Category Archives: Search Behaviors

Different Platforms, Different Ads

First published June 9, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s little argument that mobile’s time has come. According to Google, mobile searches make up anywhere from 5% to 12% of the total query volume for many popular keywords. And for many categories (like searches for local businesses) the percentage is much higher. That officially qualifies as “something to consider” in most marketing strategies. For many marketers, though, the addition of mobile is a simple check box addition in planning a search campaign. In Google’s quest to make life simple for marketers, we’re missing some fundamental aspects of marketing to mobile prospects. Okay, we’re missing one fundamental aspect:  it’s different. Really different.

Last week, I talked about how my behaviors vary across multiple devices. But it’s not just me. It’s everyone. And those differences in behavior will continue to diverge as experiences become more customized. The mobile use case will look significantly different than the tablet use case. Desktops and smart entertainment devices will be completely different beasts. We’ll use them in different ways, with different intents, and in different contexts. We’d better make sure our marketing messages are different too.

Let’s go back to the Jacquelyn Krones research from Microsoft, which I talked about in the last column. If we divide search activity into three buckets: missions, excavations and explorations, we can also see that three different approaches to search ads should go along with those divergent intents.

Excavation search sessions, which still live primarily on the desktop, are all about information gathering. Success ads for these types of searches should offer rich access to relevant content. Learn to recognize the keywords in your campaigns that indicate excavation queries. They are typically more general in nature, and are often aligned with events that require extensive research: major purchases, planning vacations, researching life-altering events like health concerns, moving to a new community, starting college or planning a wedding. In our quest to squeeze conversions off a landing page, we often not only pare down content, but also on-page navigation pointing to more content. For an excavation-type search, this is exactly the wrong approach. Here, the John Caples approach to copy writing might be just the ticket: long, information rich content that allows the user to “create knowledge.”

Missions, especially on mobile devices, are just that. You get in and you get out, hopefully with something useful — that lets you do something else. Successful ads in this environment should do the same thing: take you one (or several) steps closer to a successful completion of the mission. Ad messaging should offer the promise of successful mission completion, and the post-click destination should deliver on that promise. Clean, hassle-free and exquisitely simple to use are the marching orders of mobile advertising.

Perhaps the most interesting search use case is that on a tablet device. I’ve chatted with Yahoo’s relatively new VP of search, Shashi Seth, about this. He believes tablets might open the door for the visually rich, interactive ads that brand marketers love. And Krones research seems to indicate that this might indeed be the case. Tablets are ideal for exploration searches, which tend to be meandering voyages through the online landscape with less specific agendas. The delight of serendipity is one big component in an expedition search. And it’s this that marks a significant departure for most search marketers.

Every search marketer learns the hard way that it’s incredibly difficult to lure search users away from the task they have in mind. When we do our keyword analysis, we’re usually disappointed to find that the list of highly relevant words is much smaller than we thought. So, we extend our campaign into keywords that, while not directly relevant, are at least adjacent to the user’s anticipated intent. If they’re looking for a jigsaw, we might try running an ad for free children’s furniture plans. Or, if they’re looking for a new car, we might try running an ad that reminds them that they can save 15% on their car insurance just by clicking on our ad.

We’ve all been here. In the mind of the marketer, it makes sense to buy these keywords. After all, the two worlds are not so far apart. A new owner of a jig saw might indeed be interested in building a set of bunk beds. And the new car owner will need car insurance. The problem is, neither of those things are relevant “in the moment,” and “in the moment” rules in most search interactions. So, after a few months of trying, we reluctantly remove these keywords from our campaign, or drop the bid price so low they’re buried 3 pages of results deep.

But perhaps tablet users are different. I’m certain the search experience on a tablet will soon look significantly different than it does on a PC. I would expect it to be more tactile and interactive – less rigidly ordered. And, in that environment, given the looser constraints of an expedition-type search, we might be more willing to explore a visually rich distraction. Shashi Seth thinks so. Krones’ research seems to also point in this direction. For this search marketer, that’s reason enough to test the hypothesis. Or, I will test it, as soon as Google, Yahoo and Bing make that possible.

