Category Archives: Online Trends

4000 Ads a Day and Counting

First published October 11, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s not easy being a consumer. Current estimates indicate that the average urban dweller is exposed to between 3,000 and 5,000 advertising messages every day. That means, settling on the middle number, that every waking hour (sleep seems to be our only reprieve, and I hear they’re working on that) you’re presented with an ad every 14.4 seconds. That’s every 14.4 seconds, every minute of every day you’re alive. The frequency of this advertising barrage has doubled in the past 30 years.

“Are We There Yet?”

So, let’s imagine that your 5-year-old child interrupted you every 14 and a half seconds with “Moooommmm…” or “Daaaaddd…”. If we use my patience limits as a baseline here, that mean’s you’d last about 1.3 minutes before you went ballistic. The difference, of course, is that we’re genetically hardwired to pay attention to our children, much as we sometimes might try not to. We’ve been conditioned to ignore advertising.

But what happens when we really want to buy something? Suddenly, we’re looking for information, and we spend a lot of time doing so. At least, that’s true for some purchases. Take a computer, for instance. It’s not unusual to spend 10 to 15 hours researching a computer purchase, from the minute you decide you need one to the minute you tear open the box in your home. That’s not including the many hours needed to get your “plug and play” box actually playing after plugging.

The Cost of Consumer Research

Of course, we generally don’t put a cost on our time, but let’s say an hour of your time is worth about $40 (an average rate for someone making $75,000 per year). That means that $1,000 box of electronics cost you an additional $600, just in time spent to pick the right box.

The Internet is not making this any easier. Yes, as consumers, we’re armed with more information sources, but we spend a lot of time sorting out sense from nonsense. The explosion of information sources, both the good and the bad, mean we’re spending more time thinking about what we should buy. A study by ScanAlert found that that across many ecommerce categories, the average time to buy has increased by almost 79% in the past two years. Now, this was just the duration from first visit to purchase in the actual online store. It doesn’t include any consumer research before visiting the store. But I think we’re safe to assume that there would be a corresponding increase in the amount of online consumer “tire kicking.”

It’s No Picnic for Advertisers Either

Before you feel too sorry for yourself, let me tell you, it’s not easy being an advertiser, either. How do we get past the filters? How do we stand out from the other 3,999 messages you’ll hear today?

To recycle some research I did for a previous column (because research is a terrible thing to waste), the Ontario Tourism Board ran newspaper ads in Toronto targeting people looking to vacation in the province. The ad cost (at posted rate card rates) about $54,000. Even with an exceptional response rate, that ad might sneak though the filters of 1,700 or so people and actually catch their attention. This works out to an average cost of about $32 per introduction, or, to put it another way, $32 to tear a hole through that advertising barricade you’ve been building.

Got a Minute? I’ll Make it Worth Your While

So, if advertisers are willing to pay to get your attention, why not cut out the middle man and pay you directly? Why should the Toronto Star get all that money, when you’re the person the advertiser wants to talk to? What if every one of those 4,000 advertisers who are going to try to get your attention today (Consuummmerrr…Consummmerrr!) paid you a dollar to listen to what they have to say? You’d do okay financially, to the tune of about $1.46 million a year. Of course, your brain would explode after the first hour.

The concept is not as far-fetched as it seems. In fact, in 1999 John Hagel III and Marc Singer, both principals with McKinsey and Company, wrote a book called “Net Worth” that explored this very premise (along with a number of others) as a potential online business model. The book provided a detailed business plan for a new concept: the infomediary. Some of the details have been passed over in the last eight years since publication, but the basic premise still addresses a significant disconnect in today’s advertising marketplace. Next week, I’ll lay out the foundation of infomediaries and look at how some of our favorite search players seem to be inching their way towards Hagel and Singer’s proposal.

We now return you to your regular commercial onslaught.

How Should I Compare Thee to Google?

First published September 20, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There is a substantial amount of online speculation being generated around the question of where Facebook is going, and will it beat Google?  John Battelle is currently drafting a list of questions, including those two, to run past Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit.

At first glance, asking if Facebook can beat Google is a bit like asking if a penguin could beat an aardvark.  Beat it at what? What’s the contest? Or, perhaps more appropriately, asking whether your neighborhood can beat your table saw. Talk about comparing apples and oranges — and at least those are both fruit. Facebook is a community and Google is a tool.  But the question may not be as farfetched as it seems, because undoubtedly, as each grows and explores new monetization opportunities, more common ground will emerge between the two.

The Next “Google” Is….

To be honest, I don’t quite understand this compulsion to compare every new online business model to Google.  It’s a bit like comparing every business in your city to a successful grocery store, or a gas station.  Businesses are unique — and this is true whether you’re looking online or on Main Street.  They have different revenue engines, different objectives, different customers, and different ways to connect with those customers.  I suppose you could compare bottom-line revenues, this usually being considered the lowest common denominator with most businesses, but I’m not sure what the point is in that.  What are you trying to prove?  The success of the company?  If the supermarket makes 150 times as much as a coffee shop, does this mean the supermarket is 150 times more successful?

