Category Archives: Online Trends

Google: Inching Toward a More Targeting World

First published August 9, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Google is mastering the art of the low-key announcement. Increasingly it’s been rolling out changes that have the potential to be fundamentally earthshaking with little or no fanfare and, to this point, it seem to be successful in minimizing the pickup.

Take last week’s announcement, for example. Susan Wojcicki, vice president, product management, quietly announced at a press briefing that Google is offering more targeting functionality on its search ads.

Now of course, as Google moves more towards personalization, I’ve been saying that the introduction of ad targeting, specifically behavioral targeting, has been inevitable. In various interviews, Google representatives, including Nick Fox and Marissa Mayer, have consistently said that whatever factors there are for determining relevancy on the organic listings will eventually also be brought into play on the sponsored listings. The goal for Google is to ensure that all the results, organic and sponsored, are highly relevant to the user.

Whispers of World Domination

What’s notable about this development is not so much the additional functionality that’s been introduced, but the way it was introduced. There seems to be a consistent pattern emerging with these announcements, where the language is very carefully determined and the releases are made with minimal fanfare. My belief is that it’s part of an overall strategy to minimize the pushback to the incremental introduction of higher levels of personalization and behavioral targeting.

First of all, let’s look at what exactly increase functionality means. At this point, targeting is only determined by groups of searches done at the same time. So, for example, if you first search for “Paris France” and then search for “Hotel specials.” Google will likely show you sponsored results specific to Paris, even though you didn’t specify Paris in your second query. While this move is logical and smart, and therefore will be accepted gladly by advertisers, it’s fairly benign for the user. You can see there’s nothing particularly sinister about putting together a couple of searches, especially if they’re done one right after the other. Fellow Search Insider Mark Simon talked more about this development in Monday’s column .

Search Spin Doctors

So if this offers a potentially differentiating value for Google and its ads, why did the company introduce it so quietly? The announcement was quietly slipped under the door of a few industry publications like Search Engine Land , and there was the small piece on Reuters . There was virtually no pick-up. Even advertisers weren’t given a heads-up that Google was rolling out this functionality. Google further proved its mastery of the understated release by somehow convincing Reuter reporter Eric Auchard to lead the story with the title “Google wary of behavioral targeting and online ads.” I’m still not sure how the company managed this particular piece of sleight-of-hand.

Also telling is how Google’s back gets up if the words behavioral targeting are even used in context with these new developments. As Mark astutely points out, even though Google is adamantly saying this isn’t behavioral targeting, it is, of course. Google can play around with semantics all it wants, but this is very definitely behavioral targeting. In multiple interviews with me and others, company strategists have gone out of their way to explain how their approach has nothing to do with profiles and segmentation. The language used by Nick Fox and Susan Wojcicki made it very clear that this is all about the context of the task you’re engaged in right now, and nothing is retained or remembered to build a profile. Google is doing everything it can to distance itself from the world of “traditional behavioral targeting” practiced by Tacoda and Revenue Science.

So why the soft sell? And why the pushback on behavioral targeting? I believe it’s all part of a carefully measured strategy that will incrementally roll personalization into everything that Google does, including the serving of ads. On that Mark Simon and I definitely agree (perhaps I’m “in my Gord” on this one). But the move toward personalization is a long slow tango with the user. Actually, it’s more like the Bolero. Everything is heading in that one direction, but the intensity will definitely pick up as we move along.

Moving Toward Win/Win for Both Advertisers and Users

I had a chance to chat with Larry Cornett from Yahoo last week about search user interfaces. We talked about the fact that user acceptance of personalization will be a moving target. As the wins for the user increase as functionality is rolled out, the resistance to surrendering personal information lessens.

I believe Google is acutely aware of this quid pro quo factor and is carefully playing its personalization cards one at a time so as not to spook the user. There’s just too much at risk for Google, especially on the search results page, if users begin to lose trust in the ads.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, that first time you know you’ve been behaviorally targeted, it can be jarring. It takes a while for the user to get used to the efficiency of behavioral targeting. We’re not quick to forget that advertisers have been screaming at us with irrelevant and bogus sales pitches for the better part of a century now. It scares the hell out of us to think that advertisers might have access to personal information that would allow them not only to scream at us, but also know our name, where we live and what Web sites we look at when we have five minutes to goof off.

But I believe the stand that Google currently taking about the use of personal information as a signal for serving ads is a temporary one. It’s a line drawn in the sand, and as user sensitivity around targeting and personalization begins to drop, as it inevitably will, Google will be a little less reluctant to use the words behavioral targeting.

If you look at the big picture and the pieces of the network that Google is beginning to assemble, it’s very difficult to see any other path than personal targeting in the future. But don’t expect any big earthshaking announcements from Google about it in the near future.

Search Engines Innovate, Why Not SEMs?

First published July 26, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The future of search has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve just done a series of interviews with some of the top influencers and observers in the space — Marissa Mayer, Danny Sullivan, Greg Sterling, Michael Ferguson, Steven Marder, Jakob Nielsen and others — talking about what the search results page may look like in 2010. I’ll try to corral this into a white paper this fall. I’ve also chatted with a few people about the future of search marketing. And here’s the sum of it all. “Hang on, because you ain’t seen nothing yet!”

Change is the Constant

I have remarked to a number of people in the last week or two that I’ve seen more change in the past six months in the search results page than I have in the last 10 years. And all my interviewees seem to agree: We’re just at the beginning of that change. Whether its personalization, universal results, Web 2.0 functionality or mobile, our search experience is about to change drastically. Search will become more relevant, more functional, more ubiquitous and more integrated. It will come with us (via our mobile devices) more often and in more useful ways. It will expand our entertainment options. It will change forever our local shopping trips. And it will all happen quickly.

As Search Goes, So Goes SEM

The question is, what does this do for search marketing? In a recent conversation, I was asked where the major innovation in the search marketing space was coming from. This was prefaced by the remark that when a well-known industry analyst was asked the same question, they (I’ll keep the gender neutral, as there really aren’t that many industry analysts out there) said there was almost no innovation coming from search marketers. They were “living off the fat.” My first inclination was to jump to the defense of the industry, but this proved harder than I thought.

I realized I haven’t seen a lot of innovation lately. Certainly, the engines themselves are innovating. And I’m seeing innovation in adjacent areas (Web analytics, competitive intelligence). But I’m not seeing a lot happen in the search-marketing space. After a raft of proprietary bid management tools hit a few years ago, there’s been little happening to move the industry forward. In fact, I’ve noticed a lot of SEM heads buried in the sand. We are not encouraging change; we are actively fighting it.

There are probably a lot of reasons why. First and foremost, I think a number of companies that have been in the space for a while are tired. I’ve touched on this in a previous three-part series in Search Insider. Secondly, it’s tough to develop new tools or technologies when you’re completely dependent on APIs or (worse still) scraping information from the search engines.

