Author Archives: ghotchkiss

How Gender Affects Search: Part One

First published January 4, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A recent PEW Internet study exploring how men and women use the Internet points out some interesting differences between the sexes. This caught my attention because in every study we’ve done, we’ve tried to break out results by gender and explored the different usage patterns. It’s been fascinating to see how millions of years of conditioning and the differences in our respective genetic wiring have impacted our use of a new technology. The PEW study echoed a lot of what we had seen. What I’d like to do over the next two columns is explore this further. Today, I’ll present some of the more interesting findings from the PEW study and ours, and next week I’ll provide my thoughts on why we may be seeing what we’re seeing.

Comfort Levels:

The PEW study found that men are slightly more intense Internet users than women, and seem to be more engaged when on line. Men are more likely to go online on a daily basis and tend to do so a little more frequently. Men are also a little more likely to have a high-speed connection at home.

When we add age breakdowns to the mix, an interesting anomaly occurs, with older men (65 and over) more likely to be online than older women, but younger women (18 – 29) more likely to be online than younger men.

What They Do Online:

Men and women have very distinct reasons for going online. Men tend to retrieve information, such as weather, news, sports scores, and financial information. They also download software, listen to music (or download it), research products, look for jobs, find out how to repair something, or educate themselves on a topic.

For women, the Internet is first and foremost a communication vehicle, with e-mail a prime reason for usage. Women also look for health, medical and religious information, and support for health or personal problems.

Some gender stereotypes never die. Women are still more likely to look for maps and directions online than men. Once a guy, always a guy!

The Sexes and Search:

It used to be that there was a distinct male bias towards search usage. That is rapidly disappearing, but is still apparent. In earlier studies (done in 2003 and 2004) PEW found that 35 percent of men and 25 percent of women were likely to use a search engine on a typical day. In 2005, usage on both sides of the gender divide soared, but men still edged out women, by 43 percent to 39 percent.

In our research, we found that men were more likely to use Google, which dominated as the engine of choice. For women, although Google was still the number-one choice, it was closely followed by MSN and Yahoo.

We also found that men were more likely to use advanced search queries. They also tended to spend a little less time actively reading listings, and made their decisions to click faster. Women tended to be a little more deliberate in their search sessions. Men scanned more of the search results page, but women spent more time with the page.

We found that women were more influenced by what they read in the listing, when men seemed to be a little more conditioned to trust the first organic listings. This usually translated into slightly higher click-throughs on the sponsored results for women.

Perhaps the most interesting thing we found, despite the differences noted above, was this: when men and women interacted with almost every type of site online, there were distinct differences in how they assimilated information, navigated sites and responded to visual cues. When we looked at how they interacted with a search results page, the differences, while present, were much more subtle.

Why?

Hang onto that question, and I’ll hazard a guess next week.

We Are What We Search? Hopefully Not!

First published December 29, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

To judge from the various most-popular-search lists that are showing up as the year draws to a close, the average search user is a pubescent male, with an IQ that hovers in the low 90’s, and who spends an unhealthy amount of time in his room. I have said, on several occasions, that our search patterns are a reflection of our society. If that’s true, our society’s intellect is about as deep as the ring left by a Starbucks coffee cup.

When I saw the first list come in my e-mail, I don’t know why I was surprised. After all, Pamela Anderson holds the record as the most searched-for term for the past decade, and Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are breathing down her neck. But come on; are we really as shallow as our searches seem to indicate?

Lycos has just released its list for the past year. The top 10 terms for 2005 are:
Paris Hilton
Pamela Anderson
Britney Spears
Poker
Dragonball
Jennifer Lopez
WWE
Pokemon
Playstation
Hurricane Katrina

There we have it, the greatest depository of information every assembled, instantly accessible to all who seek knowledge and enlightenment, and Paris Hilton is the best we can do? And Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, (although arguably, Paris, Pam and Britney all qualify in this category) barely made the list?

Maybe it’s just Lycos users that are scrapping the bottom of the online barrel. So I checked out Google’s Zeitgeist and Yahoo! Buzz.

Yahoo!’s Buzz is at least a little more balanced on gender. The top 10?
Britney Spears
50 Cent
Cartoon Network
Mariah Carey
Green Day
Jessica Simpson
Paris Hilton
Eminem
Ciara
Lindsay Lohan

Still not a fertile recruitment bed for MENSA, I’m guessing.

Google doesn’t publish the overall top 10, instead breaking them up into categories and top gainers. Perhaps this is their way of defending their users’ intellectual reputation. But if the top news searches are any indication, there are very few Google users following in Edward R. Murrow’s footsteps. Topping the list was Janet Jackson, with such compelling news stories as xbox 360, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Michael Jackson and yes, the omnipresent Ms. Spears also making the list.

