Category Archives: Online Trends

Universal Search and Other Surprises from Google’s Searchology

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

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

universalsearch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AskX

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

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

Interview with Ask’s Michael Ferguson

I recently had the opportunity to chat with one of my favorite usability people, Michael Ferguson at Ask.com. You can find excerpts of the interview, along with commentary, on Search Engine Land in this week’s Just Behave column. Some of Michael’s comments are particularly timely now, given Google’s announcement of Universal search.

Gord: How does Ask.com approach the search user experience and in big terms, what is your general philosophy?

Michael: A lot of what we do is, to some extent, informed by core search needs but also by our relevant market share, understanding that people have often experienced other engines before they come to us, not necessarily in that session but generally on the web. People have at least done a few searches on Google and Yahoo, so they have some context coming from those search experiences. So often, we’re taking what we’ve learned from best practices from competitors and others and then, on top of that, trying to add a lot of product experience and relevance experiences that are differentiated. Of course, we’re coming from this longer history of the company where we’ve had various user experiences over the time that we’ve been around. We’ve marketed around natural language, in the late 90’s and answered people’s questions at the top of the page, but in the last year and a half or so, we’ve rebranded and really focused on getting the word out to the end users that we are a keyword search engine, an everyday search engine.

A lot of the things that we’ve done with users have been to try to, implicitly, if not explicitly, inform users that are coming to the site you can use it very much like you can use any other kind of search engine you’ve been on before. Or, if they’re current users and people are coming back to the site, to let them know that the range of experiences and the type of information we bring back to them has greatly expanded. So that’s pretty much it. It’s informed by the context of not just a sense of pure search and information retrieval and all the research that’s gone on that in the last 35 or 40 years but also the dynamics of the experiences that we’ve had before and people’s previous experiences with Ask. Then, an acknowledgement that they’ve often searched on other sites and looked for information.

Gord: You brought up a number of topics that I’d like to touch on, each in sequence. You mentioned that in a lot of cases, they’re coming to Ask and they’ve used Google or Yahoo or they’ve used another engine as one of their primary search tools. Does Ask’s role as a supplemental engine or an alternative engine give you a little more latitude? You can add things from a functionality point of view to really differentiate yourselves. I actually just did a search and see that you, at least on my computer here, have made the move to incorporate some of the things that you were testing on AskX into the main site. Maybe we’ll start there. Is that an ongoing test? Am I just part of a beta test on that or this rollover complete now?

Michael: We’re still in testing with that and it will roll out. We have decided because of a lot of the user experience metrics that we’re getting from the beta test that we’re going to go for it. We have decided to move the full experience over to the AskX experience. Of course, there are variants to that, but the basic theme of, in a smart way, bringing together results from different search verticals and wrapping those around the core organic results (as well as) a sponsored experience. So that will happen sometime this year. We don’t know exactly when, but just a couple of days ago, we really decided we’ve seen enough and we’re pretty excited about that.

Google has a really great user experience going, and Yahoo does too, but they have so many different levers that move so much revenue and traffic and experience metrics that I think it’s harder for them to take chances and to move things around and get buy-offs at a bureaucratic level. To some extent, we see ourselves as having permission and a responsibility to really innovate on the user experience. It’s definitely a good time for us because we have such great support from IAC and they’re very much invested in us improving the user experience and getting more traffic and getting frequency and taking market share and they’re ready to very much invest in that. So we don’t need to cram the page with sponsored links and things like that. It’s mostly a transitional time when we’re getting people to reconsider the brand and the search engine as a full keyword based, everyday search engine that has lots to offer. I’m talking to people all the time about Ask and there’s definitely still people that say, “Hey, last night, it came up with my buddies at the bar, this trivia question about the Los Angeles Lakers, 1966 to 1972 (and I went to Ask and asked a question)”. Then there are other people that see us as evolving beyond that but still really surprised that we haven’t had image search.  Now with AskX we’ll have preview search and there’s lots of other stuff coming along now. So yes, it’s a great place to be. I love working with it. There are so many things that, in an informed way, we can take chances on, relative to our competitors.

Gord: So does this mean that the main site becomes more of an active site? Are you being more upfront with the testing on Ask.com rather than on AskX.com?

