Category Archives: Online User Experience

The Social Fabric of Search

First published February 1, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

You know the phenomena of Synchronicity, where once you become aware of something it seems like everyone is talking about the same thing? You can’t turn a corner without seeing some reference to something that just a week ago didn’t even register on your social consciousness. For me that was social search and the time was last week. While I was certainly aware of social search before that, for some reason, last week was the week where the knocking got so loud I had to pay more attention.

In looking at the referrer logs for my blog I noticed that Stumbleupon seemed to have emerged as a major traffic source. Also last week, I was on a panel with Danny Sullivan and he mentioned that we have to start watching social engines like Digg and Stumbleupon as emerging trends in the search space. Finally I did an interview with Larry Cornett, one of the key usability people at Yahoo, and when I asked him what the differentiating factor was for Yahoo in the future, he pointed to the emergence of social search and gave me Yahoo! Answers as the current example of that in practice.

There seems to be a lot of buzz around social search but exactly how is social search shaping our search experience and why we should be looking at it in the future? When Danny Sullivan mentioned that social search is something to keep your eye on, I made the point that different types of search engines lead themselves to different types of search activity.

Serendipitous Search

What I noticed Stumbleupon show up in my referrer report, I did some investigation into what Stumbleupon is about. Stumbleupon is the embodiment of serendipitous search. Its whole purpose is to help you find new sites that you might think are interesting. And here’s where the aspect of social search, or community, comes in. Stumbleupon depends on a network of like-minded people to earmark sites that would be of interest based on your profile. It’s based on the concept that great minds think alike. Apparently, someone in the online universe had pegged my blog as one that might be of interest in some particular niche and suddenly dozens of other people were stumbling upon it, guided by their online friends.

Stumbleupon is probably the best example of serendipitous search but Digg is another one, albeit with a slightly different flavor. While Stumbleupon helps you find sites, Digg connects you directly to new content about specific topics. Like Stumbleupon, Digg uses a rating system to allow community members to vote on whether a site or story is noteworthy. Both Stumbleupon and Digg have emerged as significant drivers of traffic in recent months so as marketers, we have to keep these sites on our radar.

From the user’s perspective, the aspect of social search becomes interesting in these two examples because they help guide us to explore undiscovered territory online. We’re going where we haven’t been before and it helps us when people who share our interests can guide the way. In each case, social search lends credibility to new sites with which we have no previous experience.

The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki wrote a book called the Wisdom of Crowds. The basic premise of the book is that crowds, given the right conditions, can be amazingly intelligent. He cites a number of examples where a large group of people, acting independently with limited amounts of information, collectively came to decisions that were more valid than those of all but the very smartest individuals within the group. The whole became greater than the sum of its parts.

This is the basis of a new flavor of social search where the community collectively builds the index of the search engine. Consider Yahoo! Answers. You pose the question and Yahoo’s community kicks into gear to provide the answers. These answers are aggregated and provide searchable content that make up Yahoo! Answers. Based on my conversation with Larry Cornett and recent comments by Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, it appears that Yahoo Answers provides a clue into their strategy for going head to head with Microsoft and Google. This concept of community building a better search experience is key to Yahoo and a main strategic platform for the future.

Another example of this variation of social search can be found in Search Wikia, the new search initiative that “is going to change everything” according to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. In Search Wikia, it’s a case where the broad concept seems to be in place but the specifics on how it’s going to be executed still seem a little thin.

The biggest challenge with this variation of social search is that it depends on the engagement of individual members of the community. Unless you have volunteers that are willing to spend their time enhancing the search experience, the scalability of the project breaks down. Anything that depends on people to take time to tag results, to contribute or to answer questions is dependent on the person’s motivation to participate. While that’s present in a very small percentage of our population, it’s not a commonly found trait in most of us. It’s generally been proven that hardware is rapidly scalable, people are not.

However you define social search, the fact remains that the combination of search and the very notion of an online community are inherently aligned. Communities are all about connections, and nothing can connect faster than online search. It will take us a while to smooth out the wrinkles, but search is fundamentally social and communities are fundamentally connected. These concepts will live together in the online world.