And Newton Minnow called commercial television a vast wasteland!

But wait a minute. Yahoo! Buzz lets you see what other cultures are searching for. How does the U.S. stack up against the world?

You’ll be happy to know the French are just as boorish, with the regular suspects, Britney, Jennifer Lopez and Paris (the scantily clad debutante, not the city) showing up on their list. Toss in Jessica Alba for good measure. The Germans show a disturbing dichotomy in their search habits, with half of the terms showing Teutonic practicality and the other half being just plain kinky. On one hand you have “trip planner,” “weather” and “cheap flights,” and on the other you have “erotica” and “partner swapping.” Interestingly, the Germans don’t seem as star-struck as the rest of the world. The only celebrity to make the list was Sarah Connor, a German pop star.

How about my fellow Canadians? Well, I wish I could report differently, but our national stereotype seems rooted in fact. For seven months out of 12, we’re searching for Hockey.

The Google AOL Deal: Commentary from the Cheap Seats

First published December 21, 2005 from Mediapost’s Search Insider

 

‘m from Canada, and up here, we examine every hockey trade in minute detail. We look at who got what for whom, how the trade adds or detracts from the respective team’s talent pools, and who came out the winner. So, the recent AOL-Google deal caught my attention. Why does Google want AOL? What’s the strategy? Where’s the win?

AOL: Hanging On.

From AOL’s perspective, the deal makes tons of sense. AOL is an anachronism in a fast-changing world. It’s a dial-up service that’s trying to carve out a niche in the new broadband landscape. It’s been struggling to survive as an online portal, with its once mighty subscriber base dwindling by 33 percent (we’ll come back to this subscriber base in a minute). Time Warner has pretty much hung AOL out to dry, reducing it to running TV ads saying you should continue to use AOL because it will protect you from online viruses. Come again? If that’s your most compelling differentiation strategy, alignment with the current online Golden Child can’t be a bad thing.

With the deal come a couple of strategic promises to AOL. First of all, it gets a guaranteed position in Google’s sponsored search ads. Rumor has it that the last right-side sponsored position on page one is now AOL’s. Anyone who’s looked at our eye tracking report on Google knows that this is hardly prime real estate. In this spot, you can expect to be seen by about 10 percent of the visitors to the page, and capture less than 1 percent of the click-throughs.

But, this deal does mark a departure from Google’s existing model, where there are no guaranteed spots and position is determined by a combination of click-through and the price the advertiser is willing to spend. Even though the placement on the page is hardly ideal, AOL’s guaranteed slot now means someone gets bumped to page two of the search results, which means an immediate 80 percent to 85 percent reduction in the number of people who will visit that page. This is not the democratic advertising model that Google originally envisioned.

Church/State revisited.

Another rumor had Google apparently offering advice to AOL on how to get its content pages to rank better in the organic results. Again, this appears to call into doubt Google’s constant fallback position on the church/state divide, where the organic results will never be subject to any commercial influence.

My sense is that this line is getting more and more difficult for Google to define, and this trend can only continue. I’m not so sure this is a bad thing. If you read my previous column on Matt Cutts, the Google engineer that heads up the spam squad, you know that Google has been reaching out to the Webmaster community more and more. The once-locked doors appear to be opening, even if it’s just a crack. Based on my company’s experience, if you can present Google with a case where the indexing of a site isn’t going as expected, it is usually responsive in offering some advice. To me, this form of technical troubleshooting is a win/win. Google gains some insight that could help to improve the entire index, and you can find out why the hell your site isn’t being indexed properly by Google.

What is less clear is when Google passes on “optimization” advice, which is what the AOL deal appears to promise. Here, the church/state line is pretty much obliterated by the tap dance that Google is performing on top of it. And it becomes a question of whom Google is offering this advice to. Is it everyone? Is it the biggest advertisers? Is it only companies that they own a piece of? If this is indeed part of the deal, expect a lot of blog and forum fodder on this topic.

What’s in the deal for Google?

First of all, Google locks up AOL’s sponsored search business for another five years, effectively locking out Microsoft. When this currently accounts for approximately 11 percent of Google’s gross revenue, that could be reason enough. Also, financial analysts expect an imminent transfer of ownership with AOL, which could trigger a quick liquidity event for Google, minimizing its long-term risk.

But I believe the strategic value of the deal lies in AOL’s user base. True, it’s smaller than it used to be, dropping from a one-time high of over 32 million down to a current level closer to 20 million, but it’s still the largest base available anywhere. Comcast is the next closest at around 8 million (based on ISP Planet numbers). And AOL’s base is 20 million people that the company knows something about.

