Author Archives: ghotchkiss

What Sport Rules on Search?

I’ve been meaning to post on this for awhile, but you know how things go.

Anyway, Google Trends is pretty fun to play with. Being in Canada in hockey playoff season, I thought it would be interesting to compare the big 4 sports in North America.

Here’s the results:

So…over all Football rules in terms of search volume, with very regular peaks in basketball during playoffs.

On the top graph, hockey doesn’t look too impressive, but check out the search volumes in the cities. Hockey rules! Even in Minneapolis, the lone US city to make the list, they’re still looking for hockey. To be honest, we consider Minnesotans honourary (notice the Canadian spelling?) Canadians anyway.

Winnipeg is die hard hockey heartland, and they haven’t had a NHL team in 10 years (the Jets moved to Phoenix and became the Coyotes).

I’m not sure whether to be proud of our national obsession, or a little embarassed.

And in the interest of being topical, here’s how searchers cast their votes in April (the latest month available) for American Idol contestants. Hmm..this was almost a full month before the finals. Could search be the crystal ball for reality TV?

MySpace #6 in Search, Google Still #1

ComScore just released their April search market share numbers, and for the first time, they’ve added MySpace on the list, debuting at a respectable number 6 with 43 million searches and a 0.6 share.

This is an interesting generational development. Kids always need to carve out a space for their own that doesn’t seem controlled by adults. Online, this appears to be happening at MySpace. Will this territoriality change the search habits of a new generation? I can admit I’m way past this generation, so I don’t “get” MySpace but I’ll be watching with interest anyway. 43 million searches is nothing to sneeze at.

Other numbers from the ComScore release.

Google gained market share in the US for the ninth consecutive month, with 43.1 percent. Yahoo came in second with 28 percent and MSN third with 12.9 percent. Yahoo has dropped almost 3 points in the past year, and MSN dropped 3.2 points.

Despite my admiration for Ask’s new interface, it appears that not many are sharing my enthusiasm. Their market share has also dropped slightly in the past year, from 6.1 % down to 5.9%. By the way, I can’t say I’m a big fan of the Apostolos Gerasoulis commercials that Ask is running. In their attempts to position Ask as an alternative to Google, the message comes off a little desperate. And as cute as Apostolos’s son Eli is, I’m thinking this is the kid everybody asks for help with homework, but who probably won’t get invited to many parties in high school. (I may or may not have personal experience being this type of kid). Anyway, see what you think.

It does appear that we’re searching more than ever, with total search volume up to 6.6 billion queries a month for the US. That’s a 4% increase over March.

Overall gist of the numbers? Playing it safe won’t beat the Google juggernaut. Time for some bold strategies.

Lights! Camera! Google!

Google will be rolling out user initiated video advertising across it’s AdSense network.

Broken record time. I applaud Google’s decision to keep engagement with the video in the hands of the user.

But on a more fundamental level, I have to question the whole level of engagement with display advertising on sites. It seems like the harder advertiser’s scream, the more determined we are to ignore them. On a recent eye tracking study we did for MarketingSherpa, we were absolutely amazed with the small amount of scanning done in the typical ad positions on a page. Less than 10% of visitors even looked at these sections (top banner, right and left rail) of the page. Now, the purpose of the study wasn’t to look at this aspect specifically, but the scan patterns were undeniably clear. Interestly, text based ads that appeared within the flow of the main content had higher scanning levels, even when they appeared well below the fold.

Of course, these numbers are probably not terribly surprising, given the fact that visitors aren’t there to look at ads, but it makes you question the whole idea of paying by impression. If you’re buying based on a CPM model, realize that for every 1000 impressions, only 60 or 70 people are actually seeing the ad, even for a split second. Suddenly, those low clickthrough rates start to make sense.

A Conversation with Ask’s CEO, Jim Lanzone

First published May 18, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I had the chance to spend some time talking to Ask’s new CEO, Jim Lanzone. The first thing that become very clear is that Lanzone is tired of his company’s being compared to Google, MSN and Yahoo. I immediately slipped into the trap of asking how Ask intends to fight the big G and the two other contenders. It was obviously a question that he has heard all too often in the past. “Let’s begin by resetting the framework for the question,” Lanzone replied. “We don’t want to climb Everest right now. We’re not planning on knocking out Google. Our goal is to take our 20 million users, who are currently using us twice a month, and bump that up to four times a month. That doubles our market share,” he said.