Top Spot or Not in Google?

Brandt Dainow at Think Metrics shared the results of his campaign performance with Google Adwords and came up with the following conclusions:

    • There is no relationship between the position of an advertisement in the Google Ad listings and the chance of that ad being clicked on.
    • Bidding more per visitor in order to get a higher position will not get you more visitors.
    • The number one position in the listings is not the best position.
    • No ad position is any better than any other.
    • The factor which has the most bearing on your chance of being clicked on is the text in your ad, not the ad’s position.

These conclusions were arrived at after analyzing the Google ads he ran this year. He says,

“while position in the listings used to be important, it is not anymore. People are more discriminating in their use of Google Ads than they used to be; they have learned to read the ads rather than just click the first one they see”

This runs directly counter to all the research we’ve done, and also that done by others, including Atlas one point. So I decided it was worth a deeper dive.
First, some facts about the analysis. It was done on ads he ran in October and November of last year, for the Christmas season. He acknowledges that this isn’t a definitive analysis, but the results are surprising enough that he encourages everyone to test their own campaigns.
In the following chart, he tracks the click through per position.

Dainow
Brandt expected to see a chart that started high on the left, and tapered down as it moved to the right. But there seemed to be little correlation between position and click through. This runs counter to our eye tracking, which showed a strong correlation, primarily on first page visits. Top sponsored ads on Google received 2 to 3 times the click throughs.

enquirorank

Further, Atlas OnePoint did some analysis from their data set, and similarly found a fairly high correlation between position and click through on Google and Overture/Yahoo.

atlasrank

So why the difference?

Well, here are a couple thoughts right off the bat. Dainow’s data is exclusively for his campaigns. We don’t see click through rates for the other listings, both paid and non-paid, on the page, so we can’t see how his ads stack up against others on the page. Also, it may be that for the campaigns in question, Brandt’s creative is more relevant than the other ads that show. He makes the point that creative is more important than position. I don’t necessarily agree completely. The two work together. The odds of being seen are substantially higher in the top spots, and your creative doesn’t work if it isn’t seen. The discriminating searcher that Dainow sees emerging who takes the time to read all the ads isn’t the searcher we see in eye tracking tests. That searcher quickly scans 3 to 4 listings, usually top sponsored and the top 1 or 2 organic listings and then makes their choice. This is not only true of our study, but the recent Microsoft one that just came out. Although Dainow’s charts over time certainly seem to show that position is less important, there could be a number of other factors contributing to this.

I will agree with Brandt though that if seen, relevant and compelling copy does make a huge difference in the click through rate of the ad. And for consumer researchers in particular, I still see search advertiser’s cranking out copy that’s not aligned to intent. But all the evidence I’ve seen points to much higher visibility, and hence, click throughs, in the top sponsored spots.

When looking at analysis like Brandt Dainow is presenting, you have to be aware of all the variables. In this case, I’d really like to know the following:

  • What were the keywords that made up the campaigns
  • What was the creative that was running for his clients
  • What was the creative the competition was running
  • What were the overall click throughs for the page

In doing the analysis, you really need to control for these variables before you can make valid conclusions. Some are ones we can know, others, like the overall click throughs, only the engines would know.

But Dainow is quick to point that his findings show the need for individual testing on a campaign by campaign basis. And in that, we’re in complete agreement. Our eye tracking tests and other research shows general patterns over common searches, and the patterns have been surprisingly consistent from study to study. It probably gives us as good idea as any what typical searcher behavior might be. But as I’ve said before, there is no such thing as typical behavior. Look at enough searches and an average, aggregate pattern emerges, but each search is different. It depends on searcher intent, it depends on the results and what shows on the page, it depends on the engines,  it depends on what searchers find on the other side of the click. All these things can dramatically affect a scan pattern. So while you might look to our studies or others as a starting point, we continually encourage you to use our findings to set up your own testing frameworks. Don’t take anything for granted. But that’s a message that often doesn’t get through. And my concern is that advertisers looking for a magic bullet will read Dainow’s conclusions highlighted at the top of this post and swallow them whole, without bothering to digest them. And there’s still far too many question marks about this analysis for anyone to do that. I’ve contacted Dainow to set up a chat so I can find out more. Hopefully we can shed more light on this question.

