Category Archives: Online Trends

Hold Up the Bing Bandwagon

First published June 4, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I seem to be in the minority. Everybody (including fellow Search Insider Aaron Goldman) seems to be jumping on the Bing bandwagon. It’s generated some good initial reviews, and Aaron goes as far as to say, “Bing is far and away the most serious challenge to Google that anyone’s ever posed.”

I’m not so sure. Don’t get me wrong. Bing is a good step forward for Microsoft. It shows they’re serious about search. But unlike Aaron, I don’t think Bing is going to make a significant difference in market share numbers. I think Microsoft will get a temporary blip, causing everyone to rush to pronounce Google’s imminent death, and then everyone will go back to searching the way they did before: on Google.

Wanted: Revolutionaries!

Search needs an iPhone. Bing is a Razr. Bing is a repackaging of the same old experience, the same blue links. Microsoft has added some filters and additional navigation. But at the core, there’s nothing revolutionary about it. It won’t break a habit.

Here’s the fundamental problem. Microsoft says search is broken, and Bing is the answer. If Bing is the answer, it must mean that search wasn’t really that badly broken. In fact, it must have been barely scratched. Because the Bing experience really isn’t that different than my Google experience. Bing narrowed the gap, but they didn’t jump to the other side. It seems to me that it wasn’t search that was broken. It was Live Search that was broken. And, if we agree on that, than Bing is a pretty effective band-aid.

What We Need is an iPhone of Search

But what if Microsoft is right (as I suspect they are), and search is broken? What if we could have a significantly better search experience? What would it take to deliver that? It requires scrapping all preconceived notions and starting over. It requires an approach like the iPhone.

The iPhone isn’t a mobile phone, it’s a mobile Web and computing device. The phone is secondary. The iPhone is in the middle of changing the way we interact with online. We squeeze, spread, stroke, tap and shake. The iPhone also opened up an ecosystem of functionality. The App Store is the true genius of the iPhone: little bits of integrated functionality, making our lives more fun, more productive and more connected. Apple never intended to catch up. It intended to vault over the competition, changing the rules and opening a new marketplace. Apple strategists had nothing short of revolution on their minds.

What Bing has done is heated up the search race again, and that might be the best thing that comes out of its launch. The amount of ink generated already shows that we all want a more competitive search space. Google has had it relatively easy for a long time.

Catching the Wave

Ironically, the most exciting thing I saw last week got lost amongst all the buzz about Bing.  Google’s Wave does for email what I am proposing for search: it takes the current status quo and completely shatters it. Wave may be an integral piece in a new, richer world of online functionality, delivered to you through the Chrome Browser. Google is slowly assembling a critical mass of SaaS applications that threatens to change our concept of how we do things digitally. As those pieces come together, count on search to be at the core of it.

If I were Microsoft, that’s what would be keeping me up at night. Its empire was built on a foundation that’s over 20 years old: the concept of desktop applications. It has struggled to move into the new world of SaaS. But Google seems to be getting it and building a new world order around it. Now, that’s a revolutionary concept.

Conversations from Northwest Flight 033

First published May 28, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“So, what is it you do?”

Oh, no! It was the question I dread. I froze.

The question was posed by a very nice woman in her mid-50s who was returning to Bellingham, Wash. from a one-month trip to Europe. She was my seatmate on yesterday’s flight back from Amsterdam.

Since I got into search, I’ve hated that question, mainly because I don’t know how to answer it. I’ve tried several times, and it’s never been a terribly satisfying experience.

There was my mom, who was trying to understand what her eldest child did. I believe really, truly, she asked with the best intentions.  But this was before she had a computer and Google was just one of those words you hear that has no frame of reference, like antebellum, Shevardnadze or Hezbollah. You know the word is important to someone, just not you. 30 seconds into my answer, I knew it was hopeless. “I work with computers, Mom, on the Internet.”

“Oh, my friend was talking about that. She’s having problems with her computer. Could you fix it?”

“Sure, Mom.”

Then there was the U.S. customs agent in Sumas, Wash., who asked me the question while I was trying to gain entry into the country to go talk at a Google sales conference.