It’s a very risky call to spend time and resources developing new tools or technologies that can be rendered useless by an arbitrary change at Google or Yahoo — or made obsolete by the rapidly increasing pace of innovation.

Either Help Push Or Get Off!

Whatever the reason (and I’m sure the Search Insider blog will be getting a number of posts refuting my observation), the fact is that if search marketers are, in fact, riding the wave, it’s coming to a crashing halt very soon. The need for innovation and changing your strategic paradigm is greater than ever. As the search engines change rules, those search marketers that want to survive must change. Innovation will become a necessity.

And, in the end, this will be a good thing.

The change that’s happening in the search space is reflective of the change that is happening throughout marketing and advertising. It’s the continuing evolution of a much more efficient marketplace, where connections between customers and vendors are made tremendously more effective through access to information on both sides.

The traditional uncertainty of advertising is being leeched out of the system, due, in large part, to the tremendous effectiveness of search. And as search becomes more relevant and useful, it will make those connections more reliable, less intrusive and more successful for both parties. The opportunity is there for search marketers to help advertisers successfully negotiate this more efficient marketplace. It remains to be seen if we’re up for the challenge.

Personalization Doesn’t Have to Make Search Perfect – Just Better

First published July 19, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

For the first time in a long time, I’ve been consistently frustrated with the result that Google’s been returning for several of my searches. It’s not that Google’s getting worse, it’s that the nature of my searches has changed significantly. My searches are getting fuzzier as I’m stepping into territory I don’t know very well. Google is not functioning terribly well as my “discovery” engine.

Aaron’s Ambient Findability

Aaron Goldman wrote an absolutely fascinating column last week about ambient findability, based on Peter Morville’s book. I’ll definitely be taking Aaron’s advice and ordering my copy from Amazon soon. The interesting thing was that I read Aaron’s column shortly after I did an interview with Jakob Nielsen where he expressed similar cynicism about the practicality of search personalization. To sum up, both instances pointed to the fact that doing personalization is very difficult to do right. It’s probably impossible to do perfectly. But then again, personalization shouldn’t be perfect because humans aren’t. There will always be the human element of variability and unpredictability.

Google’s limits as a discovery engine

As much as the topic of ambient findability fascinates me (I explored the territory myself in a previous Search Insider ) I won’t steal Aaron’s thunder because I know he’s doing a follow-up column this week. I’ll take a more mundane path and talk about my increasing level of frustration with Google.

As I mentioned in last week’s column, I’m currently doing research for a book. Right now, what I’m researching is the nitty-gritty of why and how we make purchase decisions. By the way, Aaron suggested an interesting book, so I’ll do the same. Please do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Clotaire Rapaille’s “The Culture Code .” This is one of the most fascinating marketing books I’ve read in some time. Rapaille talks about the challenge of doing traditional market research in trying to uncover people’s attitudes towards brands or other aspects of our culture, like food, healthcare and even the American presidency. The problem is that in most traditional market research vehicles (focus groups & surveys) we’re stuck with what people say. It’s almost impossible to uncover what people really feel. What people say comes directly from their cerebral cortex, the logical and rational part of their brain. But what they feel comes from the limbic and reptilian part of the brain, the dark, shadowy corners of our personas. The minute you ask them a question, no matter what the format, you immediately get the cortex in gear. This got me thinking about neural marketing and the actual mechanisms in our mind that click over when we make the decision to buy or not.

Rapaille’s book simply served to whet my appetite. I voraciously started looking for more of the same but books, research or articles that explore the primal reasons why we buy seem to be few and far between (hint: if you know of any, please pass them along in the Search Insider blog so we can all share). I turned to Google and tried a number of queries to try to dig up academic research or Web sites on the subject matter. I was definitely venturing into new territory and while Google usually acts as a reliable guide, it was leaving me stranded high and dry in these particular quests.

Personalization is an idea, not an algorithm

So, let’s get back to personalization. Would personalization in the form (Kamvar’s algorithm) that is currently being envisioned and rolled out by Google help me in this matter? Probably not. The signals (search and Web history) would be too few to help me zero in on the content I’m looking for. It wouldn’t really improve Google’s utility as a “discovery” engine. It would run into the same road blocks that Aaron and others consistently point out.

But here’s the thing. Google is making a huge bet on personalization. But personalization is not the only thing Google is working on. Personalization simply acts as a hub. MIT’s Technology Review recently did an interview with Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research. Norvig is, quite literally, a rocket scientist (he was head of computational sciences at NASA in a previous life) who is taking Google’s research in some interesting new directions. Speech recognition and machine translation are two notable areas. Speech recognition can overcome some major input obstacles not only on the desktop, but, more notably, on mobile devices and on a convergent home screen that fully integrates our online world and entertainment options. And machine translation can enable a number of automated systems that can power further online functionality. Both are very much aligned with Google’s engineering view of the universe, where introducing people into the equation just introduces friction in an otherwise perfect world.

But the really telling part of the interview came when the conversation turned to search. Norvig talks about the current imbalance of search, where there is an avalanche of data available but the only gate to that data is the few words the searcher chooses to share with the search engine. We’re trying to paint personalization into a corner based on Google’s current implementation of it. And that’s absolutely the wrong thing to do. Personalization is not a currently implemented algorithm, or even some future version of the same algorithm. It’s is an area of development that will encompass many new technologies, some of which are under development right now in some corner of Google’s labs.

Personalization, in its simplest form, is simply knowing more about you as an individual and using that knowledge to better connect you to content and functionality on the Web. There are many paths you can take to that same end goal. Sep Kamvar’s algorithm is just one of them. By the way, Norvig’s particular area of expertise is artificial intelligence. Let’s for an moment stop talking about personalization and start talking instead about what the inclusion of true artificial intelligence could do for the search experience. But artificial intelligence requires signals, and personalization is a good bet to provide those signals. It doesn’t have to get it perfect every time, it just has to make it better.

Just as a last point, Marissa Mayer said in an interview that Google’s current forays into personalization serve no other purpose than to give Kamvar some data to play with to improve his algorithms. We’ve all quickly jumped on personalization (and yes, I’m probably the most guilty of this) as the new direction of search, but many of us (and I believe my guilt ends here) are making the assumption that personalization means a form of what we’re seeing today. It doesn’t. Not by a long shot. And, at the end of the day, what we’re looking for is a jump ahead in matching our needs with what the Web has to offer. To win, Google doesn’t have to do it perfectly. It just has to do it better than everyone else.