Digital Voyeurism: The New Reality

I remember the first time I went to my local gym and saw a new sign, hastily hand drawn and posted, announcing that cell phones were no longer allowed in the change rooms. It took me a minute or two to get it, but I finally figured it out. Ahh..they come with cameras now.

There are two dimensions to this that I wanted to briefly explore. First of all, with digital cameras everywhere, businesses have to be more careful about the face they show to the public, because it’s likely that if their bad side is showing, there’ll be someone there to snap a picture. Consider the example of one Kohl’s store in Dallas.

kohls5_2A shopper visited the store in the post Christmas season, found a store that looked like a tornado just ripped through it and just happened to have a cell phone with a camera and a fairly well read blog. It gets worse. His post happened to catch the eye of Seth Godin, who has one of the most read blogs on the Web. The result? A PR nightmare for Kohl’s. And this can happen anywhere. The next time a character at Disneyworld alledgedly sucker punches a guest, you can count on a camera being nearby. It’s enough to make your average PR Director retire to a remote Caribbean isle, one without internet connections.

The second implication has to do with personal privacy. If there are pictures snapped of us, and they get posted to the web without our knowing, or our permission, what will the fall out be? They’re there for the whole world to see, through any one of a number of image search engines. Fellow SearchInsider David Berkowitz explores that in his column today:

“The overarching issue, the one that’s most likely to keep me up at night, is, “Do we have to entirely relinquish our right to privacy?” If the answer is yes, then it simplifies the issue. We press forward with every technological innovation, privacy be damned. We accept that everything we say can be recorded, and it’s not just to improve customer service.”

Smile..you’re on Candid Camera!

New Microsoft Eye Tracking Study

Microsoft has just released the results of an internal eye tracking study that looked at the impact of snippet length. For more detail, visit Marina Garrison’s blog where she looks at the notable findings.

msheatmapm

A few quick ones and some comments:

Snippet length doesn’t seem to impact people’s search strategies.

This makes sense to us. We found scanning for word patterns rather than actual reading. In fact, a longer snippet may actually detract from the user experience in certain scenarios, such as navigational search. It makes it more difficult to pick up information scent quickly. Remember, we’re on and off the search page as quickly as possible.

People scan 4 listings regardless

This is definitely aligned with the Rule of 3 (or 4) we found in our eye tracking study. We found, however, that this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but rather a pretty common tendency. It changes depending on whether top sponsored ads appeared, how closely aligned the top result was to intent and other factors. But in general, we would agree that most people tend to scan 3 or 4 listings before clicking on one.

Scenario Success Rates Dropped Dramatically as the “Best” Listing Moved Down the Page

No big surprise here. This was referred to in our first study as the “Google” Effect, and it comes from our being trained that best result should show up on top. I actually co-authored a paper with Dr. Bajaj and Dr. Wood at the University of Tulsa about this very topic. By the way, it was Dr. Bajaj that called it the “Google” Effect, not me, so please Yahoo and Microsoft, don’t beat me up on this one.

The report is available for download.

A Day in the Life

First published January 4, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The U.S. Census Bureau has just released its new statistical abstract. According to the study, here’s how the average adult or teen will spend his or her time in 2007:

  • 65 days in front of the TV;
  • 41 days listening to the radio;
  • A little over a week on the Internet;
  • A week reading a daily newspaper; and
  • Another week listening to recorded music.

I have just one question: Who the hell are these people? Nobody I know.

The Census Bureau was unavailable for comment on the findings, so I have to make some assumptions. I’m assuming that the Internet time includes any work-related activity. So I tallied up my time on the Internet, actively using it, and found I averaged about 4 hours a day. Granted, I’m not a normal user (in oh-so-many ways) but bear with me. That means I spend almost 2 months on the Internet in a year.