One of Google’s challenges has been in getting users of its tools to surrender profile information that could be used to better target advertising messages. MSN is already offering targeted search advertising, which means Google is desperate to even the playing field. Microsoft has the advantage of having years of profile information accumulated through users signing up for Hotmail or Messenger accounts. Google had to catch up, and quickly. This one deal may have helped the company do that. The one question mark is that AOL’s user base is notorious for their lack of online sophistication, being relatively new to the Internet. Does this user base come with a demographic profile that will appeal to Google advertisers?

On the face of it, the AOL deal appears to be another smart move on Google’s part. For a relatively small investment, the company seems to gain all the strategic advantages it was looking for. Google captures a large block of users with some existing profile information, it locks up an important revenue stream, and it gains access to a very important portal property without jeopardizing its current wildly successful search site. As they say up north: good trade, eh?

What Happens on the Road, Stays in the Blog

First published December 15, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Heaven help anyone trying to lead an illicit double life on the convention circuit. Blogging and camera phones have turned us into a society of voyeurs. This is especially true in the search marketing industry. We are all content producers who publish our thoughts. During one conversation at a recent after-hours reception, we began keeping score–and realized that everyone in the conversation either had a blog or wrote a regular online column. Many did both.

It becomes even more amusing when you have one conversation over dinner at a show with a few friends, and within the next few days, all of you have posted online comments about the conversation, each from your own perspective. To find the truth, you have to triangulate the comments and discover that the substance of the conversation lies somewhere between the extremes.

This is a dynamic altering of how we communicate. The degrees of separation that divide our global community become short-circuited online. In one example, I wrote a column a few weeks ago about a conversation I had with Greg Jarboe about white hats and black hats. The event that sparked the conversation was a dinner he had with a black hat in Stockholm. A few days later, Greg was approached by someone in a coffee shop in his hometown about the column he wrote about black hat SEO. He had no idea what she was talking about, until he tracked it back to my column. Also, Danny Sullivan, in his blog, actually had me having dinner with the black hat, even though I was several thousand miles away from Stockholm at the time. Since that time, Greg has gone on to write about the same event in his blog. That one conversation has sparked at least a dozen blog posts and columns, all with slightly different takes on the actual event.

Somewhere in this observation lies something profound about the Internet. It changes the way we live. We now exist with one foot in the real world and one foot in the virtual. We are individuals, but we are also the sum of a million different parts that float around in the online world, and it’s usually search that connects those parts. We become the composite of other’s online comments about us. Our Google Doppelganger becomes a part of us, and vice versa.

Flori, my father-in-law, is an old-world Italian carpenter. To him, Gord Hotchkiss is the person who married his daughter, fathered his grandchildren, and who does something vaguely unexplainable with computers. We get along wonderfully, but our conversations center on our shared experiences: family camping trips, what my daughters are doing, homemade Italian wine, and why I’m out of town so much. Once, when I was on the road, he asked my wife why I have to speak at these shows. In an effort to explain, she Googled me. Up came about 16,000 entries, in almost every language, from every corner of the world. There was the online persona of “Gord Hotchkiss.” It was a side of me my father-in-law never knew existed. I was deeply embedded in a network of communication, and in part, that network defined me.

I find it (mostly) exhilarating when I meet new people at a conference and they’re already familiar with me because of my online presence. I tend to share a lot about my personal side, because it’s such an integral part of me. As one person said, upon meeting me for the first time, “I feel like I know your wife and kids, because you write about them.” So, my online persona extends to include my family. Through me, they’re developing a virtual presence. At this point, they’re not coming up when they Google themselves, but I assure them it’s only a matter of time.

I’m not sure we’ve really explored the consequences of this shift, but I know it’s earth-shaking in its importance. We are all now producers of content. We can all reach global audiences. We are judged by our thoughts, our observations and our intellectual mettle. We leave a footprint online. Search is the connector that introduces us to our audience.

Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press created a quantum change in the society of the 1500s. But there was still a physicality to printing. It consumed resources. It took time. Because of these physical restrictions, publishing evolved into big business, with its own controls and checks and balances. Distribution of one’s views did not come easily. Just ask any author who dreamed of getting on the best-seller list. Today, a blog post can take a few moments and no money. In a few hours, it can be picked up on a search engine. If it happens to rank well for a popular keyphrase, especially one that’s of immediate topical interest, it could attract thousands of readers in a few days.

It’s a sobering thought. Most of us feel in control of our own lives. We can be the person we wish to be. And the people who form opinions of us we usually deal with face to face. But online, people form opinions of you without ever meeting you. Our online personas rush beyond the bounds of our physical world. We hand control over our online persona to people that have no idea who we really are. They blog about us and expand our footstep, adding to the sum definition of who we are, without really knowing us.

In the old days, you could be your own person. Today, you belong to a global community. Anyone could be watching, anytime. And you thought Wisteria Lane was a tough place to keep a secret!

