Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Captiva: 27 Days and Counting

First published April 7, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As of today, we’re  27 days away from the kick-off of the Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla. Yesterday, after several weeks of going through pitches, we locked down the agenda.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, we’re trying to put a little more vertical in our perspective for this summit, taking our view to a higher level than is typical at most search-based conferences. The theme is Re:Invention, with sessions on the Re:Invention of Marketing, Organizations, Customers, the Search Experience and pretty much everything else.

The format is the same we field-tested last spring — think TED for Search.  In total we have 39 sessions spread over the 3 days, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes each. I’ve asked presenters to be thought-provoking, future-focused — and, if appropriate, even controversial. For those three days, we’ll ponder how everything we know may be reinvented in the very near future and what it means for each of us.

We’ve worked to bring different perspectives to the stage. We have publishers speaking (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook will all be there), as well as agencies, academics (Wharton and Ball State) and a few vendors. But we also have marketers. In fact, almost 20% of our agenda is marketers talking specifically about their experiences and their view of the future, including presenters from IBM, 3M and Logitech.

Over the next few columns (with the exception of next week, but more on that then), I’m going to spotlight some of the presentations that will take the stage at Captiva:

Sharon Drew Morgen: Buying FacilitationTM: A New Sales Paradigm

I met Sharon Drew Morgan (virtually) last year and was instantly astonished by the clarity of her view of the sales process. Sharon has been working on understanding the decision process of buyers for most of her professional life. Her Buying Facilitation approach is one of those astoundingly logical frameworks that almost everyone overlooks. I guarantee it will forever change how you think about marketing, nurturing and sales.

Roger Dooley: Neuromarketing: The Brain on “Buy” 

Neurosciencemarketing.com is one of my “must read” blogs. Its author, Roger Dooley, has been covering the science of neuromarketing pretty much from day one.  We share a fascination for how the brain works, especially in a marketing context. Roger will bring us up to speed on where neuromarketing is at these days, and speculate on how it might reinvent marketing in the future.

Aaron Goldman, Craig Danuloff and Matt Lawson – The Slippery Slope of Privacy 

These are actually three presentations with one common theme: What are the implications of privacy, and how will it impact advertising? Fellow Search Insider (and rapper) Aaron Goldman kicks off with exploring the differences between privacy and personalization. Then Craig Danuloff unpacks a fascinating idea we chatted about recently at another show: how might your digital “footprint” change the way we look at personalized marketing? Finally, Marin’s Matt Lawson explores Apple’s view of privacy, a timely conversation considering how intimate we’re getting with the company’s various devices.

Of course, as with every Summit, it’s not so much what happens on the stage as what happens off it that defines the value of the show. Count on departing Saturday feeling challenged and better connected than ever.

Vacationing “On the Grid”

First published March 31, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s 5 a.m. in Kauai. I’m sitting on the lanai of our condo, writing this in the glow from my laptop. I’ll continue to work on various things until about 8 a.m., when I’ll try to swim some lengths in the pool and then see what else my wife and daughters have planned for the day. Every so often I’ll check emails to see if there’s anything urgent that has to be responded to. The rest I’ll file away until tomorrow, when again I’ll get up at 5 a.m. Also, tomorrow (your today as you read this) I’ll have a 5-hour plane ride back to the mainland that will largely be used to “catch up.” I’m not jockeying for leadership in the holiday martyr’s club (it doesn’t seem like work when you’re watching the sun rise over Poipu), I’m simply describing a typical Hotchkiss vacation. It’s been this way for the past 14 or 15 years. I’ve heard about getting “off the grid.” I’ve just never been able to do it.

Some of my colleagues rave about dropping off this proverbial grid. “It was amazing!” they enthuse. “I didn’t check one email for five days!” I wonder what weird u-turn technology has taken when we feel we’ve created this monster we have to escape from, hiding in some far-flung unwired backwater, hiding from the penetrating gaze of our Outlook inbox. A number of analogies spring to mind: the fiery eyeball of Sauron that scans the Middle Earth landscape, ready to rain down pure, malevolent evil on the unwary tourist (or hobbit). Or, perhaps more appropriately, a massive wired mesh similar to a bug zapper, ready to trap and jolt any innocent vacationer who is foolish enough to fire up his laptop.