Okay, I represent an extreme, and I realize that. So how about my wife, Jill? She is above average in nearly every regard, but when it comes to Internet use, is probably a closer approximation of your garden-variety user. Jill spends about an hour-and-a-half online a day. That puts her at just over 3 weeks of surfing in a year. My kids? About two-and-a-half hours a day, the majority of that chatting with umpteen zillion friends simultaneously on Messenger and butchering the English language I love, but I digress. That’s about five-and-a-half weeks in a year.

Perhaps the whole Hotchkiss family is abnormal when it comes to using the Net. Who are the least Net-savvy people I know? My Mom and Dad. Even they spend a half hour a day online, which puts even them slightly higher than the U.S. average.

Let’s attack the question in a different way. Let’s put together a day in the life of this mythical average American. According to the statistical abstract, here’s how his or her day is spent:

4.27 hours watching TV

2.7 hours listening to the radio

And roughly a half hour each surfing the Net, reading a newspaper and listening to music

Let’s assume that this person gets an average of 7.5 hours sleep and spends another 1.5 hours eating. That leaves fewer than 7 hours a day to do everything else, including being gainfully employed (unless their job is actually watching TV). Into that basket would fall things like reading a book, going for a walk with your family, hitting the gym, cleaning up the house, going on a vacation and talking with friends. Something seems askew here.

So I’m left with two possibilities. Either I have a warped view of the world because everyone I know represents the extreme end of the spectrum, or the U.S. Census Bureau has its facts wrong. If it’s the former, that means there are people, somewhere, that are really dragging down our collective average by remaining comatose in front of the TV for the better part of a day. I knew they existed, I just didn’t know there were so many of them. And it can’t really be the second possibility, can it? I mean, when’s the last time you remember the government getting its facts wrong?

 

US Statistical Abstract: Time Well Spent?

The U.S. Census Bureau just released their new Statistical Abstact for 2007. In it, they predict the amount of time adults and teens will spend consuming media in various forms:

  • 65 days in front of the TV
  • 41 days listening to radio
  • A little over a week on the Internet in 2007
  • Adults will spend about a week reading a daily newspaper
  • Teens and adults will spend another week listening to recorded music
  • Consumer spending for media is forecasted to be $936.75 per person

What was interesting about this was noticing the gap that still exists between TV and Radio consumption and time spent on the Internet. To me, it’s indicative of the nature of engagement, at least for now.

According to these stats, we will spend 10X the amount of time in front of a television than we will spend in front of a computer cruising the Internet. The media release didn’t elaborate on the nature of time spent on the Internet. Does this mean work time as well?

Given these numbers, one can understand why the lion’s share of ad budgets still go to television, and I expect that TV sales execs will gleefully quote these given every possible opportunity. But consider the following:

  • The consumption of entertainment content online is in it’s infancy. Strike that, it’s actually embroyonic. If YouTube is the barometer of where we’re at, we have an immense way to go. All the hype about online video is still largely centered around viral growth amongst very early adopters who are watching amateur videos less than 3 minutes in length. It’s not the actual current  impact of online video that’s creating buzz, it’s the paradigm shifting that we have to do when we consider the democratization of content creation, the searchability of the digital format and the interactive possibilities that come with the online distribution channel.  All these things speak to a totally new experience. We’re just not there yet.
  • Think about the difference in your engagement level when you’re interacting with the Internet, as opposed to passively watching TV or listening to the radio. Think about how you respond to advertising messaging, especially when it’s relevant to the task you’re pursuing. The influence of this difference in engagement on consumers hasn’t been quantified yet, but at a gut level, we know it should be significant, probably a quantum leap in effectiveness. Actually, the numbers drive this home. In the research that’s been done on the impact of various channels on consumers, the Internet consistently ranks near the top, usually right after word of mouth, and much higher than television. And it has this impact with one tenth of the exposure time.
  • We need time to change our habits. Television watching has been ingrained in our daily routine for decades. Radio for a bit longer. Newspapers for centuries. The Internet is just celebrating its first decade as a widely accessible channel, and high speed access is less than 5 years old. Given that, the one week number is actually quite remarkable.

I’m sure these numbers will be quoted often, and spun in drastically different directions, depending on who’s doing the spinning. At first glance, my thought was “only one week?”. But as I thought about it, the numbers just emphasized the vast potential of online. What will be fascinating is to revisit this in a year’s time and see how these numbers change. In Internet terms, 12 months is an eternity.