 

Targeting Your Search Campaign: Seeking 42-Year-Old Female In Kalamazoo

First published December 8, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Search marketers love granularity in campaign management. Correction: we love the results of granularity. That’s an important distinction. Do search marketers want to spend 98 percent of their remaining time on earth manually tweaking a 50,000-keyphrase campaign? Not me. But we also don’t want to set on the broad match “auto pilot” and let the campaign fly itself. In a marketing channel as measurable as search is, we can’t get the highly optimized success rates we’re looking for unless we roll up our sleeves and get dirty.

So here we sit, awash in spreadsheets and rule-based bid management tools, with metric acronyms (ROI, CPA, ROAS) up to our earlobes, wading through a tsunami of numbers, hoping at the end of it all that there will be a bottom-line result that brings a smile to our client’s face. Some are born to numbers, and some of us have numbers thrust upon us.

Search marketing by the numbers. So, at Chicago’s SES show, it was with interest that I sat in on the session where Jed Nahum from MSN adCenter provided a peek at his company’s new demographic targeting tools. Suddenly, search marketers have a whole new level of complexity to deal with. It’s not enough that we do keyword by keyword management. It’s not enough that we have to watch our competitors’ bids, the time of day, and the day of week. Throw geo-targeting into the mix for good measure. If you’re lucky enough to be included in MSN’s beta, you can now target by age and gender.

As panelist Kevin Lee from Did-It pointed out, if you took full advantage of all the permutations and combinations, you would end up with somewhere around 7,500 possible campaigns, per keyword! The arithmetically challenged amongst us in the audience felt the anxiety pangs in our chest.

It all depends on how you look at it. Numbers like this can be daunting to crunch, if you look at the entire universe. But the whole point of targeting is not to reach everyone; it’s to reach the right person, at the right time. If you start from the potential customer and work backwards, targeting provides a level of power unavailable before. It just depends on your perspective. If you’re looking at the work involved to manage a 50,000-keyphrase campaign, additional targeting options can look like a colossal pain in the butt. If you’re looking at the optimum way to reach that ideal customer, it will be your best friend.

The prerequisite here is getting to know ideal customers, intimately. Know who they are and what their intent is. Know where they live and where they work. Know what they’re looking for when they use a search engine and how they’ll search for it. And most importantly, know what they’re looking for when they end up on your site. If you have firm answers for all these questions, you’ll love the new targeting features that MSN is making available, because they will provide the shortest possible path to your best prospects.

Targeting in action. Kevin Lee added more sage advice: you always want to buy your best clicks first. The eye tracking research undertaken by Did-It, Enquiro and EyeTools showed that top sponsored positions deliver substantially higher visibility and click-throughs than do the side sponsored positions. You’re looking at a visibility multiple of 3X to 4X, and a similar boost in click-throughs. But for competitive words, those positions come at a premium that may be beyond the reach of many advertisers. Now, if you can boost your bids for your carefully selected prime segments through pinpoint targeting, you can gain those top spots for just the right prospects, and then drop out of the top for less desirable segments.

You can’t target everyone… yet. Obviously, MSN can’t deliver targeted search ads to every user of MSN Search. To enable age and gender demographic targeting, users have to volunteer some information about themselves, either through signing up for a Hotmail account, a MSN Passport or some other Microsoft account. Nahum was pushed for what percentage of MSN’s user base this might be. His answer was a coy “larger than you might think.” While the transparency of the answer wasn’t what the audience was looking for, moderator Danny Sullivan made this salient observation: “Look, compared to the targeting you can do through television or almost any other medium, this is a quantum leap forward.” Hard to argue that one.

Get used to it. In the recent full speed game of one-upmanship that the search engines are playing, it won’t be long before Google and Yahoo! have introduced their own targeting tools. This will be the new reality of search marketing. It’s somewhat ironic that a marketing channel that took off because of its self-service simplicity is now becoming one of the most complex media-buying challenges in advertising today. But with complexity comes power, and there may be no channel available to marketers today that’s more powerful than search.

Measuring the Impact of Google Analytics

First published November 30, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Google’s recent announcement of a free analytics tool has sent shockwaves through the online community. There’s nothing surprising about this. What is surprising is the impact and where it’s being felt.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach this story for almost two weeks now. This is my third attempt at this column. I rewrote most of it the day of my deadline. I suspect if I had a few more days, the story would rewrite itself at least a couple more times.

Here’s what I thought the story originally was. The giant, Google, launches a free service and in the process decimates the online analytics industry. I happened to be at a show a couple weeks ago where I had a chance to chat with John Marshall, CEO of ClickTracks, a highly respected analytics provider. Wonderful, I thought, an interview with a victim. This would be great: pathos, tragedy, conflict. I had me a column. John didn’t play along. This wasn’t a tragedy, he said. This would be good for the entire industry. There we had the first twist of the story, and the first rewrite.