Much as we’d love we’d love to blame technology for our digital indentureship, it’s not really the one who’s at fault here. We started going down this path the minute we decided we wanted to work with ideas rather than physical things. My first job was loading 50-pound bags of various animal feed into the back of semi trailers. Had I chosen to stick with that original career path, I would have no problem leaving my job behind. It’s hard to pack a warehouse full of pig feed and several 18-wheelers in your suitcase. Getting “off the grid” would have simply meant changing location.

But today I earn my living by constructing ideas rather than stuff, and ideas are pretty portable. They have a nasty habit of following you around the world. In fact, the whole justification of getting “off the grid” is to recharge your mental batteries so you can come up with more ideas. It may cut into your vacation time, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It’s not often I gaze longingly into the back of an empty semi, wishing I had 45 tons of something to load into it. A few hours on a laptop seems like a pretty good trade-off to me.

And let’s face it. My day job has allowed me to travel to places like Kauai with my family. This grid we speak of disparagingly is the very same grid that allows me to earn my living the other 350 days of the year. It’s often frustrating, and the pressures can be downright debilitating some days, but it’s also challenging and exciting. One of the main reasons I don’t mind staying “on the grid” during my vacation times is that I find a change of scene often helps me attack problems with a new perspective.

“But what about your family?” you ask. Getting up early to spend time with my laptop almost seems like I’m conducting some illicit affair. It’s actually a topic I’ve discussed at length with my wife and daughters. We realize that this is a mixed bag, with pros and cons. But we all agree that the pros far outweigh the cons. And, besides, they all carry their own personal “grids” around as well.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll truly get “off the grid” and I’ll have a new view of things. But as for today, this column is rapidly drawing to a close, I’m seeing a faint pink glow in the sky over Kauai, and the birds are starting to sing. All in all, it’s looking like another fabulous day, thanks to the “grid.”

The View from Haleakala

First published March 24, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

On the island of Maui, Haleakala is a dormant volcano that climbs 10,000 feet above sea level. When you visit Maui (I’m writing this column from the lanai of our rented condo in Kihei) you’re told, repeatedly, that you have to see sunrise from Haleakala. This is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. It means bundling up. Hawaiian breezes become significantly colder at 10,000 ft. It also means dragging yourself out of bed at an ungodly hour to drive an hour and a half up a winding mountain road in the dark. But the view, should you make the effort, is otherworldly. There is a reason why everyone tells you that this is a must. It’s one of those moments that forever jams itself in your memory. You’ll be talking about it for the rest of your life.

The point is, the best things in life take effort. They don’t come to you like a mai tai delivered on the beach. They belong to the same category as the view from Haleakala. You have to work your butt off to achieve it, but when you do, something stirs in your soul and lifts you to a higher plain. You feel, quite literally, on top of the world.

This analogy, although it feels far from the world of search, actually bears more relevance to my day job than you might realize. I once said that search marketing was like golf: easy to do, but almost impossible to master. Anyone can throw together a search campaign, just as anyone can hack their way around 18 holes. But to take search to its full potential takes a huge amount of time, thought and effort. It means tearing apart every element of a campaign and building it back up from scratch, looking for the advantages that raises your performance to another level. Search at this level is not for everyone. It’s only for those willing to work this hard.

One of the non-vacation things I’m doing on this trip is finalizing the agenda for the Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla. The sheer complexity of search was driven home as I reviewed dozens of pitches for the available slots on the agenda. The programming committee wants to continue what we started on Captiva last year, putting together three days that challenge marketers to take search to an entirely different level. As I read through the pitches and responded with suggestions, the theme of the Summit jumped out at me: reinvention. The next stage for search requires taking nothing for granted and being willing to reimagine everything we do.