A Sign of Things to Come: eShopping at a Store near You

A small article in the Wall Street Journal (a subscription is needed to read the whole article) is a precursor of a big shake up to come. It’s something I’ve been predicting for sometime now, and while it will take awhile to gain traction, it will turn local retail upside down.

Three malls in California and one in Arizona have agreed to allow shoppers to check prices on actual inventory through text messages from their cell phones with a service called NearbyNow. According to their site, NearbyNow plans to add another 17 malls throughout the US to their network by April. Another service called Slifter is focusing on national chains like Best Buy, CompUSA and Foot Locker.

Here’s why this is revolutionary and why you’ll be hearing more.

  • For shopping, this represents discontinuous innovation. It’s a big win for the user, allowing them to shop smarter than ever before. Consumer demand will drive adoption of this new approach.
  • For retailers, this is scary as hell. By allowing their inventory to be captured realtime, they’re agreeing to be compared side by side with everyone else, including online retailers with no physical overhead to drive up prices. It completely levels the playing field.
  • As a number of technologies improve and converge, this will become substantially more useful and powerful. Mobile computing, GPS and search functionality will make this a must have for consumers.
  • It completely fuses the online and offline worlds, making the transition seamless.

This is one of those ideas you just know will take off, but there’s going to be some significant hurdles to overcome. These services are only as good as their success at signing up merchants. The more stores in the network, the more successful. If only a few are included, consumers will always wonder if there’s a better deal that isn’t part of the service, defeating the purpose. And a number of retailers will resist this trend til the bitter end. Ultimately, it will be consumer insistence that will force the laggards to join.

Another challenge will be the user interface. Right now, both services run on cell phones, meaning you have to deal with an awkward keypad and stripped down display. But this problem will rectify itself with advances in mobile technology.

In the world of shopping, this changes everything.

Year End Lists and the Stories They Tell

I was just putting a Search Insider column in the can for next week (it will run next Thursday) about the year end lists that are coming out of the various search engines and it brought up a few observations, together with a story that hit my desk about Google capturing 63% of searches.

First of all, the top ten lists. Here are the reported lists from each of the engines

Google Yahoo Microsoft
  1. Bebo
  2. Myspace
  3. World Cup
  4. Metacafe
  5. Radioblog
  6. Wikipedia
  7. Video
  8. Rebelde
  9. Mininova
  10. Wiki
  1. Britney Spears
  2. WWE
  3. Shakira
  4. Jessica Simpson
  5. Paris Hilton
  6. American Idol
  7. Beyonce Knowles
  8. Chris Brown
  9. Pamela Anderson
  10. Lindsay Lohan
  1. Ronaldinho
  2. Shakira
  3. Paris Hilton
  4. Britney Spears
  5. Harry Potter
  6. Eminem
  7. Pamela Anderson
  8. Hilary Duff
  9. Rebelde
  10. Angelina Jolie

First of all, I say reported because these aren’t actually the real top searches. Danny Sullivan had a good post pointing out the inconsistencies. These are filtered, sanitized and in Google’s case, apparently manipulated. The same could be true for the others, but unfortunately, they haven’t provided a tool like Google Trends that we can use to trip them up.

Be that as it may, it’s the comparison between them that holds the story that I touched on in the column, but would like to explore in greater depth.

Look at Google’s list. It’s obvious that people are using Google to interact with the web. They’re using it like a tool, to get to where they’re going. This becomes more apparent when we add the real top searches, the navigational queries that were filtered from the list.

googletrendsnav

People use Google to get to Yahoo, MSN..and even Google (okay, I’m still trying to figure that one out).

Look at Yahoo and Microsoft’s list. It’s the online equivalent of the trash tabloid section of the local magazine rack. These aren’t essential searches, these are fluff. It’s the searching you would do if you had time to kill. It’s the searching you would do if you had nothing better to do. It’s the searching you would do if you weren’t using Google for something useful.