Facebook: A Sense of Place

Nevertheless, let’s return to the question of whether Facebook will supplant the Google juggernaut.  Let me spend a few minutes looking at the inherent differences between the Facebook model and the Google model, at least as far as they sit today.  Facebook is an online environment, a community, and as such it’s a totally different animal than Google.  The nature of the interaction with users is completely different; the intent of the site is completely different.  Facebook creates an online space, and search is only incidentally used to navigate that space.  True, as the space becomes larger and more rich, search will become more important as a core functionality within Facebook. Communities need to be functional (something that Facebook seems to get better than any of its competitors). They need infrastructure, and because searching is fundamental functionality no matter where you are online, the same will be true in the Facebook community.

Google: The Right Tool

And it’s that core functionality that has allowed Google to grow and prosper while the many predecessors to Facebook have emerged, flourished briefly and died on the vine, including Google’s own Orkut.  Google is, right now, still the Swiss army knife of the Web.  When it comes to online functionality, and in particular, finding things online, Google is the undisputed champion.  I’m currently mulling over the concept of how we navigate online and physical spaces and the fact that, while we need spatial cognitive maps to navigate our hometown, we don’t need them to navigate the Web. There is no static physical 3-dimensional space that we have to memorize routes through.  Online landmarks occupy no physical location. Rather, we have a conceptual space, and we use search to navigate based on informational proximity, rather than physical proximity (thanks to Nico Brooks for planting this virulent little “thought weed” in my rather overgrown mental garden). Google has been tremendously successful because it’s the knee-jerk choice for millions of consumers to navigate the Web, looking for stuff to buy.

Twains On A Collision Course…

So, that’s a very quick view of how the two properties diverge. But let’s look at how they share similarities. For all Google’s success as a tool, it longs to be more than that. The introduction of iGoogle, which will be driven by Google’s moves into personalization, will make it more of your own online, conceptual space, encroaching on Facebook territory. And Google wants your iGoogle portal to be the place you organize the ever-increasing functionality of the semantic Web. That objective puts it on a head-on collision with Facebook. Both are encouraging an open platform development ecosystem where developers can plug new functionality into their infrastructure.  This last note is somewhat ironic, because philosophically, Microsoft has always wanted to be the one to create the development infrastructure of the new Web. Looks like another case where the big M was left sputtering at the starting line.

Facebook, in turn, is looking to be the place where you define yourself as an individual in the new online landscape. It wants to be your home in the emerging online “cloud.” Their exponential growth is nothing short of amazing. Other than Linked In, I have never received a significant number of invitations from any social network. But in the past two months, I’ve received more friend invitations from Facebook than I have linking requests from Linked In. And these are primarily people in my age group, so they’re hopelessly old and far removed from anything resembling a “cutting edge.”

My 14-year-old daughter is aghast at the notion that I even have a Facebook account. It’s akin to me tagging along with her and her friends on a visit to the mall. Our general manager, a grandma (although a very funky grandma) is hopelessly addicted to Facebook. Obviously, there’s more here than your usual “flash in the pan” social network. As Facebook incorporates more online functionality for the individual, and Google looks to create a sense of personalized place for that same individual, expect the two to go head to head.

I’ve always thought that the importance of “favorite” places online has been somewhat disregarded. We are creatures of habit, and unless we’re looking for something out of the ordinary, we’ll probably keep treading down the same online paths over and over. That’s why every new start-up is at an immediate disadvantage, unless it can provide something sufficiently remarkable and differentiated from what previously existed. Google did this, and it appears that Facebook is on the same path. And in that way, these two do beg comparison.

Search Engine Results: 2010 – Marissa Mayer Interview

marissa-mayer-7882_cnet100_620x433Just getting back in the groove after SES San Jose. You may have caught some of my sessions or heard we have released a white paper looking at the future of search and with some eye tracking on personalized and universal search results. We don’t have the final version up yet, but it should be available later this week. The sneak preview got rave reviews in SJ.

Anyway, I interviewed a number of influencers in the space, and I’ll be posting the full transcripts here on my blog over the next week. I already posted Jakob Nielsen’s interview. Today I’ll be posting Marissa Mayer’s, who did a keynote at SES SJ. It makes for interesting reading. Also, I’ll be running excerpts and additional commentary on Just Behave on Search Engine Land. The first half ran a couple weeks ago. Look for more (and a more regular blog schedule) coming out over the next few weeks. Summer’s over and it’s back to work.

Here’s my chat with Marissa:

Gord: I guess I have one big question that will probably break out into a few smaller questions.  What I wanted to do for Search Engine Land is speculate on what the search engine results page might look like to the user in three years time.  With some of the emerging things like personalization and universal search results and some the things that are happening with the other engines: Ask with their 3D Search, which is their flavor of Universal, it seems to me that we might be at a point for the first time in a long time the results that we’re seeing may have a significant amount of flux over the next 3 years.  I wanted to talk to a few people in the industry about their thoughts of what we might be seeing 3 years down the road.  So that’s the big over-arching question I’m posing.

Marissa: Sure, Minority Report on search result pages…Well, I’d like to say it’s going to be like that but I think that’s a little further out.  There are some really fascinating technologies that I don’t know if you’ve seen..some work being done by a guy named Jeff Han?

Gord: No.

Marissa: So I ran into Jeff Han both of the past years at TED. Basically he was doing multi-touch before they did it on the iPhone on a giant wall sized screen, so it actually does look a lot like Minority Report. It was this big space where you could interact, you could annotate, you could do all those things.  But let me talk first about what I see happening as some trends that are going to drive change.