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?

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.

Google’s Mission and the Economic Colonization of the Web

First published January 27, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Aaron Goldman and I agree — it’s time for Google to rethink its mission statement. But we disagree on the reason. Goldman thinks it’s time “to call a spade a spade” and for Google to come clean on their intention to grab as many ad dollars as possible. From this perspective, the change in the mission statement is really just to better align it with Google’s business.

I think “organizing the world’s information” needs to be changed for a different reason. I think there are inherent limitations in it that may seriously impact Google’s revenue stream in the future.

A Quick Update

But first, some background. Eric Schmidt has moved into that corporate limbo called “executive chairman”-ship. I don’t really know what an executive chairman does. I asked Google and it’s also pretty fuzzy on the concept. According to Schmidt, it’s to focus on external partnerships and to “advise” Larry and Sergey. To me, it sounds like a long and polite good-bye. Whatever we know about the shift, I guarantee there’s more to the story.

Also, Google rocked expectations on Q4 earnings, so all appears to be rosy in Google-world. But quarterly earnings calls are a notoriously poor indicator of the strategic health of an organization. They reflect the success of strategic decisions made a year or two ago and the ability of the organization to execute against them. They tell you nothing about the strategy today, or how the company may do in the future. Which brings us back to the mission statement.

Missionary Work

Organizing the world’s information sounds like a lofty goal, and it is. It was entirely appropriate given the “wild-west” nature of the Web when Google first appeared in 1997. But on the Web, information equals data, and data comes in two forms: structured and unstructured. Google’s mission was defined at a time when almost everything online was unstructured. It was a mess. It needed to be organized. And Google’s revenue model sprung from its ability to match consumer intent with all this unstructured content. It was a broad-based attempt to tame the Web, and it was tremendously successful.

But the success came with limitations. If you’re going to try to organize unstructured information, you have to rely on some method to interpret the meaning of the information. You need some framework to organize information into. Google, like every other engine, relied on language as a measure of relevance — specifically matching content to a query made up of keywords. But language is notoriously difficult for machines to get right, because it’s ambiguous. Consider that words like “set,” “cut” and “break” can be defined in close to 100 different ways. Google’s struggle for the past decade and a half has been dealing with the difficulties of organizing unstructured data.

Another challenge is trying to deal with all unstructured data in the same interface. Google has tried to meet the challenge by incorporating more and more content categories into the main results page. There are currently more than a dozen categories you could conduct your search in. The elegance of the one-size-fits-all engine is rapidly becoming clunky and awkward.

The Colonization of the Web

Over the same time that Google has been pursuing its mission, the Web has become economically colonized. Where there’s an opportunity to make a buck, there is motivation to move data into a more structured format. Pockets of economically viable data have become increasing structured in the past 10 years, including all travel categories, books, movies, music and many commonly purchased products. Increasingly, we’re going to see this colonization, which will organize information in a way that Google could never do “on-the-fly.” And as this data becomes more structured, it allows for a different interaction with it. Data becomes more functional and more useful. It moves from conducting a search to using an application. Think of the difference between trying to plan a trip using nothing but Google — and planning the same trip using Kayak. That’s the difference between dealing with unstructured and structured data.

This colonization will hit Google where it hurts most — the highest volume, most commercially relevant searches. At this point, Google still acts as a navigational path to these structured destinations, but this is a transitional band-aid at best. The Web is growing up and it’s being tamed in bits and pieces; not by Google’s algorithmic wizardry but by commercial opportunities.

Google is right to focus on the possibilities of mobile. More and more of our online activity will happen there. But mobile is not a new frontier, it’s simply a new view into the same landscape. It will leverage the same colonies of structured data. In fact, the mobile use-case is perfectly suited to dealing with structured data. It will accelerate the colonization.

Google’s concept of “organizing” falls short of our end goal, which is using information to do things with. If I were Google, I’d be doing some wordsmithing using words like “useful” and “functional.”