I’m sure part of this comes from Yahoo and Microsoft’s portal roots. It speaks to a different philosophy towards search. Google aims to be the Web’s Swiss Army knife. It appears that Yahoo and Microsoft aspire to be the Entertainment Tonight of the Internet. When it comes to the Internet, Google is infrastructure, Yahoo and Microsoft are superstructure.

And that’s a fundamental issue for Yahoo and Microsoft. To win, or even hold their own in search, they have to offer tool-like utility. They have to live, breath and eat usability. They have to beat Google at Google’s own game. It’s not an easy task, and it’s getting harder every day. The latest numbers from Hitwise show they’re losing ground, not gaining it. According to the just released report, Google has a 62.79% share of searches for the 4 week period ending Dec. 16, compared to 21.9% for Yahoo and 9.28% for Microsoft. The number has been consistently trending up for Google, and trending down for the competition.

One last thing. Yahoo can say they focus on usability, but take a tour of the interface they put on their top 10. This would be enough to make Jakob Nielsen go postal. It’s one of the most irritating interfaces I’ve run into in a long time. It’s completely in Flash, launches with an irritating video clip, and makes you hunt around for the plain HTML version. I just know somewhere in Sunnyvale, there’s a team patting each other on the back for putting this thing together.

The Coming Storm: Search and Consumer Privacy

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

Earlier this week, in OnlineSpin, Seana Mulcahy wrote about two new complaints filed by consumer groups with the Federal Trade Commission. The shadowy subjects of tracking online behavior, analytics and targeting are outlined in the complaints.

Earlier this year, in an interview, I predicted a showdown between search engines and consumers around privacy issues. I suspect these two complaints could be the harbinger of the coming storm.

The Natural Convergence of Search and Behavioral Targeting

It makes all kinds of sense for the worlds of search and behavioral targeting to overlap, and the conjunction of those two worlds is a very powerful place indeed for the marketer. Behavioral targeting allows you to track and target potential customers based on their click stream. You can identify promising click streams based on sites visited and behavior on those sites. The odds of picking the right person at the right time to receive your message go up substantially.

Now let’s look at search. At some point in the buying cycle, which is mirrored by the click stream, almost all consumers will turn to a search engine to look for more information. This is a rather momentous point. At the earliest occurrence, it often indicates when the consumer switches from awareness to consideration. It’s when they become actively engaged in the act of purchasing, which puts them in a whole new mindset. From that point forward, they could turn back to the search engine at different times to assist them in the purchase. The key is that consumers who are using a search engine are very receptive to information about the product or service, because they’ve requested that information. Push turns to pull.

 

The Challenge with Search

The problem with search right now is knowing where the consumer is–at which touch pointIs it early in the cycle, near the beginning of the consideration phase, when consumers are compiling candidates for their consideration set? Is it somewhere in the middle, when they’ve assembled their set and are comparing features or looking for reviews? Is it when they’re ready to purchase? It’s almost impossible to tell from the query, because as past comScore studies have shown, there is often not a search funnel. The same query could be used at each point in the cycle.

Given this inability to disambiguate intent from the query, most marketers aim for the sure bet. They go for the purchase, because it’s much easier to track conversions and ROI. Do a search right now on any engine for “digital cameras” and look at the sponsored ads that appear. I guarantee they’ll be aimed at someone ready to purchase. Is this the query you would use if you had done your research and were ready to purchase one specific model? Would you even buy online? Probably not. But it is the query you would use if you were starting to consider your options.

You’re not alone. The marketers on the results page are missing over 80% of potential buyers by focusing on the less than 5% who are ready to buy now. It’s just not a good match-up for the advertiser or the consumer.

Enter BT

Now, if you were able to combine behavioral targeting with that all- important search touch point, you could serve a research-based ad if you knew at what stage in the buying cycle the consumer was, based on his online visits. You could take the guesswork of matching the message to the person. And finally, we could start to pull away from the pure direct response tactics that restrict the effectiveness of search. It’s tremendously powerful.

This is not something in the far-distant future. The mechanisms are already in place for search engines to track your online behavior. Tool bars, mini apps, personal search history. All of these can and do track where you’ve been. Everybody is being tracked to some degree.

