet they are by far the least aggressive than presenting sponsored advertising at the top of the page.  The result? They keep scanning highest on this top real estate.  They have higher click through on both first-time visits to the page and repeat visit.  They don’t break user scanner behavior into two distinct paths, but keep it concentrated in the Golden Triangle.  The result is that when they do choose to show sponsored ads in this area, they have much higher levels of engagement and click through over the entire interaction with the search results page, not just the first visit to the page.  If you use the overall user experience as your metric, higher monetization will come as a natural result.  The minute you try to force monetization by hijacking valuable real estate for purely commercial purposes, without consideration for what the user wants, you start eroding your revenue channel.  It’s no great secret. Pony up 149 bucks and you can buy a 200 plus page report showing you exactly how Google does it.

Guy Kawasaki in Kelowna

I had the pleasure of seeing Guy Kawasaki speak in my hometown of Kelowna last week.

Guy2

Photo courtesy of Manoj Jasra

The presentation was one I had seen him give in Vegas at PubCon last fall but the repetition did nothing to reduce the enjoyability of the presentation.  Guy is one of the most engaging speakers I’ve ever had the privilege of seeing.  I was hoping to be able to get to know him a little bit better but unfortunately, he had a pinched nerve from a hockey injury and was unable to sit at our table for dinner.  He was obviously suffering but managed to pull it together and deliver a great presentation.  We had actually bought tickets for a number of our team at Enquiro because we knew it would be inspirational for them. None were disappointed and both Manoj and Jody actually did blog posts the same night of the presentation  when they got home. Considering the  event didn’t  wrap up till 10:30, that shows dedication and passion!If you’re not aware, Guy is a huge hockey fan and he definitely played to the crowd with a number of hockey references.  Guy said he doesn’t often get the chance to use hockey stories but when in Canada, he takes full advantage.  He mentioned that he was actually considering canceling the speaking gig, given the pain that he was in with his injury, but he asked himself,  “What would Mark Messier do?” and then sucked it up and made the trip.  I’m glad he did.  If you ever get the chance to see Guy speak, I would highly recommend going.  I would also recommend becoming a regular reader of his blog, one of the most popular blogs on the web.

The Art of Contradiction

First published March 28, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

From “The Argument Clinic,” Monty Python

Michael Palin: An argument isn’t just contradiction.
John Cleese: It can be.
Michael Palin: No it can’t. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
John Cleese: No it isn’t.
Michael Palin: Yes it is! It’s not just contradiction.
John Cleese: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
Michael Palin: Yes, but that’s not just saying ‘No it isn’t.’
John Cleese: Yes it is!
Michael Palin: No it isn’t!
John Cleese: Yes it is!
Michael Palin: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
(short pause)
John Cleese: No it isn’t.

I think the world of SEO has spun into a prolonged Monty Python sketch. The flavor of the month seems to be manufactured debate designed to take up polar opposite positions on any given topic. There’s nothing like a little dustup online to get the creative juices going and generate a lot of blog activity, and, if the topic of that debate strikes enough nerves, a corresponding bushel of new links. It seems like no matter what someone says, someone else in the blogosphere automatically takes the contradictory viewpoint, sometimes not so much because he or she disagrees — but just because they want to post a comment on their blog and generate some links.

You Say “Potato,” I Say “Patattah”

There’s nothing new with online debate, but in the past it tended be fueled by real passion. Today I suspect that we’re all scanning the online landscape, looking for a viewpoint that we can be diametrically opposed to, just for the sake of generating some dialogue and some link bait.

And, just so we can be crystal-clear about this at the outset, when it comes to the above practice, I’m guilty as charged. In the past couple of months I’ve engaged in at least three or four of these debates in my own blog. Some I truly felt passionate about and some were simply me jumping on the other side of the question for the sheer purpose of having a little fun and perhaps generating a comment or two. Perhaps the low point of this particular form of online content generation reached its lowest point when both I and fellow SearchInsider David Berkowitz decided to open up the debate in this column on no less worthy a topic then Kevin Federline (just kidding, David, I know this wasn’t just a heartless exercise for you. I’m sure you’re very passionate about K-Fed.).