One is that we are seeing more and more broadband usage and I think in three years everyone will be on very fast connections, so a lot more to choose from and  a lot more data without taking a large latency hit.  The other thing we’re seeing is different mediums, audio, video.  They used to not work.  If you remember getting back a year ago, everytime you clicked on an audio file or a movie file, it would be, like, ‘thunk’?  It needs a plug in, or “thunk”, it doesn’t work.  Now we’re coming into some standardized formats and players that are either browser or technology independent enough, or are integrated enough that they are actually going to work.  And also we’re seeing users having more and more storage on their end.  And those are the sort of 3 computer science trends that are things that are going to change things.  I also think that people are becoming more and more inclined to annotate and interact with the web. It started with bloggers, and then it moved to mash ups, and now people are really starting to take a lot more ownership over their participation on the web and they want to annotate things, they want to mark it up.

So I think when you add these things together it means there’s a couple of things.  One, we will be able to have much more rich interaction with the search results pages. There might be layers of search results pages: take my results and show them on a map, take my results and show them to me on a timeline.  It’s basically the ability to interact in a really fast way, and take the results you have and see them in a new light.  So I think that that kind of interaction will be possible pretty easily and pretty likely.  I think it will be, hopefully, a layout that’s a little bit less linear and text based, even than our search results today and ultimately uses what I call the ‘sea of whiteness’ more in the middle of the page, and lays out in a more information dense way all the information from videos to audio reels to text, and so on and so forth.  So if you imagine the results page, instead of being long and linear, and having ten results on the page that you can scroll through to having ten very heterogeneous results, where we show each of those results in a form that really suits their medium, and in a more condensed format.  A couple of years ago we did a very interesting experiment here on the UI team where we took three or 4 different designs where the problem was artificially constrained.  It was above the fold Google.  If you needed to say everything that Google needed to say above the fold, how would you lay it out?  And some came in with two columns, but I think two columns is really hard when it was linear and text based.  When you started seeing some diagrams, some video, some news, some charts, you might actually have a page that looks and feels more like an interactive encyclopedia.

Gord: So, we’re almost going from a more linear presentation of results, very text based, to almost more of a portal presentation, but a personalized portal presentation.

Marissa: Right and I think as people, one, are getting more bandwidth and two, as they’re more savvy with how they look at more information, think of it this way, as more of serial access versus random access.  One of my pet peeves is broadcast news, where I really don’t like televised news anymore.  I like newspapers, and I like reading online because when I’m online or with newspapers, I have random access.  I can jump to whatever I’m most interested in.  And when you’re sitting there watching broadcast news you have to take it in the order, at the pace and at the speed that they are feeding it to you.  And yes, they try to make it better by having the little tickers at the bottom, but you can’t just jump in to what you’re interested in.  You can only read one piece of text at a time, and it’s hard to survey and scan and hone in on one type of medium or another when it’s all one medium.  So certainly there is some random access happening with the search results today.  I think as the results formats becomes much more heterogeneous, we’re going to have a more condensed presentation that allows for better random access.  Above the fold being really full of content, some text, some audio, some video, maybe even playing in place, and you see what grabs your attention, and pulls you in.   But it’s almost like random access on the front page of the New York Times, where am I more drawn to the picture, or the chart, or this piece of content down here?  What am I drawn to?

Gord: Right.  If you’re looking at different types of stimuli across the page, I guess what you’re saying is, as long as all that content is relevant to the query you can scan it more efficiently than you could with the standardized text based scanning, linear scanning, that we’re seeing now

Marissa: That’s right.

Gord: Ok.

Marissa: So the eyes follow and they just read and scan in a linear order, where when you start interweaving charts and pictures and text, people’s eyes can jump around more, and they can gravitate towards the medium that they understand best.

Gord: So, this is where Ask is going right now with their 3D search, where it’s broken it into 3 columns and they’re mixing images and text and different things.  So I guess what we’re looking at is taking it to the next extreme, making it a richer, more interactive experience, right?

Marissa: Rather than having three rote columns, it would actually be more organic.

Gord: So more dynamic.  And it mixes and matches the format based on the types of material it’s bringing back.

Marissa: Well, to keep hounding on the analogy of the front page of the New York Times.  It’s not like the New York Times…I mean they have basically the same layout each time, but it’s not like they have a column that only has this kind of content, and if it doesn’t fill the column, too bad.  They have a basic format that they change as it suits the information.

Gord: So in that kind of format, how much control does the user have? How much functionality do you put in the hands of the user?

Marissa: I think that, back to my third point, I think that people will be annotating search results pages and web pages a lot.  They’re going to be rating them, they’re going to be reviewing them.  They’re going to be marking them up, saying  “I want to come back to this one later”.  So we have some remedial forms of this in terms of Notebook now, but I imagine that we’re going to make notes right on the pages later.  People are going to be able to say I want to add a note here; I want to scribble something there, and you’ll be able to do that.  So I think the presentation is going to be largely based on our perceived notion of relevance, which of course leverages the user, in the ways they interact with the page, and look at what they do and that helps inform us as to what we should do.  So there is some UI user interaction, but the majority of user interaction will be on keeping that information and making it consumable in the best possible way.