Interview with Jakob Nielsen on the Future of the SERP (and other stuff)

jakob-nielsen_cropped.jpg.400x400_q95_crop_upscaleI recently had the opportunity to talk to Jakob Nielsen for a series I’m doing for Search Engine Land about what the search results page will look like in 2010.  Jakob is called a “controversial guru of Web design” in Wikipedia (Jakob gets his own shots in at Wikipedia in this interview) because of his strongly held views on the use of graphics and flash in web design. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Jakob, even though we don’t agree on everything, because of his no frills, common sense approach to the user experience. And so I thought it was quite appropriate I sound him out on his feelings about the evolution of the search interface, now that with Universal search and Ask’s 3D Search we seem to be seeing more innovation in this area in the last 6 months than we’ve seen for the last 10 years. Jakob is not as optimistic about the pace of change as I am, but the conversation was fascinating. We touched on Universal Search, personalization, banner blindness on the SERP and scanning of the web in China, amongst other things. Usability geeks..enjoy!

Gord: For today I only really have one question, although I’m sure there be lots of branch offs from it. It revolves around what the search engine results page may look like in 2010.  I thought you would be a great person to lend your insight on that.

Jakob: Ok, sure.

Gord: So why don’t we just start? Obviously there are some things that are happening now with personalization and universal search results. Let’s just open this up. What do you think we’ll be seeing on a search results page in 3 years?

Jakob: I don’t think there will be that big a change because 3 years is not that long a time. I think if you look back three years at 2004, there was not really that much difference from what there is today.  I think if you look back ten years there still isn’t that much difference.  I actually just took a look at some old screen shots in preparation before this call at some various search engines like Infoseek and Excite and those guys that were around at that time, and Google’s Beta release, and the truth is that they were pretty similar to what we have today as well.  The main difference, the main innovation seems to have been to abandon banner ads, which we all know now really do not work, and replace them with the text ads, and of course that affected the appearance of the page.  And of course now the text ads are driven by the key words, but in terms of the appearance of the page, they have been very static, very similar for 10 years.  I think that’s quite likely to continue. You could speculate the possible changes. Then I think there are three different big things that could happen.

One of them that will not make any difference to the appearance and that is a different prioritization scheme. Of course, the big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

But of course from the user perspective, that’s not going to look any different. It’s just going to be that the top one is going to be the one that the various search engines, by what ever means they think of, will judge to be the best and that’s what people will tend to click first, and then the second one and so on. That behavior will stay the same, and the appearance will be the same, but the sorting might be different. That I think is actually very likely to happen

Gord: So, as you say, those will be the relevancy changes at the back end. You’re not seeing the paradigm of the primarily text based interface with 10 organic results and  8-9 sponsored results where they are, you don’t see that changing much in the next 3 years?

Jakob: No.  I think you can speculate on possible changes to this as well. There could be small changes, there could be big changes.  I don’t think big changes. The small changes are, potentially, a change from the one dimensional linear layout to more of a two dimensional layout with different types of information, presented in different parts of the page so you could have more of a newspaper metaphor in terms of the layout. I’m not sure if that’s going to happen.  It’s a huge dominant user behavior to scan a linear list and so this attempt to put other things on the side, to tamper with the true layout, the true design of the page, to move from it being just a list, it’s going to be difficult, but I think it’s a possibility.  There’s a lot of things, types of information that the search engines are crunching on, and one approach is to unify them all into one list based on it’s best guess as to relevance or importance or whatever, and that is what I think is most likely to happen.  But it could also be that they decide to split it up, and say, well, out here to the right we’ll put shopping results, and out here to the left we’ll put news results, and down here at the bottom we’ll put pictures, and so forth, and I think that’s a possibility.

Gord: Like Ask is experimenting with right now with their 3D search. They’re actually breaking it up into 3 columns, and using the right rail and the left rail to show non-web based results.

Jakob: Exactly, except I really want to say that it’s 2 dimensional, it’s not 3 dimensional.

Gord: But that’s what they’re calling it.

Jakob: Yes I know, but that’s a stupid word. I don’t want to give them any credit for that. It’s 2 dimensional. It’s evolutionary in the sense that search results have been 1 dimensional, which is linear, just scroll down the page, and so potentially 2 dimensional (they can call it three but it is two) that is the big step, doing something differently and that may take off and more search engines may do that if it turns out to work well.  But I think it’s more likely that they will work on ways on integrating all these different sources into a linear list. But those are two alternative possibilities, and it depends on how well they are able to produce a single sorted list of all these different data sources.  Can they really guess people’s intent that well?

All this stuff..all this talk about personalization, that is incredibly hard to do. Partly because it’s not just personalization, based on a user model, which is hard enough already. You have to guess that this person prefers this style of content and so on.  But furthermore, you have to guess as to what this person’s “in this minute” interest is and that is almost impossible to do. I’m not too optimistic on the ability to do that.  In many ways I think the web provides self personalization, you know, self service personalization. I show you my navigational scheme of things you can do on my site and you pick the one you want today, and the job of the web designer is to, first of all, design choices that adequately meet common user needs, and secondly, simply explain these choices so people can make the right ones for them.  And that’s what most sites do very poorly. Both of those two steps are done very poorly on most corporate websites. But when it’s done well, that leads to people being able to click – click and they have what they want, because they know what they want, and its very difficult for the computer to guess what they want in this minute.

Gord:  When we bring it back to the search paradigm, giving people that kind of control to be able to determine the type of content that’s most relevant to them requires them interacting with the page in some way.

Jakob: Yes, exactly, and that’s actually my third possible change. My first one was changing to the ranking scheme; the second one was the potentially changing to two dimensional layouts. The third one is to add more tools to the search interface to provide query reformulation and query refinement options. I’m also very skeptical about this, because this has been tried a lot of times and it has always failed.  If you go back and look at old screen shots (you probably have more than I have) of all of the different search engines that have been out there over the last 15 years or so, there have been a lot of attempts to do things like this. I think Microsoft had one where you could prioritize one thing more, prioritize another thing more. There was another slider paradigm. I know that Infoseek, many, many years ago, had alternative query terms you could do just one click and you could search on them, which was very simple. Yet most people didn’t even do that.

People are basically lazy, and this makes sense.  The basic information foraging theory, which is, I think, the one theory that basically explains why the web is the way it is, says that people want to expend minimal effort to gain their benefits.  And this is an evolutionary point that has come about because the people, or the creatures, who don’t exert themselves, are the ones most likely to survive when there are bad times or a crisis of some kind. So people are inherently lazy and don’t want to exert themselves. Picking from a set of choices is one of the least effortful interaction styles which is why this point and click interaction in general seems to work very well. Where as tweaking sliders, operating pull down menus and all that stuff, that is just more work.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: But of course, this depends on whether we can make these tools useful enough, because it’s not that people will never exert themselves.  People do, after all, still get out of bed in the morning, so people will do something if the effort is deemed worthwhile.  But it just has to be the case that if you tweak the slider you get remarkably better results for your current needs.  And it has to be really easy to understand. I think this has been a problem for many of these ideas. They made sense to the search engine experts, but for the average user they had no idea about what would happen if they tweaked these various search settings and so people tended to not do them.