“So, you work with Google?

“Kind of. I’m not an employee of Google, but our clients use them.”

“To search?”

“No, to advertise.”

“Advertise? Where?”

“On the results page.”

“There are no ads on Google.”

“Well, actually there are.”

The conversation could have gone two ways here. I could have explained the entire monetization of search, or I could have looked for the nearest available exit from the conversation. I opted for the latter. I gained entry into the U.S., but never did convince the agent that Google sold ads.

Just to be clear: I hate the question, not the answer. Search has been extraordinarily generous to me. It’s not a job. It’s not even a chance at a multi-million-dollar buy-out. It’s the passion. It’s a chance to wake up every morning and discover something nobody knew before. It’s knowing that your opinion counts just as much as anyone’s, because we’re all figuring it out and none of us, not even all those Ph.D.s at Google, are experts yet. It’s getting the chance to explore the potential with some of the most exciting companies in the world, around the globe. And it’s the absolute blessing to be able to spend your time doing that and make enough money to provide your family with a good lifestyle. I’m not rich, but I am very happy.

Search allowed me to exceed my dreams. I started off wanting to be Darren Stevens, the ad exec working for the big agency. Sometime in my mid-20s, twenties, I decided I was less of a Darren Stevens and more of a Michael Steadman. If that name’s not familiar, Michael Steadman was Ken Olin’s character on “thirtysomething.” I wanted to be co-owner of the Michael and Elliot Company, a small but dynamic ad agency with a handful of talented and dedicated employees, cranking out great creative for regional advertisers.

Today, my company has over 30 employees and a brand new sales office in San Jose, Calif., and we work with major accounts globally. My opinion is respected in an industry I love. I travel and speak all over the world.  In fact, a research contract with Europe’s biggest telecom and a speaking gig with Google’s U.K. team were what led me to my plane ride back from Amsterdam yesterday. Based on what my life goals were, search allowed me to whiz by them some time ago and there’s still no end in sight.

But still, there was that damned question: “So, what is it you do?” 

Oh, what the hell…

“I’m a search marketer.”

“Mmm. That must be interesting.”

Wow! She got it. She knew what I was talking about. It was just as if I said I was an accountant or a lawyer.

“Yes. It is. Very interesting.”

She went back to her book. Perhaps it was on the Hezbollah, or a biography of Shevardnadze.

The Spring Search Insider Summit and My Hidden Agenda

First published April 16, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I have an odd reaction whenever I get an email from Ken Fadner in my inbox. My face contorts in the strangest way. It’s half a bemused smile, half a wince, with a dash of anticipation thrown in. For those of you who don’t know him, Ken is the publisher of MediaPost. I’ve been working with Ken in putting the agenda together for the upcoming Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla.

You Have Mail…

Ken is remarkable in that, as far as I can tell, he reads every single post and column that goes up on the MediaPost site. In fact, Ken can remember more about my past columns than I can. “You know,” Ken will tell me as we discuss some topic, “you wrote about that last year.” Inside, I say to myself, “I did?” while on the outside I nod wisely and knowingly.

Ken also has the admirable quality of making sure the Insider Summit agenda is as fresh, relevant and insightful as possible. Hence my contorted reactions to his emails. We’re just three weeks away from the Summit. For everyone who’s programmed a three-day show, you know you pretty much want to have the agenda locked down by now. But Ken and I also decided three shows ago to make the Summit more a free-flowing conversation than a series of panel presentations. So I remain damned by that decision. How the hell do you program a free-flowing conversation? And Ken, every time he reads an interesting post or column, pings me and says, “Should we add this to the agenda?”  Hence the contorted facial expressions.

Search Touches Everything Now

What is interesting in this is the breadth of issues that are trying to vie their way onto our three day agenda: Search and the economy, search and brand relationships, search and ad exchanges, search and online experiences, search and attribution models, search and internal corporate politics.

