Author Archives: ghotchkiss

The Bold and the Beta: Two Approaches to Search Innovation

First published March 16, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As search innovation rolls out to the user, the beta release has been a tried and true way of testing the waters. Currently, there are dozens of different flavors of search in beta, including a significant portion of Google usability. Beta releases were originally a quality assurance exercise, allowing real users to identify bugs in a new product.

Today, the advantage of beta in search is that it’s a relatively low-risk way to test the appeal of new search functionality and interfaces with real users. Beta release is to technology as a test market is to advertising. A beta interface can be thrown up without impacting the main site, which continues to produce the bread and butter revenue. The hope is, of course, that word of the beta will spread virally through the Internet, and the developer finds its beta release turn into the next big thing online. You pretest with users, find you have a home run, and when the time is right, you throw the switch, incorporating some or all of the new technology into your mainstream product.

The beginning of Google was a classic study in how a beta release can introduce a hot new upstart. Google was in beta forever, and had attracted a significant chunk of the search market before it ever was officially released. Use of Google spread virally like wildfire through the academic and journalist communities, eventually cracking the mainstream as the word spread. The beta campaign worked like a charm, and by the time Google was mainstream, it had so much momentum it never looked back.

Since then, every search player has thrown new technology up as a beta, to see what sticks, and hopefully, takes off to become the next flavor of Google. Notable beta candidates currently are Google’s Froogle (another perennial beta release) and Video Search, Microsoft’s Windows Live Search and Yahoo’s Mindset. Each hopes that it will be the next big thing. Given the stakes that are up for grabs in search, I’m not sure beta release is the best way to get the next big win. Here are some reasons why:

Beta Users Are Early Adopters

The beta user is not your typical animal. They tend to be more risk tolerant  and patient with bugs, and are the early adopters. This audience works well if your beta release objectives are bug tracking, but not so well if you’re trying to gauge a potential market buster.

Search is now mainstream; it’s crossed the chasm. The classic Google success story took place when search was still in the domain of the early adopter. Today, to gain market share, you have to introduce technology that appeals to everyone. I tend to be an early adopter. My wife is a classic online pragmatist. I’ll fool around with new technology, and I think some of the stuff in beta is pretty cool. But it’s not my loyalty you have to win, it’s my wife’s, and she doesn’t even know Google Labs exists, let alone is willing to take the brainchild of a Google engineer for a test drive. If you’re using beta users to pretest market potential, you’re probably getting the wrong feedback.

The Competition Can Peek Under Your Kimono

Search is a hot space now. In the original days of Google, search had the advantage of not being under the microscope, so a beta release of a new engine had a chance to build up some user momentum before it was attacked and reverse engineered by the competition. In Google’s case, not only was it not reverse engineered, but Page and Brin couldn’t even sell the technology to the competition. The same is not true today. Literally weeks or days are all it seems to take before the competition jumps on a new development and introduces its own version. As an example, Windows Live Search has its own version of Google Earth satellite imagery built into the interface.

When you’re penetrating a mainstream market, every day you can hold an advantage over the competition is significant. The longer something remains in beta before it becomes a significant advantage to your main user base, the longer your competition has to even the playing field.

There’s Too Much Beta And Too Little Innovation

A beta product will only become a blockbuster if it significantly ups the ante in terms of just plain coolness or usability. Today, everything gets thrown in beta, and, in many cases, there’s just not enough motivation to cause even early adopters to give it a second look. We’re being inundated with new beta releases and I personally can’t keep up. The chance of one of these spinning enough momentum to gain market share is infinitesimal at best. There’s very little that’s really buzz-worthy right now. The last thing I saw that was pretty cool in new search interfaces was Yahoo’s Mindset, but that’s generated virtually no attention even in the search biz. After taking Windows Live Search for a test drive, I found it reasonably buzz-worthy as well, but time will tell if it will gain much attention in its beta release.

It’s Time For Boldness, Not Beta

This might not be the time to play it safe in the search biz. It’s time for locked doors and midnight brainstorming, huge leaps forward and blow-your-socks-off functionality. It’s time for monumental, not incremental, improvements. Spoon feeding us innovation through never-ending beta releases might not be the way to go. The irony is that now, when there’s significant dollars at stake and risk is greatest, the only way to win might be to take that risk head-on and gamble big.

Enough Talk about Search Bubbles!

First published March 9, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Geoff Ramsey from eMarketer is a smart guy. At Search Engine Strategies in New York last week, Geoff said that search marketing is only at 10 percent of its potential size. I’m not sure how Geoff quantified the 10 percent figure, but when it comes to the fact that we’re only scratching the surface of search, I agree wholeheartedly.

There was also a lot of press last week about Google’s share price eroding because its CFO, George Reyes, said he expected slowing growth in the next quarter. So what’s the deal? Is search growing, or isn’t it?

My Breakfast With The Analysts

While in New York for SES, I had breakfast with a number of financial analysts. They wanted me to quote a hard number to try to quantify the growth of search spending quarter over quarter. They wanted the exact impact of click fraud. They were hungry, and it wasn’t for the scrambled eggs and bacon. They wanted numbers to plug into a spreadsheet and try to predict a growth trend for Google. They wanted to eliminate ambiguity, put form to the nebulous and try to quantify a social phenomenon. My panel partner, New York Times / About.com‘s Marshall Simmonds, and I tried to give them what they were looking for, but I couldn’t help but think we were on opposite sides of a communication chasm. We weren’t looking at the industry through the same lens.