Dispassionate Debate

But I have to wonder how effective we can be in arguing if we don’t truly believe in the viewpoint that we’re arguing for. Dispassionate debate is supposed to be something we learn at school. We get randomly assigned one side of an argument, and it’s our job to effectively argue that viewpoint whether we believe it or not. The advantage of dispassionate debate is that you tend not to shoot your mouth off too fast. You take the time to do some research, learn the facts, and construct a logical argument without your face turning red, your heartbeat racing and your blood pressure rising through the roof. I’m the first to admit that when someone strikes a chord with me, I tend to take it a little more personally than I should — a situation I’m currently finding myself in with one of my blog debates.

Get The Juices Going!

But the debate that really get the juices going are those things we truly believe in. Just look at how passionate an entire industry got when the very validity of SEO was questioned. Take a browse through some of the hottest threads in either Webmaster World or Threadwatch and see how vitriolic comments can get when the raw nerves are exposed.

Passionate ideological debate is a good thing. It’s what built our society and it’s what’s driven the evolution of our civilization. If we can keep the focus of the debate on the validity of the ideas and not the person making the argument, then debate is a very good thing. It’s healthy, it lets the air in, it exposes ideas and allows us to ruminate on them. And if it happens on an online forum and it happens to help reinforce the structure of the Web by generating new links, then so be it. Again, it’s just one more way to where the Web takes the things we’ve always tended to do and elevates them to a new level.

In one particular debate I was told I should not take it so personally. After 45 years of living with myself, I realize I’m just not wired that way. I do tend to take things personally — and that’s usually what prompts me to post comments, whether they’re in a column like this or on my personal blog. And I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. Yes, it might ruffle some feathers from time to time. But it’s a sign of passion — and one thing I truly love about this industry is the passion that always bubbles just below the surface. I love the fact that we’re quick to jump to the defense of ideas we hold dear. I love the fact that we’re a very eloquent group and we can make our points so well. In a column that came out last week, Bill McCloskey cried about the lack of passion in the e-mail industry. As Bill points out, I’ve never seen that to be true in search. We’re ready to argue anything, even if we don’t really hold our position to be true deep, deep in our heart.

After all, there’s no such thing as bad press — and perhaps there’s no such thing as bad link bait.

The Great K-Fed Debate

federlinesearchMy SearchInsider column last week took exception with K-Fed launching his own search engine. Actually, I take exception with the entire concept of K-Fed that but that’s another point. In today’s SearchInsider, David Berkowitz retorts, rebukes and refutes my negativity around all things Federline, saying that the K-Fed engine shows that search is ubiquitous, search is evolving and search shouldn’t be always all business, no fun. Ultimately he says let the market decide whether a Kevin Federline engine is a good idea or not. Hard to refute that point.

Anyway, knowing David, he had a lot of fun writing the column and I certainly had fun writing the original column. The thing that amazes me is that in the past week, 40% of the total ink (or whatever the virtual variation of ink is) on SearchInsider has been devoted to the topic of Kevin Federline. Perhaps someday soon you’ll be able to pick up your local copy of SearchInsider at the grocery checkout and we’ll have great juicy articles about Britney’s rehab and the latest alien that professes to be Elvis, living in Minot, North Dakota.

One last point though David. You quoted me as saying that I would rather wear Fiberglas underwear than use the Kevin Federline search engine. That’s not actually true, I would rather wear Fiberglas underwear than attend K-Fed’s birthday party. And you asked where the phrase comes from. For the life of me I can’t remember where I first heard it, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a Canadian thing. I tried to look it up and couldn’t find any references so what the hell, let’s say that I originated the saying.

Does Online Video Give Us a New User Interface?

In Wednesday’s SearchInsider, Aaron Goldman looked at video search and what’s going to be required for it to truly become an interesting advertising vehicle.  Some of the speculation comes from Aaron’s musing about what might happen if Google purchased Blinkx.

To me, video search is one of the more interesting growth areas for search in the future.  Currently, there are some restrictions on video search that are imposed by the current state of technology.  Our ability to index video is restricted to the addition of metadata.  For each video clip, someone must take the time to include the tags indicating what the video is about.  As long as video search relies on this, the opportunities for advancement are extremely limited.  But right now we’re advancing on several technical fronts to be able to index content and not rely on metadata.  Several organizations, including Microsoft, are working on visual recognition algorithms that allow for true indexing of video content.  Advancements in computing horsepower will soon give us the sheer muscle required for the gargantuan indexing task.  Once we remove humans from the equation, allowing for automated indexing video content, the world of video search suddenly becomes much more promising.