Defining the scope of a Search Summit is not nearly as easy as it was a few years ago. Then you had two topics to choose from: organic optimization and paid search management. Sessions centered on a deeper tactical dive into one of these two areas. But now, search rides on the crest of our rapidly changing behaviors. Search seems to touch everything, including our relationships with our customers, how we navigate our online landscapes and how we create an internal and external structure to better “get” search and execute on it. These are not topics that fit nicely into a 12-minute PowerPoint Slide deck. These are big, brawling, thorny issues, going to the heart of a huge shift in how we market and conduct our businesses. These are topics that can only be dealt with in conversations, in fact; many conversations that don’t begin with the pretense that we’ll reach a neat, tidy answer at the end of them. Which all sounds good in theory, but how do you build an agenda around that?

Snippets of Random Conversations…

Let me give you one example. Gian Fulgoni from comScore and I connected on the phone to discuss the topic for his morning session: Search in a Recession. Going into the call, I though I had a pretty clear understanding of what the session would be.  Gian would share some query trends showing how people’s interests, translated into search queries, have shifted given the economic conditions. But within 10 seconds our conversation had veered down a related but different path. It was fascinating, potentially profound in its implications and well worth a discussion. But there’s only so much you can pack into a three-day schedule.

Here’s another example. One of the agency support team members at Google emailed me, saying one of her team members was looking for something on the “psychology of search.” I had done a presentation on something similar at Google a few months back, and she wanted to pass along the deck. Personally, I was thrilled. The psychology of search is something I’m intensely curious about. I just never expected anyone to ask for it by name.  And it’s certainly not something you would have seen on the agenda of a search conference in 2003.

So, if you’re making plans to come to Captiva Island, (and please do, it’s a wonderful experience) I’ll do my best to lock down the agenda long enough to actually get it printed for the handouts. But don’t be surprised if conversations veer off in unexpected directions.  It’s what makes the Search Insider Summit what it is. Meanwhile, somewhere I’m sure Ken is reading this column, going “Hmm…the psychology of search. We should add that to the agenda!”

I’m expecting the email any second now.

Microsoft’s Talk vs. Microsoft’s Talk

First published April 9, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Not so many columns ago, I urged Microsoft to do something amazing in search. Last week, they did. But it wasn’t in a good way. I was on the road last week, and I saw three different things land in my inbox about Microsoft and its search efforts. With each email, my frustration mounted. Finally, Friday as I was sitting in Seattle airport, I couldn’t contain myself anymore. I sent an email to the most senior person I knew at Microsoft Search. The gist of the email was “don’t do it,” Yesterday, I got an email back thanking me for my “honest” feedback. Yet somehow, I don’t think it will make a difference.

Here were the articles I saw:

One – Google can’t innovate but Microsoft can, according to Bloomberg.com:

“Being the underdog in the Internet- search market has one advantage for Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer: He says his company can experiment, while rival Google Inc. plays it safe. ‘Google does have to be all things to all people,’ Ballmer said… Our search does not need to be all things to all people.'”

I believe Ballmer is right here, in theory. What’s happening in reality is something very different. But let’s hold that thought for a moment.

Two – Search isn’t solved, according to Arstechnica.com:

“We’re not at where we’d like to be,” Weitz [Stefan Weitz, Microsoft Web Search Team] began, and then dove in to explain that people are generally happy with how their search engine is working, until the data shows that they are not.”

Nobody is arguing that the 10 blue links is the pinnacle of search, especially Google. So it’s hard to disagree here. We judge relative to what we know, but we’re on the brink of blowing that away.

So far, Microsoft is saying all the right things.

Three – Microsoft to spend $100 Million in advertising new search engine, according to Adage.com
“Industry executives expect JWT, part of WPP, to unveil an estimated $80 million to $100 million push for the new search engine in June, with online, TV, print and radio executions.”

What? This was the email that drove me over the edge. $100 million? On Kumo..or Kiev or whatever they call this? This is wrong on so many levels, I hardly know where to start.