Risk, Reward and the Buying Matrix

First published December 23, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I explored how two parts of our brain, the nucleus accumbens and the anterior insula, are key in driving our buying behaviors. I compared them to the gas pedal and brake of our buying “engine.” The balance between the two is key to understanding how we are driven towards our ultimate decisions. The nucleus accumbens drives our anticipation of an emotional reward, and the anterior insula creates anxiety around areas of risk.

As it turns out, you can plot the two as the axes of a matrix on which, theoretically, you could plot any purchase. The four quadrants would be, starting in the lower left and going clockwise: low risk/low reward,  low risk/high reward, high risk/high reward and, finally, high risk/low reward. Let’s take a deeper dive in each quadrant to see what kind of purchases fall into each.

Low Risk/Low Reward

This is the stuff of everyday life. If you’re a “to-do” list kind of person, these types of purchases would probably be on that list. Think of household supplies like toilet paper and laundry detergent, or the milk, dry goods, etc. that make up a large percentage of your grocery list. This is the world of consumer packaged goods. The only real exceptions are those products that represent personal indulgences, like a steak or your favorite premium ice cream.

There is a huge piece of the B2B market that falls into this category as well: office  and industrial supplies, parts and other often-purchased items.

There is no gas pedal and no brake on these purchases. While the low prices remove any real risk, these are also not the types of shopping trips you look forward to all day. You simply have to get them done. This means the personal engagement with the actual act of purchasing will be minimal. Here, we are creatures of habit. We go to the same places to buy the same things because we really don’t want to invest any more time than is necessary to get the job done. If you compete in this space, you have one strategy and one strategy only: provide the fastest and easiest path to purchase.

Low Risk/High Reward

Here, we have our little indulgences; the day-to-day treats that make life worth living. The entire premium consumer product industry lives squarely in this quadrant: premium desserts, pre-made meals, beauty care products, wines, craft beers and, moving into slightly greater degrees of risk, clothes, accessories, shoes, costume jewelry and electronic gadgets.  This is also where you’d find CDs, DVDs and books. It’s in this quadrant where Amazon rules.

These purchases are all gas and little brake.  If you ever make a purchase on impulse, it’s almost guaranteed to fall into this part of the behavioral matrix.  When women plan shopping trips, it’s to indulge their reward center with these types of purchases. But men are also vulnerable to the siren call of the indulgent purchase: gadgets, tools, sporting goods, electronic games — and, for the metro-men amongst us, clothes and accessories. By the way, manicures, pedicures and spa visits all qualify, along with movies, concerts and dining out.

This quadrant is particularly timely this time of year, because when you buy a gift for someone, you hope you’ve hit this quadrant. The tough part is knowing your recipients well enough to figure out what will kick their nucleus accumbens into high gear.

While the degree of risk doesn’t merit a lot of intensive research, here the buying can be as much fun as the owning, which generally means a higher degree of engagement on the part of the buyer. Shopping environments that enhance the reward part of the equation will be attractive. Buyers are susceptible to suggestion, especially if it comes through our social connections. And brand affinities are powerful here.

In my next column, I’ll provide some examples of the other two quadrants to see what kind of purchases fall into each. Then, we’ll see how each of these buying scenarios might map on the online consumer landscape.

The Insula and The Accumbens: Driving Online Behavior

First published December 16, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

One of the more controversial applications of new neurological scanning technologies has been a quest by marketers for the mythical “buy button” in our brains. So far, no magical nook or cranny in our cranium has given marketers the ability to foist whatever crap they want on it, but a couple of parts of the brain have emerged as leading contenders for influencing buying behavior.

The Nucleus Accumbens: The Gas Pedal

The nucleus accumbens has been identified as the reward center of the brain. Although this is an oversimplification, it definitely plays a central role in our reward circuit. Neuroscanning studies show that the nucleus accumbens “lights up” when people think about things that have a reward attached: investments with big returns, buying a sports car or participating in favorite activities. Dopamine is released and the brain benefits from a natural high. Emotions are the drivers of human behavior — they move us to action (the name comes from the Latin movere, meaning “to move”). The reward circuit of the brain uses emotions to drive us towards rewards, an evolutionary pathway that improves our odds for passing along our genes.