“Search is not a zero sum gain,” Lanzone continued. “Americans use about 3.2 engines a month. We want to get on the list. We want to offer an alternative to Google.” As he pointed out, it’s much easier to post impressive market share growth percentages when you’re starting with a relatively small slice of the pie. “For Google to move the needle even a few points, they have to attract huge numbers of new searches,” he said. “We can achieve huge growth just by getting people to use us a few more times each month.”

Focusing on the User

Ask has come out of the gate strongly since the rebrand and the removal of Jeeves. The focus has been squarely on improving the search experience for its existing user. “We want to put the right tool in the right place at the right time,” said Lanzone. “We want to be waiting for the user when they need us.”

Distancing Ask from the helpful butler has proven itself to be difficult. “People are much more aware of us as Ask Jeeves than Ask. It will take time,” he said. For right or wrong, the efforts of Ask Jeeves to brand themselves as a natural query engine have stuck. A long-time member of Ask’s usability team, Michael Ferguson, pointed out the challenges of trying to change how people search. “For years, we’ve been telling people to ask us a question. We’ve perhaps been a little too successful in encouraging them. I once asked a lady what was the last thing she searched for on (then) Ask Jeeves. She was disappointed in the results she got when she typed in ‘Midnight basketball programs are more successful in LA than in St. Louis. Why is that?'”

I had written some time ago that I believe we’ve become used to truncating our search intent into a few words. Apparently, Ask now agrees. Rather than trying to accommodate natural language, Ask now takes a more standard approach to query construction.

Tools When You Need Them, Where You Need Them

Even the physical layout of Ask’s new home page tried to ease the transition from the once ubiquitous butler. Ferguson said, “We put the new tool palette where Jeeves used to be. It’s about the same height and size, so visually it has the same balance.”

The palette is a big part of the new usability focus of Ask. Lanzone explained, “We have some great tools, and we wanted to move them more upfront for the user. We didn’t want to hide them with tabs, which no one clicks on. With the palette, it’s right there, waiting for them.”

Based on initial numbers, people are using the tools more than ever before. Usage on most of them has doubled, with some, like image and map search, posting far higher gains.

Another change was a rethinking of how to use the real estate of the search results page. “The ads from the right rail are gone,” said Lanzone. “We’ve replaced that with something searchers can use, the ‘Narrow’ and ‘Broaden’ your search suggestions. Rather than 1 or 2 percent click-throughs on ads, we’re getting 30 percent click throughs on those suggestions. We know that search is an iterative process, so why not help make it easier by helping the user get to the right search faster?”

Another cleaned up area of the SERP is the top-sponsored ads. It used to be that organic results were pushed right off the page by far too many sponsored listings. Top-sponsored listings have since been restricted to three, in line with other major engines, with the rest shown at the bottom of the page. This used to be one of my pet peeves with Jeeves, and apparently I had plenty of sympathizers in the Ask usability team. “We were a public company, responding to demand for profits,” Lanzone explains. “A lot of us never agreed with that.” Kudos to parent company IAC for eventually listening to the champions of the user experience.

Not Bolder, Just Better

I wrapped up by telling Lanzone that I believed Ask was in a good position to become the bold innovator in search. Unlike Google and Yahoo, it isn’t solely dependent on a huge revenue stream from search, so it can afford to take some risks in testing new interfaces and developments. He replied, “You know, we’ve never considered what we’ve done, or plan to do, as being bold. It just has to be right for the user. All the changes we’ve made were done because in our testing, it felt right. We’re not chasing technology for its own sake. We have a laser focus on the user experience. We just want to do search right.”

I’m a huge believer in focused strategy and feet on the ground, practical user-centricity. They’re two commodities that are in drastically short supply in the current heated search space. If Ask sticks to its guns, it just may just get a shot at the big dogs in search.

Search Supercharges Ad Platforms but What’s In It for the User?

Seems like all the innovation lately with the search engines has been in rolling out sophisticated ad targeting platforms. Yahoo’s the latest to blow their horn about their own back end (and I realize that paints an ugly picture).

I’m a search marketer, and I love the advances that are being made in being able to target geographically, demographically and behaviorally, but I can’t help but think, “Who are we targeting?”. While the engines try to woo advertisers with better tools, what good is it doing if their market share is dwindling because they’re not giving the user a reason to use the engine?

I have not seen a significant improvement to the every day search user experience from any of the big 3 in years. One may argue that if you take advantage of search history or other enhancements that have debuted in beta, it offers more value to the searcher. But that does nothing for the vast majority of searches that happen every day on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Nobody has upped the ante. Ask is the only engine I’ve seen that made some significant changes on the interface (more about that later today).