I’m not going to pass judgment on a search interface I haven’t got my hands on. I don’t think it’s fair to make a call on a few leaked screenshots.   But I will say that I’ve seen nothing revolutionary about this. And that’s the point. As I’ve said over and over and over, Google is a habit. You don’t break a habit with $100 million in advertising. You don’t break it with promises of search usage kickbacks. And you certainly don’t break it with a marginal and incremental change in the search experience. Microsoft is right to introduce categorized search. They’re right to explore changing the search interface. No arguments there. But this is not the time to draw $100 million in attention to it. Best case scenario: no improvement to market share. Worst case, the biggest drop yet, if the usability aspects haven’t been fully thought out.

If you accept the message in the first two emails, Microsoft needs to be a search start-up: bold, nimble, visionary, passionate and rebellious. And there’s no way in hell that will happen on the Redmond campus.  Bold, nimble, visionary, passionate rebels are nowhere to be seen.

The First Step is Admitting the Problem

So accept what you are, and more importantly, accept what you’re not. Tweak your search product to improve experience, catch up and try to stem the market share bleeding. There’s nothing wrong with that. And stop with the rebranding. Every time you do that, you’re breaking the established habits of your own users and giving them the chance to go elsewhere.  This strategy will blow up in your face.

At the same time, stop worrying about winning the 10 blue link search war and start planning for the next battle. That’s when the Google habit will be broken and where you have a chance to change the game. Here are the things Microsoft needs to start thinking about:

–       Stop worrying about relevance and start worrying about usefulness.

–       Understand that search patterns represent a complex system and look at ways to discover emergent behavior from that system. Use your findings to improve everyone’s search experience (this is an element in Stephen Wolfram’s Alpha project)

–       Use every signal at your disposal to interpret user intent in an implicit way. Embrace personalization, behavioral patterns, the social graph, task context and anything else that helps uncover what’s in a person’s mind.

–       Reinvent the interface. Embrace how humans follow information scent. Use more intuitive interface tools to allow us to choose, filter and drill into promising paths. And make it workable in much less real estate.

–       Make a better search experience personal and portable, seamlessly transferring from the desktop to the mobile device.

–       Hold Google’s feet to the fire. Follow your own advice and innovate faster and better than they do.  Because you’re right, it’s difficult for them to innovate and risk alienating their user base. But here’s the flipside to that. It’s easier for them to take that risk when there’s no strong alternative to go to.

Before You Say No, Just Listen…

If Microsoft really wants to spend $100 million on search, here’s my suggested plan. Take $20 million and fund 10 start-ups for $2 million each. Give them a one-year mandate to reinvent search. Take the remaining $80 million and use it to develop a TV reality show. Call it “Google Killer.”  Get Steve Ballmer to host. He can throw chairs, do the Monkey Dance and lead the audience in a chant of “Developers, Developers, Developers.”  I guarantee you’ll get a better return on your investment.

And if someone at Microsoft is listening, I’m free to discuss the development deal for the show. Hell, I’ll even be one of the contestants.  Call me anytime.

When Search and Social Collide

First published March 12, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I feel the ground shifting under my feet. And I’m not the only one. John Battelle voiced his perception of shift in a post  this weekend:

Search, and Google in particular, was the first true language of the Web. But I’ve often called it a toddler’s language – intentional, but not fully voiced. This past few weeks folks are noticing an important trend – the share of traffic referred to their sites is shifting. Facebook (and for some, like this site, Twitter) is becoming a primary source of traffic.

Why? Well, two big reasons. One, Facebook has metastasized to a size that rivals Google. And two, Facebook Connect has come into its own. People are sharing what they are reading, where they are going, and what they are doing, and the amplification of all that social intention is spreading across the web.

Talking the Talk

I find Battelle’s analogy of language particularly apt here. I’m a big Steven Pinker fan and am fascinated by the way we process language. It maps well to our use of search.

There are two bursts of language development that correspond to the two biggest periods of brain development. The first, during the first few years of our lives, are when we assimilate the rudimentary rules of our mother tongue. We move from single words to small sentences. We use our new channel of expression to begin to connect with our physical environment, telling others our basic needs (hunger, diaper changes) and asking why things are. At the earliest stages, we explore through language.