In consumer behaviors, there are certain purchase decisions that fire the nucleus accumbens. Anything that promises some sort of emotional reward can trigger our reward circuits. We start envisioning what possession would be like: the taste of a meal, the thrill of a new car, the joy of a new home, the indulgence of a new pair of shoes. There is strong positive emotional engagement in these types of purchases.

The Anterior Insula: The Brake

But if our brain was only driven by reward, we would never say no. There needs to be some governing factor on the nucleus accumbens. Again, neuroscanning has identified a small section of the brain called the anterior insula as one of the structures serving this role.

If the nucleus accumbens could be called the reward center, the anterior insula could be called the Angst Center of our brains. The insula is a key part of our emotional braking system.  Through the release of noradrenaline and other neurochemicals, it creates the gnawing anxiety that causes us to slow down and tread carefully. In extreme cases, it can even evoke disgust. If the nucleus accumbens drives impulse purchasing, it’s the anterior insula that triggers buyer’s remorse.

The Balance Between the Two 

Again, at the risk of oversimplification, these two counteracting forces drive much of our consumer behavior. You can look at any purchase as the net result of the balance between them; a balancing of risk and reward, or in the academic jargon, prevention and promotion. High-reward and low-risk purchases will have a significantly different consumer behavior pattern than low-reward and high-risk purchases. Think about the difference between buying life insurance and a new pair of shoes. And because they have significantly different behavior profiles, the online interactions that result from these purchases will look quite different as well. In the next column, I’ll look at the four different purchase profiles (High Risk/High Reward, High Risk/Low Reward, Low Risk/High Reward and Low Risk, Low Reward) and look at how the online maps might look in each scenario.

Google: Caught in the Act of Balancing

First published November 18, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s column, I talked about the number of changes I was seeing on the Google results page, and, in particular, how they might maintain the delicate balance between driving revenue from the page and maintaining user trust. No sooner did the digital ink dry on the column than I received an email from an old friend, Chris Knoch, formerly of Omniture and now vice president of marketing at Ready Financial. In his email, Chris included a screen shot of a rather interesting beta that Google is running:

Google-Screen-ShotIt’s hard to say, given Google’s love for beta testing, how widely spread this test is and how indicative it might be of future ad presentations, but there are a number of fascinating implications to consider here. For today’s column, I’d like to focus on one of them: the elimination of the side ads.

Side ads generate a small percentage of the sponsored clicks from the page. For most results, the top two or three ads generate over 80% of the paid clicks on the page, with the seven or eight running down the right rail splitting the remaining 20%. That’s a lot of real estate to devote to underperforming ads. Will Google’s expandable alternative, with the user choosing to see eight more ads, generate more clicks? I suspect so. Here’s why.

We judge the relevance and quality of blocks of information as a group, rather than consider them individually. The first ad in any block will dictate the performance of the block as a whole. If it’s a high quality ad, it’s saying to the user, “I’m relevant. Chances are the rest of the ads in this group could be relevant too. At least, you should spend a few seconds deciding for yourself!” But if it’s a low quality ad, it sends the message, “Don’t waste your time here. I’m not relevant, and everything below me is even worse.”

For side ads, this means that the top ad determines the depth of scanning engagement with the entire block. The position and visual treatment of the ads reinforces that it’s a “sidebar”, of secondary importance to the main purpose of the page. We won’t invest a lot of time scanning here, and if the first ad sucks, the rest of the block is doomed.