To add to the challenge, search cannot be isolated from other marketing efforts. Its very nature is to connect and leverage every marketing element that’s in play. So, as we reinvent our search strategy, we reinvent everything: our marketing program, our sales channels, our relationship with our customers, the structure of our organizations and the fabric of our marketplaces. We really have no choice. Technology is forcing our hand in this. The world is changing quickly. We may be able to survive by going through the motions (although that’s not a sure bet) but thriving is going to take some — really, a lot of — effort .

My goal for the Search Insider Summit is to create three days that cause attendees to challenge the norm and consider the possible – even the impossible. It’s not for the faint of heart or those looking for easy answers. It’s like a drive up a 10,000 foot dormant volcano at 5 in the morning to stand shivering on the edge of a crater — inconvenient as hell, but something that may forever change your view of the world.

The 1% of News that Matters

First published March 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider.

I first heard about the earthquake in Japan from a cab driver in Milwaukee. By the time I got to the airport, it was all over the monitors. And by the time I could find a Wi-Fi connection, the first details were just starting to emerge.

Our society digests news differently now. Electronic media paints news in broad strokes. Digital media offers a never-ending deep dive into the details. In the few days since disaster struck, the Web has already built up a vast repository of information about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The Web stretches infinitely to accommodate new content, stretching its digital boundaries as required. The shelf life of broadcast news is much shorter. Time constrains the content. Detail has to be sacrificed for impact.

But on the Web, news is also a participatory experience. News isn’t a broadcast, it’s a conversation, guided by editors and journalists but often veering in unexpected directions as our collective voice hits its stride. We shape the coverage by voicing our opinions, our concerns and, for those who are in the middle of the news, our experiences. The world is smaller, rawer, more visceral, more vital — and, hopefully, more human.

In the convergence of these two shifts in how we digest what happens in the world, there lies something impactful. Traditionally, because news was a shifting canvas where yesterday’s events quickly faded to make room for today’s, we had no choice but to move on to the next story. But now, thanks to the Web, the content remains, if we choose to seek it out. While Japan’s pain is still horribly fresh, more than a year later the traumatic story of Haiti is still unwinding online.

The fact is that 99% of the news you hear nightly won’t really make much of a difference in your life in five years. They’re stories of passing interest, but in the big scheme of things, they’re rather inconsequential. And the things that will make a difference seldom make the news. But, on the Web, the time limitation of being “new” doesn’t artificially constrain what is news. For those who continue to care about Haiti, the information is there, living on in indelible binary bits.

It’s this concept of “caring” about news that is served so well online. Humans tend to react to our surroundings in two distinct ways. We react to the immediate and awesome (in both its negative and positive connotations) simply because we’re wired to notice dramatic and potentially harmful events in our environment. But, if it has no personal impact, we move on with our lives. We’re like a herd of sheep that goes back to its collective grazing after a loud noise startles us in our pasture. For this fleeting level of engagement, broadcast news works exceedingly well. It’s been designed to impact us at this transitory level, hammering us for maximum effect by a parade of violence, negativity and trauma.

But for the 1% of stories that do affect us, that will matter to us in a very personal way in five years, the 30-second sound bite is simply not enough. If news can affect our well-being, the second level of human engagement kicks in. Now, we are hungry for information. We need to dive deep into the details, so we can understand what the personal impact might be.

Consider the difference in how I would react to the news coming out of Japan if, rather than observing it at arm’s length as I did, I had a child who was teaching English as a second language in Sendai, the epicenter of the quake. Think about how I would voraciously devour any information I could find online, trying to determine if my child was safe.

For the 1% of news that does matter to us, online provides us something we never had before. It takes the temporal and archives it at a scale never before possible. Individual slivers of history are frozen in a digital record. It allows us to connect to information that is personally relevant, even long after it qualifies as “news.”

A Search History of TED

First published March 10, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I always find it interesting to look at a cultural phenomenon through the lens of search. Search provides a fascinating and quantitative look at the growth of interest in a particular topic. Having spent all last week immersed in the cult that is TED (I was at TEDActive in Palm Springs, Calif.) I thought that this was as good a subject as any to analyze.