Gord: Right. When you look at where Google appears to be going, it seems like they’ve made the decision, “we’ll keep the functionality transparent in the background, we’ll use our algorithms and our science to try to improve the relevancy”, where as someone like Ask might be more likely to offer more functionality and more controls on the page. So if Google is going the other way, they seem to be saying that personalization is what they’re betting on to make that search experience better.  You’re not too optimistic that that will happen without some sort of interaction on the part of the user?

Jakob: Not, at least, in a small number of years. I think if you look very far ahead, you know 10, 20, 30 years or whatever, then I think there can be a lot of things happening in terms of natural language understanding and making the computer more clever than it is now. If we get to that level then it may be possible to have the computer better guess at what each person needs without the person having to say anything, but I think right now, it is very difficult.  The main attempt at personalization so far on the web is Amazon.com. They know so much about the user because they know what you’ve bought which is a stronger signal of interest than if you had just searched for something.  You search for a lot of things that you may never actually want, but actually paying money; that’s a very, very strong signal of interest.  Take myself, for example. I’m a very loyal shopper of Amazon. I’ve bought several hundred things from them and despite that they rarely recommend (successfully)…sometimes they actually recommend things I like but things I already have. I just didn’t buy it from them so they don’t know I have it. But it’s very, very rare that they recommend something where I say, “Oh yes, I really want that”. So I actually buy it from them.  And that’s despite the (fact that the) economic incentive is extreme, recommending things that people will buy. And they know what people have bought. Despite that and despite their work on this now for already 10 years (it’s always been one of their main dreams is to personalize shopping) they still don’t have it very well done. What they have done very well is this “just in time” relevance or “cross sell” as it’s normally called. So when you are on one book on one page, or one product in general, they will say, here are 5 other ones that are very similar to the one you’re looking at now. But that’s not saying, in general, I’m predicting that these 5 books will be of interest to you. They’re saying, “Given that you’re looking at this book, here are 5 other books that are similar, and therefore, the lead that you’re interested in these 5 books comes from your looking at that first book, not from them predicting or having a more elaborate theory about what I like.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: What “I like” tends not to be very useful.

Gord: Interesting. Jakob, I want to be considerate of your time but I do have one more question I’d love to run by you.  As the search results move towards more types of images, we’re already seeing more images showing up on the actual search results page for a lot of searches. Soon we could be seeing video and different types of information presented on the page. First of all, how will that impact our scanning patterns?  We’ve both done eye scanning research on search engine results, so we know there is very distinct patterns that we see.  Second of all, Marissa Mayer in a statement not that long ago seemed to backpedal a bit about the fact that Google would never put display ads back on a search results page, seeming to open a door for non text ads.  Would you mind commenting on those two things?

Jakob: Well they’re actually quite related.  If they put up display ads, then they will start training people to exhibit more banner blindness, which will also cause them to not look at other types of multimedia on the page. So as long as the page is very clean and the only ads are the text ads that are keyword driven, then I think that putting pictures and probably even videos on there actually work well.  The problem of course is they are inherently a more two dimensional media form, and video is 3 dimensional, because it’s two dimensional – graphic, and the third dimension is time, so they become more difficult to process in this linear type of scanned document “down the page” type of pattern.  But on the other hand people can process images faster, with just one fixation and you can “grok” a lot of what’s in an image, so I think that if they can keep the pages clean, then it will be incorporated in peoples scanning pattern a little bit more. “Oh this can give me a quick idea of what this is all about and what type of information I can expect”.  This of course assumes as well one more thing which is that they can actually select good pictures.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: I would be kind of conservative until higher tweaking with these algorithms, you know, what threshold should you cross before you put an image up.  I would really say tweak it such so that you only put it up when you’re really sure that it’s a highly relevant good image.  If there starts becoming that there are too many images, then we start seeing the obstacle course behavior. People scan around the images, as they do on a lot of corporate websites, where the images tend to be stock photos of glamour models that are irrelevant to what the user’s there for.  And then people involve behavior where they look around the images which is very contrary to first principals of perceptual psychology type of predicting which would be that the images would be attractive. Images turn out to be repelling if people start feeling like they are irrelevant. It’s a similar effect to banner blindness. If there’s any type of design element that people start perceiving as being irrelevant to their needs, then they will start to avoid that design element.

Gord: So, they could be running the risk of banner blindness, by incorporating those images if they’re not absolutely relevant…

Jakob: Exactly.

Gord: …to the query. Ok thank you so much.  Just out of interest have you done a lot of usability work with Chinese?

Jakob: Some. I actually read the article you had on your site. We haven’t done eye tracking studies, but we did some studies when we were in Hong Kong recently, and to that level the findings were very much the same. In terms of pdf was bad and how people go though shopping carts. So a lot of the transactional behavior, the interaction behavior, is very, very similar.

Gord: It was interesting to see how they were interacting with the search results page.  We’re still trying to figure out what some of those interactions meant

Jakob: I think it’s interesting. It can possibly be that the alphabet or character set is less scannable, but it is very hard to say because when you’re a foreigner, these characters look very blocky, and it looks very much like a lot of very similar scribbles.  But on the other hand, it could very well be the same, that people who don’t speak English would view a set of English words like a lot of little speck marks on the page, and yet words in English or in European languages are highly scannable because they have these shapes.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: So I think this is where more research is really called for to really find out.  But I think it’s possible, you know the hypothesis is that it’s just less scannable because the actual graphical or visual appearance of the words just don’t make the words pop as much.

Gord: There seems to be some conditioning effects as well and intent plays a huge part.  There’s a lot of moving pieces with that and we’re just trying to sort out. The relevancy of the results is a huge issue because the relevancy in China is really not that good so…

Jakob: It seems like it would have a lot to do with experience and amount of information.  If you compare back with uses of search in the 80’s, for example, before the web started, that was also a much more thorough reading of search results because people didn’t do search very well. Most people never did it actually, and when you did do it you would search through a very small set of information, and you had to carefully consider each probability. Then, as WebCrawler and Excite and AltaVista and people started, users got more used to scanning, they got more used to filtering out lots of junk. So the paradigm has completely changed from “find everything about my question” to “protect myself against overload of information”.  That paradigm shift requires you to have lived in a lot of information for awhile.

Gord: I was actually talking to the Chinese engineering team down at Yahoo! and that’s one thing I said. If you look at how the Chinese are using the internet, it’s very similar to North America in 99 or 2000. There’s a lot of searching for entertainment files and MP3s. They’re not using it for business and completing tasks nearly as much. It’s an entertainment medium for them, and that will impact how their browsing things like search results. It’ll be interesting to watch as that market matures and as users get more experienced, if that scanning pattern condenses and tightens up a lot

Jakob: Exactly. And I would certainly predict it would. There could be a language difference, basically a character set as we just discussed, but I think the basic information foraging theory is still a universal truth. People have to protect themselves against information overload, if you have information overload. As long as you’re not accustomed to that scenario, then you don’t evolve those behaviors. But once you get it… I think a lot of those people have lived in an environment where there’s not a lot of information.  Only one state television channel and so forth and gradually they’re getting satellite television and they’re getting millions of websites. But gradually they are getting many places where they can shop for given things, but that’s going to be an evolution.