Here’s the problem. I tend to be a big-picture, long-term thinker. In that context, I see nothing but blue sky for search. It can’t help but grow exponentially. Meanwhile, the analysts are focused on the next three months and what the next earning report is going to look like. Is there a gremlin lurking out there that will jinx Google’s profitability next month?

I understand the short-term focus. I know it’s vitally important to investors. I am somewhat familiar with how the market works. But I’m just not sure how you micro- measure something that’s perhaps the most significant sociological event in our lifetime. And no, I don’t think I’m overstating the case.

This Isn’t A Bubble, It’s A Tidal Wave!

I’ve said this before, and I’m saying it again. Search is the key to online interaction. It is the connector between intent and content online. And online will soon become the only line. It will be the umbilical cord through which we interact with everything beyond our immediate physical world.

We have no idea how much our lives will change in the next two decades. It will be the most rapid assimilation of sociological change in history. Everything that forms our current reality will be reengineered and reinvented from the ground up. This includes our definitions of community, social relationships, family, communication, our work, our leisure and our very concept of self. The physical and the virtual will merge, and the simple act of searching will become the synapse that connects us to the World 2.0.

That’s a big concept, one that’s hard to constrain with talk of quarterly earnings, bid prices remaining flat and the potential danger of click fraud. These are all valid concerns, but to me, it’s a bit like forecasting the demise of the automobile in 1902 because poor roads caused frequent flat tires and there were no gas stations. Perhaps that dampened sales of automobiles in the short term, but the fact remained that a fundamental wave of change was underway, and any restricting obstacles were eventually swept away by the sheer force of that change. The same is true of search.

Consumer Control

Here’s just one concept that has been irrevocably altered forever. The individual is now in control. We can connect instantaneously with other individuals, and ground swells of societal change can happen literally overnight. We no longer mindlessly accept what is given to us, we take what we want. And search is the mechanism we use to find what it is we want. It used to be that vast power constructs were required to form the pipelines required to get goods, services or entertainment to us. The Internet has made those power constructs unnecessary. The infrastructure now exists for any company to connect to any consumer. But, and this is a fundamental concept, the consumer now chooses to connect with the company, not the company with the consumer. The agenda lies totally in the hands of the individual, and that agenda usually includes search, in any of its various forms.

Defining Online Interaction

The biggest issue facing search now is not flattening bid prices or click fraud, it’s in quantifying the value of search in the context of complex online interactions. At Search Engine Strategies I had the privilege of being on a panel with Greg Stirling from the Kelsey Group, Alan Rimm-Kaufman of the Rimm-Kaufman Group and Diane Rinaldo from Yahoo. In the Q&A after the session, Greg and I both stated that we suspect online interactions are much more convoluted and messy than we might think. We don’t navigate online in a considered way. We click quickly, make split-second decisions and use the “back” button extensively. Somewhere in this soup of online interaction, we work our way through our own buying funnel, but this could happen in one distinct session, or it could happen as fragments of several sessions spread out over months.

In there somewhere are our interactions with search. And when I say search, I use the term in its broadest context, not a clearly defined interaction with Google, Yahoo or MSN. Search for me is any user-initiated request for information, so it could be internal site search, vertical search or general search. To me, it’s the concept of search as the user-controlled online connection that holds the promise, not any individual property. I’m sure Google, Yahoo and MSN are all smart enough to realize the potential and are all working on ways to capture as big a share of this fundamental activity as possible.

To try to extricate the search activity and tie quantifiable value to each touch point from this tangled mess of online interactions becomes tremendously challenging. That’s why most search marketers only measure the end, the click that leads to the final transaction. It’s easy, but it’s not capturing the value of search along the way. And if, as I suspect, search is a essential element in online navigation, then the value is significant.

So I return to Geoff Ramsay and his prediction that we’ve only so far seen 10 percent of the potential of search. Absolutely! It’s like standing with your feet in a puddle while you watch a tsunami coming your way. It’s not a question of if you’re going to get wet, but rather, when.

Ask.com – The Dark Horse in Search?

First published March 2, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Barry Diller likes long shots. He’s built a career betting on the long shot. Climbing from the mail room of the William Morris agency to network exec was business as usual for Diller. Taking ABC from a perpetual also-ran to challenge the dominance of CBS and NBC was not out of the realm of the doable. And Diller’s Fox is the once impossible fourth network. So don’t be too quick to bet against him.

 

Today, Diller is stacking his chips for a run at the lucrative search market, and he’s betting that history can repeat itself. Fresh from killing off his venerable butler, Jeeves, Diller showcased the new Ask.com at the New York Search Engine Strategies show.

In a keynote conversation with Danny Sullivan that opened the show, Diller made it clear that he’s in this for the long haul. Diller knows it will take time and significant improvements in the user experience to wrest market share from the Google juggernaut. And Ask.com just might have the goods to add another underdog win to Diller’s already impressive CV.

Good Core Functionality

Behind the Ask interface lies some pretty impressive technology. The Teoma back end that Ask purchased in 2001 is arguably every bit as good as Google’s vaunted relevancy algorithms, and many industry insiders argue that their core concept of expert communities or hubs is actually a step ahead of Google’s link-based approach.