TED’s Back Story

The TED story, for those of you not familiar with it, is pretty amazing. TED was originally held in Monterey, Calif. in 1984, the brainchild of Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks. Some of the content on that first TED stage? The unveiling of the Mac, a rep from Sony demonstrating the compact disc, Benoit Mandelbrot talking about fractals and Marvin Minsky speculating on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Due to its proximity to Silicon Valley, the conference had a decidedly tech-heavy focus. The first one lost money, and Wurman didn’t attempt another one until 1990. It was then held annually in Monterey.

In 2001, Chris Anderson took over the show and broadened the focus, adopting a more philanthropic approach. Technology still figured prominently on the TED stage, but the conference became an intellectual smorgasbord of content, with a single session known to veer from musicians to world adventurers, scientists to CEOs.

Probably the biggest change in the fortunes of TED, however, came in 2006 when the world was invited to share what happened on the TED stage. The talks were videotaped and made freely available online. And it’s here where our search story begins.

TED:TSI (TED Search Investigation)

If you use Google Insights (as I did), you see something interesting begin to happen in the search activity surrounding TED. Through 2004, 2005 and 2006, most of the search activity for TED was about the conference. There were peaks every February when the conference took place, but other than this, the volumes were pretty consistent. There was little year-over-year growth. TED remained an exclusive club for the intellectually elite. The rest of the world had never heard of it.

In 2006, when the videos were launched, a new trend began. By the end of the year, more people were using search to find the TED talks themselves than to find out about the conference. The gap continued to widen until in 2011, the search popularity of the Talks themselves is almost 3 times as much as query volume for the conference. But volumes for both have seen impressive growth. The conference rode the wave of the popularity of the videos, with query volumes over 10 times the levels seen in 2006. The videos fueled the growth of TED, making it the must see conference of the year.

The Global Mapping of TED

Another interesting trend has been to see how TED has become a global phenomenon. TED talks are most popular in Canada, followed by New Zealand, the U.S. and South Africa. They’ve also shown impressive growth in South Africa, Singapore, Australia and India. And it’s this global popularity that led TED to announce TEDx, in 2009. These are independently organized shows held around the world, with some mentorship and guidance from the TED mother ship. They have been tremendously popular — and now search volumes for TEDx have surpassed queries for the main conference.  Epicenters of the TEDx tidal wave include the Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, India and Argentina.

If we drill down to the U.S., we find the greatest concentration of TEDsters (the official moniker of members of the TED community) in Oregon, Washington and Vermont. Surprisingly, California, where the conference is held, doesn’t even make the list of top TED states. Massachusetts, New York and Hawaii all beat it out. The top 10 TED states are all solidly blue (based on the last presidential election) — except for Montana.

And because Canada is such a TED hotbed (TED has an office in Vancouver) I’m proud to say that my home province of B.C. has perhaps the greatest concentration of TED fans in the world, followed by Manitoba, Alberta (which would be the Canadian equivalent of Montana) and Saskatchewan. According to Google, the TED world capital should be Victoria, B.C, which has the highest concentration of TED-related searches of any city, anywhere. The U.S. Capital? Portland, Ore. For some reason, TEDmania is very much alive and well here in the Pacific Northwest.

TED has legs!

Finally, you may ask if the wave of TED popularity is sustainable. I had this very conversation last week with another TEDster in Palm Springs. If you look at the growth of all search volumes so far in 2011, I would say the TED wave has barely begun. Volumes have skyrocketed this year in every category I looked at.  If you compare the query volume graphs to a typical S-shaped adoption curve, you would conclude that TED is just beginning a massive growth spurt.  Get used to hearing about TED, because that will be happening a lot in the future — especially if you’re visiting Victoria or Portland.

The Nobler Side of Social Media: Voices in a Choir

First published March 3, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I took social media to task for making us less social. This week, I’m in Palm Springs for TED Active — and on day one, saw three very real examples of how the Internet is also connecting us in ways we never imagined before. They provided a compelling counterpoint to my original argument.