Gord: The other thing we saw was that there was a really quick scan right to the bottom of the page, within 5 seconds, just to determine how relevant these results were, were these legitimate results? And then there was a secondary pass though where they went back to the top and then started going through. So they’re very wary of what’s presented on the page, and I think part of it is lack of trust in the information source and part of it is the amount of spam on the results page.

Jakob: Oh, yes, yes.

Gord: Great thanks very much for your time Jakob.

Jakob: Oh and thank you!

Is Personalization the Path to Follow?

First published July 5, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Aaron, Aaron, Aaron. Could I possibly leave you as a lone voice out in the wilderness, prophesizing about personalized search? Of course not.

Last week, fellow Search Insider Aaron Goldman pointed out some loopholes in personalized search nirvana. It’s hard to find fault with his points. They’re all very real flaws in making personalization a credible evolution in search relevancy. Also, somewhere along the line, it appears that I’ve become the cheerleader for personalized search. I do admit I’m somewhat bullish on it, but I think I should clarify why I think personalization is important.

It’s Time to Break Search’s Paradigm

Search has hit the ceiling, at least in its current embodiment. We’ve pushed the paradigm as far as it will go. Search’s nose is smashed up against the window. (I should stop writing these columns late in the evening, after a 15-hour day!). Search needs to go somewhere, and after looking at the alternatives, I believe personalization is the most probable path.

All the improvements in search over the past decade have largely been in the background. The interface you and I use has hardly changed since I first discovered Infoseek and AlltheWeb back in 1995. Sure, the algorithms have been tweaked, but they’ve all been improvements down the same path, and that path is at a dead end. For search to evolve, it needs to move beyond a pure query-initiated, algorithmic-driven exercise. Even universal search, which is the biggest change we’ve seen to the results page in the past few years, is really still a tweak on the existing paradigm. It’s just mixing the bag of results, powered by the same algorithm.

So, when we look at where search can go, there are precious few alternatives. They all aim at the holy grail, disambiguating intent. We can look at human-powered search. The idea behind this is that real, live human beings can deliver greater relevancy than an algorithm ever could. Here tread Jason Calacanis (Mahalo) and Jimbo Wales (Wikia).  Then we have the very close cousin (and in some cases, a stand-in) social search. If we somehow tag results, or implicitly give our vote, even through a click-through, will others who share our interests find the same results more relevant? Finally, we have personalization.

Don’t Expect Perfection Anytime Soon

Each approach has potential flaws. Any time you break a paradigm, iterative failure is almost a given. Nobody is going to get it perfect out of the gate. Getting to the next evolution of search will involve trial and error. That’s why I think it’s particularly brave of Google, given its current market leading position, to be moving aggressively down the personalization path. They’re eating their own lunch. It’s an inevitable move, but one that it takes guts to make. And don’t judge the potential of personalization based on what you’re seeing today. It would be akin to trying to determine the eventual impact of the automobile based on your impression of the first horseless carriage that lurched through town. There’s a reason it’s in beta.

Aaron worries about the search “ruts” that may evolve with personalization. If we tend to go down the same paths again and again, what happens when we want to explore new territory? Will personalization have formed a groove so deep we can’t crawl out of it?

Aaron is also concerned about multiple profiles on the same machine within a household. Or for that matter, multiple profiles with the same person. I search differently at work than I do at home. How will a search engine reconcile this search schizophrenia?

Of course, we haven’t even touched on the biggest challenge facing personalization: the privacy issue. Personalization is powered by mountains of sensitive data. The potential pushback on this is the biggest red flag that personalization has to contend with.

Making the Leap

But no matter which path search chooses to follow, there will be monumental challenges to address. That’s the whole crux of innovation. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But search has no option. For it to evolve into its next stage, which is to take its rightful place as the fundamental glue that connects us all to the highly functional, highly personal semantic Web, search needs to break the current paradigm. And that’s why I’m bullish on personalization. As Google’s Matt Cutts said to me once (about a totally different topic), if I had a dozen eggs, I’d be putting 11 of them in this particular basket. Sure, personalization has some big hurdles to jump. So do the alternatives. And I think the potential wins for personalization are far bigger. I have the suspicion that if personalization works as well as I think it can, we’ll look back five years from now with bemusement at the concerns we had in 2007 around the issue.

That’s the problem when you come to the end of a development path — and fundamental change, rather than incremental change, is required. It’s very difficult to see what lies ahead.

Yahoo + Yang = Google + (Page+Brin)?

First published June 21, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

So Jerry Yang is no longer just the chief Yahoo, whatever that means. Terry Semel has vacated Yahoo’s CEO office and Jerry Yang has set up shop there. At the same time, Sue Decker has stepped into the president’s role. While Terry Semel’s departure didn’t come as a great surprise to anyone in the search space, Jerry Yang’s appointment as CEO did raise a few eyebrows. In retrospect, the move seems to make a lot of sense but in the numerous conversations I’ve had on this topic in the last few weeks, no one mentioned Yang’s name as Yahoo’s possible savior.

With this move will come the inevitable speculation about how this will bolster Yahoo’s chances of competing against Google. Just last week I was interviewed by Bloomberg TV and was asked about that very topic. At that time I mentioned that the biggest difference between the two was the lack of corporate focus at Yahoo and the fact that focus, at least on the search side, has never been an issue for Google.

My belief is that there’s a lot behind the scenes that we’re not privy to that will explain Yang’s appointment as CEO when it becomes public knowledge. My suspicion is that there may be an acquisition deal in the works and this is a “feel-good” move to help shore up Yahoo’s eroding stock price until the deal can be finalized. But whether or not that’s the case, I did want to take a few minutes to make some comparisons between Google and Yahoo in light of Monday’s news.

Sacred Cow = Balanced Ecosystem?

Search is the sacred cow at Google. More correctly, the search user experience is the sacred cow of Google. And it’s the quality of that search experience that has driven the vast majority of Google’s revenue and has put them in the position where they can pose a significant threat in virtually every information channel in the world.

Recently I was worried about search appearing to take a backseat at Google. With all the media hype surrounding Google’s moves into other channels, I was worried that perhaps the corporation itself had lost sight of how important search was in their overall strategy.