But good relevancy is just the price you have to pay to play in this game. It should be a given. Relevancy algorithms won the game once (for Google) but the playing field has evened. The next step is an improved user experience, and it’s here where Ask has a couple of significant advantages that might give it a shot at taking on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Deeply Vertical

The search engines are moving to deeper vertical experiences. They are trying to interpret intent based on the search query, and delivering a richer set of results in the appropriate category. So, if the search engine knows your query is local in nature (because of the inclusion of a city or zip code) it will try to deliver local search results, complete with addresses and maps showing the location. It’s a closer match to what your intent is, which is to locate a local business. The goal of the search engine is to get you closer to the information you want, and minimize the number of clicks you have to take to get there.

Diller’s IAC includes some well established vertical properties, including CitySearch, Hotels.com and Match.com. It makes tremendous sense to use Ask as the portal into these vertical experiences. Already, the new Ask features CitySearch ratings on many local results. Diller indicated that increased verticalization is likely in the future, but it has to be integrated in a way that makes sense, “We have an enormous amount of vertical data, but we’re never going to give a bad user experience.”

Betting Big when You Have Nothing to Lose

Perhaps Ask’s biggest advantage is the fact that it has nothing to lose. The company’s market share sits at about 2.5 percent (according to Nielsen NetRatings), so it can afford to fine-tune an interface.

Google is no longer the brash newcomer in the search biz. When you have 50 percent-plus market share and your entire revenue channel is dependent on maintaining that share, you have to step very carefully. This is not usually the corporate climate that fosters discontinuous innovation. And discontinuous innovation is the only thing that’s going to unseat the leaders in the search space. As Diller said in his keynote address, “We’re not looking for Ask to be another search engine, we’re looking for it to be an alternative to the other engines.”

Ask has already introduced some interesting new features to the search experience. Their “Narrow” and “Expand Your Search” suggestions usually prove helpful. The new Ask also features an editable tool palette on the home page that immediately adds new and deep functionality, such as local, maps, shopping, dictionary and encyclopedia, images, news and weather. Desktop search has also been incorporated. When I attempted to take some of the features for a test drive, the results were mixed. I was told a number of times that the volume of searches being done prevented Ask from delivering local results.

Search and Tools Don’t Mix

When the tools worked, they did seem to deliver pretty good results and some impressive new functionality. Perhaps moving this to the home page will encourage more people to try them. But based on our observations of search user behavior, few of us want to take one second longer than necessary to fine-tune our searches. This has been shown by the anemic percentage of users that have historically taken advantage of existing advanced search features. With Ask, to launch a local search, you have to hit the tab, which introduces another search box where you add the city or zip. Sound’s pretty simple right? But users are notoriously lazy when it comes to search. Add one more click, just one, and you seem to eliminate the majority of the audience. Ask’s features are simple and intuitive, but time will tell whether users embrace the additional functionality.

I think Ask is heading in the right direction, but the first version of Ask shows tweaks to the accepted search paradigm, not the shake-up that’s required for the big win. Perhaps Diller and his search team have more surprises up their sleeve.

Barry Gets The Last Word

Diller also shared more philosophical moments in his conversation with Danny Sullivan. “I’ve spent my whole life telling stories in the narrative,” he said. “I’m fascinated by the interactivity of online, by what’s possible in a screen. I’m still curious about the potential of this radical revolution.” He also took the opportunity to take some shots at his main rival, Google. “The whole idea of ‘don’t be evil’ is a little pretentious. I don’t believe the vast majority of corporations are out there setting up evil empires.”

One thing that was interesting to note on the floors of SES was the continuing shift in attitude towards Google. Resentment towards its domination of search is growing and becoming more vocal. We want more competition in the search space, and many attendees would like to see Google’s gargantuan corporate ego get knocked down a few notches. It seems that MSN is stumbling in its efforts to get the job done, so perhaps it’s time for the guy who’s always placed his money on the long shot.

Is Search a Leech on the Internet?

First published February 23, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Search is rapidly turning from the darling of the Internet to a demon. The latest attack, brought about by search’s phenomenal financial success, is that search is sucking all the value out of millions of Web sites by scraping content in bite-sized pieces and doling it out to searchers, at the same time monetizing traffic that’s being driven by content created by the site owners, not the search engine.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen ran a post on his site a few weeks back taking the engines to task for fostering dependency on search traffic, while at the same time enjoying the impact of ever-escalating bid prices. A few analysts have also started to intimate that perhaps it’s time for marketers, especially those in direct response, to look beyond search, as click prices move the cost per acquisition beyond what’s reasonable.


Usability: Too Much of a Good Thing?

In a somewhat ironic twist, Nielsen illustrates how improved usability can be a big factor in driving up bid prices. When a new online search market emerges, bid prices usually settle out based on the relative conversion performance of the main bid contenders. Based on their current conversion and closing rates, the smarter search marketers determine what they can afford to pay per lead. But let’s say that one of the contenders suddenly makes its site a better conversion vehicle, doubling their capture and close rate. Suddenly, that marketer can bid twice as much and still end up with the same per unit ROI. It becomes more aggressive in bidding, and eventually, its competitors wake up, figure out what happened and launch their own improvement cycles. Bid prices escalate as marketers optimize every aspect of their campaign, and the search engines double their revenue by doing nothing. In this scenario, not only are engines leeches on the content of the Internet, they’re also sucking the blood out of the entire search marketing industry. The better we get, the more money they make.