Eric Whitacre is a composer and conductor. In “Lux Aurumque (Light and Gold)” he conducts a choir singing his original composition. The choir, 185 strong, never sang together. They never met each other. They live in 12 different countries. Whitacre posted a video of himself conducting the piece, and every one of those 185 members of the choir submitted their individual parts through YouTube. The 247 separate tracks were combined into a rather amazing work that has been seen almost 2 million times. One of the contributors lived in a cabin in the remote Alaskan wilderness, 400 miles from the nearest town. Her satellite link was her only connection to the world.

The Johnny Cash Project is an equally amazing collaborative effort. Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk took archival film footage of Johnny Cash, dissected it frame by frame, and asked artists from around the world to redraw each frame. The contributions were stitched back together with Cash’s song, “Ain’t No Grave” as the soundtrack. The result is mesmerizing.

But perhaps the must stunning example of digital collaboration came not from art, but the very real world of the Middle East. Wadah Kanfar, the chief of Al-Jazeera, told us how the voices of many, amplified through technology, are bringing democracy and new hope to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

These examples speak of something much broader and powerful than just the typical applications of social media. And, like social media’s less attractive side, the impact of these new connections on society is yet to be determined. There is a social experiment being conducted in real time — but the results will only be fully realized through the lens of hindsight. Can true democracy be established in a place like Libya, even with the power of connection? Time alone will tell.

The new technology of connection releases things that are deeply human: the need to be part of the greater whole (for example, the choir member from Alaska); the need to contribute something of ourselves to the world (for example, the Johnny Cash Project); and the need for fairness and justice (as in the protests in the Middle East). In the last example, these connections illuminate the human condition in the darkest corners of the world and force accountability. Since the beginning of time, unfairness in the tribe has been punished. The difference now is that our human tribe extends around the world.

Kanfar told an amazing story that unfolded during the height of one of the protests. The demonstrators pleaded with Al-Jazeera to keep the cameras rolling through the night. “If you stop, we’re lost. But as long as you keep showing what’s happening, we have hope.”

Perhaps the true paradox of social media is not that we’re becoming less social, but that we’re becoming social in different ways. As we spend less time in our flesh and blood engagements, we spend more time establishing connections that were impossible before. In the ’70s, Mark Granovetter found that our social networks are composed of two distinct types of linkages, which he called strong and weak ties. The strong ties are the family and friends bonds that generally require both proximity and significant time together. The weak ties are the extended bonds that we might call acquaintances. As Granovetter found, it’s the weak ties that carry the surprising power of a community, especially when they’re mobilized for a common purpose. We rely on weak ties for referrals, favors and job offers. They extend beyond our immediate circle and provide important social capital when required.

Perhaps social media has had a negative impact on our strong ties, as I alluded to in my last column. But, as I was reminded today, it has dramatically increased our ability to form weak ties that align to concepts, interests and causes. And don’t let the name “weak ties” fool you. When they’re synchronized, they can be tremendously powerful. You might call them the harmonized voices of a global choir.

 

The Paradox of Social Media: The More Social It Gets, The Less Social We Become

First published February 24, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I have teenage daughters. At least, I assume they’re still my daughters. They hang around our house and eat our food. But, to be honest, it’s been a while since we identified ourselves to each other. Between Angry Birds, SMS and Facebook, there’s precious little actual conversing going on in the Hotchkiss household. I barely recognize their faces, lit up as they are by the cool blue digital light of an iPhone screen. I assume that, at times, there’s a living being at the other end of their multi-texting, but I’m not really sure.

Yesterday, I overheard this in our lunch room: “I went for dinner the other night but have no idea how it was. Between tweeting my location, updating my status and posting a review to Yelp, I never actually ate anything.”

I’m guessing this comment was made in jest, but you never know. I remember one after-conference party held under the bridge in Sydney’s magnificent harbor, watching one very well-known search guru tweet his way through the entire evening. I don’t think he even noticed the Opera House on the other side of the bay. He was so busy tweeting his experience; he overlooked the actual “experiencing” part.

