Category Archives: SEO

A Cognitive Walk Through of Searching

First published October 23, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Two weeks ago, I talked about the concept of selective perception, how subconsciously we pick and choose what we pay attention to. Then, last week, I explained how engagement with search is significantly different than engagement with other types of advertising. These two concepts set the stage for what I want to do today. In this column, I want to lay out a step-by-step hypothetical walk-through of our cognitive engagement with a search page.

Searching on Auto Pilot

First, I think it’s important to clear up a common misunderstanding. We don’t think our way through an entire search interaction. The brain only kicks into cognitive high gear (involving the cortex) when it absolutely needs to. When we’re engaged in a mental task, any mental task, our brain is constantly looking for cognitive shortcuts to lessen the workload required. Most of these shortcuts involve limbic structures at the sub-cortical level, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus, thalamus and nucleus accumbens. This is a good thing, as these structures have been honed through successful generations to simplify even the most complicated tasks. They’re the reason driving is much easier for you now than it was the first time you climbed behind the wheel. These structures and their efficiencies also play a vital role in our engagement with search.

So, to begin with, our mind identifies a need for information. Usually, this is a sub task that is part of a bigger goal. The goal is established in the prefrontal cortex and the neural train starts rolling toward it. We realize there’s a piece of information missing that prevents us from getting closer to our goal – and, based on our past successful experiences, we determine that a search engine offers the shortest route to gain the information. This is the first of our processing efficiencies. We don’t deliberate long hours about the best place to turn. We make a quick, heuristic decision based on what’s worked in the past. The majority of this process is handled at the sub-cortical level.

The Google Habit

Now we have the second subconscious decision. Although we have several options available for searching, the vast majority of us will turn to Google, because we’ve developed a Google habit. Why spend precious cognitive resources considering our options when Google has generally proved successful in the past? Our cortex has barely begun to warm up at this point. The journey thus far has been on autopilot.

The prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory, first sparked to life with the realization of the goal and the identification of the sub task, locating the missing piece of information. Now, the cortical mind is engaged once again as we translate that sub task into an appropriate query. This involves matching the concept in our minds with the right linguistic label. Again, we’re not going to spend a lot of cognitive effort on this, which is why query construction tends to start simply and become longer and more complex only if required. In this process, the label, the query we plugged into the search box, remains embedded in working memory.

Conditioned Scanning

At this point, the prefrontal cortex begins to idle down again. The next exercise is handled by the brain as a simple matching game. We have the label, or query, in our mind. We scan the page in the path we’ve been conditioned to believe will lead to the best results: starting in the upper left, and then moving down the page in an F-shaped scan pattern. All we want to do is find a match between the query in our prefrontal cortex and the results on the page.

Here the brain also conserves cognitive processing energy by breaking the page into chunks of three or four results. This is due to the channel capacity of our working memory and how many discrete chunks of information we can process in our prefrontal cortex at a time. We scan the results looking first for the query, usually in the title of the results. And it’s here where I believe a very important cognitive switch is thrown.

The “Pop Out” Effect

When we structure the query, we type it into a box. In the process, we remember the actual shape of the phrase. When we first scan results, we’re not reading words, we’re matching shapes. In cognitive psychology, this is called the “pop out” effect. We can recognize shapes much faster than we can read words. The shapes of our query literally “pop out” from the page as a first step toward matching relevance. The effect is enhanced by query (or hit) bolding. This matching game is done at the sub-cortical level.

If the match is positive (shape = query), then our eye lingers long enough to start picking up the detail around the word. We’ve seen in multiple eye tracking studies that foveal focus (the center of the field of vision) tends to hit the query in the title, but peripheral vision begins to pick up words surrounding the title. In our original eye tracking study, we called this semantic mapping. In Peter Pirolli’s book, “Information Foraging,” he referred to this activity as spreading activation. It’s after the “pop out” match that the prefrontal cortex again kicks into gear. As additional words are picked up, they are used to reinforce the original scent cue. Additional words from the result pull concepts into the prefrontal cortex (recognized URL, feature, supporting information, price, brand), which tend to engage different cortical regions as long-term memory labels are paged and brought back into the working memory. If enough matches with the original mental construct of the information sought are registered, the link is clicked.

Next week, we’ll look at the nature of this memory recall, including the elusive brand message.

The Elusive Goal of Ad Engagement

First published October 16, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about the nature of engagement and the neural mechanisms that underlie it. This week, I want to explore why those same mechanisms dictate that our search interactions are going to be completely different from engagement with a TV ad or a billboard.

The key thing to understand here is how we’re driven by goals. In a drastic oversimplification, goals are the objectives that drive our information processing modules, more commonly known as our brain. Our “mind” and all that we know about ourselves are shifting patterns of information being processed in these modules. At multiple levels, we sift through data, make decisions and initiate actions to get us closer to our goals.