Now, before we round up the lynch mob for the engines, there are a few things that have to be said on their behalf. In cases like what was described above, search acts as the initial matchmaker between a site and a prospect. True, if it’s a one-time transaction, search can skim off a substantial portion of the value realized from sale, but if it’s a situation where lifetime value is a multiple of the first sale, the returns from that search lead will far outweigh the one-time cost. Nielsen also acknowledges that traffic generated from organic referrals doesn’t add anything to the search engine coffers. While he dismisses this traffic source in one brief mention, I think it should be realized that search engines have continued to provide this service, devoting a substantial portion of their page real estate to organic listings. 3 out of every 4 users are still clicking on these listings.


Search: Providing Quick Answers

Another concern expressed by Nielsen, which has also been vocalized, very loudly, by the World Association of Newspapers (http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d0e8cf3e-928d-11da-977b-0000779e2340.html) is that many users use search as an answer engine. They need a quick answer to a question (i.e., what movie had Brad Pitt’s first starring role?) and often they don’t have to go any further than the search results page to find it. The answer is often contained in the snippet of text that comes from the listed site. If you did the search above, you’d find that the site tiscali.co.uk has the answer (“Dark Side of the Sun,” by the way). The content came from that site, answered your question and you’re merrily on the way, arguing about who played the corpse in “The Big Chill.” But that’s far from the experience the owners of tiscali.co.uk wanted. They pay for their site by selling advertising. On the page that snippet came from are three separate ads. You didn’t see any of them, but you did see the ads the engine chose to show you.

Is this a grey area? Absolutely. But the organizations that are investing in the production of that content that the engines so nonchalantly pilfer are getting tired of contributing to Google’s ever increasing bank accounts. While publishers (including book publishers) acknowledge that the search engines are necessary for connecting users with their content, they don’t want those same users stopping at the search results page, having found what they were looking for. Gavin O’Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers, summed it up, “We need search engines, and they do help consumers navigate an increasingly complicated medium, but they’re building (their business) on the back of kleptomania.”


The New Golden Rule of Online

While I understand the frustration, I think it’s time for a reality check. The fact is, it’s the new User Rule for online: Those that have the users, make the rules.

Search works. Users know that. With that come some positives, and some negatives. The way I see it, search brings much more to these content sites than it takes away, so it’s not a parasitic relationship. Would these sites be happier if the search engines didn’t index their content at all? If so, that’s doable with a simple robots.txt file. If not, quit your whining and get used to it!

Pssst, Try My Search Engine and I’ll Give You a Turkey!

First published February 17, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The twains have met. Back in the dark recesses of my past, I used to toil in the radio biz as a copywriter. I had thought I left that industry far behind when I started working in the search marketing game. But, zounds, suddenly the search player’s strategy is starting to sound like it was devised by Herb Tarlek (for those of you under 40, Google “WKRP in Cincinnati.”).

Search’s Turkey Bomb?

In radio, you could know instantly when you were in a ratings period by the frenetic one- upmanship of radio stations giving away trips, prizes, cash (or dropping turkeys out of a helicopter at a mall–a memorable episode of “WKRP”) in the hopes of luring listeners for those all important few weeks when the ratings were being tallied. The logic of simply offering programming that people might actually want to listen to seemed to be lost in a flurry of promotional bribery. It always struck me as a tainted sort of lunacy.

Now, here I am in the pristine world of search, where we’re above that sort of thing. Well, we were, until this week.

Both Yahoo! and MSN appear to be willing to bribe users to use their search engines. Apparently Google’s ever rising market share has pushed them to the point of desperation. With MSN’s Search and Win (http://www.msnsearchandwin.com/), a search on selected keywords could win you a gift certificate, MP3 player, digital cameras or rather substantial donation to your favorite charity. Yahoo has also polled some of its e-mail users to see if a bribe could bring them into the Yahoo search fold.

The Smell of Desperation

To me, this seems like outright capitulation to the acknowledged dominance of Google in search. Ironically, Google is currently being punished by shareholders for being a one- trick pony–but the fact is, this pony has legs. More and more people are searching, and Google is being used by most of them. Yahoo and MSN’s share has been consistently sliding, and in MSN’s case, is dangerously close to being classified as a second-tier player, while Google is pulling in about half of all Web searches.

The desperation shown by Yahoo and MSN represents their admission of the importance of search in the new online ecosystem. I recently mentioned to someone that MSN has already conceded the first round of the search game to Google. MSN has deep enough pockets that lost search advertising revenue isn’t a critical concern. While search revenue is of much more concern to Yahoo, I suspect its principals have also realized that they can’t beat Google head to head on search as it currently sits. But MSN and Yahoo are looking beyond round one to what search will become. Increasingly, search will become more integrated, personalized and verticalized. It will extend beyond the desktop and will be the primary online connector. And it’s in this evolution of search where the stakes get incredibly high. Neither MSN nor Yahoo want to concede that territory to Google, so the concept of critical mass becomes a key factor.

Critical Mass for the Tornado

As the next round of search begins and as the search experience is redefined, there has to be a large enough user base to ensure rapid adoption of new developments. We’re in the middle of Geoffrey Moore’s market adoption tornado (as described in his book Inside the Tornado : Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley’s Cutting Edge), and delays of even a month or two can be fatal in deciding who the emerging gorilla will be. MSN and Yahoo need to build a user base that’s at least in the same neighborhood as Google. The odds of winning it all are dramatically lower if you’re beginning with a single-digit market share, no matter how great your product is. For proof, just look at the long struggle of Apple to gain dominance with its Mac line.