It seems to me that the more we engage in social media, the less social we actually become. The world in front of our noses is increasing being obstructed by one type of screen or another. The more we live in our new digital communities, the less we live in our real-life, flesh and blood ones. I can’t remember my neighbor’s name, but I can track the minute-by-minute location of people I’ve never met and probably never will. And by the way, congats on becoming Mayor of the Beans n’ Buns coffee shop on the corner of “LOL” and “OMG” in a city I’ll never set foot in. I’m not sure why that’s important to me, but all the “in” people assure me it is.

Humans were built to be social, but I’m not sure we were designed for social media. For one thing, research has proven that multitasking is a myth. We can’t do it. Our kids can’t do it. Nobody can do it. Much as we think we’re keeping all our digital balls in the air, eyes darting back and forth from screen to screen, it’s all a self-perpetuated ruse. Attention was designed to work with a single focus. You can switch it from target to target, but you can’t split it. If you try, you’ll just end up doing everything poorly.

Secondly, we’re built to communicate with the person in front of our nose. We pick up the vast majority of a conversation through body language and visual cues. Try as technology might, there’s just no way a virtual experience can match the bandwidth or depth of engagement you’ll find in a real face-to-face conversation. Yet, we continually pass up the opportunity to have these, opting instead to stare at a little screen and text our thumbs off.

As we spend more time with our digital connections, it’s inevitable that we’ll have less satisfying engagements with the people who share our physical space and time. The disturbing part about that is we may not realize the price we’re paying until it’s too late. Social media has slyly incorporated many elements from online gaming to make using it treacherously addictive. I suspect if we wired up the average teen while she was using Facebook or Foursquare, we’d find a hyperactive pleasure center, bathing her brain in dopamine. We’re forgoing the real pleasures of bonding to pursue an artificially wired short-cut.

The ironic part of all this is that I wrote this column on a four-hour flight, spending most of it staring at some kind of screen or another. The person sitting next to me on the plane? I don’t think we spoke more than four words to each other.

How Smart Do We Want Search to Get?

First published February 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Imagine if a search engine was smart enough to be able to anticipate your needs before you know you need them. There it sits, silently monitoring your every move and just when you get a hankering for Thai food (burbling up to the threshold of consciousness), there it is with the hottest Thai restaurants within a 2-mile radius. You didn’t have to do a thing. It was just that smart!

Sound utopian? Then take a moment to think again. Do we really want search to become that smart? Sure, it sounds great in theory, but what would we have to share to allow search to become truly prescient?

The odd thing about humans is that we want our lives to be easier, but we don’t want to sacrifice control in the process. Well, to be more precise, we don’t want to sacrifice control in some situations. It all comes down to our level of engagement with the task at hand and the importance of gut instinct.

Humans have a mental bias towards control. We are most anxious when we have no control over our environment. In fact, even when we have very little control over outcomes (such as in a casino) we fool ourselves into thinking we do. We believe that the way we toss the dice on a craps table (or the hat we’re wearing, or the color of our underwear) has some impact of which numbers come up for us. Factory workers on an assembly line are much happier when they have a button that can stop the line, even if they never use it. We love control and are loath to relinquish it.

Even if a search engine had a 100% success rate in anticipating our intent, chances are we’d feel anxious about surrendering control of our decisions. In fact, this issue has already played out once online. At the height of the dot-com boom, billions of dollars were invested in creating friction-fee online marketplaces. The theory was that certain buying purchases, especially in the B2B marketplace, could be totally automated.  In a magazine article for supply chain management in 2000, an industry consultant saw a bright future for e-procurement: “”As long as you understand the business rules for making decisions, there’s no reason why you can’t automate.  Why can’t two computer systems – with built in rules – talk to each other?” 

It sounds completely rational, but ration has little to do with what we want. We want to feel in control. B2B buying didn’t become automated because we have too much investing in making buying decisions, even when we’re buying widgets for the assembly line, a bank of servers or copy paper in bulk. We don’t trust machines, no matter how smart they are, to make our decisions for us.