It appears my fears were misplaced. Google’s Matt Cutts was quick to comment on a blog post that search is still integral to everything that Google does and that the team was hard at work improving that search experience. Shortly after that, the personalization and universal search announcements began to roll out of Google labs. From everything I’ve been seeing, Google is more intent on improving the search user experience than ever and is using universal search and personalization as the hub that will drive a much more extensive user interaction with Web content and information. Of course, a more efficient delivery of advertising goes hand-in-hand with that strategy.

I’ve always been a big believer in corporate sacred cows. These are the untouchable tenets that drive the overall strategy of the company. From everything I’ve seen, heard or read about Google, the search user experience is its sacred cow. The company is focused on engineering the most effective and relevant connection between users and their desired content. The advantage of the sacred cow is that it gives an unquestionable rallying point for the company. All else is fair game but that single strategic foundation is what keeps the company on track.

Yahoo has no sacred cows. In all my conversations with the company there’s a lot of talk about community and a balanced ecosystem. Those very terms suggest compromise. There are a ton of Yahooers (although, like the Yahoo share price, this number is eroding as well) who are passionate about their jobs and would love to see their particular interest elevated to the status of the corporate sacred cow, but they’ve become frustrated with the lack of support from the CxO level. Just last year, Sue Decker was quoted saying that Yahoo is quite content to be No. 2 in the search game. In fact, the company’s strategy was trying to hang on to their eroding market share. It was, in effect, a public capitulation to Google. That announcement hit the Yahoo search team squarely in the gut. They definitely were not ready to give up on search.

Eric Schmidt = Terry Semel?

From the outside, it may appear that Eric Schmidt and Terry Semel served fairly similar roles. In both cases they are cofounders still actively involved in the business. The cofounders were incredibly young and lacked traditional “business expertise.” And both Schmidt and Semel stepped in with a significant amount of past experience.

But there the similarities ended. From the very beginning, Schmidt understood that while he served as CEO, Page and Brin were always going to take a very active role in running Google. And Schmidt stepped into his role with a tremendous amount of respect for the sheer intellectual horsepower that Page and Brin brought to Google. He never wanted to remove them from their decision-making roles. He understood that they were a key element in Google’s success.

Semel, on the other hand, came from the Hollywood Warner Bros. power structure and was intent on making Yahoo the new entertainment giant.

That strategy, however, had one fatal flaw. No one at Yahoo, least of all Semel, understood that media consumption was going to be an entirely different game online. Prepackaged bits of content, carefully packaged for easily digested consumer consumption, pushed out to us by a media giant – this was not how we were going to find our entertainment in the future. Now, we were completely in control and we would choose what, where and when we would watch. We didn’t need a power channel pushing us content. We needed a better tool for finding the content we were interested in. The rules had changed and Yahoo didn’t have a new version of the rulebook. No one had the rulebook, because it hadn’t been written yet.

Larry + Sergey = Jerry + David?

Finally, to me the biggest difference between Yahoo and Google is in the day-to-day role of the founders. Brin and Page have never backed off from their control positions at Google. In fact one of the running jokes at Google is their tendency to swoop in, roll up their sleeves and bury themselves in the minutiae of one particular item or project, much to the frustration of the team working on it. There is a Google-wide conspiracy aimed at trying to keep their hands off of any important code. As frustrating as this micromanaging might be to the individuals involved, it does give the two an intimate knowledge of everything that’s happening at the company. Their voracious intellectual appetite gobbles up this tremendous amount of detail and somehow digests it into strategic decisions that are very seldom wrong. Someone recently told me that one of the reasons that Brin has some challenges relating to the real world is that he’s never been wrong in his life. He doesn’t know what it means to fail.

David Filo and Jerry Yang, while still actively involved in Yahoo, have been quietly influencing from behind the scenes. They’re easier-going and not nearly as intense as Brin and Page. They suggest rather than demand. They stepped back, willing to let Semel run the show. In traditional wisdom, they did exactly what entrepreneurs and cofounders should do. They passed the torch on.

But in this case, it didn’t work. Yahoo lost its way. Brin and Page’s nettlesome but much-needed day-to-day involvement kept Google on track. Yahoo was left to founder and flopped back and forth, never being exactly sure what it was.

Even in the few hours since the announcement was made (as of the writing of this column) there has already been reports that the management change is exactly what Yahoo needs. Jerry Yang is recognized as a champion for the user experience on Yahoo and, in stepping back into the CEO’s old role, seems to signal a return to the fundamental principle of the user’s importance. In my view, it’s too little too late. If users were really that important to Yahoo, why were they pushed out of the driver’s seat in the first place?

Semel Says So Long – Yang’s Back

Well, the other shoe dropped. Terry Semel’s stepped down and Yahoo is dusting off co-founder Jerry Yang and bringing him back as CEO. Sue Decker steps in as President.

There’s a whiff of desperation here. I’ve often said that one of the reasons Google has excelled in search is the hands on involvement of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They had an intimate interest in the Google user experience and made it a sacred cow at Google, closely watched by Marissa Mayer. The entire Google empire has been financing solely by the strength of that user experience, so don’t ever underestimate the power of it.

The Yahoo or MSN (Live..etc) user just never had as highly a placed champion (or champions). The fact that Jerry Yang and David Filo cashed in relatively early at Yahoo and watched from the sidelines allowed the search also-ran to drift and be run into the ground by bean counters and those who had dreams of an online media empire. The waffling back and forth came close to killing Yahoo, and may yet.

Sue Decker is a fiscally responsible executive (a.k.a. bean counter) and Jerry Yang, who still has a garage full of Yahoo stock, is probably a little worried about slipping down the Forbes list if the share price continues to erode. So he’s stepping back into the ring, full time.

Will this have much of an impact on the Google/Yahoo rivalry? No, I don’t think so. Jerry cashed in and eased back, where Sergey and Larry would have never dreamed of it. The motivations are different. And Sergey and Larry take an engineer’s proprietary interest into the nitty gritty minutiae of Google, where Yahoo was never really an engineering brain child. It was a collection of links, the manifestation of a online community. It embraced technology because it had too.

To me, this seems like it’s buying time, to keep share prices propped up until a deal can be inked, nothing more. The faces have changed, but the look of desperation remains the same.

Coincidentally, I was just in Toronto last week and talked on Bloomberg TV about the need for leadership and focus at Yahoo.

Canada, It’s Time to Clue into Search!

First published June 14, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve never hid the fact that I’m Canadian. I’m fervently proud of that fact, and more than willing to take the good-natured ribbing I often get on the road from my American friends. I usually bear the brunt of some Canadian joke on a panel (often, I’m the one telling it) and I’m more than happy to act as a one-person tourism bureau. But this week, at SES Toronto, I’ve got to say that when it comes to search marketing, Canadian advertisers have their heads up their ass.

Being a Canadian, I’ve pondered long and hard about whether to soften that comment. After all, heaven forbid it comes off sounding rude. Saying someone, anyone, especially your fellow countrymen, have their heads up their ass sounds so, well, American. It’s unequivocal, to the point, in your face, aggressive: everything that Canadians generally aren’t. We’ve had it bred and/or frozen out of us.