While I can’t fault Yahoo’s and MSN’s wisdom in recognizing they can’t continue to let their market share slide, I do question this particular strategy. Iwon.com has been trying to bribe search users with giveaways for years now, and their current market share is a paltry one half of one percent (according to recent Nielsen numbers). MSN has stated that this is just a way to get users trying MSN search. Presumably, they’ll be so impressed that they’ll keep coming back. I remain unconvinced, for reasons that I stated in last week’s column, The Search Experience has a De Facto Standard (for Now). My recommendation for Yahoo! and MSN? Work on the user interface. Tweak the relevancy of your results. Give people a reason to give up Google that’s more compelling than a chance at a Baby Gap gift certificate. I don’t think you’re there yet, and until you are, bribing might win you a pair of eyeballs for a search or two, but it won’t win the hearts and minds of new users.

Search has a De Facto Standard – For Now

First published February 9, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

We’ve recently done a lot of testing on how people interact with search results, both on the general engines we all use, and vertical search engines in a few industries. We discovered a number of things, but one finding in particular surprised us. The user interaction with search results has been defined. A standard has been established. And until a discontinuous improvement in the search interface comes along, we will expect all search to be the same.

Google: The User’s Definition of Search

Google’s interface has become the de facto standard for search. Even now, all three of the major properties have very similar search results layouts, with only slight variations to distinguish them. It’s in those variations, the nuances of design and layout, where the differences in the user experience can be found. Everything is measured against Google, and at this point, Google’s interface defines the ideal search experience.

Information Scent in Search

First, let me weave together a few theories to give some background to how we retrieve and interpret information on a search results page. First of all, information scent. Almost every interaction we have with a Web site is to find some type of information. We have intent, we have a goal, and when we interact with a site, we want to get closer to that goal. This is especially true on a search engine. Here, our quest for that information is intensified.

Information scent says that most cues on a Web page have an inherent information scent about what could lie behind the cue. Every hyperlink or navigation option offers some “residue” of what we will find when we click on it. We assess all the cues on a page, and typically go to where this scent is the strongest.

On a search engine, we have been conditioned to believe that this scent will be strongest in the top organic listings. We naturally move towards these. The top sponsored ads happen to be in the path between where we typically orient ourselves (upper left corner) and where we want to go to pick up the information scent. Because of their position, they have a good chance of catching our attention. This behavior creates the Golden Triangle we identified in our first eye tracking study.

So, is position enough? No, we do want to verify this by confirming the scent on the individual listings. And here is an important point to remember. On the average, we take about six seconds to scan listings before we choose one on a search results page, and in that time, we scan four or five results (this is based on our previous research). But it takes about six or seven seconds just to read one listing. So we’re not reading them. We’re scanning them, and this is a crucial difference. In scanning them, we’re looking for patterns of words that seem to offer scent. This is the semantic mapping I talked about in a previous Search Insider (I’d Love to Search but Words Get in the Way). We’re spending no more than a second (or less than a second) to pick up whether there’s a pattern of words that offer the information residue we find most closely matches our intent. It’s a split-second decision.

Hit Bolding

So, how do we pick up these patterns? Here’s where Google has created one of its de facto standards. The first place we look is the title of the first listing (toward the left side), and we expect to see our search query bolded. This immediately reinforces that we’re on the right “scent.” From there, we quickly scan to pick up other words. The more hit bolding there is, the stronger the subliminal confirmation that this result offers strong scent.

Google does the best job of query hit bolding. Their use of fonts, the size, and the relative strength of the bolding quickly reinforces a relevant pattern. MSN, in contrast, doesn’t do any hit bolding on the title. Don’t be surprised if you see this change in the near future, as MSN draws closer to the Google standard.

Page Balance

Google also has a slightly different page balance. There tends to be more white space separating organic listings from the sponsored right side rail. The page looks a little less crowded and more usable at a glance. And as I mentioned in last week’s column(The 50-Millisecond Judgment), this split second judgment will affect our entire interaction on the page.

White space aids in the assimilation of word patterns. It causes them to stand out a little more. Have someone run the same query on the top three engines, then show you the three results for a split second each. Which page tends to offer the greatest chance of success? For the majority of us, I’m guessing that’s Google.

Another point on page balance. As I’ve said, our destination is typically the top organic listings. The biggest difference between Yahoo and Google is in how far down the page those organic results are pushed. They are significantly lower on Yahoo. Again, this runs against the standard of what we expect.

Implications for Enterprise Search

Finally, a quick word on enterprise search. For vertical engines and other sites in which search results play a major role, take the emerging standard defined by Google to heart. Understand that when people interact with your search results, they’re expecting a Google-like experience. The further you take them from that, the less ideal the user experience will be.

Google has done a lot right (and a few things wrong) but perhaps the smartest move it’s ever made is to pay meticulous attention to the search user experience. Whether the company designed an ideal interface by intention, or whether we’ve just been conditioned to accept it as the ideal interface, it works for us.

 

The 50 Millisecond Judgement

Originally published February 2, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Fifty milliseconds is not a long time. It’s about one frame of video, or half as long as the blink of a human eye. And that tiny little slice of time is all it takes for a visitor to a Web site to decide how appealing that site is.