As a search marketer, it’s all about market share. It takes time to target and strategically plan a campaign, and while the new platforms offer some impressive capabilities, they also add time required to manage them. Am I going to use that time to target 11% of the search market, 23%  or 50%? It just makes sense to use your time where it gets you the biggest return.

A word of advice. Worry about getting the users first, then worry about the tools to target them.

Putting Every Book Ever Published One Click Away

is Sherman had an interesting post in Searchenginewatch about a Wired article on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s goal to make every book ever written digital and searchable. While they’ve been working on it awhile, there’s still an immense amount of information to digitize. Chris also talks about the ephemeral nature of the web and wonders if the search indexes could help reconstruct seemingly lost web pages by retrieving crawled versions from their cache.

Almost since the beginning of recorded history, man has dreamed about collecting all the world’s knowledge in one place. Perhaps the closest we ever came was the Library of Alexandria. That was over 2000 years ago. It’s estimated that the Library held over 500,000 scrolls. Today, Google is scanning about 1,000,000 books a year, and that only represents 5% of all the books in print. Obviously, the task is larger than ever, but we may also be closer to realizing it than ever before!

Will Search Become a Duopoly!

Turning the heat up on the Microsoft-Google showdown is causing speculation that smaller players may get squeezed out. The timing is interesting, because I had a great chat with new Ask CEO Jim Lanzone last week. I’ll be posting more about it later this week, but Ask is taking a very down to earth, pragmatic and focused approach to the upcoming search war, and one that resonates with me. Don’t count these guys out yet!

Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool Broken?

Quick question. Is anybody else getting really strange results out of the Keyword Selector Tool at Yahoo? I just did a search for Los Angeles, and apparently all people are searching for are cars. These were the results I got:

Searches done in April 2006
Count Search Term
 350883  toyota los angeles
 333459  honda los angeles
 280591  bmw los angeles
 279022  chevrolet los angeles
 238133  ford los angeles
 226776  mercedes benz los angeles
 181748  nissan los angeles

Either everyone in Los Angeles is buying a new car, which could be, or the inventory tool needs a complete engine rebuild. Just wondering if anyone can shed a little light on this.

Did a quick check on Google based on keyword popularity and here’s what this tool gave me as the top variations:

los angeles, los angeles hotels, los angeles ca, los angeles california

That seems to make more sense

Quintura, Staking the Future on Semantic Mapping

First published May 11, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I pity the poor new entry in the search engine space. How do you possibly stake out new territory in the hottest online space there is? How do you avoid being swept away in the tidal wave of momentum that is going to the industry leaders, Google, Yahoo and MSN? How do you attract enough users to gain a critical mass? Well, you have to offer something different.

A new desktop search tool, Quintura, is betting that a new user interface based on the concept of semantic mapping is just the ticket it needs to win the search lottery. And if semantic mapping sounds familiar, it should. I’ve been talking about semantic mapping for almost two years now. It’s a powerful concept in understanding how people search and something we identified in our previous research. But when it comes to building a new user interface around it, I’m not sure Quintura’s implementation will be taken up by the search masses.

A Semantic Map Primer

First of all, if you haven’t heard me speak about the concept previously, let me introduce you to the theory of semantic mapping.

Whenever we use a search engine, we have a concept in mind. The concept is usually fairly complex, consisting of a lot of pre-existing relationships we have made mentally. I’ll stick to the example I usually use to illustrate the concept. Let’s assume we’re beginning our research for an upcoming digital camera purchase. In this case, our concept will likely include connections with brands we’re familiar with (Nikon, Kodak, Canon, Olympus, etc), features (zoom, number of megapixels, autofocus) and our intent (finding consumer reviews, reading testimonials, finding side-by-side feature comparisons). These connections can be expressed by the words that define them. Together, all the words that define our concept make up our semantic map. It could consist of dozens or even hundreds of words.

But when we go to a search engine, we distill the concept down to the broadest possible phrase, both out of a desire to be inclusive in our search, and out of a reluctance to expend too much effort in constructing our search (which is a diplomatic way of saying we’re lazy). So we search for “digital camera.”  When the results are presented to us, that original concept and its accompanying semantic map is still in place. It plays a vital role in how we react to the listings. We scan listings, and if we happen to find appearances of the words in our map, that listing registers as being a better match to our intent.

Quintura’s Take on Semantic Maps

When I first heard about Quintura, it was like somebody had built a search tool around the Powerpoint slide I’ve been using for the last year and a half to illustrate the concept. Just like that slide, the query used sits in the middle of an actual word map, surrounded by related words that further define the concept. In Quintura, as you click on words that define the concept, they get added to your query, causing the words in your map to update and restrict the focus of your search, allowing you to quickly and graphically structure very specific queries. The theory is that clicking through a semantic map will allow you to spend less time sifting through irrelevant results.