Goal Interrupted

Most advertising is interruptive. It’s a detour on the road to our goals. The holy grail of direct marketing is to time delivery of the message so that it coincides with our pursuit of a goal. If you can get a realtor brochure to my doorstep at exactly the time I’m thinking of putting my house up for sale, you’ve substantially increased the odds of active engagement with your advertising message. But despite the advances in targeting methods, the odds of perfect coincidence are frustratingly slim. So advertising has to depend on other methods, like emotion, to trigger primal reactions and force suspension of current goal pursuit to engage with the message.

One of the comments on last week’s column, by fellow Search Insider Kaila Colbin, provides a perfect example of this. Kaila provided a link to a particularly powerful use of emotion in a TV ad from New Zealand Post. Now, despite the powerful emotional appeal, in a typical stream of ads inserted in a commercial block in network programming, the ad would still need to batter our way into our consciousness. With Kaila it succeeded once, hitting all the right emotional cues, and so her subconscious has been primed to respond to this ad should it appear on the radar screen of her constant scanning of her environment. In Kaila’s case, she would rush to the TV to change the channel, preventing her from dissolving into a messy puddle of tears.

Active Engagement

But by drawing our attention to the link, Kaila set up a totally different nature of engagement. She embedded the concept in our working memory by allowing us to create a goal around the viewing of the ad. We were engaged with the concept on a totally different level. Watching the ad was the goal, so no diversion of attention was required. We were primed to pay attention by Kaila’s recommendation. This is the power of ads that go viral in social networks, like Dove’s Evolution.

This concept of attention is at the center of two targeting tactics that have proven effective in the online environment: behavioral and contextual targeting.

Engaging Tactics

With behavioral targeting, we track behavioral cues through clickstreams, hoping that it will improve our odds of presenting our advertising message at exactly the right time to coincide with our target’s pursuit of a goal. The well-timed presentation of an ad for Chinese hotel rooms at almost the same time I was planning a trip to China was an example I’ve talked about before. Because planning for the trip had recently occupied my working memory and presumably I hadn’t yet reached my goal (the trip wasn’t completely planned yet), this message stood a pretty good chance of being engaged with (despite the fact that it creeped me out a little).

Contextual targeting employs a different but related strategy. If advertising messages are about the same topics as the content that I’m engaging with, transference of that engagement should be easier than with unrelated topics. Indeed, at Enquiro we’ve found that engagement with these ads actually occurs at two levels. There’s the initial awareness of the ad and the subsequent decision to engage with the ad. We’ve found that awareness is often higher with non-contextually targeted ads, but engagement and recall is higher with contextual ads. I have my theories about why this is so (having to do with the nature of the creative and the interplay of active consciousness and selective perception) but that could fill up an entire column in itself.

Engaging Search

Finally, we have search. In my previous examples of online targeting, we’re still using our best guess about optimum timing based on some pretty broad assumptions: click streams provide an accurate measure of intent, and interest in content means interest in related advertising messages. These targeting methods simply improve the odds in what is still essentially an interruption in the pursuit of a goal. But use of search is inherently aligned with goal pursuit. Information gathering is a key subtask in the pursuit of many goals, and search is an important tool in our information foraging arsenal. The goal is firmly embedded in our working memory and we’re on high alert for cues relevant to our end goal. This is why information scent in search results is so critical. No diversion of attention is required. Our attention is firmly focused on the results presented on the search page (both paid and algorithmic), because we believe that one of those results will take us one step closer to the goal.

This concept of active engagement is key to understanding search’s role in branding. Next week, I’ll look at how our cognitive mechanisms digest the results on a search page.

Picking and Choosing What We Pay Attention To

First published October 9, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In a single day, you will be assaulted by hundreds of thousands of discrete bits of information. I’m writing this from a hotel room on the corner of 43rd and 8th in New York. Just a simple three-block walk down 8th Avenue will present me with hundreds bits of information: signs, posters, flyers, labels, brochures. By the time I go to sleep this evening, I will be exposed to over 3,000 advertising messages. Every second of our lives, we are immersed in a world of detail and distraction, all vying for our attention. Even the metaphors we use, such as “paying attention,” show that we consider attention a valuable commodity to be allocated wisely.

 

Lining Up for the Prefrontal Cortex

Couple this with the single-mindedness of the prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory. There, we work on one task at a time. We are creatures driven by a constant stack of goals and objectives. We pull our big goals out, one and a time, often break it into sub goals and tasks, and then pursue these with the selective engagement of the prefrontal cortex. The more demanding the task, the more we have to shut out the deluge of detail screaming for our attention.

Our minds have an amazingly effective filter that continually scans our environment, subconsciously monitoring all this detail, and then moving it into our attentive focus if our sub cortical alarm system determines we should give it conscious attention. So, as we daydream our way through our lives, we don’t unconsciously plow through pedestrians as they step in front of us. We’re jolted into conscious awareness until the crisis is dealt with, working memory is called into emergency duty, and then, post crisis, we have to try to pick up the thread of what we were doing before. This example shows that working memory is not a multi-tasker. It’s impossible to continue to mentally balance your check book while you’re trying to avoid smashing into the skateboarding teen who just careened off the side walk. Only one task at a time, thank you.