Gord: Ok, and then if, like you said, if you go one step further, and provide multiple layers, so you could say, ok, plot my search results, if it’s a local search, plot my search results on a map.  There’s different ways to, at the user’s request, present that information, and they can have different layers that they can superimpose them on.

Marissa: So what I’m sort of imagining is that in the first basic search, you’re presented with a really rich general overview page, that interweaves all these different mediums, and on that page you have a few basic controls, so you could say, look, what really matters to me is the time dimension, or what really matters to me is the location dimension.  So do you want to see it on a timeline, do you want to see it on a map?

Gord: Ok, so taking a step further than what you do with your news results, or your blog search results, so you can sort them a couple of different ways, but then taking that and increasing the functionality so it’s a richer experience.

Marissa: It’s a richer experience. What’s nice about timeline and date as we’re currently experimenting with them on Google Experimental is not only do they allow you to sort differently, they allow you to visualize your results differently.  So if you see your results on a map, you can see the loci, so you can see this location is important to this query, and this location is really important to that query.  And when you look at it in time line you can see, “wow, this is a really hot topic for that decade”.  They just help you visualize the nut of information across all the results in these fundamentally different ways that ‘sorts’ kind of get at. But it’s really allowing that richer presentation and that overview of results on the meta level that helps you see it.

Gord: Ok.  I had a chance to talk to Jakob Nielsen about this on Friday, and he doesn’t believe that we’re going to be able to see much of a difference in the search results in 3 years.  He just doesn’t think that that can be accomplished in that time period.  What you’re talking about is a pretty drastic change from what we’re seeing today, and the search results that we’re seeing today haven’t changed that much in the last 10 years, as far as what the user is seeing.  You’re really feeling that this is possible?

Marissa: It’s interesting, you know, I pay am lot of attention to how the results look.  And I do think that change happens slowly over time and that there are little spurts of acceleration.  We at Google certainly saw a little accelerated push during May when we launched Universal Search.  I’m of the view that maybe its 3 years out, maybe it’s 5 years out, maybe it’s 10 years out.  I’m a big subscriber to the slogan that people tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.  My analogy to this is that when I was 5, I remember watching the Jetson’s and being, like, this rocks!  When I’m thirty there are flying cars!  Right?  And here I am, I’m 32 and we don’t even have a good flying car prototype, and yet the world has totally changed in ways that nobody expected because of the internet and computing.  In ways that in the 1980s no one even saw it coming.  Because personal computers were barely out, let alone the internet.  It’s interesting.  We do our off site in August. I do an offsite with my team where we do Google two years out. There it’s really interesting to see how people think about it.  I take all the prime members on my team, so they’re the senior engineers, and everybody has homework.  They have to do a homepage and a results page of Google, and this year it’ll be Google 2009.

Gord: Oh Cool!

Marissa: Six months out, it’s really easy because if we’re working on it, because if it’s going to launch in 6 months and it’s big enough that you would notice, we’re working on it right now and we know it’s coming.  And five years or ten years out we start getting into the bigger picture things like what I’m talking to you about.  When the little precursors that get us ready for those advances happen between now and then that’s what’s shifting.   So I’m giving you the big picture so you can start understanding what some of the mini steps that might happen in the next 3 years, to get us ready for that, would be.  The two to three year timeframe is painful. Everybody at my offsite said, “this timeframe sucks!” So it’s just far enough out that we don’t have great visibility, will mobile devices be something that’s a really big new factor in three years?  Maybe, maybe not.  Some of the things are making fast progress now may even take a big leap, right, like it was from 1994 to 97 on the internet.  Or if you think about G-mail and Maps, like AJAX applications..you wouldn’t have foreseen those in 2002 or 2003.  So, two or three years is a really painful time frame because some things are radically different, but probably in different ways than you would expect.  You have very low visibility in our industry to that time frame.  So I actually find it easier to talk about the six month timeframe, or the ten year timeframe.  So I’m giving you the ten year picture knowing that it’s not like the unveiling of a statue, where you can just take the sheet, snatch it off and go, “Voila there it is”.  If you look at the changes we’ve made over time at Google search they’ve always been “getting this ready, getting this ready”.  So the changes are very slow and feel like they’re very incremental.  But then you look at them in summation over 18 months or two years, you’re like, “you know, nothing felt really big along the way, but they are fundamentally different today”.

Gord: One last question.  So we’re looking at this much richer search experience where it’s more dynamic and fluid and there are different types of content being presented on the page.  Does advertising or the marketing message get mixed into that overall bucket, and does this open the door to significantly different types of presentation of the advertising message on the search results page?

Marissa: I think that there will be different types of advertising on the search results page.  As you know, my theory is always that the ads should match the search results.  So if you have text results, you have text ads, and if you have image results, you have image ads.  So as the page becomes richer, the ads also need to become richer, just so that they look alive and match the page.  That said, trust is a fundamental premise of search.  Search is a learning activity.  You think of Google and Ask and these other search engines as teachers.  As an end user the only reason learning and teaching works, the only way it works, is when you trust your teacher.  You know you’re getting the best information because it’s the best information, not because they have an agenda to mislead you or to make more money or to push you somewhere because of their own agenda.  So while I do think the ads will look different, they will look different in format, or they may look different in placement, I think our commitment to calling out very strongly where we have a monetary incentive and we may be biased will remain.  Our one promise on our search results page, and I think that will stand, is that we clearly mark the ads.  It’s very important to us that the users know what the ads are because it’s the disclosure of that bias, that ultimately builds the trust which is paramount to search

Gord: Ok.  Great to see you’re a keynote at San Jose in August.