The next is during adolescence. Now, we use language to connect with others. We fine-tune empathy, create relationships and probe the fit and fiber of those relationships through words.  We mirror others’ emotions in our own minds, and language is an essential part of that process.

As Battelle says, our use of Google equates to our first explorations of our online world. Our queries are quick and primitive stabs in the dark, hoping to find something of interest. But now, we’re become online adolescents. We’re connecting and conversing, and in that, there is a new and indexable Web or words  that becomes very interesting.

Humans being Human

Online becomes fundamentally important when we use it to do the things that come naturally for us. Seeking information is natural, and search gave us a new and more effective way to do it. Connecting with others is natural, and Facebook and Twitter give us a new way to do that as well.  This isn’t about technology. This is about being human. Technology should be transparent in the process.

But when those fundamental activities leave lingering digital footprints that are quickly converging, there is something staggering in the implications. The ability to create feedback loops between patterns that emerge in the complexity of online, and then use that ability to navigate and connect to places and people, foretells the future of the Web. Twitter and Facebook are not replacements for Google. They are social signals that potentially increase the effectiveness of our online language exponentially.  To quote Battelle again:

The conversation is evolving, from short bursts of declared intent inside a query bar, to ongoing, ambient declaration of social actions.

Consider the implications: Google’s mission to index and organize all the world’s information; the increasing use of personalization to uncover your conscious and subconscious intent; and, the ability to tap into the very vibrations of a vast social network. It will take time to bring it together, but when it does, it will change everything.

Search a Real Downer

The latest numbers from comScore show how the mood of the nation has shifted, and how it’s being reflected in what we search for. This is a topic I’ve talked about numerous times, so rather than spout it all again, I’ll just provide a few links to past posts. But I think one of the tables from the comScore release paints a pretty sobering picture:

Growth in Search Terms Related to Economic Downturn
December 2008 vs. December 2007
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore Marketer
Search Term 
Total Searches (000)
Dec-2007
Dec-2008
% Change
“Coupons”
7,637
19,921
161%
“Unemployment”
2,688
8,214
206%
“Discount”
6,271
7,928
26%
“Mortgage”
4,518
7,756
72%
“Bankruptcy”
1,012
2,589
156%
“Foreclosure”
824
1,373
67%
“Unemployment Benefits”
215
748
247%
“Online behavior has come to reflect the interests or concerns of Americans, and we are certainly seeing this manifest itself with respect to the economic downturn,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Search volume using terms relating to the economy has ballooned over the past year as Americans have become increasingly concerned over their economic wellbeing.”
Gian and I talked about this almost a year ago at the Search Insider Summit in Florida. That lead to a column in Search Engine Land talking about how whatever is top of mind for us translates into search activity – Battelle’s Database of Intentions. Ironically, this same tendency is one of the reasons why I think Search will do particularly well in the current economic meltdown – the subject of another Just Behave column.

Is Gen Y Wired for Television?

Cory Treffiliti had an interesting post this week on MediaPost, talking about how TV (and the 30 second spot) is not dead, and how, for two occasions, at least (the Super Bowl and the inauguration) he found himself in front of a TV, not a monitor.

Right now, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the concept of digital immigrants and digital natives. The theory is that through neuroplasticity and neural pruning, we have a generation coming forward that are fluent in digital technology. Actually, tomorrow I’m talking to one of the researchers, Teena Moody at UCLA, who has been doing some interesting fMRI studies in the area, along with Dr. Gary Small.

So, if the Digital Native theory holds true, I wonder what that does to Treffiliti’s observation. I, like Cory, find myself wanting the more immersive experience of a TV for certain types of viewing. But the fact is, the TV is a technology I grew up with. My brain is wired to understand TV. Is the same true of a 15 year old who’s used to doing 6 things at once in front of a computer? Would they have the same need to watch events like this on the TV, rather than a computer monitor, or a mobile device, for that matter?