You Looked, but Did You See?

The power of our ability to focus and filter out extraneous detail is a constant source of amazement for me. We’ve done several engagement studies where we have captured physical interactions with an ad (tracked through an eye tracker) on a web page of several seconds in duration, then have participants swear there was no ad there. They looked at the ad, but their mind was somewhere else, quite literally. The extreme example of this can be found in an amusing experiment done by University of Illinois  cognitive psychologist  Daniel J. Simons and now enjoying viral fame through YouTube. Go ahead and check it out  before you read any further if you haven’t already seen it. (Count the number of times the white team passes the ball)

This selective perception is the door through which we choose to let the world into our conscious (did you see the Gorilla in the video? If not, go back and try again). And its door that advertisers have been trying to pry through for the past 200 years at least. We are almost never focused on advertising, so, in order for it to be effective, it has to convince us to divert our attention from what we’re currently doing. The strategies behind this diversion have become increasingly sophisticated. Advertising can play to our primal cues. A sexy woman is almost always guaranteed to divert a man’s attention. Advertising can throw a road block in front of our conscious objectives, forcing us to pass through them. TV ads work this way, literally bringing our stream of thought to a screeching halt and promising to pick it up again “right after these messages”. The hope is that there is enough engagement momentum for us to keep focused on the 30 second blurb for some product guaranteed to get our floors/teeth/shirts whiter.

Advertising’s Attempted Break-In

The point is, almost all advertising never enjoys the advantage of having working memory actively engaged in trying to understand its message. Every variation has to use subterfuge, emotion or sheer force to try to hammer its way into our consciousness. This need has led to the industry searching for a metric that attempts to measure the degree to which our working memory is on the job. In the industry, we call it engagement. The ARF defined engagement as “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding media context.” Really, engagement is better described as smashing through the selective perception filter.

In a recent study, ARF acknowledged the importance of emotion as a powerful way to sneak past the guardhouse and into working memory. Perhaps more importantly, the study shows the power of emotion to ensure memories make it from short term to long term memory: “Emotion underlies engagement which affects memory of experience, thinking about the experience, and subsequent behavior.  Emotion is not a peripheral phenomenon but involves people completely.  Emotions have motivational properties, to the extent that people seek to maximize the experience of positive emotions and to minimize the experience of negative emotions.  Emotion is fundamental to engagement.  Emotion directs attention to the causally significant aspects of the experience, serves to encode and classify the ‘unusual’ (unexpected or novel) in memory, and promotes persisting rehearsal of the event-memory. In this way, thinking/feeling/memory articulates the experience to guide future behaviors.”

With this insight into the marketing mindset, honed by decades of hammering away at our prefrontal cortex, it’s little wonder why the marketing community has struggled with where search fits in the mix. Search plays by totally different neural rules. And that means its value as a branding tool also has to play by those same rules.  I’ll look at that next week.

Emotion and the Formation of Brand Memories

First published August 21, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In my last column, I looked at how beliefs can affix labels to brands, which forever after form our first brand impression. Beliefs are a heuristic shortcut we use to reduce the amount of sheer thinking we have to do to come to quick and efficient decisions. Today, I’d like to focus on emotions and their part in the forming of memories.

Why “Selfish Genes” Remember

First, from an evolutionary perspective, it might be helpful to cover off why humans are able to form memories in the first place. To borrow Richard Dawkins’ wording, memories are here to ensure that our “selfish genes” are passed on to future generations. While memories are incredibly complex and wonderful things, their reason for being is mindlessly simple. Memories are here to ensure that we survive long enough to procreate. This is why emotion plays such a huge role in how memories are formed and retrieved.

Researchers have long known that emotions “tag” memories, making their retrieval easier and the resulting effect more powerful. In fact, very strong emotions, such as fear or anger, get stored not just in our cortical areas but also get an “emergency” version stored in the limbic system to allow us to respond quickly and viscerally to threatening situations. When this goes wrong, it can lead to phobic behavior. Emotions add power and urgency to memories, moving them up the priority queue and causing us to act on them both subconsciously and consciously. The very meaning of the word emotion comes from the latin “emovere” — to move.

Driven by Emotions

Emotional tagging works equally well for positive memories. Our positive emotions are generally affixed to three of the four human drives identified by Nohria and Lawrence: the drive to bond, the drive to acquire and the drive to learn. For the selfish gene, each of these drives has its evolutionary purpose. We have the strongest positive emotions around the things that further these drives the most. We reserve our strongest “bonding” emotions for those that play the biggest part in ensuring our genetic survival: partners, parents, children and siblings. In some cases we share a significant portion of our genetic material; at other times, the complex sexual wiring we come with kicks into gear.

If we look at the drives to acquire or to learn, millions of pages have been written trying to decode human behavior in pursuit of these goals. For the purpose of this column, it will have to suffice to say that markets have long known about the power of these drives in shaping human behavior and have tried every way possible to tap into their ability to move us to action, usually through consumption of a product.