Marissa: Should be fun.  This whole topic has me kind of jazzed up so maybe I’ll talk about that.

Search Engine Results: 2010 – Interview with Danny Sullivan

Danny-SullivanHere’s another in the series of the Search:2010 transcripts, this one of my chat with Search Engine Land Editor Danny Sullivan:

Gord: The big question that I’m asking is how much change are we going to see on the search engine results page over the next three years.  What impact are things like universal search and personalization and some of the other things we’re seeing come out, how much of that is going to impact the actual interface the user is going to see.  Maybe let’s just start there.

Danny: I love the whole series to begin with because then I thought, Gosh, I never really sat down and tried to plot out how I would do it, and I wish I had had the time to do that before we talked (laughs).  But it would be nice to have a contest or something for the people who are in the space to say I think this is the way we should do it or where it should go.
But the thing at the top of my head that I expect or I assume that we’re going to get is… I think they’re going to get a lot more intelligent at giving you more from a particular database when they know you’re doing a specific a kind of search.  It’s not necessarily an interface change, but then again it is.  This is the thing I talked about when I was saying about when the London Car Bombing attempts happened, and I’m searching for “London Bombings”.  When you see a spike in certain words you ought to know that there’s a reason behind that spike.  It’s going to be news driven probably, so why are you giving me 10 search results? Why don’t you give me 10 news results?  And saying I’ve also got stuff from across the web, or I’ve got other things that are showing up in that regard.  And that hasn’t changed.  I‘d like to see them get that.   I’d like to see them figure out some intelligent manner to maybe get to that point.  Part of what could come along with that too is that as we start displaying more vertical results the search interface itself could change.  So I think the most dramatic change in how we present search results, really, has come off of local.  And people go “wow, these maps are really cool!” Well of course they’re really cool, they’re presenting information on a map which makes sense when we’re talking about local information.  You want things displayed in that kind of manner.  It doesn’t make sense to take all web search results and put them on a map. You could do it, but it doesn’t communicate additional information for you that’s probably irrelevant and that needs to be presented in a visual manner.  If you think about the other kinds of search that you tend to do, Blog search for instance, it may be that there’s going to be a more chronological display. We saw them do with news archive where they would do a search and they would tell you this happened within these years at this time.  Right now when I do a Google blog search, by default it shows me ‘most relevant’.  But sometimes I want to know what the most recent thing is, and what’s the most recent thing that’s also the most relevant thing right? So perhaps when I do a Search, a Google blog search, I can see something running down the left hand side that says “last hour” and within the last hour you show me the most relevant things in the last hour, the last 4 hours, and then the last day.  And you could present it that way, almost sort of a timeline metaphor. I’m sure there are probably things you could do with shading and other stuff to go along with that.  Image search…Live has done some interesting things now where they’ve made it much less textual, and much more stuff that you’re hovering over, that you can interact with it in that regard.  An I don’t know, it might be that with book search and those other kinds of things that there’ll be other kinds of metaphors that come into place that you can do when you know you are going to present most of the information just from those sorts of resources.  With Video search… I think we’ve already seen a lot of the thing with video search is just giving you the display and being able to play the videos directly.  Rather than having to leave the site because it just doesn’t make sense to have to leave the site in that regard.

Gord: When I was talking to Marissa, she saw a lot more mash ups with search functionality, and you talked about having maps and that with local search making sense, but its almost like you take the search functionality and you layer that over different types of interfaces that make sense, given the type of information your interacting with.

Danny: Right.

Gord: One thing I talked about with a few different people is ‘how much functionality do you put in the hands of the user?’ how much needs to be transparent? How hard are we willing to work with a page of search results?

Danny: By default, not a lot, you know if you’re just doing a general search, I don’t think that putting a whole lot of functionality is going to help you. You could put a lot of options there but historically we haven’t seen people use those things, and I think that’s because they just want to do their searches. They want you to just naturally get the right kind of information that’s there and a lot of the time if they give you that direct answer you don’t need to do a lot of manipulation.  It’s a different thing I think when you get into some very vertical, very task orientated kinds of searches, where you’re saying, ‘I don’t just need the quick answer, I don’t just need to browse and see all the things that are out there, but actually, I’m trying to drill down on this subject in a particular way’.  And local tends to be a great example. ‘Now you’ve given me all the results that match the zip code, but really I would like to narrow it down into a neighborhood, so how can I do that?’  Or a shopping search.  ‘I have a lot of results but now I want to buy something, so now I need to know who has it in inventory? Now I really need to know who has it cheapest? And I need to know who’s the most trusted merchant?’ Then I think the searcher is going to be willing to do more work on the search and make use of more of the options that you give to them.

Gord: Like you say, if you’re putting users directly into an experience where they are closer to the information that they were looking for, there’s probably a greater likelihood that they’re willing to meet you half way, by doing a little extra work to refine that if you give them tools that are appropriate to the types of results they are seeing.  So if it’s shopping search, filtering that by price, or by brand.  That’s common functionality with a shopping search engine and maybe we’ll see that get in to some of the other verticals. But I guess the big question is, in the next three years are the major engines going to gain enough confidence that they’ll be providing a deeper vertical experience as the default, rather than as an invisible tab or a visible tab.