The media we interact with determines the media we seek. I agree with Cory that TV, as we know it, is in no imminent danger of demise, but I also see it caught in a wave of change that will make it increasingly difficult to stake some revenue positive high ground. And if we thought the past decade was one of precipitous change, what happens when the technologically fluent Gen Y’s start taking over the world? In the words of Bachman Turner Overdrive (giving away both my age and my Canadian nationality in one fell swoop):

“You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

Tweets from the Edge

First published February 5, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m now on Twitter (@outofmygord if you’re interested), which, to use the emerging verb of consensus, means that I tweet.  I’m not sure I’m a Twaddict (a la Todd Friesen) but I am moving through Rohit Bhargava’s 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance

1 . Denial  — “I think Twitter sounds stupid. Why would anyone care what other people are doing right now?”

2. Presence —  “Ok, I don’t really get why people love it, but I guess I should at least create an account.”

3. Dumping –“I’m on Twitter and use it for pasting links to my blog posts and pointing people to my press releases.”

4 .Conversing — “I don’t always post useful stuff, but I do use Twitter to have authentic 1X1 conversations.”

5. Microblogging — “I’m using Twitter to publish useful information that people read AND converse 1×1 authentically .”

My self-assessment has me currently lodged between steps 3 and 4, but with signs of promise. And so, through the phenomenon of synchronicity, it now seems that everywhere I turn I see signs of Twitter. One of the recent one’s was Kaila Colbin’s Search Insider column about Twitter’s monetization strategy, or lack of same. Twitter is not unique; virtually every social network struggles with this issue. I would like to add two observations from my perspective.

The Curse of the Early Adopter

Social networks seem to be perennially stuck on the edge of the wrong side of Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm.  They flourish with early adopters, who are by nature fickle when it comes to technology and any bright shiny object, but social networks have difficultly embedding themselves in the mainstream. I’m seeing signs that Facebook might successfully make the leap across the Chasm, based on my “Jill” litmus test. When my wife is familiar with a technology, it usually means it’s crossed the Chasm.  Jill doesn’t have a Facebook page, but she has visited it (due largely to the fact that we have teenage daughters — ’nuff said).

The problem in trying to track these things is that whatever the blogosphere is buzzing about bears little resemblance to what will actually gain traction with a mainstream market. We (and yes, I include myself) are exactly the wrong people to prognosticate about what may be the next killer app for the average Joe. We are all technology nerds. Everyone I know in this industry is a technology nerd. The ones who actually blog and emerge as thought leaders are the most hopeless of the lot. We exist in a rarified technological atmosphere and have largely lost touch with the real world. It doesn’t mean we’re inherently prone to be wrong about the marketability of new technology, but it also means we’re not inherently right. We’re guessing, and all too often we let our personal enthusiasm bias our forecasts.

Social networks are always held up to Google as the monetization baseline, and it’s an unfair and misleading comparison. There were a number of circumstances unique to Google that won’t be replicated with a social network. They include user intent, the nascent stage of the Internet during Google’s introduction, lack of visionary competition and the luxury of developing a critical mass of usage on its own real estate.  The problem with monetizing Twitter is that much of the interaction with it happens on a third-party app.

Social and Market Norms

Perhaps the biggest reason why it’s difficult to monetize social results has to do with how our online experiences are framed, and the concept of social vs. market norms.  Here’s an example. You take your family out for an Italian dinner. The meal is fabulous. The portions are huge. After one of the best meals you’ve ever had, you hand $180 to the hostess. She throws it back in your face, storms into the kitchen and you’re abruptly escorted to the door. If we were at a restaurant, this reaction would be rather surprising. But if we’re at my mother-in-law’s for Sunday dinner, it suddenly makes sense. The difference is the frame in which we view the scenario. If we look at it through a market norm, the rules that govern commerce and fair trade, it’s entirely appropriate to offer fair compensation for a meal. If we look at it through a social norm, the rules that govern our family and friend relationships, it’s an unforgivable insult.

This slippery slope between market and social norms is the treacherous one that a social network must tread. Here’s another example. You’re at a party and you’ve asked two friends about their opinions on the best car for you to buy. Another person at the party overhears this — someone who just happen to be a salesperson at the local Ford dealership. Sensing opportunity, the salesperson whips around and immediately starts telling you why the Ford Mustang is the perfect car for you. How would you feel? How would you respond to the information?  How uncomfortable would the discussion become?