In summary, we reserve our strongest emotions for those things that are most aligned with the mindless purpose of the selfish gene, passing along our DNA. These emotions tag relevant memories, giving them the power to move us to immediate action. Perceived threats trigger negative memories and avoidance or confrontation, while positive memories drive us to pursue pleasurable ends.

Brand + Emotion = Power

This emotional tagging of memories can have a huge impact on our brand relationships, in both positive and negative ways. While I’ve painted a very simplistic picture of the primary objective of emotions and memories (and the heart of it is simple), the culture we have created is anything but. Memories and emotions play out in complex and surprising ways, especially when we interact with brands.

Brand advertisers have become quite adept at pushing our evolutionary hot buttons, trying to tag the right emotions to their respective memories. Their goal is to affix a particularly strong emotion (either negative, referred to in marketing parlance as prevention, or positive, which we’ve labeled promotion) to their particular brand construct so that when the memories that make up that construct are retrieved (along with the attached beliefs and brand label) they are powered with the turbo-charge that comes with emotion. If the marketer is successful in doing this, they have unleashed a powerful force.

When emotions play a role, our motivation comes not just from rational decisions, but a much more primal and powerful force that sits at the core of our subconscious brain. The most successful brands have managed to forge these emotional connections. And when the emotions remain consistent for a particular brand, there are coalesced into a strong brand belief that is almost unshakable once formed. This is why your father buys nothing but Fords, Mac fans wouldn’t be caught dead with a plain grey laptop ,or coffee connoisseurs swear that Starbucks is worth the price.

Next week, I’ll give you one particularly interesting example of how one brand belief and its corresponding emotions developed, in a fascinating study from the emerging world of neuromarketing.

Needs, Beliefs and Search

First published August 7, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the last few weeks, I’ve looked at how we gather information, depending on how complete the information is we already have. But it’s not just information that colors the search interaction. Like all human interactions, we are governed by our desires, our objectives and our beliefs, and this is certainly true in search.

Computing Concepts

Steven Pinker is one of the foremost proponents of a computational theory of mind. Following in the footsteps of Alan Newell, Alan Turing, Herbert Simon   and  Marvin Minsky,  Pinker argues that our “minds” lie within the patterns of information processing and functionality founds in the specialized modules of our brains. Like a software program being executed step by step, our minds break down the incredibly complex concepts we are faced with each day and feed them through these patterns. We create objectives that get us closer to our desires, and in order to get there in the most efficient way possible, we depend on a vast library of heuristic shortcuts that include our beliefs. We don’t think everything to death. We make quick decisions and create short cuts based on existing beliefs. Simon called this  bounded rationality.

Irrational Short Cuts

The challenge with these short cuts, as  Amos Tversky,  Daniel Kahneman, and more recently,  Dan Ariely, have discovered, is that they’re often quite irrational. Our beliefs are often driven by inherent patterns that have evolved over thousands of years. While they may be triggered by information at hand, the beliefs lie within, formed from a strange brew of inherent drivers, cultural influences and personal experience. In this brew, it’s almost impossible to see where one belief shaper begins and another leaves off. Our beliefs are largely formed in our vast mental sub-cortical and subterranean basement, below the hard white light of rational thought. But, once formed, beliefs are incredibly stubborn. Because we rely on beliefs to save our cognitive horsepower, we have an evolutionary interest in keeping them rigidly in place. Heuristic shortcuts don’t work very well if they’re based on ever-changing rules.

And there you have the crux of marketing. Every time we’re presented with a symbol that represents a concept, whether it be a word, a picture, a sound or a logo, it unlocks a mental concept complete with corresponding beliefs. Unless it’s a brand we’ve never heard of before (in itself a significant marketing challenge), that brand comes with corresponding belief luggage, some of it undoubtedly highly irrational. We are built to quickly categorize every new presentation of information into existing belief filing cabinets or “schemas.” The contents of those filing cabinets are difficult to explore, because they exist at a subconscious level. Consultants such as  Gerald Zaltman and  Clotaire Rappaille have carved out lucrative careers by creating methods to unlock the subconscious codes that lie behind brands.

Search and Our Subconscious Baggage

So, when we interact with a search engine, it’s important to understand that this is not entering new information onto a blank canvas. Each word (or now, image) on a search page has the potential to trigger an existing concept. This is especially true for the appearance of brands on a page. Brands are neat little labels that can sum up huge bundles of beliefs.

It’s actually amazing to consider how quickly we can filter through the degree of information presented on a search page. We quickly slice away the irrelevant and the items that don’t fit within our existing belief schemas.

It’s not just the information on the page that we have to filter through. It’s all the corresponding baggage that it unlocks within us. Somehow, through the power of our subconscious mind, we can scan 4 or 5 listings, let the words we scan trigger corresponding concepts in our minds, quickly evaluate which listing is most likely to get us closer to our objective (based on beliefs, aligned with our desire) and click, all within a few seconds.