I asked John what he thought when he heard Google’s announcement.”My first thought was that I was wrong,” he said. “I didn’t think you could provide Web analytics for free because you can’t afford the cost of support. Customers need a lot of hand-holding. Then, the more I thought, the more I realized that I may not have been wrong. Google is only providing support by e-mail. I don’t think that will be enough. There isn’t a single sale we make where the customer doesn’t have questions during the process. “The main limiting factor in analytics today isn’t technology, it’s people and brain power,” he added. “The fundamental challenge that remains to be solved is the interpretation of the numbers. There just are not enough people who can look at the numbers, get the message and implement the required solutions.”

“If you’re right, and not enough people know what to do with the numbers, won’t Google introducing a free tool ultimately help?” I asked him. “There will be more people than ever exposed to analytics reporting, because there’s no price barrier anymore. Granted, many will be lost, but many will also learn through trial and error. Will this build the overall demand for analytics?” “Absolutely,” he answered. “Google Analytics will ultimately be good for the entire industry. It will boost adoption. More people will use analytics. You have to remember, there have been free tools before. Analog was one of the original analytics programs, and it’s open source, free. In fact, it was developed by the CTO of ClickTracks. We know all about competing with free. We’ll gain more than we lose.”

OK, I thought. John’s putting a positive spin on this. But surely, when Google introduces a free product with a pretty good feature set, it will cause bloodshed. I wrote my second draft, which was along the lines of Google becoming the Big Box of the analytics industry, and wiping out a lot of independents. Thinking I had it locked, I emailed a draft to John for his feedback. My view was that while the chances looked good for quality tools like ClickTracks, there would still be significant pain.

Much to my surprise, John e-mailed back a totally different story. In the one week that had passed since we first spoke, business had never been better! Damn, another rewrite, with the column due in a day.

Here were some of John’s primary points.

First of all, people don’t seem comfortable with the fact that Google is holding all this data about their sites and its performance. “The privacy backlash has expanded in online forums and is creating a groundswell of concerns. Interest in our products is quantifiably higher than before!” wrote John. “Customers are simultaneously aware of Web analytics AND aware of data privacy concerns. The degree to which customers are coming in the doors here at ClickTracks and opening discussions with ‘is my data private?’ has surprised us.” The concerns about privacy have not been restricted to the US., he added. “Our products are popular in Japan where, like the US, there is huge skepticism towards centralized data collection. In our experience, customers want to own their data. Customers are suddenly savvy enough to ask this question before signing up”

Secondly, Google has clearly stumbled out of the starting gate, failing to scale quickly enough to meet demand. “Google is clearly struggling to support this service,” John wrote. “This raises concerns about data integrity and accessibility in the long run, especially for a service where the customer has no recourse.” John’s feeling is that the Google Analytics approach goes a step in the wrong direction, moving closer to third-party collection of visitor data. Google always maintains the same position on privacy. “Don’t worry,” they tell us. “We would never do anything evil with this information.” But they never get around to really telling us what their intention is.

As many are pointing out, the data could be used as intelligence to bump ad prices up or allow for cross site profiling of visitors. Sophisticated customers are aware of this and are asking a lot of pointed question before they commit to an analytics solution. I’m sure Google has been surprised by the impact of its announcement. Demand has been so great that Google has had to lock out users until they get a chance to catch up. But they probably weren’t prepared for the degree of concern over privacy of information, or the emerging portrait of Google as Big Brother.

At this point, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that this will be a topic for at least one or two further columns in the future. But for today at least, this column is done.

A Whiter Shade of Black

First published November 10, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I was chatting with my friend Greg Jarboe. For those of you who don’t know Greg, he’s the guru of cranking up Web visibility through effective optimization of press releases and leveraging news search. But the pearl of wisdom that I picked up from Greg this time was an offhand comment that said volumes about our industry.

Stockholm Confidential.

Greg had just gotten back from a search conference in Sweden. At said conference, there tends to be a handful of black-hat SEOs that hold court after the show shuts down, showing off their spam de jour. For those of us who primarily live on the white side of the fence (and I say primarily because one is never sure exactly where that fence is) it’s always a guilty pleasure cornering one of these dark magicians. They’re brash, confident and masterful in their manipulation of algorithmic loopholes left by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Using every tactic in their arsenal, they manipulate sites up the rankings and make fistfuls of money in the process. I once asked a black hat if he had any ethical twinges. He replied, “The odd time, but my kids are going to a great college.”