Dr. Gitte Lindgaard and her team undertook a fascinating study at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Their goal: to determine just how long it takes to make a reliable judgment of the visual appeal of a Web site. They found that we can accurately judge visual appeal in just 50 milliseconds, or one twentieth of a second! The study was published in Behaviour and Information Technology, March – April 2006.

In three different studies, the Carleton team flashed home pages of Web sites, specifically chosen to provide a spectrum of visual appeal, at participants for varying lengths of time and then asked the participants to rate the pages from 1 (very unappealing) to 100 (very appealing). In the first two studies, the duration of exposure was 500 milliseconds, or half a second. In the third study, participants were randomly shown the pages for either 500 milliseconds, or 50 milliseconds. The ratings were then correlated and analyzed to determine the reliability of the rankings. Dr. Lindgaard’s team found that reliable assessments of visual appeal can be made even with a 50 millisecond exposure.

Beyond this finding, however, there were a number of topics touched on in the paper that site designers should take to heart. While these topics weren’t included in the scope of the study, the paper cites numerous studies that have tried to explore the nebulous area of visual attraction and how we determine it.

Blink Revisited

For anyone who’s read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, you know that researchers are discovering that humans make decisions in two very distinct ways. On a visceral level, it seems that a decision-making mechanism is hardwired right into our physiology. Our bodies seem to reach conclusions long before our brain catches up. To quote Dr. Lindgaard’s paper, “More recent neurophysiological evidence supports the contention that emotional responses can indeed occur pre-attentively, before the organism has had a chance cognitively to analyze or evaluate the incoming stimulus or stimuli. A small bundle of neurons has been identified that lead directly from the thalamus to the amygdala across a single synapse, allowing the amygdala to receive direct inputs from the sensory organs and initiate a response before the stimuli have been interpreted by the neocortex.”

After this very brief response, we begin to rationalize our response by logically evaluating the stimuli. The two-phase decision-making mechanism typically works together to help us reach our conclusions. Gladwell’s contention is that the first response, the “blink” response, is often the right one.

First Impressions Do Count

So, how important is that first, split-second decision in online interactions? Because of something called a “halo effect,” it can be vital. If we have a positive emotional response in those first few milliseconds, our logical mind will kick in and try to rationalize that response. We will look for positive reasons why it was the right decision, and we will tend to ignore negative factors. If the first impression is not good, the opposite occurs. We look for reasons not to like something, and tend to discount any positives we might find. We want to prove our first impression right.

Translated to an online experience, we make an immediate, intuitive decision whether we like a site or not, without reading one word of content. From that moment on, our entire interaction with that site is colored by that first impression.

Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

How do you judge what is appealing or what is not? It’s a thorny issue, as Dr. Lindgaard acknowledges in the paper. It’s been said that we all have different concepts of what’s beautiful or appealing. However, there was remarkable consistency across all three studies with the sites that were found appealing, and the ones that weren’t. In fact, it was found that in groups of as small as 5 people drawn randomly from the larger group, consensus emerged on the winners and the losers. So while beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, it appears that we pretty much see eye to eye when it comes to Web sites.

One reason might be in the factors we use to judge appeal on a Web site. We are not looking at it as a pure object of aesthetic beauty. A Web site should be usable, so we are also making an assessment of how appealing a site would be to use. We’re looking for a site to be clean, pleasant and symmetrical. We’re looking for proper use of screen real estate and balance. Previous research by Dr. Marc Hassenzahl suggests that we may use two methods of evaluation, which he refers to as beauty (the pure aesthetic appeal) and goodness (the more practical factors, including usability).

One thing that wasn’t covered in the study was seeing how sites rank when user intent is added to the mix. The participants in the study had no particular goal in mind. They weren’t looking for anything. I would love to see what happens when we introduce intent and participants are judging sites not just on appeal, but on the promise of delivering on their intent.

A Qualitative Research Primer

For anyone who’s interested in qualitative research, this study offers some valuable tidbits on testing methodologies. It’s an interesting challenge to gather results on something as raw and intuitive as a first impression. The minute you start to analyze the response, you distance yourself from that first visceral reaction. Does the very act of rating a site kick in the rational mechanism and bias the original response? As in most studies, Dr. Lindgaard acknowledges that there are many more questions to be answered here. In a brief chat I had with her, she expressed her eagerness to continue down this path, “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “There’s so much more here!”

Back To Those 50 Milliseconds

What does this have to do with search marketing? Well, everything. Through the utilization of search engines, you will hopefully be driving thousands of new visitors to your site. That’s thousands of first impressions, formed in less than the blink of an eye. Search marketing is useless if it doesn’t deliver a positive onsite experience. Our obsession with position and click-through is meaningless if all our efforts (and all budgets) are blown apart by those first 50 milliseconds.

It is my intense belief that the key to success lies in better understanding what happens when those synapses fire and those first impressions are formed. It’s not just an understanding of the mechanics of the Web that will create a successful search marketer. It also helps to peer into the awesome machinery of the human mind.

The Real Cost of SEO: It’s Not Budget, It’s Believers!

First published January 26, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Not too long ago, I was moderating a panel of search marketing experts who were comparing the merits of sponsored search and organic search optimization. We were unanimous in our support of organic optimization; none of us could think of an individual case where the cost- effectiveness of organic didn’t far exceed every other marketing channel our clients had tried. From the audience came the question, “If organic optimization is so effective, why isn’t it a more common strategy?”