This simple act of using a search engine is actually a very impressive and intricate cognitive ballet using the power of our conscious and subconscious minds.

Search Behavior: I Know What I Want, But Not Where to Find It

First published July 24, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I looked at search behaviors when we knew what we were looking for and where to find it (http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/search_insider/?p=832). This week we’ll look at what happens when you know what you’re looking for — but you’re not sure where to find it.

Judging a Patch By its Scent

In the first instance, when you know what you’re looking for and where to find it, you have defined your patch and you have a pretty good idea what route to take to find your specific piece of information. In the second instance, you don’t know in which patch you’ll find the piece of information. This is where classic way-finding behaviors and information scent can play a critical role in seeking information.

When you’re not sure which information patch contains the right information, you have to judge each patch by its relative “scent.” This pretty much guarantees you’ll visit more than one patch, which for our purposes translates to Web sites. You’ll try to do a preliminary assessment of scent based on what you see on the results page, but you’ll reserve most of your judgment for when you click through to the site.

Looking for Greener Grass

One of the interesting aspects of optimal foraging for food is that there are costs to move from patch to patch. You have to literally assess whether the grass is truly greener on the other side of the fence, or whether it would just be a senseless waste of effort. Most animals have a highly developed heuristic instinct about when the time is right to move on to the next patch. Biologist Eric Charnov, who reached out to me (I’m still following up with Eric to get a follow-up interview for a future column) after my original information-foraging column, called it the  Marginal Value Theorem. In a nutshell, Charnov’s Theorem says that we decide how long to stay in a patch based on how rich the current patch is and how distant the next patch is.

One of the challenges of the Marginal Value Theorem is that we often have no way of knowing what the “richness” of the next patch might be until we commit to expending the energy to go see it. We risk the effort based on our assessment of the current patch and the hope that better patches lie ahead. And the risk lies in the fact that it takes energy to move from patch to patch. The degree of risk lies in the distance to the next patch, our expectation of the richness of that patch and the value of the patch we’re currently in.

Patch Hopping with Search

But online, the Internet is non-dimensional in the traditional sense. There is no distance; the only dimension is time. How much time are we willing to expend to find the next patch? And search gives us the ability to greatly reduce the time needed to navigate from patch to patch. We structure queries to define the “diet” we hope to find in each patch. We then can click through to see if the scent matches our definition of diet.

Remember, time is the resource we hope to conserve, so these explorations from the search page are very quick. We can visit a number of patches in seconds. We define the diet (what we’re looking for) and start down the page visiting the most promising patches. Based on user research we’ve done at Enquiro, searchers typically take 10 to 12 seconds for the first click from the search results page, and spend about 15 seconds assessing the scent on the pages they visit.

Because we are programmed to save effort, if we visit a few patches and come up short, we’ll use a new query to define a new collection of patches. Because we have no defined notion of which patch will be the right one, we have to use shortcuts to judge each patch quickly and efficiently. We have little patience for unpromising patches.

Of course, our level of patience is also determined by how rare the prey is we’re pursuing. If we believe it should be rather plentiful, we also believe the scent should be easy to pick up. But if our prey is elusive, we’ll be more patient in our quest to pick up its scent. Those are the searches that will drive us to the second or third page of results.

We Don’t Consume Information

If we find a rich patch, we file it away for future consideration. This is another area where information foraging diverges from biological foraging. Looking for food is a zero-sum game. If we don’t eat the food we find, someone else will. So when we find a rich patch, we stay put until we eat as much as we can (or until a richer patch beckons).

But online, information is not really consumed. Even if we use it, it’s still there for the next visitor. There’s no risk to move on and find other information patches. This is where traditional way-finding strategies come in. As we explore for information, we define the landscape based on the richest information patches. These become landmarks which we return to again and again. So we quickly use search to define the best patches and tag them for future reference. Then, we return to them at our leisure, knowing the information will still be there, waiting for us.

Next week, we’ll looking at the third state of information-seeking — where we don’t know what we’re looking for or where to find it — and how this impacts our search behavior.

 

Search Behavior: I Know Just What I’m Looking For

First published July 17, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

We seek information to fill gaps in our existing knowledge. The extent of that current knowledge and how we’ve structured it will play a large part in determining intent. It will help shape our knowledge requirements, our strategies for retrieval and how we will evaluate information scent. As stated in my previous two columns, we’re generally in one of three states when we turn online for information; we know what we’re looking for and where to find it; we know what we’re looking for, but not where to find it; or, we don’t know what we’re looking for or where to find it. Today, I want to explore intent in the first of these states:

We Know What We’re Looking For — and Where to Find It

In the first case, we have a solid idea of the information we’re looking for. Our mental representation has a defined structure and we have a good idea of what the missing piece looks like. For example, we’re looking for a phone number, an address or another missing detail. Because the structure of the information in our minds is almost complete, we have a similarly clear cut idea of where we’re most likely to find the information. We know the right “patch” to look in and where to find the information in the “patch.” In this case, we’re looking for the simplest route from point A to point B.