Danny: I still tend to think that the way that they are going to give a deeper vertical experience is the visible tab idea, which is you know, that you are not going to be overtly asked to do it, it is just going to do it for you, and then give you options to get out of it, if it was the wrong choice. So, both Ask, and Google, which are getting all the attention right now, for universal search, you know, blended search if you wanna find a generic term for it that, doesn’t favor one service over the other.  The other term is federated search and I’ve always hated that because it always felt like something from that, you know, came out of the Star Trek Enterprise (laugh). No, I want Klingon search! (laugh) I think that in both of those cases you do the search and the default still is web.  And Ask will say, over here on the side we have some other results. Yes, universal search is inserting an item here or an item there but in most of the cases it still looks like web search, right? They still, really feel like OneBoxes. I haven’t had a universal search happen to me yet that I’ve come along and I’ve thought ‘that really was something I couldn’t have got just from searching the web’ except when I’ve gotten a map.  That’s come in when they’ve shown the map, and that is that kind of dramatic change, and I think at some point they will get to that point, that kind of dramatic change where you just search for “plumbers” and a zip code.  I’m so confident of it I’m just going to give you Google local. I’m not just going to insert a map and give you 7 more web listings that are down there. I’m going to give you a whole bunch of listings and I’m going to change the whole interface on you and if you’re going ‘well, this isn’t what I want’, then I’m going to be able to give you some options if you want to escape out of it.  I like what Ask does, in the sense that it’s easy to escape out of that thing because you just look off to the side and there’s web search over here, there’s other stuff over there.  I think it’s harder for Google to do that when they try to blend it all together. The difficulty remains as to whether people will actually notice that stuff off to the side, and make use of it.

Gord: That was actually something that Jacob Nielsen brought up. He said the whole paradigm of the linear scan down the page is such a dominant user behavior, that we’ve got so used to, you know engines like Ask can experiment with a different layout where they’re going two dimensional, but will the users be able to scan that efficiently?

Danny: I’ve been using this Boeing versus Airbus analogy when I’m trying to explain to people the differences between what Google is doing and what Ask is doing.  Boeing is going, ‘Well, we’ll build small fast energy-efficient jets’ and Airbus is saying ‘We’ll build big huge jets, and we’ll move more people so you’ll be able to do less flights’.  And when I look at the blended search, Google’s approach is, well, we’ve got to stay linear, we’ve got to keep it all in there. That’s where people are expecting the stuff and so we’re going to go that way.  Ask’s approach is we’re going to be putting it all over the place on the page and we’ve got this split, really nice interface.  And I agree with them. And of course Walt Mossberg wrote that review where he said ‘oh they’re so much nicer, they look so much cleaner’, and that’s great, except that he’s a sophisticated person, I’m a sophisticated person, you’re a sophisticated person, we search all the time.  We look at that sort of stuff. A typical person might just ignore it; it might continue to be eye candy that they don’t even notice. And that is the big huge gamble that is going on between these two sorts of players and then, yet again, it might not be a gamble because when you talk to Jim Lanzone, he says ‘My testing tells me this is what our people do’. Well, his people might be different from the Google people. Google has got a lot more new people that come over there that are like, ‘I just want to do a search, show me some things, where’s the text links? I’m done’. So I tend to look perhaps more kindly on what Google is doing, than some people who try to measure them up against Ask because I understand that they deal with a lot more people than Ask, and they have to be much more conservative than what Ask is doing.  And I think that what’s going to happen is those two are going to approach closer together.  The advantage, of course, Jim has over at Ask, is that he doesn’t have to put ads in that column so he’s got a whole column he can make use of, and it is useful, and it is a nice sort of place to tuck it in there. If you really want to talk about search interfaces, what will be really fun to envision is what happens when Ajax starts coming along and doing other things. Can I start putting the sponsored search results where they are hovering above other results? Is there other issues that come with that?  There may be some confusion as to why I’m getting this and why I’m getting that. Can I pop up a map as I hover over a result? I could deliver you a standard set of search results and I can also deliver you local results on top of a particular type of picture.  If I move my mouse along it, I could show you a preview of what you get in local and you might go “Oh wow, there’s a whole map there”. I want to jump off in that direction.  That would be really fun to see that type of stuff come along there, but I’m just not seeing anything come out of it.  What we typically have had when people have played with the interface is, these really WYSIWYG things like, ‘well we’ll fly you though the results, or we’ll group them’.  None of which is really something that you’d need, that added to the choices, “do I want to go vertical, do I not want to go vertical?”

Gord: When we start talking about the fact that the search results page could be a lot more dynamic and interactive, of course the big question is what does that do for monetization of the page?  One of the things that Jakob (Nielsen) talked about was banner blindness.  Do people start cutting out sections of the page?  We talked a little about that.  How do you make sure that the advertising doesn’t get lost on the page when there’s just a lot more visual information in there to assimilate?