The challenge is that you moved from a social norm to a market norm and you weren’t in control of the transition. The same is true when you use a social network to ask for information and suddenly the network uses that to present targeted ads to you.  Kaila was right to point to Twitter’s search functionality as its only monetization opportunity. Google has conditioned us to accept a search results page as a place we can look at through market norm eyes. Also, we’re searching all Tweets for mention of a product, not specifically asking our friends. The difference is crucial in how we accept the advertising message.

The confluence of social networking and search is exciting to contemplate, but expect a lot of trial and error in the quest to find the right business model. Personally, I don’t expect to find it any time soon, and I also expect a lot of miffed users as part of the collateral damage.

Hyperlinking Reality

First published January 29, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Fellow Search Insider David Berkowitz (David, it’s been too long since we riffed on each other’s columns!) allowed his curiosity to wander down some fascinating potential directions search may evolve in a couple of recent columns, first looking at Ford’s plans for integrating GPS-enabled voice search  in all its  vehicles, and then speculating how one search could be launched in 17 different ways, both today and in the future. One of his speculations is what I wanted to explore further today:

“Instead of entering a query, Penny may be able to put on a special set of glasses and scan her surroundings for store names and reviews. The headsets and eyewear from Vuzix now link up to other portable devices such as iPods and camcorders, but they keep including more functionality within the gadgets themselves.”

Picture This…

Sound far-fetched? Not according to the MOBVIS (Mobile Attentive Interfaces in Urban Scenarios)  project in Europe. In a nutshell, the MOBVIS technology allows you to take a picture of your surroundings with your camera-equipped mobile device, then MOBVIS recognizes aspects of your environment and places hyperlinks on the items where it has relevant information. So, if you take a picture of a bus stop, MOBVIS can retrieve what buses stop there and what the schedule is. Assuming city buses are equipped with GPS and telemetric units, it could also tell you how long you have to wait for the next bus.

Currently, the MOBVIS project is visually mapping and testing in three European cities; Graz, Austria; Ljubljana, Slovenia; and Darmstadt, Germany). Geo-referenced imagery tied to streetscapes from these three centers is online and available to the scientific community. One has to imagine that Google would be paying particular attention to this, as it’s a natural tie-in with its Street View project.

Say Cheese and Search…

So, let’s imagine what MOBVIS could do. First of all, it could be an incredible interactive guide, bringing mountains of information about your surroundings to just one click away on your mobile device. Dining reviews, items on sale in local stores, entertainment schedules and reviews, transit schedules, self-guided tours, could all live on the other side of the MOBVIS linking icon. Now, all that is theoretically available through GPS positioning, but in urban pedestrian applications, GPS has some functional limitations. It’s difficult to get an accurate enough fix to narrow your location to even a half block radius, especially in the downtown “urban valley” core. MOBVIS allows you to restrict your information quest to exactly what you want to include in your viewfinder, making it a much more specific query tool. Also, MOBVIS could be tremendously useful for the visually impaired, allowing them to scan their surroundings and retrieve information.

Making Reality More Useful

What MOBVIS does, along with all the other search permutations mentioned by David, is point the way of search’s future. I’ve always said that search is not about the destination, whether it’s Google, Yahoo or Live. It’s about the functional engine that sits behind the portal. It’s about the ability to link people with relevant information and, more importantly, timely functionality. Search is about letting people do what they have to do. MOBVIS is just one more way to establish the link. It’s a pretty amazing way that opens up some intriguing possibilities, but what makes MOBVIS exciting is its potential for helping us navigate our current reality. David’s 17 ways to search, Aaron Goldman’s past speculations about ambient findability, and my ongoing exploration of search as an expression of us reaching for our goals all share a common theme: search enhances our ability to do things.