In theory, this should be a huge step forward in the user experience. But, feeling somewhat traitorous to the concept I helped pioneer, I’m not sure it’s the answer for the next big search interface. Here’s the problem…

When All’s Said and Done, We’re Still Lazy…

You’ve been able to structure advanced search queries for ages. But through it all, less than 5 percent of all searches have taken advantage of these capabilities. Quintura’s take is just another way to build the query. The real time updating is cool, and may help refine the search when you’re not exactly sure of the query you should be using, but I’m not sure this is enough. I think it will make Quintura an interesting footnote in the search “also ran” category.

There are reasons why we search the way we do, and not being able to think of the words is generally not one of them. We know the words–in fact, we know too many of them. They reside just under the conscious layer, making themselves known when there’s a match in the result we’re looking for. But this is hardly an articulated process. It happens in split seconds, through subconscious connections. It’s almost transparent to us, as we hardly notice it’s happening. It’s one of those things that when you hear it explained, you say, “Yeah, that makes sense. I’m sure I do that,” but you didn’t know you did it.

My theory? If it takes longer than one second and more than one click to refine your search, you’ve excluded 95 percent-plus of your potential market. Quintura’s approach, although undeniably cool, fails on both counts. I still believe semantic mapping is vitally important, but I think search engines have to get better at creating those maps transparently, through disambiguating our intent by getting to know us better. I believe it’s unrealistic for a search engine to expect the user to go to the trouble of building the map for them.

So what about the other 5 percent? The power users, or the searchers who don’t know what they’re looking for and need the prompting of related words? Again, it comes back to critical mass. This might be a welcome addition to Google’s advanced features, but it can’t attract enough attention as a stand-alone to survive. Then again, perhaps catching Google’s attention isn’t such a bad play.

Sorry, Quintura. I feel like I’m disowning one of my children, but unless you’re looking at being gobbled up by one of the big three, I don’t see this as the winning ticket in the great search lottery.

Day of Reckoning Coming for Big Brands; or, to Hell and Back on United

I’ll start with a caveat: I’m PO’d. I spent a night from hell on Tuesday trying to get to Toronto from Chicago. But I hope in the midst of my spouting I get a valid point across.

First, the story of why I’m PO’d. I was flying United on what was supposed to be a one hour hop from Chicago to Toronto. By the way, United asked over $500 for this hop.

I start off by grabbing a sandwich at a little express counter by the gate from a place called Reggio’s To Go. A basic ham and cheese cost me about 8 bucks. This is an airport, so I’m not expecting great things from the 8 dollar sandwich, but even with those low expectations set, I was surprised by how abysmal the sandwich actually was. I had to check twice to make sure it was the sandwich I was eating and not the packaging. It tasted like it had been sitting in the display case since the early Bronze Age. I happened to glance at the sign for Reggio’s, which is obviously a franchise. The brand message is “Fresh and Ready to Go”. “Ready to go” in the garbage seems to be what they meant.

We’re on board by 6:15, the scheduled departure time. The plane is packed, leg room is negligible, and to make matters worse, the person sitting to my immediate right is just coming back from Japan. There’s no room left in overhead, so she tries to jam a roller suitcase, a backpack and a large shopping bag under the seat. None of the 3 fit, so she piles them on the floor between her legs, hoping no one will notice. Nobody does..or at least, nobody mentions anything. This makes the already scarce leg room even more restricted. By this point, I’m resigned to a miserable one hour trip, but then again, it’s an airline, so I didn’t really expect anything more.

The plane is unbelievably hot, but no worries, we should be in the air soon, and hopefully the plane will cool down. We wait, and wait, and wait. After what seems like a century, the pilot comes on and let’s us know they’re having a problem with the fuel gauge. They’re going to try to fix it to know how much fuel we actually have, and then we’ll be on our way. I think it was about this point I passed out from sheer heat exhaustion. After another 20 minutes or so, I woke up, my neck screaming in agony, my legs dead from the waist down, and sweat starting to drip from my forehead. The fuel gauge is still not working, and there’s no progress in sight. After another 30 minutes, it appears that the fuel gauge is thwarting the best efforts of United’s top maintenance crew, so they at least let us off the pressure cooker, 90 minutes past departure time and no closer to Toronto. Somebody insightfully wonders aloud about what they used for a fuel gauge on the flight in?