Great question. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t an easy one.


Requirement One: Corporate Understanding

The problem with organic optimization is that it can’t be owned by any one department in a larger organization. While a sponsored campaign can be launched by a single department–or by an individual, for that matter–with no impact on any other department, organic optimization needs buy-in throughout an organization. This is why we generally see the best optimization on sites where C-level executives are close to the front lines, believers in optimization, and can give a single go-ahead that will open the required doors for organic optimization to happen. The bigger the organization, the more unlikely it is that this will happen.

Usually, the need for organic optimization is recognized by someone in the marketing department. Here’s the typical scenario: marketing has been convinced to try sponsored search. They’re generally happy with the results, but then they read an article or attend a conference where someone (and I happen to be a prime culprit) tells them that 70 percent of the clicks actually happen in the organic results. “Wait a minute,” they say. “I’m spending $4.28 a click and I could get more traffic with a free listing?” They immediately run to the nearest computer and see how they rank for the terms they’re currently buying. Nothing on the first page, or the second, or the third. Ah, there they are! Number 48 for their term–stuck in no-man’s land.


Requirement Two: A Friendly IT Department

In the next step, the marketing guy usually visits the IT department, which has technical ownership of the company Web site, and begins with the question, “How come we don’t rank on the search engines? What’s wrong with our site?”

You want to create a sworn IT enemy for life? This is the way to do it. And if this doesn’t work, follow up with the comment, “If you guys can’t do it, we’ll have to find someone who can.” This is generally where my company comes in, right in the middle of a vicious turf war between marketing and IT.


Requirement Three: No Sacred Cows

Now, the SEO experts (that would be us) start saying that the Flash on the front page has to go. Suddenly, marketing is not so sure. “We love that Flash, and it cost us a lot of money!”

It gets worse. The entire navigation structure of the site has to change, we need a lot more content, we’re going to want to create separate topic areas for our main offerings, we have to reconfigure our CMS, and we have to strip out all the Javascript we have on every page and reference it as an external .js file. Suddenly, marketing is second-guessing us, IT is up in arms, legal is having a fit because none of the additional content required has been vetted, and the C-level executives are wondering what the hell hit them.


Requirement Four: Champions with Perseverance and Thick Skins

At this point, our marketing champion, who got the whole ball rolling, is on everybody’s most- wanted list, and not in a good way. Everybody’s thinking, “You know, on second thought, maybe it would just be easier to stick to our sponsored search campaign.”

There is a cost to doing SEO. It’s not the budget required, which is minimal relative to other marketing initiatives. It’s the time and patience required on the part of one person to get the buy-in that’s needed to make SEO happen. That’s a price that many companies have been unwilling to pay up to now.


The Payoff

Let me give you some reasons why it’s worth it:

  • What’s good for a search engine is good for humans. The changes that make your site easier to index are almost always changes your visitors will appreciate as well. More content, less unnecessary Flash, standard navigation options and cleaner code will bring you in line with long-standing usability guidelines.
  • Organic traffic is not dependent on budget. This traffic base goes on, day after day, whether you’re topping up your AdWords account or not.
  • Organic optimization gets less painful as time goes on. Once you make the commitment, the painful part can be over relatively soon, but you’ll be reaping the benefits for years to come.
  • You’ll reach a whole new market segment. People tend to look at organic listings when they’re in the research phase, higher in the buying funnel. This gives you the chance to intercept consumers earlier and build a relationship that can last a long time.
    Ode to an Ex-Client

    I’d like to close off with a painful real-world example to prove my point. We had the CEO of a company bring us on to help with organic optimization. But rather than pave the way for success, he threw us to the lions and quickly exited the scene. We identified the issues keeping the company from higher visibility on the search engines, outlined our recommendations, and handed them over to the IT team for implementation.

    And there our suggestions sat, and sat, and sat. Meanwhile, the IT team pursued its own agenda, spinning its wheels on minutiae while ignoring the fundamental issues that had already been identified. Our frustration level rose, as did the CEO’s, who was wondering why there was no improvement. Guess who the internal IT team pointed the finger at? Eventually, we parted ways with the client. We couldn’t win, and the client was getting no value from recommendations that no one would follow.

    Wee usually monitor activity for a period of time following the termination of a contract. Eventually, this client did get around to doing one or two of the things we recommended. These were relatively easy fixes, but the results were dramatic: a 448 percent increase in visibility in the organic listings. Of course, at this point, no one remembers who made the original recommendation. All they’ll remember is that they only saw improvement after they got rid of their SEO company.

Lights, Camera, Point and Click!

First published January 19, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In a flurry of announcements out of Redmond this week, there was one that struck a chord with me, because it is very similar to a development I forecast in an article entitled “All Roads Lead Online” about a year ago.

Product placement gone wild.

Microsoft will be making online video more interactive by creating the ability to click on a product in the video and receive advertising for whatever you clicked on. It’s like product placement on steroids. See a cool stereo, the car you just have to have, or a particularly yummy dinner in a chic restaurant–and you just pause, click, and immediately get more information. Cool, hey? And that’s just the first stage.

Imagine a little more functionality. Rather than just being served an ad, what would happen if a smart little Web app in the background did a little online research for you? What if it combs for product reviews and consumer ratings, then shops for the best price, determines availability and shipping information, and keeps all this information in a convenient file for your browsing pleasure when the show is done?