But as Seana pointed out in her column, most of us are blissfully unaware of it. That’s because it’s been relatively benign to this point. In return for a handy tool bar that offers increased convenience, the ability to index your desktop and other added functionality, we just click the accept button without really reading what we’re accepting. Up to now, there hasn’t seemed to be any consequences. But in the background, the engines are quietly collecting terabytes of click-stream data. And the time is coming when that data will be put to use.

Privacy Storm Front

At first, it will be subtle and a little unsettling. The search ads we’ll be seeing will be targeted much more precisely. They will seem to speak just to us. It will be like the advertiser is reading our mind. We’ll be thrilled at first, but eventually, we’ll read an article somewhere that will explain the uncanny ability of the advertiser to give us just the right message. It’s because they’ve been watching us, tracking what we do online. And it won’t just be on search, it will be throughout the search engine’s advertising networks.

“Hmmm” you’ll say to yourself, “I’m not sure I’m okay with that.”

More and more consumer groups will launch protests. Politicians will sense opportunity and jump on their soapboxes. There will be a very vocal minority that will rail against this “Big Brotherism.” There will also be a group of advertisers that will continue to step way beyond the acceptable, using targeting to subvert the user experience, rather than enhance it, hijacking the user and taking them to places they never intended. This will add fuel to the fire. And because they’re the most visible target, the search engines will bear the brunt of the attack.

In the end, we’ll realize there’s much more pro than con here. Effective targeting will generally add to our experience, not take away from it. We’ll toy with trying to use a third-party privacy filter, but in the end, most of us won’t be willing to give up the additional functionality in return for maintaining an illusion of anonymity online. Much of the usefulness of Web 2.0 (I know, I hate the term too, but at least it’s commonly understood) will be dependent on capturing personal and click-stream data. We’ll give in, and the storm will gradually fade away on the horizon.

At least, that’s my prediction.

What Happens When the Whole World becomes Searchable?

My Search Insider column today was big picture stuff, looking at how search can connect us to a digitized world.

Here’s an excerpt:

There is this vast binary universe out there, terabyte after terabyte of data that grows each and every second, capturing the essence of who we are and what we do. And the sole door to that world, the channel we all must pass through to gain entry, is search. In the act of searching, we connect to that universe.

Catch the rest of the column at MediaPost.

The column drew some interesting responses, both on the Search Insider blog and emailed to me.

Martin Edic truly thought globally

In the spirit of creating a ‘brain melter’, imagine the extension of search created by GPS and satellite imaging. Suppose I want to create a search engine devoted to global climate change. If I can access these sources I could literally do a planetary search that included both digital data a geographoc, geological, weather and other environmental data all viewable as imagery, maps, text, etc.

David Gust took exception to my plaudits for Pandora: I initially thought Pandora was great, but eventually it became monotonous. A descriptor genome for the music is great, but it doesn’t decipher the music consumption genome in me.

My point is that indexing means little without context. Context is about behavior and that is where the true focus must be placed to truly unlock value of “Indexing the World”

Derick Harris,w ho obviously has a lot of time on his hands, took me to task for my “pointless” vision of an Orwellian future

I do wish that these marketing rhetoricians of search, such as Mr. Hotchkiss, would “think first” about what they are asking, in terms of “big questions” — instead of wasting our time with patently pointless essays that amount to self-serving indulgences posing as questions that really amount to a whole world Googleized into an information hell.

…Ouch! Sorry Derick, I obviously hit a sore spot.

And in the spirit of wired “Big Brother”, Warren Peace (come on..that can’t be your real name. But if it is, kudos to your parents!) shared his vision of a database schema for a “global object database” or GOD for short…

whereby every kind of digital data could be stored, indexed and cross-referenced, and rated for accuracy (couldn’t find funding for it, though). One issue is that many things are analog, not digital, and digitizing them means losing important information. An image of a person and a list of their interests is NOT the person, just an avatar. Do we really need an avatar of every living thing?

Perhaps that’s what the real “God” is – an analog, searchable object database that details absolute accuracy.

Talk about your brain melters!