When this happens, we move accessing information in a video from being a linear experience to being a nonlinear experience.  Suddenly we have random-access to information embedded within the video.  As mentioned, the technology is being developed to enable this, but the question is, will we as viewers be able to adapt to this paradigm shift?  The evolution of video has been one that is coming from a linear, storytelling experience.  Every video is generally a self-contained story with a distinct beginning, middle and end.  This is how we’re used to looking at video.

But when video search makes it possible to access information at any point in the video, how will that impact our engagement with that video?  In the last 10 years, we’ve seen some fairly dramatic shifts in how we assimilate written information.  We have moved from our past experience, where information was presented in very much a linear fashion in novels or books, to the way we currently assimilate information on websites.  When we interact with websites, we “berry pick”, hunting in various places on the page for information cues that seemed to offer what we are looking for.  Assimilation of the written word is much more erratic experience right now.  We move in a nonlinear fashion through websites, picking up information and navigating based solely on our intent and the paths we choose for ourselves.  One of the greatest revelations in website design was that we can not restrict users to a linear progression through our site, much as we might want to control their experience.

This adaptation has happened fairly quickly on websites, but will it happen as quickly with video?  When we can search for and access information anywhere in the video, what does that do for the nature of our engagement with that video?  Certainly it opens the door to some very interesting marketing opportunities, with what I’ve previously described as “product placement on steroids”.  The ability to click on any item in a video and instantly be connected to more information about that item creates a tremendous opportunity for advertisers.  But it also opens the potential for multiple paths through a video.  Does watching a video become more like playing a video game, where we can pursue different paths and have different experiences depending on the path we choose?  Does a travel video on Prague become an interactive virtual tour, where we choose our own path through Prague?  And is that interactive virtual tour assembled on-the-fly from dozens of different video clips? do we assemble content based on our intent with the help of our video search tool?  Do video producers take a dramatically more granular approach to producing content, leaving you to assemble the storyline from these individual bits of content, based on what you want to see?

This promises an extraordinarily rich user experience.  Consider how this might play out for an individual user.  We go to Google video search tool and search for the Loreta, one of the top tourist attractions in Prague.  We find a clip that takes us on a quick virtual tour and within the clip we could click on other things of interest.  For instance, we could climb to the top of the bell tower and take a look over Prague.  We could click on any building and if there was a video available we would be instantly transported to that building.  Or, if we choose, we could search for the nearest hotel and find the corresponding video clip.  The entire video has been indexed so no matter what we click on, our video search engine can use that to initiate a query and bring us back the resulting clips.  The clips are assembled into a virtual montage that we can navigate through depending on our interest areas.  We create a virtual version of Prague, assembled from all the video content that’s available, and we can access just what we’re interested in and search for any content that might be embedded into any of those individual video files.  Underneath this layer of video content there could be additional layers of functionality.  For instance you could tie it in with mapping functionality, à la Google Earth.  You could tie in Web search functionality so that you could easily click through to the relevant websites.  This could also provide access to booking engines and a number of other potential actions that we could take.

Such an experience is not that great a stretch from where we are currently at.  To see how it might play out take a look at Microsoft’s PhotoSynth.

photosynth

PhotoSynth View of Piazza San Marco in Venice

It does just what I’m describing with video, only with pictures.  It creates a 3-D world from the thousands of pictures that have been publicly shared.  I highly recommend taking it for a spin, as it provides a fascinating look at what human computer interfaces can be.

As we start considering the possibilities for video, the problem is we’re still stuck in our current paradigm of how we interact with video.  My feeling is once indexing technology allows us to truly index the content of the video, the nature of our interaction with video will completely change.  We’ll take the sensory input we expect from video and extend that into our typical user experience with more types of content.  Our interfaces will be more satisfying because they will become more like real life.  They will engage more of our senses and put us into a deeper and richer virtual world.  More and more, as technology progresses, our interface with technology will start to look more like our experience with the physical world.  As this happens, we will have the ability to step from a interface that engages our senses of sight and sound into a more abstract world where we interact with written text.  The transition between these two interfaces will be seamless and we can step back and forth as we wish.

The promise of video lies not so much in taking video as we know it and bringing it online.  The promise of video is that it provides a distinctly different user experience which could prove to be the new interface to technology.  But to make this happen we have to be able to index and search for the content that lies embedded within video.  We have to be able to take that video content and manipulate and mold it into a virtual world that we can interact with.  And that is the promise that lies within the next-generation video search.