Googling Google on Google

One of the ongoing anomalies in search is the number of people who go to their favorite engine to search for proper domain names. Some of the most popular queries on every engine are the URLs of their competitors. People search for Yahoo.com on Live Search, or Google.com on Yahoo. People even search for Google on Google. In looking at the query logs, the only explanation seems to be mass stupidity. But in actual fact, this is foraging playing itself out. We habitually use engines to navigate the Web, so even when we know the Web site, why should our behavior be any different? (This still doesn’t explain the searching for Google on Google. Perhaps stupidity is the right answer here.)

Let’s say you’re looking for the address of the head office for a corporation. You know it will be on their site somewhere, and you have a pretty good idea it will be somewhere within the “about us” section. Rather than go directly to the site and navigate through it, you choose to search for “Company X head office address.” Or, even more likely, you just search for “Company X,” knowing that the official site will come up high in the results.

Pre-Mapping the Search Results Page

In this case, before the results page even loads, you know exactly what you’re looking for and where you’re likely to find it. If you’re searching on Google, it’s likely that you’ll get an extended result in the number one organic spot with Site Links to key parts of the site. This is a great match for your expected information scent. Previous to this introduction by Google, we saw that for navigational searches where we knew the destination we were looking for, there was a higher degree of scanning of the site URL at the bottom of the result listing. Normally there’s not much interaction with this part of the listing.

In this first category, we look at search as a tool, the quickest possible route to the information we know exists. We will quickly zero in on the only relevant information on the results page, the listing for the site we’re looking for. Now, the question for marketers is, what happens when there’s both an organic and sponsored listing for the same site on the same page? Will one cannibalize the other? While we’ve never tested for this specific intent, I can speculate based on what we’ve seen in other research.

Habitual Scanning Behaviors

In one study, we split our group in half, giving one a purchase-type task and the other an information-gathering task. In both cases, we looked at scan patterns in the top sponsored and organic results. We expected to see our information-gathering group relocate their scanning down to the organic results. But this didn’t happen. What we realized is that we scan the search page out of habit. We’re not rationally optimizing our scan path based on intent. We’re following the same pattern we always do, the top to bottom, left to right, F-shaped pattern that’s common across all users. That behavior is conditioned and engrained. It’s been etched at the sub-cortical level of our brain in our basal ganglia and executes subconsciously (see Ann Graybiel’s work  on this for more). But what does change is how we respond to the information scent cues on the page.

Although scanning followed the same pattern for both groups (in fact, the interaction was even higher with sponsored listings for the information-gathering group, likely because they weren’t exactly sure what they were looking for and so were in a more deliberate mode) the click patterns were significantly different. The official site that marked the successful destination in the scenario was in both the top organic and sponsored location. In the commercial task, the clicks split almost 50/50, with half happening in the sponsored listings, and half in the organic listings. But in the information-gathering group, all the clicks happened in the organic listing. Based on our preconceived idea of the information we were seeking, that particular “patch” seemed more promising.

Next column, we’ll look at intent and how it impacts search behavior when we know what we’re looking for, but not where to find it.

 

Foraging for Information with Search

First published July 10, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In my last column, we looked at berrypicking as an analogy for gathering information. The theory was put forward in 1989 by Marcia Bates. Then, in 1995, two researchers found even more inherent behaviors demonstrated in the way we seek information. It turns out that we may literally hunt for information.

The Genetic Case for Searching

We didn’t come equipped with an inherent strategy to pull information from a Web search results page. There is no genetic coding specific to Google. But as two researchers at Xerox’s PARC research facility, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card, really started to explore how humans navigated online environments looking for information in 1995, they found something fascinating. They found that the way we seek information online is very similar to an activity that is as old as evolution itself: the hunt for food. Pirolli and Card called this the information foraging theory.

The basic principle behind information foraging is not so much about gathering the maximum amount of information, but rather in maximizing our time and efforts in pursuit of the right information. This goes to the human knack for conserving our resources in pursuit of our objectives.

The Easiest Route to Information

We must remember that any interaction with a search engine is part of a much broader range of activity that will hopefully result in achieving a large objective that is aligned with a human drive: learning, bonding, acquiring or defending (Nohria/Lawrence ). We take these macro objectives and break them up into distinct tasks and allocate resources against those tasks based on the expected usefulness of the outcome. This is where the food-gathering analogy provides some useful perspective.

We eat food to survive. Food is the fuel that powers our activities. In the stripped-down logic of evolutionary survival, it doesn’t make sense to expend more energy in the pursuit of food than the food itself contains. We would starve and die. So we have become remarkably effective at finding food in the easiest way possible. The big objective of the pursuit of food and survival is broken down into discrete tasks or actions, and we instinctively determine how much time and effort to spend on each of these tasks or actions depending on how much closer it will get us to the objective: our next meal. There is a cascading series of risk/reward decisions and mental trade offs happening below the level of our rational awareness. Our evolutionary programs play themselves out subconsciously.