Google’s treatment provides a compelling alternative to the user. It restricts the number of ads shown to only the highest quality ones (you’ll notice that this presentation appeared on a broad query, where there would be sufficient inventory to provide high quality ads). The ads should be just as relevant to the intent of the user as the organic results, and given the query, probably more relevant. The user should be hooked. The presentation of two ads (I’d bet big money on the fact that Google will be testing both two and three ad presentations above the “more ads” button) gives a ready-made consideration set for the user. We’ve known for some time now that users “chunk off” a result set in groups of two or three results (maximum four) and consider them as a group. There are natural visual barriers (the related search suggestions) that reinforce the visual presentation of the top ads as a group. What this means is that the user will judge relevancy, and if the first two (or three) ads pass the test, there’s a high likelihood that the set will be expanded.

When the set is expanded, the entire visual balance of the search results set is changed to the benefit of the advertisers, but the user initiates it. The user has given the ads an implicit vote of confidence, and by doing so, all organic results are pushed down out of visual scanning range. My guess is that this will result in much higher engagement with the ads, virtually eliminating the sidebar blindness that has typically plagued right-rail ads.

It’s a perfect example of maintaining user trust while driving more revenue. Based on this beta, I’d have to say, “Well done, Google!”

Is the Internet Making Us Stupid – or a New Kind of Smart?

First published September 9, 2010 inn Mediapost’s Search Insider

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I’m reading Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows.” His basic premise is that our current environment, with its deluge of available information typically broken into bite-sized pieces served up online, is “dumbing down” our brains.  We no longer read, we scan. We forego the intellectual heavy lifting of prolonged reading for the more immediate gratification of information foraging. We’re becoming a society of attention-deficit dolts.

It’s a grim picture, and Carr does a good job of backing up his premise. I’ve written about many of these issues in the past. And I don’t dispute the trends that Carr chronicles (at length). But is Carr correct is saying that online is dulling our intellectual capabilities, or is it just creating a different type of intelligence?

While I’m at it, I suspect this new type of intelligence is much more aligned with our native abilities than the “book smarts” that have ruled the day for the last five centuries. I’m an avid reader (ironically, I’ve been reading Carr’s book on an iPad) and I’m the first to say that I would be devastated if reading goes the way of the dodo.  But are we projecting our view of what’s “right” on a future where the environment (and rules) have changed?

A Timeline of Intellect

If you expand your perspective of human intellectualism to the entire history of man, you find that the past 500 years have been an anomaly. Prior to the invention of the printing press (and the subsequent blossoming of intellectualism) our brains were there for one purpose: to keep us alive. The brain accomplished this critical objective through one of three ways:

Responding to Danger in Our Environments

Reading is an artificial human activity. We have to train our brains to do it. But scanning our surroundings to notice things that don’t fit is as natural to us as sleeping and eating. We have sophisticated, multi-layered mechanisms to help us recognize anomalies in our environment (which often signal potential danger).  I believe we have “exapted” these same mechanisms and use them every day to digest information presented online.

This idea goes back to something I have said repeatedly: Technology doesn’t change behavior, it enables behavior to change. Change comes from us pursuing the most efficient route for our brains. When technology opens up an option that wasn’t previously available, and the brain finds this a more natural path to take, it will take it. It may seem that the brain is changing, but in actuality it’s returning to its evolutionary “baseline.”

If the brain has the option of scanning, using highly efficient inherent mechanisms that have been created through evolution over thousands of generations, or reading, using jury-rigged, inefficient neural pathways that we’ve been forced to build from scratch through our lives, the brain will take the easiest path. The fact was, we couldn’t scan a book. But we can scan a Web site.

Making The Right Choices

Another highly honed ability of the brain is to make advantageous choices. We can consider alternatives using a combination of gut instincts (more than you know) and rational deliberation (less than you think) and more often than not, make the right choice. This ability goes in lock step with the previous one, scanning our environment.

Reading a book offers no choices. It’s a linear experience, forced to go in one direction. It’s an experience dictated by the writer, not the reader. But browsing a Web site is an experience littered with choices.  Every link is a new choice, made by the visitor. This is why we (at my company) have continually found that a linear presentation of information (for example, a Flash movie) is a far less successful user experience than a Web site where the user can choose from logical and intuitive navigation options.