We get to the gate and are told to stay close for updates. The passengers with connections try to get rebooked. They’re understandably upset. But United’s gate agents seem to think the best approach is to meet rudeness with rudeness. The agents are short tempered and surly, snapping at passengers who have the nerve to see if they can somehow get to Toronto before the clock strikes midnight. “Is your luggage checked? Yes? Sorry then, I can’t do anything for you. Go sit down.” I swear to God, that’s the exact quote I heard.

After another hour and a half at the gate, the recalcitrant fuel gauge gives in and we get back on the plane. We finally get in the air by 10, almost 4 hours after the scheduled departure time. The pilot came on to thank us for our patience and assures us we have 3 of United’s finest flight attendants looking after us. There’s nothing wrong with them, but there’s nothing very right either. There was absolutely no attempt to make it up to us. No gesture of apology. If these are United’s finest, the hiring standards must be pretty low.

As we touch down in Toronto, the pilot comes on again and thanks us for flying the friendly skies. Friendly skies? Frat house initiations are less painful than what I just went through!

And here’s my point. Brand messaging has to be more that a cool line for your ads. It should be a promise. It should drive every aspect of the company. It should embody the unique value you offer. I had the chance to share the keynote spotlight at a recent show with David Neeleman, CEO of JetBlue. David quipped at the beginning that when they started JetBlue, their goal was to raise the bar of the airline industry. Quickly they realized that within the industry, the bar was set so low that you could crawl over it. They soon had to look outside the industry to find examples of best practices that meant something.

The brand relationship should be built at every customer touchpoint. I had a number of touchpoints with the United brand on Tuesday, and the sum total left me feeling like I’d been mugged. If United really believes they offer a friendlier experience, then every employee should embody that attitude. None of the ones I met yesterday seemed to have been let in on the secret. The attitudes ranged from indifferent to downright surly.

United has probably spent billions getting their brand message out through advertising. But do you think they could spring a few hundred bucks to treat us all to a drink, or even a free cookie when it really mattered? Brand is built on the front lines, face to face with a customer. It’s delivering when the chips are down. It’s taking responsibility for a positive customer experience, and doing what it takes to fix it when it’s not. United abdicated this responsibility, so their brand message became nothing more than a brand lie. It’s worthless to me. In fact, it’s worse than that, because United just dug a hole for themselves with me that they may never get out of. I will avoid United like the plague from this point forward.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, with Reggio’s and the world’s worst sandwich (somewhat ironic, because I had one of my best sandwiches in Chicago the day before). If their slogan is to be any more than another brand lie, then they have to deliver edible food. The brand has to mean something. How do they expect it to mean something to the consumer when the company itself doesn’t believe the brand message?

Up to now, companies could get away with this. You could screw over the consumer and their circle of influence was limited. Sure, they’d complain, but as long as you kept bumping millions into slick TV ads painting idyllic pictures of brand nirvana, you could keep the ruse going. It was the “sucker born every minute” approach to advertising. But those days are coming to an end. Now, when I call bullshit on a brand message, I have an expanded reach through the internet. Some call it consumer generated media. I call it Bitching 2.0.

There’s a new ecosystem developing online. Marketing theorists have long known of mavens. Mavens are a key component in social epidemics, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in the Tipping Point. Traditionally, they’re the ones that have been entrusted to keep brands honest. They are the uber-consumers that the rest of us look for guidance to. They tell us what’s good, and what’s not. Traditionally, they needed social connectors to spread the word.

But what happens when you give a maven a blog? Suddenly, connectors are built into the infrastructure of the web. I would argue that the new mavens are the ones with the most read blogs. They’re thoughtful, they’re well informed, and many of us have them pegged in our feed readers. Suddenly, the scope of their influence expands exponentially. As an example, my blog is only a few weeks old, but most of my posts are read by hundreds of people. If I get a link in another blog, the viral impact starts to take over. My rant against a bogus brand message could reach thousands. And there were at least a hundred other passengers on that United flight, just as PO’d as me, any of which could be a blogging maven. The web puts the spread of word of mouth on a dramatically expanded scale, on a compressed timeline. Also, it makes word of mouth, traditionally a fleeting thing, into a permanent fixture online. This blog post will live in perpetuity on the web, searchable by any search engine. Suddenly, the big brands can’t take the reach of a single consumer for granted.

To me, this shift of power to the consumer is one of the most exciting aspects of the web, and it’s long overdue. Now, we have the power to force corporations to keep their brand promise, or perish.

And to the staff of United Flight 1110, let me pass this along. The definition of “friendly” is:

  1. Of, relating to, or befitting a friend
  2. Favorably disposed; not antagonistic
  3. Warm; comforting.

Please pass it along to every United staff member you know.