This trip, Greg managed to take a black hat to dinner. And in between the courses, a confession came out that stopped Greg in his tracks. “Black hat stuff is getting too hard. I’m actually thinking about turning legit.” What? Is this capitulation? Is Courtney Love taking up a nun’s habit? What would cause a confirmed black hatter to turn his back on the incredibly lucrative dark side of SEO and step into the light? As much as the army of engineers at Google and Yahoo would like to say it’s their constant refinement of their algorithms, I think there’s another force at work here. Online is just growing up.

Frontier Mentality.

Up to now, online has been the Wild West. The sheriff hadn’t come to town yet. Black hats could get mediocre sites to the top of the rankings because the vast majority of legit sites had no clue about search engine optimization. Reams of content were hidden in content management systems, locked off from the search engines by impenetrable dynamic urls. Ill-conceived site architectures meant redirects off the home page to destinations buried four and five levels deep. The essential title tag wasn’t even optimized. This is more common than you think. I’ve participated in a number of search workshops where some of the best-known brands in the world had their sites examined. It’s rare to see a keyword show up in the title tag.

But, slowly, things are changing. Brands are clueing into the importance of algorithmic search. Spider friendliness is usually a requirement in evaluations of new CMS solutions or site redesigns. And when you take a site that has thousand of pages of content, with rich internal linking structures and scads of legitimate, authoritative incoming links, it will jump to the top of the search results. It’s inevitable. Those are the sites MSN, Yahoo and Google want at the top of their results. Those are the sites we want to see at the top of the results. It’s the online universe working as it should.

The Settling of Main Street.

Today, these huge brands are turning to white-hat search practitioners to help unlock the full potential of their sites. At this point, it’s still a trickle, but it’s improving every day. And every time a big brand grabs a spot in that “Golden Triangle” at the top of the search results, a black-hat-manipulated site is moved a little further down the ladder. It doesn’t matter what tricks a black hatter has up its sleeve, you can’t beat the sheer bulk of these killer sites, as long as they’re properly optimized.

So, as the online geography becomes more civilized through the influx of legitimate business, black hats are forced to move off Main Street into the back alleys. There’s less territory for them to operate in. And now, they’re competing for position against other black hats who are as ruthless as they are, rather than against naïve site owners who have never heard of a meta tag or Pagerank. It gets harder to make a buck.

I’m not discounting the effort that the search engines have made to clean up spam. Google’s Florida Update was probably the single biggest blow to black hat optimization and affiliate spam. But, at the end of the day, spam’s being eliminated because better sites are being optimized effectively, allowing them to naturally claim their rightful territory in the search listings. And it’s the legitimate SEO industry that’s making that happen.

Isn’t it ironic? As the Web grows up, it appears that many of us in the SEO industry might actually turn out to be the sheriff.

Google, Search and a Brave New World

First published October 27, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As I write this, I have literally just closed the cover on John Battelle’s new book, “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.” Reading it was a unique experience for me. It was addictive, like literary crack. I devoured it in huge gulps. I can’t recall the last time I read a book in such a short time.

Look, They’re Writing About Us!

For the last 10 years, the part of my life not devoted to my wife and kids has been consumed with search. So reading the book was like reading a family history. I knew many of the people quoted. I had lived through the history recounted. I even found a quote from myself in the book.

I’ve never met John Battelle, but as I read, it was like he had crawled into my brain, picked up things I’ve been thinking about for years, then rendered them whole with much more skill and eloquence than I could ever possibly manage.

“The Search” is unlike any previous volume written on search. There have been several “how-to” books that have explored the mechanics of search, both from a user’s and marketer’s perspective. But Battelle for the first time explores search as a business and social phenomenon. Not only that, he muses that it might be THE social phenomenon, with world-shattering implications. For anyone who has grown up in search, it’s like seeing your high school sweetheart become a world-famous centerfold. “See, I told you she was hot. No one believed me!” It’s public confirmation of everything we’ve been trying to tell people for a decade.

Battelle has somehow managed to get access to the people who literally invented the industry. He has obviously immersed himself in the world of search, but has brought a 50,000-foot view that allows him to explore a much larger picture from a slightly different perspective. He looks at what search may evolve to become. As the founder of Wired and The Industry Standard, Battelle has the journalistic chops to dig out the good stuff and get it right, but he maintains a wide-eyed wonder at the sheer enormity of the social implications.

A Peek inside Google’s Kimono

What emerges is a fascinating glimpse into search as an emerging phenomenon, and a particularly astute look inside the relatively private world of Google. As regular readers of this column know, I’ve devoted more than a few words to this perplexing company.

I remember telling someone at a conference once that Google alternatively strikes me as pure genius, and as the proverbial room of monkeys randomly striking at typewriters. The truth, according to Battelle, is that Google is both. The monkeys are the genius. And the hope is that in the process they’ll reinvent everything.