What we want is a search engine that guides us, but doesn’t push us. We want a smarter search experience, but we think of it as a filter rather than an arbitrator. Ideally, we want a concierge, who can make informed suggestions that we can then act on.  

Could a search engine become smart enough to predict our wants and desires before we’re even aware of them? Possibly, but the other part of that trade-off may be one we’re unwilling to make. How much privacy do we have to give up in order for the engine to know us that well? One of the hottest growth markets is in the area of personal technology. These little bits of tech live with us day in and day out. Consider the Fitbit, a sophisticated motion sensor that tracks our daily movements as long as we keep it with us. This daily diary of our activity (even how restless our sleep is) can be fed directly to the Web. The idea is intriguing, but the reality is a little disconcerting, especially when you think where this technology may go in the future. 

As we embed more and more technology into our everyday lives, there is the opportunity to collect signals that could help a search engine (but at this point, the label “search engine” seems wholly inadequate), track behaviors and make very educated guesses about what we might be interested in.  Our dreams and desires could potentially be crunched into just another algorithm. Practical? Perhaps. Desirable? I suspect not.

Finally, slumbering just below this discussion is the lurking presence of ultra-targeted advertising, and it’s this that we may find most troubling. If technology someday succeeds in reading our very minds, how can we use that same mind to say no?

A “Page” from Google’s PR Book

First published February 10, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Somehow, I’ve gotten myself squarely in the middle of Bing and Google again. Sometimes I should just keep my big mouth shut. The latest brouhaha is Google calling Microsoft a bunch of “cheaters” for copying search results. I called it “silly.”And it is. Pretty much everyone in the search universe (outside Mountain View) agrees that this is much more about Google trying to give Bing a black eye in the media than any serious threat to intellectual property. But somehow, as Google was swinging, it’s the one that ended up with the shiner.

If this were a one-off incident, I’d put it down to some misplaced indignation and bad PR “spin” advice. Google is within its rights to bring it to Bing’s attention. I just think Google didn’t have to be so pissy about it.

A New Attitude (and it ain’t pretty)…

But I don’t think this was a misstep. I think it’s all part of a new attitude, and a sad one at that, for Google. I wrote about this almost a year ago, in April, when I found Google becoming increasingly brittle and defensive in its public face:  “The humility is disappearing and hubris again rules the day. It’s almost as if, now that Google is the king of the hill and is drawing more than their fair share of scrutiny, much of it negative, they’ve gone into defensive mode. They’ve circled the wagons and drawn more inside.”

Apparently I’m not the only one who’s noticed that. Kara Swisher, in a post titled “Google’s Bing Attack Has Larry Page Written All Over It,” says Google’s new attitude comes right from its new CEO: “I would wager that we’re about to see a lot more of this pugnacious, in-your-face tone from Google under Page’s leadership, which could have far-reaching implications for the company.

While I have no idea if it was his decision to let loose the dogs of algo-war on Microsoft, many with knowledge of how Google manages its public persona observed to me this week that this was just the kind of popping off that the outgoing Schmidt often tried to mitigate and soften.

Google on a Ram-Page…

I now suspect that Google’s increased hubris (that I mentioned in last year’s column) was caused by Page flexing his influence within the organization. I trust Swisher’s take on the mood at Google. I’ve heard similar stories of Page’s “nerdily indignant voice” from others unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a tirade. Now, however, it’s permeating the company, and that’s sad.  Recently, I did a pretty extensive series of posts on where search might be heading. I had open and free- ranging conversations with Microsoft and Yahoo, but Google was “too busy” to have a real interview. I had to submit my questions by email and Google choose simply to ignore some of them because the company disagreed with my premise. Undertones of “how dare you question us?” rang clearly through my communications with the Big G.

I miss the days when Google was much more open-minded and accessible. I actually could get Marissa Mayer on the phone to talk about Google’s search interface. I could pick Peter Norvig’s brain about the future of the industry. Once I even had Eric Schmidt ask me “what [he] needed to know.” But that was then, and this is now.