But after looking at the facts, I couldn’t come to any other conclusion. The irony is that Canadians (I hope myself included) have played a major role in shaping the North American search industry. People like Barbara Coll, Todd Friesen, Andrew Goodman, Ian McAnerin, Ken Jurina and Jim Hedger are considered world-class in the game. But most of us are shaping the industry working with American clients. It’s because Canadian advertisers haven’t woken up to search yet, and there’s just no excuse for that, because Canadian customers are light years ahead of them.

Canada’s wired!

Canadians use the Internet more than anyone else in the world. According to comScore (responsible for all the stats in this paragraph), we spend more time online, have more wired households, are more sophisticated in our online behavior, do more searches. Pick your metric, Canada is ahead of the pack when it comes to online usage. For example, when we look at average hours spent online per month, Canadians are top with 40 hours, followed by Israel with 37.4 and South Korea with 34. The U.S. is in 8th place with 29.4. Canada also leads the pack in online reach, with 70% of households wired. This time, the U.S. comes in second with 59%. Average pages viewed per visitor? Canada comes in tops with 3800. The U.K. is second with 3300 and the U.S. clicks in with 2500.

See a pattern emerging? We spend a hell of a lot of time online up here. And much of that time is looking for something to buy. Canadians are the world’s best shoppers. We research every purchase down to the nitty-gritty detail. The Internet was created for shoppers just like us.

But what about the advertisers?

I’m writing this at SES Toronto. By common consensus with most Canadian search marketers I’ve talked to, Toronto seems to be the epicenter of the orifice that Canadian advertisers have lodged their collective heads in. The city doesn’t get it, the province doesn’t get it, the country doesn’t get it. When it comes to search, Canada (with a few exceptions) is clueless.

I remember my first SES in Toronto. I had been attending the U.S. shows for a few years previously, and it was with more than a hint of nationalistic pride that I attended the first Canadian show. But my jaw soon dropped at the questions I was fielding from the audience. This group was at least three years behind the U.S. market. That was four years ago. Since then, the U.S. has dramatically outpaced Canadian growth in search savviness. And if you look elsewhere, almost every market I’m familiar with, including the U.K, France, Italy, Germany and even China is rapidly gaining on the U.S. But Canada still seems to be blundering its way forward, overlooking the fact that Canadians spend a huge amount of time online using search engines. It’s to the point where it’s unforgivable.

Show us the money!

Here are just a few of the stats I pulled from comScore, Yahoo Canada and other sources:

  • Canadians spend $28.05 in online advertising per Internet user. The US spends $71.43.
  • 21% of Canadians media usage is online, but it gets 6% of the budget.
  • In contrast, newspapers and magazines get a 7% share of total media usage, but capture 42% of Canadian ad budgets,
  • The U.S. spends almost twice as Canada per capita on search marketing.

I did a few searches from my hotel in Toronto to see if the big brands show for common searches. They don’t. The quality of sponsored ads up here is abysmal. If you were planning a vacation in Ontario, don’t expect to see the official tourism site for the Ontario government in the top sponsored ads. They don’t do search. If there’s anything our research has shown, it’s that you need relevance in top sponsored to encourage interaction with this real estate. Until you get quality advertisers, sponsored is No Man’s Land.

So, in an atypical move for a Canadian, I’m railing against the cluelessness of our advertising community. Next time I come to Toronto, you’d better have your act together. Canadian shoppers get it, why don’t you?

By the way, sorry if this sounds harsh. Must be all the time I’m spending out of the country. Hopefully my passport won’t get revoked.

An Intimate View of the World Through Google’s Eyes

First published May 24, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The walls are coming crashing down at Google. They’re in the middle of tearing down silos and aggregating content. But that aggregation will likely come with a very unique viewpoint some day: yours.

Last week at Searchology (an event I couldn’t attend, due to a conflict) Google unveiled universal search, along with a few other assorted tidbits. David Berkowitz covered this in Tuesday’s Search Insider, so forgive me if some of this is redundant, but I think we’re covering unique ground in our approaches.

Mixing up Google’s Buckets

The key for universal search? Results that come from a number of different sources: the Web, blogs, video, news, images, maps, local, product, to name a few, all presented on the same results page. And yes, ads. Because, in the words of Google’s Marissa Mayer, “sometimes an ad is the right answer.” So, in effect, Google is no longer a search engine. It’s an “idea portal,” aggregated from Google’s vast Web reach around a specific query, on the fly and brought together for the user. And Google, in its infinite wisdom, will apply a universal ranking algorithm across disparate content to pull what it feels is the most relevant to the top of the page.

Universal search, in one fell swoop, makes the idea of vertical search irrelevant, because Google is making it all horizontal. The company will assemble a smorgasbord of content from their various buckets, prepared right in front of your eyes in 0.23 seconds.

Does One Score Fit All?

But here’s the challenge. The task of applying a content-agnostic relevancy score is daunting, and according to Google, it’s the reason it’s only now introducing universal search, after a number of years in the lab. In fact, it’s so daunting, you’ll probably only see other types of content creep onto your results page in the most obvious of cases. For example, a search for a specific video that’s suddenly very hot will bring back the video clip near the top. For most searches, the net impact of vertical search will be the appearance of some additional links to other vertical “buckets” near the top of the results set. Like most things that can impact the user experience, Google is treading carefully here.

Just Add Two Dashes of Personalization

So why bother? Because universal search becomes much more interesting when you combine it with personalization. In a recent interview I did with Mayer, she said she didn’t see a strong vertical angle for personalization in the near future. I can’t help but think that personalization will drive universal search. In fact, I don’t think universal search works very well without personalization. In both cases, we’re looking at an on-the-fly algorithm that works over and above the base Google algorithm, reordering results for you. Google will be able to be more confident in offering a much richer and more diverse set of universal results when you can tap into previous search and Web history. It will give them a lot more background to help them put context around your query. With personalization, every search becomes your customized portal, centered on what’s on the top of your mind right now. And that’s pretty interesting, both for the user and the advertiser.

And One Cup of Assorted Advertising

Obviously, Google’s mind is straying down this path as well, because at Searchology, Mayer did a pretty intense backpedal from her previous position that display or rich media ads would never appear on the search results page. The official position is now: “potentially… possibly… probably.” Google’s statements used to be much more unequivocal, but lately, they’re sounding much less adamant and much more political. No door shall remain unopened, even if it’s just a crack, because chances are, Google may have to squeeze through it in the future.

Increasingly, the puzzle pieces of Google’s empire are falling into place. When you take personalization, universal search, enhanced ad serving capabilities and outreach into the most popular Web communities and bring them together, you start to see a pretty compelling network emerge, and it’s all centered on the user, one user at a time.