Carr is right when he says this is distracting, taking away from the focused intellectual effort that typifies reading. But I counter with the view that scanning and making choices is more naturally human than focused reading.

Establishing Beneficial Social Networks

Finally, humans are herders. We naturally create intricate social networks and hierarchies, because it’s the best way of ensuring that our DNA gets passed along from generation to generation. When it comes to gene propagation, there is definitely safety in numbers.

Reading is a solitary pursuit. Frankly, that’s one of the things avid readers treasure most about a good book, the “me” time that it brings with it. That’s all well and good, but bonding and communication are key drivers of human behavior. Unlike a book, online experiences offer you the option of solitary entertainment or engaged social connection. Again, it’s a closer fit with our human nature.

From a personal perspective, I tend to agree with most of Carr’s arguments. They are a closer fit with what I value in terms of intellectual “worth.” But I wonder if we fall into a trap of narrowed perspective when we pass judgment on what’s right and what’s not based on what we’ve known, rather than on what’s likely to be.

At the end of the day, humans will always be human.

Wired for Information: A Brain Built to Google

First published August 26, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In my last Search Insider, I took you on a neurological tour that gave us a glimpse into how our brains are built to read. Today, let’s dig deeper into how our brains guide us through an online hunt for information.

Brain Scans and Searching

First, a recap. In Nicholas Carr’s Book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains,” I focused on one passage — and one concept — in particular. It’s likely that our brains have built a short cut for reading. The normal translation from a printed word to a concept usually requires multiple mental steps. But because we read so much, and run across some words frequently, it’s probable that our brains have built short cuts to help us recognize those words simply by their shape in mere milliseconds, instantly connecting us with the relevant concept. So, let’s hold that thought for a moment

The Semel Institute at UCLA recently did a neuroscanning study that monitored what parts of the brain lit up during the act of using a search engine online. What the institute found was that when we become comfortable with the act of searching, our brains become more active. Specifically, the prefrontal cortex, the language centers and the visual cortex all “light up” during the act of searching, as well as some sub-cortical areas.

It’s the latter of these that indicates the brain may be using “pre-wired” short cuts to directly connect words and concepts. It’s these sub-cortical areas, including the basal ganglia and the hippocampus, where we keep our neural “short cuts.”  They form the auto-pilot of the brain.

Our Brain’s “Waldo” Search Party

Now, let’s look at another study that may give us another piece of the puzzle in helping us understand how our brain orchestrates the act of searching online.

Dr. Robert Desimone at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT found that when we look for something specific, we “picture” it in our mind’s eye. This internal visualization in effect “wakes up” our brain and creates a synchronized alarm circuit: a group of neurons that hold the image so that we can instantly recognize it, even in complex surroundings. Think of a “Where’s Waldo” puzzle. Our brain creates a mental image of Waldo, activating a “search party” of Waldo neurons that synchronize their activities, sharpening our ability to pick out Waldo in the picture. The synchronization of neural activity allows these neurons to zero in on one aspect of the picture, in effect making it stand out from the surrounding detail

Pirolli’s Information Foraging

One last academic reference, and then we’ll bring the pieces together. Peter Pirolli, from Xerox’s PARC, believes we “forage” for information, using the same inherent mechanisms we would use to search for food. So, we hunt for the “scent” of our quarry, but in this case, rather than the smell of food, it’s more likely that we lodge the concept of our objective in our heads. And depending on what that concept is, our brains recruit the relevant neurons to help us pick out the right “scent” quickly from its surroundings.  If our quarry is something visual, like a person or thing, we probably picture it. But if our brain believes we’ll be hunting in a text-heavy environment, we would probably picture the word instead. This is the way the brain primes us for information foraging.

The Googling Brain

This starts to paint a fascinating and complex picture of what our brain might be doing as we use a search engine. First, our brain determines our quarry and starts sending “top down” directives so we can very quickly identify it.  Our visual cortex helps us by literally painting a picture of what we might be looking for. If it’s a word, our brain becomes sensitized to the shape of the word, helping us recognize it instantly without the heavy lifting of lingual interpretation.