The virtual tourist.

Here’s another scenario.You’re watching a movie that features some gorgeous locations in France and Italy. As you watch the movie, you hit a flag button on your MediaCenter remote every time you see an interesting villa, an intriguing town, a vintage bottle of wine or that little bistro that seems so romantic. By the end of the movie, you have a complete travel itinerary planned, complete with the lowest fares available from your home, hotel availability, restaurant reservations and even menu suggestions. A couple more clicks and you’re booked.

Search: the connector between intent and content.

Whenever someone questions the longevity of search, this is one of the scenarios I trot out for them. Search is the engine that underlies all this functionality. It is the bridge that connects intent and content. This core functionality is what will drive almost all online connections in the future. And those connections will be controlled by whoever wins the search war. Suddenly, all the buzz around search starts to make sense.

Imagine what this will do to the world of product placement. It will be a feeding frenzy the likes of which have never been seen before. Suddenly, every video can be one long, multilayered commercial. And as frightening as that sounds, remember that you’re in control. You choose the advertising you want to be served. Advertising isn’t an intrusion when you’re asking for it.

Custom-tailored marketing.

Let’s further envision MSN’s demographic targeting layered on top of this. Now, different segmented targets can be fed different advertising messages. A 55-year-old male lawyer in Portland can see a completely different message than a 24-year-old female teacher in Armonk. A unique user experience can be wrapped and delivered to each.

There’s one last piece of the puzzle that really brings this home: personalization. The more the owner of this connection knows about you, your likes, your interests and your schedule, the more helpful it can be. As it aggregates information, it can be tailored specifically for you.

The announcement of interactive video by Microsoft is just the tip of an immensely large iceberg. As our entertainment choices converge online and become searchable through the same technology that powers Google, Yahoo and MSN, online becomes the gatekeeper for the vast majority of advertising that will be delivered to us. And search has the key to the gate.

How Gender Affects Search: Part Two

First published January 12, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about studies, done both by the PEW Internet group and Enquiro, that explored the differences between how men and women interact online. A number of differences had been observed in general with how both sexes use the Internet, but I wrapped up by saying that while this was also true in search, the differences seem to be much more subtle.

First, let’s explore one of the biggest variations in how men and women use the Internet. Please understand I’m talking averages and generalities here. Yes, there are women and men who are exceptions to what I’m about to say. I’m aware of the fact, and endlessly grateful for it.

The task-obsessed male.

The PEW study found that while men look at the Internet as a resource and tool to accomplish a task, women use it as a communication channel. Men appreciate the Internet’s ability to help them get the job at hand done. They like the do-it-yourself nature of the Internet, they love new toys, and they’re more apt to adopt and experiment with new technologies. When a man is online, he has a clear goal in sight and is looking for the shortest possible path to get there. While men will experiment forever to get some new piece of software or hardware working, they have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to looking for information online. For everyone who has a Flash intro on their site, here’s my hedged bet. Look at your abandonment numbers when the Flash file is loading, and I’m betting 60 percent-plus of those are men.

The multitasking female.

Women are social creatures. They also multitask better, and are more comfortable browsing. Women will be more patient with non-obvious navigation options. They’re more apt to explore the nooks and crannies of a site to see what they can find. And they look at the Internet as a way to reach out to a larger global community, and to connect with geographically distant friends and family.

Right brain vs. left brain in search.

This offers our first clue why the gender split is not so apparent on search. Search is a task-oriented activity. You got there to get closer to your online objective. For that reason, search is more left-brain (words and numbers) than right-brain (emotions and intuition), a more masculine endeavor than a feminine one. That’s why men were much heavier users of search engines than women in the earlier days of the Internet. Women are catching up, but the balance has been on the male side since day one. And when women do use search, they are forced to adopt a more masculine approach to it.

This right-brain, left-brain theory of mine extends to the actual search interface as well.

I believe one of the reasons we don’t see more gender variation in search result interaction is because the format forces everyone, whether man or woman, to use the left brain to assimilate the information. There are no emotional stimuli, no pictures, not even much in the way of colors. Everything is presented as text. The right brain has been rendered basically useless in this exercise. This has the impact of leveling the playing field between the sexes in interacting with search results.

This is not true throughout the interaction, however. When searchers start clicking through to sites, the typical left-brain and right-brain tendencies take over again, and the nature of interaction again splits along gender lines more noticeably.

We shape what we see in search.

My fellow Search Insider David Berkowitz added his own thoughts after last week’s column. David proposes that it’s the interactive nature of search that eliminates some of the gender variations in how we interact with the results. With most Web sites, the same material is presented to everyone when they arrive, and it’s up to the individual how he or she interacts with it. The content is the same, the design is the same, the navigation options are the same. This allows an open opportunity for men and women to react differently.

But with search, you don’t see results until you take an action, namely the launching of a search. Then, the results are tailored to the query that has just been launched. And it’s this increased level of engagement that may take men and women down a more similar path. We have already dictated the content of the page, to some extent, so there is less opportunity for men and women to react differently to the resulting page. In David’s words, “The search engine becomes the ineffable partner, the one who’s always responding to you on target, based on how you initiated the conversation”.

So those are a few ideas of why Venus and Mars are much more closely aligned in search than in other online destinations. I may be totally off-base, but what else is new? I’m a guy!