Born Foragers

While seeking information is a more abstract concept than finding food, Pirolli and Card argue that the same inherent skills are used, including the same trade-off decisions. In evolutionary terms, our information-seeking skills are an adaptation of our food-gathering skills. Each time we seek information, we “hunt” for it and make decisions about how much cognitive energy we want to expend in the pursuit and the optimum strategy for gathering the information. We forage for information.

This explains much of the typical behavior we see with online properties, especially search. We quickly seek and filter through information, using our heuristic guidelines and trade-offs.

And when we look at our use of search engines, there are two important concepts put forward by Pirolli and Card that must be considered: the importance of information patches and diets.

The Right Patch and The Right Diet

As we seek information, the same as seeking food, we will spend our time where the promise of successful pursuit is the greatest, based on clues or telltale hints we encounter. We look for the best information “patch,” which is determined by information “scent,” the smell of informational relevance. The greater the scent, the greater the promise of an abundant information patch.

Search engines give us the ability to create our own patches, somewhat like a spider spinning a web to catch prey. We see what we catch based on the scent, and if we don’t like what we see, we quickly spin another web with another query. There is almost no effort expended in the process, so we have little patience if we’re not presented with adequate scent. This is why so much time is spent scanning the top of the page. I call it the area of greatest promise, that tiny yet critical patch of real estate in the extreme upper left corner of the search page, where we expect the strongest scent, figuratively. We judge the value of the whole patch based on what we see in the first few words in the first few listings on the page. If we don’t find strong scent, we start questioning the value of the patch.

But we also have to make a determination of which information we include in our diet. Remember, it makes no evolutionary sense (assuming we’re using the same mechanisms we use for foraging food) to expend energy pursing food that doesn’t return an equal or greater return on our investment. So we will quickly filter out low-quality information. In fact, if we think a patch contains only low-quality information, we’ll exclude it from our diet.

Search has been remarkably successful in becoming the preferred “patch” for a diverse set of information needs, but it still comes up short in one particular category. It doesn’t do very well at helping us find information when we don’t have a clear idea of what we’re looking for. Search is still rather ineffective as a “discovery” engine. But despite its limitations in this area, we have still been increasingly conditioned to turn to search when we forage for information because of its remarkable efficiency.

The Quest for Information

First published June 26, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The third in my series in looking at how we search and how it might impact our brand relationships. Today, I look at how the emergence of Web search marks a dramatic leap forward in our quest for information.

The Great Library of Alexandria, built in 300 BC, was designed to hold all the knowledge of man. The dream of Ptolemy II was to assemble all the scrolls of the world in one place. Last week we explored why we sought knowledge. The Ptolemaic library was the first attempt to create one single repository for that information. Unfortunately, the media for recording knowledge was papyrus, which proved to be unpredictably flammable. The library burned not once but several times.

One of the challenges of seeking information is that it tends to be spread out and difficult to access. As we saw last week, when we seek information, we tend to either know what it is and where to get it, know what it is but not where it is, or, most challengingly, we don’t even know what it is we’re looking for.

Organizing the World’s Information

Google’s quest, picking up where Ptolemy left off, was to organize the world’s information. This is the big hairy audacious goal of all big hairy audacious goals. It’s never been accomplished before in the history of man. But Google is betting that it can be done thanks to the migration of information to a digital format.

In seeking information, humans will take the path of least resistance. This is not to say humans are inherently lazy. Like many things that come from evolutionary psychology, we have a tendency to reduce human behaviors to overly simplified maxims — and the inherent laziness of humans is one such oversimplification. It is true, however, than humans are inherently thrifty with our energy expenditures. Harvard professors Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria, in their book “Driven: How Human Nature Shapes our Choices,” theorize that humans are driven by four basic drives: The drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to learn and the drive to defend. As we pursue these drives, we constantly balance effort vs. rewards. We will pursue the things important to us, but we will generally find the easiest means to our ends. This is particularly true of intellectual effort, where many cognitive short cuts are prewired and are triggered without our conscious awareness.

The Irresistible Lure of Web Search

This is why search has become such a  fundamental human activity. The aggregation of information that sits just a few keystrokes away is a tremendously engaging prospect for us energy-efficient humans. We will take the easiest path to retrieve the information and do it in a brutally efficient way. Search interfaces have to be intuitive and sparse. The more complicated the task, the less attractive it is to us. This is why search tools that ask us to do any more than type in the bare minimum of keywords will ultimately fail if there’s an easier choice. And this is why Google has become a habit for us.

But what about intent? Different types of searches may require different interfaces and treatment of results. Again, we make expenditure/reward calculations at an instinctive level based on our experience and knowledge. We decide which actions will be most likely to yield the information we seek. As you explore human nature, one of the most striking discoveries is just how sophisticated our subconscious energy conservation mechanisms are. Habits, emotions, instincts and other non-rational drivers guide us to make split-second decisions that should provide the best results with the least effort, and they are usually remarkably accurate. They have been field-tested and encoded into our genes by natural selection for generation after generation.