Thus primed, we start to scan the search results. This is not reading, this is scanning our environment in mere milliseconds, looking for scent that may lead the way to our prey. If you’ve ever looked at a real-time eye-tracking session with a search engine, this is exactly the behavior you’d be seeing.

When we bring all the pieces together, we realize how instantaneous, primal and intuitive this online foraging is. The slow and rational brain only enters the picture as an afterthought.

Googling is done by instinct. Our eyes and brain are connected by a short cut in which decisions are made subconsciously and within milliseconds. This is the forum in which online success is made or missed.

How Our Brains are Wired to Read

First published August 19, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

How do we read? How do we take the arbitrary, human-made code that is the written word and translate it into thoughts and images that mean something to our brain, an organ that had its basic wiring designed thousands of generations before the appearance of the first written word? What is going on in your skull right now as your eyes scan the black squiggly lines that make up this column?

The Reading Short Cut

I’m currently reading Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” a follow-up to Carr’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The concept Carr explores is fascinating to me: the impact of constant online usage on how the neural circuits of our brain are wired.

But there was one quote in particular, from Maryanne Wolf’s book, “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” that literally leapt off the page for me: ‘The accomplished reader, Maryanne Wolf explains, develops specialized brain regions geared to the rapid deciphering of text. The areas are wired ‘to represent the important visual, phonological and semantic information and to retrieve this information at lightning speed.’ The visual cortex, for example, develops ‘a veritable collage’ of neuron assemblies dedicated to recognizing, in a matter of milliseconds, ‘visual images of letters, letter patterns and words.'”

For everyone reading this column today, that is one of the most relevant passages you may ever scan your eyes across. It’s vitally important to digital marketers and designers of online experiences. Humans that read a lot develop the ability to recognize word patterns instantly, without going through the tedious neural heavy lifting of translating the pattern through the language centers of the brain. A quick neurological tour is in order here.

How the Brain Reads

The brain has a habit of developing multiple paths to the same end goal. Many functions that our brain controls tend to have dual routes: a quick and dirty one that rips through the brain at lightning speed and a slower, more rational one. It’s the neural reality behind Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink.” This dual speed processing is a tremendously efficient way of coping with our environment. The same mechanism, according to Wolf, has been adapted to our interpretation of the written word.

Humans have an evolved capacity for language. Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker and others have shown convincingly that we come out of the box with inherent capabilities to communicate with each other. But those abilities, housed in the language centers of the brain (Wernicke’s and Broca’s Areas, if you’re interested) are limited to oral language. Written language hasn’t been around nearly long enough for evolution’s relatively slow timeline to have had much of an impact. That’s why we learn to speak naturally just by hanging around other humans, but only those with a formalized and structured education learn to read and write. We have to take the native machinery of the brain and force it to adapt to the required task by creating new neural paths.

Instantly Recognizable…

So, when we read a page of text, there’s a fairly complex and laborious process going on in our noggins. Our visual cortex scans the abstract code that is written language, feeds it to the language centers for translation, and then sends it to our prefrontal cortex and our long-term memory to be rendered into concepts that mean something to us. The word “horse” doesn’t really mean the large, hairy, four-legged mammal that we’re familiar with until it goes through this mental processing.

But, like anything that humans do often, we tend to create short cuts through repetition. It’s important to note that this isn’t evolution at work, it’s neuroplasticity. The ability to read and write is built in each human from scratch. The brain naturally tries to achieve maximum efficiency by taking things we do repeatedly and building little synaptic short cuts. Humans who read a lot become wired to recognize certain words just by their shape and appearance, without needing to run the full processing cycle. Your name is a good example. How often have you been reading a newspaper or book and run across your last name? Does it seem to “leap off the page?” That was your brain triggering one of its little short cuts.

So, what does this mean for online interactions, particularly with a search engine? In next week’s column, I’ll revisit a fascinating brain scanning study that was done by UCLA and take a peek at what might be happening under the hood when we launch a Web search.