Google, formed in the petri dish of hypergrowth unlike anything ever seen before, is either heading for the world’s largest comeuppance, or it may just change the world. Although Battelle is remarkably even-handed in his portrayal, there’s no doubt that he’s rooting for Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders.

Google is advancing on a thousand different fronts at once. With their acknowledged brilliance, arrogance and determination, Brin and Page have built a company that worships at the altar of technology. The high priests are legions of engineers, all given explicit instructions to invent something cool. There is little in the way of top-down strategy. Page is quoted as saying that he’s not a big believer in strategy. Rather, the Google Brin and Page envision is a support system for rampant entrepreneurialism, with grassroots innovation ultimately driving the direction of the company. The multi-million dollar Founders’ Award attaches heavy bonuses to this activity, giving employees a reason to stay in the corporate nest, rather than founding their own companies and ultimately hoping to be acquired again by Google.

But a paradox lies at the heart of Google. For all its encouragement of grassroots innovation, the company is also portrayed in the book as a serfdom, with Brin and Page as the iron-fisted and mercurial overlords prone to micromanaging. There is one particularly vivid scene where CEO Eric Schmidt finds Brin shaking at his desk, suffering through a bad back, meticulously poring over 500-plus applications for internal development projects, to see which will get his stamp of approval.

Despite the name, “The Search” is not just another search book. It’s a probing look at the crux of what makes the Internet such a powerful force for change. It explores the fabric of our society, and makes us realize that fabric could be ripped apart by forces already unleashed by technology. I’m not sure it will be as compelling a read for those outside the industry. Like most things to do with search, there will likely be more who say “Huh?” than “Wow!”

I Speak Search

First published October 13, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m not sure if this is being done in some university somewhere, but I would love to know if our use of search engines is changing how we communicate.

The search query is a form of communication that is deceptive in its simplicity. We are becoming adept at paring down complex concepts into a few well-chosen words, with no unnecessary filler. Even if we do throw in a few “the”s and “what”s, the search engine conveniently strips them from our query.

For example, I wanted to know what time zone Atlanta is in today. I went to Google and typed, “What is the local time in Atlanta?” Google truncated my query to “local time Atlanta.” Of the seven words I typed, four were unnecessary.

Which leads me to think, how many unnecessary words do we use every day as we communicate? If I cut this column down to the bare minimum of words required to convey the concept, it would probably drop from about 800 words to 200 or so. How much of our lives do we spend jamming extraneous words into our conversations and e-mails?

Who’s the advanced searcher?

The common view is that we’re pretty unsophisticated in the way we use search. Less than 5 percent of all searches use advanced search techniques, and by advanced, I mean something as simple as using query operators like “and,” “all” or “not.” I’m betting that the vast majority of Google users have never clicked on that little “Advanced Search” link that sits next to the search box. Sometimes, I think we search marketers are the only ones who ever use these features to mine Google’s index for competitive intelligence regarding back links and pages indexed. But I’m beginning to believe the common view is misguided. I think we’re getting quite sophisticated; we have learned how to make a few words go a long way. Don’t mistake short queries for a lack of sophistication. Generally, a short query matches our intent at the time. We want a broad, inclusive focus. When we’re ready to narrow the parameters, we add the words necessary. We understand that search is an iterative process.

Men (and women) of few words.

One of my favorite examples of on-the-mark ripostes was between two literary adversaries, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Their exchange went like this: Faulkner said of Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

And Hemingway’s response: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” Perhaps search engines are turning us into the Hemingways of the online generation. We cut out the fat, distilling concepts into the fewest words possible. We are learning the language of the search query. And although it’s not perfect, and can be frustrating at times, most of the time it works very well, thank you.

Consider the plight of Ask Jeeves. This engine made much of its ability to interpret queries written in plain English. In other words (lots of other words), queries that didn’t have the fat removed. The idea was that we would be more comfortable interacting with an engine with personality, which spoke the same language we do. Ask Jeeves’ current share of the search market? Less than 2 percent (according to Hitwise). While the Ask Jeeves model might have been attractive to new Internet users, we tend to pick up “SearchSpeak” pretty quickly. It’s not difficult. After a couple of queries, we learn how many words it takes to bring back the results we’re looking for, most of the time. Soon, we leave full sentences behind and cut back to just the essential words to frame our search intent.

So, if I’m right, what will our communications look like in a few short years? Will we have discarded the majority of the language, communicating in pared-down, task-oriented phrases? Will using search lead us into a new linguistic shorthand? A manifestation of this trend is now being seen in e-mails and instant messaging. In some cases, we’re even discarding words completely and going with acronyms. You don’t laugh uproariously anymore, you LOL, and if it’s really funny, you ROTFLMAOPMP.

Global SearchSpeak.