Picking the Right Path to Information

There’s another factor at play here, our level of confidence that past behaviors will continue to yield satisfactory results in the future. And this is part of a largely subconscious decision process when we chose the path to the information we seek.

Remember, when we seek information, we fit into one of three categories: we know what we’re looking for and where to find it, we know what we’re looking for but don’t know where to find it, or we don’t know what we’re looking for or where to find it.

Search engines fit the first two categories quite nicely. The first category leads to the huge volume of navigational search we see online, where we’re looking at search to connect us to the right page on the right site. And the second category gives us the more typical search behavior, where we tell the engine what we’re looking for and it provides it suggestions of the best place to find it.

It’s the third category where search engines struggle. When we don’t know what we’re looking for or where to find it, it’s difficult to find the words for our query. It’s in this category where search engines are trying to break new ground, by becoming discovery engines.

So, how has evolution equipped us to look for information? In the next column, I’ll look at information foraging, information scent and berry picking.

Oops – I Did It Again. Sorry Andrew.

One year ago, I may have mentioned that my fellow countrymen (or at least a select group of Canadian marketers) had their heads up a part of their anatomy at SES Toronto. Andrew Goodman afterwards promised to force feed me Canadian politeness serum before he put me in front of another Toronto crowd. And Andrew, I want you to know I tried. I really tried. But then Rogers missed the boat in an incredibly stupid way, and, well..I may have said something similar again. I’m sorry, I really am.

Last year, I tore up the Ontario Tourism Board for not using search effectively, prompting a multipart debate with them in my Search Insider Column. First, I said they weren’t doing search. They said they were and I didn’t know what I was talking about. I looked at what they were doing and amended my stance: they were doing search, just not doing it very well. I offered free advice. They declined my offer. We went home in seperate cars. I didn’t get a card on Valentine’s Day. I think this time, it’s really over between us.

This year, having a hard time believing that Andrew was daring to put me in front of a Toronto crowd again, I decided to stay on safer ground and give a rather non controversial tour of why the Golden Triangle is the way it is, using results from several recent studies. But the main theme of the study was that relevance and the presentation of recognized brands are both critical elements in the Golden Triangle for commercial searches. I was finishing my slide deck on the day of the announcement that the iPhone was finally coming to Canada. Rogers would be the exclusive carrier. I just knew there would be a corresponding search spike and I thought this would be a great example of how to utilize search effectively. The following Google Trends Graph shows just how big this spike was:

google-trends-iphonesm

I searched for “iPhone” and what did I find? Nary a mention of Rogers. No ad, no organic listing.

google-iphonesm

I went to their site and other than a mysterious and unusable link off their home page that went to a 3 line media release, there was no information. Surely, Rogers couldn’t be this stupid, could they? But alas, they were.

So, I amended my slide deck to include the examples. And yes, I may have got a little hot under the collar at SES again, and I’m pretty sure I said something not so polite. But you know what? I’m getting sick and tired of going to the business capital of Canada year after year and seeing that the major Canadian brands are still miles behind the rest of the world in search. Do a search for any major consumer product in Canada and almost all the big brands are completely absent. They don’t get it. Or in many cases, their agencies don’t get it. Look, accept the reality. People search. People search because they’re looking to buy things. On June 10, thousands of Canadians searched for information on the new 3G iPhone. I’m suspecting more than a few of them are intending to snap one up July 11. And not one advertiser had the foresight to buy a search ad on what was probably the biggest search day of the year for iPhone, including the exclusive carrier. Correction, one advertiser did…Research in Motion, the maker of the Blackberry.

Maybe being big and stupid worked in Canadian advertising up to now, but it won’t work in the future. You have to understand that Canadian’s aren’t stupid when it comes to the internet. We’re amongst the world’s biggest Internet users. Our early lead in terms of high bandwidth penetration is slipping (another sign of sheer stupidity) but we still go online more than almost anyone in the world. Yet Canadian advertisers are avoiding search, turning the Golden Triangle into an advertising slum. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Canadian offices are slamming their heads into brick walls, wondering when Canadians will finally get it. They’ve all asked me. And frankly, I’m tired of apologizing for Canadian marketers. Yes, we’re a cautious country. Yes, we’re deliberate. But it’s gone beyond that. Now, there are no more excuses. Roger’s absense from the search page on June 10 was inexcusable. It was either stupid or incredibly arrogant. It was one of Canada’s best known brands telling thousands of Canadian’s looking for information on buying an iPhone one of two things:

  1. We’re huge and we have a monopoly so why do we have to spend a handful of our advertising dollars actually giving you useful information? We know you’re going to buy from us because you have no where else to go. And oh, by the way, we’re going to charge you whatever we want, or;
  2. Sorry, we just don’t get this whole internet thing. You mean people actually search for information online? Huh..imagine that.

I’m passionate about being a Canadian. I am tremendously proud of my country. But I’m also passionate about search. And in this one area, Canadians are ridiculously behind the curve.