Danny: Well I think a variety of things that are going to start happening there.  For example, Google doesn’t do paid inclusion, right, but Google has partnerships with YouTube and they have these channels, and they’re going to be sharing revenue from these channels with other people. So when they start including that stuff up, perhaps they are getting paid off of that.  They didn’t pay to put it in the index but, because they are better able to promote their video channels, more people are going over there, and they’re making money off of that as a destination.  So in some ways, they can afford to have their video results start becoming more relevant because they don’t have to worry about if you didn’t click on the ad from the initial search result, they sort of lost you.  In terms of how the other ads might go, I guess the concern might be if the natural results are getting better and better why would anyone click on the ads anyway?  Maybe people will reassess the paid results and some people will come through and say that paid search results are a form of search data base as well.  So we’re going to call them classifieds or we’re going to call them ads, we’re going to move them right into the linear display.  You know there’ll be issues, because at least in the US, you have the FCC guidelines that say that you should really keep them segregated.  So if you don’t highlight them or blend them in some way, you might run into some regulatory problems.  But then again, maybe those rules might start to change as the search innovation starts to change, and go with it from there.  I don’t know, the search engines might come up with other things.  You know we’re getting toolbars that are appearing more on all of our things. Google might start thinking, ‘Well, let’s put ads back onto that toolbar’.  We used to have those sorts of things, and everyone seems to catch on, but they might come back, and that might be another way that some of the players, especially somebody like Google, might make money beyond just putting the ad on the search result page.

Gord: In the next three years, are we going to get to the point where search starts to become less of a destination activity like the way it is now, and the functionality  sits underneath more of Web 2.0 or semantic web or whatever you want to call it.  It almost becomes a mash up of functionality that underlies other types of sites. Are we going to stop going to a Google or a Yahoo as much to launch a distinct search as we do now?

Danny: You know people have been saying that for at least 3 or 4 years now, especially with Microsoft. ‘Oh you’re not even going to go there, you’re going to do it from your desktop.’  Vista, which I have yet to actually use.  I’ve got the laptop and I’m about to start playing with it! Apparently, it’s supposed to be even more integrated than it was with XP.  But I still tend to think, you know what? We do stuff in our browsers.  I know widgets are growing and I know there’s more stuff that’s just drawing stuff into your computer as well, but we still tend to do stuff in our browser.  I still see search as something where I’m going to go to a search engine and do the search.  With the exception of toolbars. I think we’re going to do a lot more searching through toolbars.  Tool bars are everywhere; it’s really rare for me to start a search where I’m actually not doing it from the toolbar.  I just have a toolbar that sits up there, and I don’t need to be at the search engine itself.  But I still want the results displayed in my browser.  Because I think most of the stuff I’m going to have to deal with is going to be in my browser as well.  So it doesn’t really help to be able to search from Microsoft Word, right?  Because I don’t want all these sites in a little window within Word. I’m probably going to have to read what they say, so I’m probably going to have to go there.  I think that will change though if I have a media player, then I think it makes much more sense for me, and you can already do this with some media players, where you can do searches, and have the results flow back in.  iTunes is a classic example. iTunes is basically a music search engine.  Sure, it’s limited to the music and the podcasts that are within iTunes, but it doesn’t really make any sense for me to go to the Apple website. Although, interestingly, here’s an example where Apple is just a terrible failure.  They’ve got all this stuff out there, they’ve got stuff that perhaps you might be interested in even if you don’t use their software and there’s just no way to get to it on the web.  The last time I looked you really had to do the searches in iTunes.  So they’re missing out on being a destination for those people who say ‘I’m not going to use iTunes’  or ‘I don’t have iTunes’ or ‘I’m on a different version.’ I don’t know if you’ve downloaded it recently but it takes forever and it’s just a pain.

Gord: I think that covers off the main questions I wanted to cover off in this.  Is there anything else as far as search in the next three years that you wanted to comment on?

Danny: You know, it’s hard because if you’d asked me that three years ago, would I have told you, ‘watch for the growth of verticals and watch for the growth of blended search’, (laughs) right?  I’ve been thinking really hard because, I’m like, ‘Gosh, now what am I going to talk about because they’re doing both of those things’. I think personalized search is going to continue to get strong.  I do think that Google is onto something with their personalized search results.  I don’t think that they’re going to cause you to be in an Amazon situation where you’re continuing to be recommended stuff you’re no longer interested in.  I think that people are misunderstanding how sophisticated it can be.  I think that the next big trend is that, ironically from what I just said to you, search is going to start jumping into devices.  And everything is going to have a search box.  But it will be appropriate.  My iPod itself will have a search capability within it.  And the iPhone, to some degree, maybe is going to be that look at how it’s happening already. But I’ll be able to search, access, and get information appropriate to that device within it.  Windows Media Center, when I first got that in 2005, I said, this is amazing, because it’s basically got TV search built into it.  I do the search and then of course, it allows me to subscribe to the program, and records the program, and knows when the next ones are coming up.  And it makes so much more sense for that search to be in that device than it did for me to have it elsewhere.  I use it all the time, when I want to know when a programs on, I don’t have to find where the TV listings are on the web, I just walk over to my computer and do a search from within the Media Center player.  So I think we’re going to have many more devices that are internet enabled, and there’s going to be reasons why you want to do searches with them, to find stuff for them in particular.  That’s going to be the new future of search and search growth will come into it.  And in terms of what that means to the search marketer, I think it’s going to be crucial to understand that these are going to be new growth areas, because those searches when they start are going to be fairly rudimentary. It’s going to be back in the days of, OK, they’re probably going to be driven off of meta data, so you got to make sure you have your title, and your description and making sure the item that your searching for is relevant.