Going further, will a truncated version of English become the new international language? Will SearchSpeak pick up where Esperanto left off? Finally, you can have revenge on your grade school grammar teacher and toss away adverbs, adjectives, modifiers and participles to your heart’s content. All we’ll be left with is a handful of tried-and-true nouns and the odd verb. Anybody should be able to become fluent in SearchSpeak in a few months. Then, you can travel the globe, communicating in short, to-the-point phrases: “London pub, near Buckingham Palace” or “Paris hotel NOT rude staff.” While the discarding of the majority of the English language may be a frightening thought, it’s not really that big a leap. This is pretty much the way we all communicated with our parents when we were between the ages of 13 and 18: “Goin’ out…Nowhere…Nothing.Later.”

 

The Extreme Makeover of Integrated Search Planning

First published September 28, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s bordering dangerously close to jargon. As you scan a topic list at a conference, it doesn’t really grab you by the throat and drag you into the session room. I wanted to call my session something like “Search: the Shortcut Between You and Your Customer,” or “Search, the Vital Online Intersection.” In the end, we compromised on “Integrated Search Planning: How Organic, Sponsored and Paid can Optimize All Media Spends.” Not really lyrical, but it works.

It’s a shame that Integrated Search Planning doesn’t sound sexier, because when you spend some time thinking about it, it’s a concept that can sneak up and smack you in the side of the head. This is an idea that’s immensely powerful.

Living Online. We spend more and more of our lives online. The Internet is beginning to challenge TV for its share of our time and our attention. Add the fact that you’re actively engaged when you’re online, as opposed to passively absorbing programming and advertising, and the Internet’s role as an influencer becomes tremendously important. So, for any given set of consumers, we can assume that online is a vital factor.

Now consider the fact that our time online is being integrated more and more into our other activities. If we see something on TV that interests us, chances are very good that further research will be done online. The same is true for magazines, newspapers or other media. Increasingly, the Internet is being unlocked from the desktop box in the den, and emerging into our prime living space. At home, our Media Center PC is right next to the TV, given a spot of honor in the room where we spend 80 percent of our time. I’m also the proud owner of a new Pocket PC, and after I recovered from the shock of my first usage bill and learned to use remote Internet connectivity sparingly, I found myself intrigued by this notion of being online, anywhere, anytime.

In a few more years, the integration will be complete. The line between our real world and our online world will have disappeared. The world’s largest depository of information will be ours to have, whenever the mood strikes us.

Connecting the Dots with Search. Now comes search. There are billions of dots out there on the online landscape. Search is the quickest way to connect them. It’s our transporter, getting us from here to almost anywhere instantly. No, it’s not foolproof. Yes, it can be frustrating, but nothing is better. We don’t like typing in urls. We don’t want to figure out where we put the backslash, the hyphen or the tilde. We just pick a few words, jam them into a search tool bar and happily click away. We use search to navigate online. The fact that 97% of us use one of three engines, and close to 60% of us use just one, makes it even easier. The search market is highly consolidated. It’s like the glory days of TV advertising, when there were just 3 networks and cable hadn’t started fragmenting the market.

So, if you’re looking for the online intersection where you’re most likely to intercept a prospective customer, it’s search. I know you’ve heard that before, but really spend a couple of minutes thinking about it.

No matter what activity, what interest, what intention your target customers have, chances are very good that they’re going to use a search engine today. It’s like owning a billboard on the busiest intersection in the world.

So, let’s get back to the riveting topic of integrated search planning. The rest of your marketing has one purpose: generate engaged interest. If it’s successful, where does your prospect turn? Odds are very good that it will be a search engine. While they’re there, you have about six-and-a-half seconds to catch their interest. If you’re successful, you can then direct them to your site, where you have the opportunity to turn them into a lifetime customer.

Let me give you an example. Some years ago, we pitched an idea to a large company. A big part of their marketing push was a major sponsorship of NASCAR racing. Every year, they poured millions into their sponsored team. To support this online, they had a separate section of their site that was devoted to the team, including up-to-date standings, race stats and other information. Unfortunately, for various reasons, the site had no search engine visibility.

At the time, sponsored search was in its infancy. So the company could have owned the entire NASCAR bucket of keywords for a few thousand dollars a month. With a little site optimization, they could have also gained the prime organic space on the major engines. They could have owned all online search traffic interested in NASCAR for less than 0.4% of their sponsorship budget, driving prospects to a heavily branded site, building loyalty and putting their prospective customers one click away from product information. Unfortunately, the company didn’t get it; the executives passed on our proposal. My only hope is that somewhere, someone is still kicking himself for this decision.

How could you not integrate search into the rest of your media planning and creative strategy? Isn’t this a no-brainer? Apparently not, because only a small fraction of companies are doing Integrated Search Planning right now. Maybe we do have to come up with a sexier title for it.