I suspect there is much we don’t know about the transition from Schmidt to Page. The cracks are beginning to show in the Googleplex. I would guess the brittle bravado we’re seeing on the outside is masking a very un-Googlelike nervousness in Mountain View. Aaron Goldman nailed some of the symptoms in yesterday’s Search Insider.  Last April, I said, “I have no idea what this means in the big picture, but I do know that the tone and temper of an organization is a pretty reliable indicator of future success.” The signals I’m seeing with increased frequency indicate trouble ahead, and quite possibly, the most spectacular flame-out in high-tech history.

Why Can’t I Argue with Google (or Malcolm Gladwell)?

First published February 3, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week I was in San Francisco for Big Think’s Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box. I took copious notes but there was one comment in particular I found intriguing. Luc Barthelet, from Wolfram|Alpha said that the company’s goal is not just to provide an answer, but show the route taken to arrive at the answer. Then we’re free to question the validity of the answer. “I want to argue with a search engine. I want to be able to challenge its logic.”

This was the first time I had ever heard this, but it immediately struck a chord. Why can’t we argue with Google? Why do we just accept its answers? How do we know they’re right? Of course, Google doesn’t really create an answer, it connect us with answers. But more and more, Google is disintermediating the source of the answer. For many searches, we never go beyond the search results page. We accept the answer as presented by Google, without ever questioning the rationale behind the answer.

Why is arguing important? What could we gain from arguing with Google? Let me give you one example of why it’s good to argue.

There is no problem…

The Summit featured recorded video clips from famed pundits, including Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell told us that the purpose of the Summit — to ponder how we might reinvent search — was misguided. “Can we build a better Google or Bing? Yeah, sure we can. But it solves a problem that’s not really a problem.” In Gladwell’s view, we already have access to all the information we need.

I diasagree vehemently with Gladwell. This same logic could be applied to any avenue of human endeavor and would stop all progress and innovation in its tracks. Could a horse and covered wagon transport us across the country? Yeah, sure it could. But I’d rather take a plane, thank you. And someday I hope there’s an even faster way. Gladwell’s off-the-cuff comment shocked the audience. How could he provide an answer so obviously lacking in informed context? The structure of his argument had holes so big we could have poked the Golden Gate Bridge through them.

Say What, Malcolm?

If Gladwell believes that a valid answer to every question is Wikipedia, perhaps his argument holds water. But he is ignoring the fundamental precepts of information foraging and retrieval. We need to surface the best information by taking the shortest possible path to it. Everyone who knows anything about search agrees with that, and we also agree that we’re not there yet. Not by a long shot.

But going beyond this, there’s the broader question: Is the current use case of search the one we need going forward? Right now, search is about the retrieval of relevant information. Let’s leave aside the question about whether it’s successful at doing that. But is simple retrieval of information (often false information) enough anymore? As Esther Dyson pointed out, perhaps “search” isn’t even the verb we should be using now. Is “solving” or “fulfilling” a better description of what we need? Dyson remarked, “We use the Ito connect to and affect the world around us.” And if that’s the use case, search falls far short of our expectations.

But I couldn’t argue with Gladwell, because he wasn’t in the room and I couldn’t uncover the rationale behind his pithy answer. He was a bit like Google; he dropped his wisdom from on high and was gone.

The Importance of Arguing

We argue because it knocks down intellectual straw men. It allows us to test and prod the logic that lies behind opinions. It challenges beliefs, which tend to keep us barricaded from the rest of world. If those beliefs are deeply held, they may be difficult (or impossible) to dislodge, but if they’re never questioned, minds will never change — and we’ll all barrel down those pre-laid tracks to a much too predictable future.

I agree with Barthelet. We should be able to argue with online information. We should be able to see the path taken to answers. We should be able to challenge sources. It’s more appropriate in some instances than others, and it’s an option we may not take advantage of very often, but it should be open to us.