Gord: So obviously all that leads itself to the question of mobile search, and will mobile search be more useful by 2010?

Danny: Sure, but it’s going to be more useful because it’s not going to be mobile search.  It’s just the device is going to catch up and be more desktop-like.  I have a Windows mobile phone at the moment, and I have downloaded some of the applets like Live Search and Google Maps, and those can be handy for me to use, but for the most part, if I want to do a search, I fire up the web browser, I look for what I’m looking for, the screen is fairly large, and I can see what I wanted to find.  And I think that you’re going to find that the devices are going to continue to be small and yet gain larger screens, and have the ability for you to better do direct input. So if you want to do search, you can do a search. It’s not like you’re going to need to have to have something that’s designed for the mobile device that only shows mobile pages.  I think that’s going to change.  You’re going to have some mobile devices that are specifically not going to be able to do that and those people in the end are going to find that no one is going to be trying to support you.

Gord: Thanks Danny.

Buzzing ‘Bout Ask

First published August 23, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

On the floors of the San Jose Convention Center at Search Engine Strategies, I’ve heard a lot of buzz about many different things. I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about everything from click fraud to personalization to how long the wait would be for a bus to the Google Dance. But it was a conversation I had last night at dinner that had me reflecting as I was looking for a column topic for this week.

I’ve written before about how I like many of things that Ask is doing. This week, unprompted by me, at least 5 different people have told me over the last two days how much they like Ask’s new interface. Tonight at dinner, that’s how one of these conversation kicked off. But soon (and this also was a recurring theme) it veered in the direction of “I really like Ask, but what’s up with their TV ads ?”

Search + TV Advertising: a Dismal Track Record

First of all, I really don’t think TV advertising is the answer for any search engine. Let me recount some of those that have invested heavily in TV in the past: Infoseek (via Disney and ABC), Snap (via NBC), Altavista and Microsoft. Hmmm, what’s the common factor here? Sinking market share, perhaps? I won’t argue the merits (or lack of same) of Ask’s decision to use television, because I think there’s a much more important factor here; the company’s interface. And in that regard, I applaud its strategy.

I’ve often been asked what Microsoft should do to bolster market share. My advice has always been: be bold with your interface. Take risks. Differentiate yourself. Well, sorry, Microsoft, you’re too late. Ask has already done it. And my guess is you may soon find yourself in last place in a four-horse race.

But back to my dinner conversation. After we finished sniggering at Ask’s TV ads, I said, “You know, this is just how Google got to be number one.” No, not by running TV ads with Kato Kaelin or Chicks with Sword. I meant getting people talking about their search experience. Google grew to be a search giant by word of mouth. The company differentiated itself in the world of search by significantly upping the user experience. This got people talking, and more importantly, got people using Google, even when it was just a beta student project sitting on some borrowed servers at Stanford.

Remarkable Search Experiences

Now, Ask is generating the same kind of buzz. It’s getting people talking. It’s greasing the wheels of the WOM machine. It’s noteworthy. It’s remarkable, in the truest sense of the word. The bold moves of the 3D interface will do more for market share than dancing chicks with swords ever will (although, I have to admit, that also is getting people talking).

Jim Lanzone is a smart guy. Barry Diller is a double threat: a smart, rich guy . And kudos to Michael Ferguson and his usability team. They’ve come a long ways from Jeeves, and every step I’ve seen so far has been one in the right direction (TV ad strategies aside). As Lanzone once said to me when I asked him how Ask was going to conquer Google: “We don’t want to climb Everest right now. We’re not planning on knocking out Google. Our goal is to take our 20 million users, who are currently using us twice a month, and bump that up to four times a month. That doubles our market share,”

Now, even with these realistic goals, this is not a cakewalk. For Ask to overtake Live would require a tripling of its market share, according to the latest numbers from comScore. But I’m hearing a lot more buzz about Ask than about Live, and I’m hearing it in the right circles, the people who know good search when they see it. We’ll see if that buzz successfully crosses the chasm.

Interface Innovation

But there’s more than just market share at stake here. Ask has also boldly moved into the role of the innovator. It has pushed the envelope and introduced a different look to the search experience. It’s broken the linear paradigm. True, the company had less to lose, but it still took guts.

I was chatting with Jakob Nielsen not that long ago, and he had reservations about the ability of Ask to pull this off. He said “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.”

Shortly after that conversation, we actually put it to the test for one particular task. We gave one group a query to do on Google, with its blended linear list, and one group the same query on Ask, with its 3D interface. Average on-the-page duration for the two groups was within one second of each other. Our panelists adjusted very well to Ask’s interface. Of course, that was just one interaction, but my gut tells me that breaking the paradigm might not be as difficult as Jakob imagines. It will all depend on providing strong information scent and relevance in the key areas of the page.

For search marketers, there’s another important point to consider. Our interactions with the page, the top-to-bottom linear F-shaped scan that produced the Golden Triangle, could soon be changing. The page will be much richer visually, and segmented both vertically and horizontally. It’s a brand new piece of real estate, to be navigated in a different way.

And now, my final point. If I prove to be correct and Ask does move into third place, it won’t be TV ad dollars that does it. It will be because the company focused on users and gave them something remarkable. And if you want to know how quickly and how far the word can spread, look up Reed’s Law sometime. In fact, why not try Ask?

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.