Universal Search and Other Surprises from Google’s Searchology

When Google yesterday invited a number of reporters to come down to Mountain View for an event they called Searchology, I figured they had something in the works. I had to turn down the invitation because of other commitments, but we sent Enquiro’s Director of Technology and analytics blogger, Manoj Jasra down in my stead. Sure enough, just after noon yesterday, I received a press release announcing the introduction of universal search. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Manoj about what else Google may have unveiled in Mountain View yesterday, but even just working my way through the official release from Google gave me plenty of food for thought. For the extensive list of the announcements and some running commentary, check out Danny’s post on Searchengineland.

To me, the one thing that jumps out in this is the announcement of Universal Search. Basically, Universal Search is the breaking down of the information silos that currently exist on Google and blending them into a single set of results. The changes right now are very subtle. Web results still dominate the typical results page and the primary thing that would be noticeable by the user are additional dynamically generated navigation links that sit just about the results.

universalsearch

The key to universal search results is an on-the-fly algorithm that looks across all of Google’s information sources and prioritizes and ranks all the items coming from these disparate sources based on the user intent. Now, it’s in those last five words, “based on the user intent” that the really important piece of this comes out. Just a few weeks ago, I interviewed Marissa Mayer about the inclusion of Web history in the dataset to calculate personalized search results. This just gives Sep Kamvar and his personalization algorithm a lot more to chew on as they determine user intent. During the interview, I asked Marissa Mayer if personalization allows Google to be more confident in delivering vertical results. Marissa indicated that this was not an area they were currently looking at.

There are a lot of different things that we could do with this data. I’ll be totally honest. Verticals isn’t something that has been first and foremost in our minds so I don’t really think there’s a strong vertical angle here at the moment.

To me it just didn’t make sense. Couple that with yesterday’s announcement of Universal search results and I’ve got to conclude that Marissa was throwing up a smokescreen.

Personalized search is the engine is going to drive universal search. The two are inextricably linked. When you look at the wording the Google throws around about the on-the-fly ranking of content from all the sources for Universal Search, that’s exactly the same the wording they use for the personalization algorithm. It operates on-the-fly, looks at the content in the Google index and re-ranks it according to be perceived intent of the user, based on search history, Web history and other signals. It’s not a huge stretch to extend that same real-time categorization of content across all of Google’s information silos. That is, in fact, what Google’s announcement yesterday said. Call it a silo, call it a vertical, the end result is the same. As Google gains more confidence in disambiguating user intent, more specific types of search results, extending beyond Web results, will get included on the results page and presented to the user.

This introduces something else that opens up some interesting implications for Google. And again, if they choose to go down this path, it flies in the face of something that Marissa Mayer has previously stated. On the search results page as we know it, display or other types of advertising just don’t work that well. The search results pages is heavily text-based. We look for text, we respond to text, we click on text. Anything that’s not text acts as an interruption and distraction. There’s no place on this page for display or rich media advertising.

But if you mix up the search results page and start including things like images, video clips, maps, icons for audio files, you move away from the common paradigm of the text based search results page. The Google page becomes much more like a personalized, on-the-fly portal based around the intent of our query. As such, it includes stimuli from a lot of different sources, presented in a lot of different ways. There will be many things fighting for your attention. And in this paradigm, perhaps display and rich media advertising works better. In another announcement from Google, Marissa Mayer appears to have backtracked and open the door for this.

Yesterday, Marissa responded to a question about possible inclusion of non text-based ads in this way:

Well we don’t have anything to announce on that today. I do think this opens the door for the introduction of richer media into the search results page. We are now going to understand how users interact with that. And as Alan always likes to say search is about finding the best answer, not just the best URL or the best textual snippet.  

For us ads are answers as well. Searching ads is just as hard as searching the Web, as searching images. And so I was hoping that we could bring some of these same advances in terms of the richness of media to ads.

Greg Sterling, in his post on Search Engine Land, calls it something of a bombshell (Greg, I’m now regreting that I didn’t attend, as I would have loved to chat to you about this) and I agree. This is a significant retraction of Google’s long running stand on keeping display ads off the SERP:

There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.

Google said in their announcements that the changes for the user will be subtle at first. In fact, the position of the dynamically generated navigation links that appear about the search results will largely be ignored by most users. They won’t even know they exist. But in typical Google fashion, this tentative presentation of new functionality will be an incremental one. The typical path that Google takes when introducing new functionality is

  • subtly introduce new navigation options in the way of links that tend to be out of the primary scan path
  • make it an opt in experience for the user
  • gradually roll this functionality into a default opt in
  • eventually integrate more fully into the standard presentation of results
  • move to full integration and remove the ability for the user to opt out

if Google goes down this path with both universal and personal search, you can expect to see a substantially different look for search results in the near future. And as with most things we’ve talked about that Google is looking at introducing, there will be a trade-off between overall functionality for most users and a relinquishing of control for a small number of users.

My final point for this post is the speed of which Google is introducing new search innovations. A few weeks ago I posted that Google may be treating search as the forgotten child, devoting more attention to the sexier new channels they were acquiring, including pretty much everything under the sun. Matt Cutts was quick to post a comment saying that Google was still very much involved with search and that there would be a number of new things rolling out in the near future. It appears that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about and now have to eat my words, as the announcements over the last few weeks have indicated that Google is still very much in the search game and is moving forward at, what for them, is breakneck pace.

I’ve often stated before the Google was the victim of their own success. Because they have such a large slice search market, any changes to the actual presentation of the search pages came with a lot of risk. It’s a major monetization channel for them, their biggest one by far, and any changes in user experience through the introduction of new functionality comes with the potential of dramatically reducing click through on sponsored ads. I predicted that this would make it tough for Google to really innovate with search and we would probably be looking to the smaller players to aggressively pursue innovation. Interestingly, much of my recent conversation with Ask’s usability team lead, Michael Ferguson, revolved around this point. That interview will be running tomorrow on Search Engine Land, with full transcript posted to this blog. If you look at what Ask is been doing with AskX:

AskX

 It’s very similar to what Google says they will be doing with universal search results. It’s taking content from a number of different sources and rolling it into one combined search results page. It came as a complete surprise to me when I read the release indicating that Google is moving aggressively down the same path. Google will not be taking the path that Ask is, by aggressively presenting new functionality on their main site, Google will introduce it incrementally, bit by bit. But expect the evolution of the search experience on Google to move fairly quickly.

All of Google’s announcements in the last few months point in the same direction. They all point to a highly personalized, highly relevant portal to all of Google’s information. Here’s my other prediction. While Marissa was very careful in past interviews to state that personalization is currently impacting only the organic search results, with no work being done on the personalized presentation of sponsored content, I smell another smokescreen. Personalized presentation of advertising content is just too huge a revenue opportunity for Google and we’ll be seeing it in the very near future.