In a recent post, Silicon Valley writer Sarah Lacy speculated that Google might be nearing the end of its reign as online’s Golden Child. She used some dubious logic about usage and traffic to posit that the mantle is ready to be passed to Twitter or Facebook. What she missed is the central premise of Google’s mission. It’s not about driving traffic to Google.com. It’s about connecting us with what we’re looking for. What Google has been doing through Google Maps, Street View, Universal Search, personalization, Google Mobile and yes, even the lowly but ubiquitous Google Toolbar, is weaving together the functionality needed to deliver on that mission. It remains to be seen whether Google will be successful in doing so, but it’s certainly well in the lead. And that’s the power of Google’s potential. It’s about providing the infrastructure to connect all the dots, both online and in the real world. It’s not about being one of the dots.

Google Evolves Back to its Core

First published January 22, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about how the economy will sort out winners and losers even faster. This week, a trio of news releases seems to confirm that search, and Google, in particular, will be a winner. Unfortunately, almost no one will recognize that they’ve won.

Reports out of AdGooroo and Covario show that search is still ticking along better than ever. AdGooroo has Google and Microsoft on track for the best Q4 in history. Apparently, despite the gathering storm, people still search and still click on ads. And, relatively speaking, there’s been minimal impact on search ad budgets. We saw a lot of advertising budgets hold the course for 2009. This was a good news/bad news scenario. The good news was, budgets weren’t cut. The bad news was that planned increases, in some cases aggressive increases, were put on the shelf.

So, are there smiles in Mountain View? Not according to a MediaPost  article from yesterday. Google is jettisoning every piece of financial baggage it can, drastically cutting costs to keep the financial boat upright in advance of the earnings report (due out today). The latest cut? Google’s newspaper business.

What Does It All Mean?

By any sane analysis, Google is doing very nicely, thank you. Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst quoted in the MediaPost article, expects to see 23% year over year revenue growth, with 14.3% growth expected for 2009. In the rational world, that would be cause for popping Champagne corks and backs bruised from vigorous patting. Given the performance of every other company on the planet, double-digit growth is nothing short of miraculous. But in Google world, it’s an “all-hands-on-deck” disaster. True, Google’s stock price has retreated to levels not seen since 2005 (Psst.. stock tip: Buy!), but the financial engine is ticking along very nicely, thank you.

What is happening is a bit of natural selection and forced evolution at the Googleplex, and although this will be painful, it will be very healthy in the long term. Google is picking its winners and culling the losers. At the same time, its strategists are redefining themselves into a sustainable business model. I suspect Eric Schmidt and CFO Patrick Pichette have stolen a page from Rahm Emanuel’s book: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” The economic freefall and irrational pessimism of analysts gives them the opportunity to impose some logical constraint on the overexuberance we saw from Google in days gone past. Google was going to reinvent everything, from advertising to telecommunications to sustainable energy. Now, it appears Google realized there’s more than enough in its core mission (organizing the world’s information) to keep it busy for the foreseeable future. I always thought that the starry-eyed idealism was commendable but not sustainable. Google is growing up.

Think Search is Strong Now? Just Wait…

In the meantime, think for a moment how search has positioned itself. Despite one of the worst economic years in recent memory, Google showed 23% growth in revenues. During the same time period, every other economic metric went into free-fall. Consumer confidence plunged to its lowest levels ever. Retails sales and online sales both hit the skids. Let’s not even talk about home sales. The Dow Jones is down 40% in the past year. The economy didn’t just slow down. It screeched to a halt. But in this same time, search kept plugging through without a hiccup. Did the astronomical growth continue? No, but 23% is pretty damn good in anyone’s books.

People kept searching and clicking on ads. In fact, according to AdGooroo and Covario, they did so more than ever. The only thing impacting search right now is the sheer fear of advertisers who are being assailed on all fronts.

Understandable? Yes. Rational? No.

So, when we hit bottom and start climbing out of this economic black hole, search will have consolidated its position as the most accountable of marketing channels. It will form the basis of a new marketing model: consumer-driven, immediate, measurable, effective, interactive. And Google will be the most powerful player on the block. Best of all, the company can do it without worrying about selling newspaper ads, redefining America’s power grid or colonizing space. All Google has to do is focus on helping people find what they’re looking for.