Michael: Well, I think the general sense of what we’re going to do is that, at some point this year, the AskX experience will, at least at a wireframe level, become the default experience and, of course, we have a lot of next generation “after that” stuff queued up that we’re thinking about and we’re actively testing right now but not in any live sense.  So potentially, things will slide in behind the move of the full interface going out and then AskX will remain a sandbox for another instance of, hopefully, new and really useful and differentiated search experience coming after that. A general thing that we’re going to try to do, instead of having 15 or 18 different product managers and engineering teams working on all these different facets of information retrieval and services, we’re going to stay search focused and just have one sandbox area where people go in and see multiple facets of what we’re thinking about.

Gord: Let’s talk about the sponsored ads for a bit. I notice that for a couple of searches that I’ve done while we’ve been talking that they’ve definitely been dialed down as far as the presence of sponsored on the page. I’m only seeing top sponsored appear, so you’re using the right rail to add additional search value or information value, whether it be suggested searches or on a local search, where it brought me back the current weather and time. So what’s the current strategy on Ask as far as presentation of sponsored results and the amount of real estate devoted to them?

Michael: Just to fit along with the logic of Eye Tracking II (Enquiro’s second eye tracking study), those ads are not a delineated part of the user experience for the end user and they’re relevance and their frequency can color the perception of the rest of the page and especially the organic listings below them. Right now, as I said, we’re very much focusing on improved user experience and building frequency and retention of customers, which all the companies are, I’m sure. But we’re really being, basically, cautious with the ads and getting them there when they’re appropriate and, as best we can, adjust them over time, so that when they’re there, they’re going to valuable for the user and for the vendor.

Gord: That’s a fairly significant evolution in thinking about what the results page looks like from say, two years ago, with Ask. Is that purely a function of IAC knowing that this is a long term game and it begins with market share and after that comes the monetization opportunities?

Michael: Actually, I think way before we got acquired by IAC we knew that. We test like other engines would. We test lots of different ad configurations and presentations and things like that but definitely you want to balance that. Way before we got acquired we realized that there’s one thing that’s kind of fun about making the quarter and blowing through it a little bit and then there’s another thing about eroding customers. And definitely there’s a lifetime value that can be gained by giving people what you know is a better user experience over time, so once we did become part of the IAC family, we brought them up to speed with the results that we were finding that were pointing to taking that road and they’ve very much been in support of it. And, of course, their revenue is spread amongst a lot of different pieces of online and offline business so their ability to absorb it is probably more flexible than ours was as a stand alone company.

Gord: That brings me to my next question, which is, with all the different properties that IAC has and their deep penetration into some of the vertical areas, you had talked about the opportunity to bring some of that value to the search results page. What are we looking at as far as that goes? Are we going to see more and more information pulled from other IAC into the main AskX interface?

Michael: Maybe the most powerful thing about the internet is that you as an individual now have a very empowered position relative to other producers of information, other businesses where you can consume a bunch of different points of view. You have a bunch of different opportunities to do business and get the lowest price and read reviews that the company itself hasn’t sanctioned, or anything like that.  You have access to your peer network and to your social networks. Search, like the internet, becomes, and it necessarily needs to be, a proxy for that neutral, unbiased view of all the information that’s available. This probably gets a little bit into what may or not may work with something like Google’s search history. Users over time have said again and again, “Don’t hide anything from me or don’t over think what you may think I might want. Give me all of the best stuff, use your algorithms to rank all that, but if I get the sense that anything’s biased or people are paying for this, then I’m not going to trust you and I’m going to go somewhere else where I can get that sense of empowerment again.”

As I’ve sat in user experience research over time, I’ve seen people..and I know this isn’t true of Google and I know it isn’t true of Ask right now with the  retraction from paid inclusion…but you ask users why they think this came up first on Google, maybe with a navigational query like Honda or Honda Civic and Honda comes up first. They’ll say, “Oh, Honda paid for that.” So even with the engines that aren’t doing paid inclusion, there’s still this kind of wariness that consumers have of just generally somebody on the internet, somewhere, behind the curtains, trying to take advantage of them or steer them in some way. So as soon as we got acquired by IAC, we have made it very much part of their perception of this and their culture. Their product management point of view is that you can’t sacrifice that neutrality. You can’t load a bunch of IAC stuff all over the place. The relationship with IAC does give us access to proprietary databases that we can do lots of deep dives in and get lots of rich information out  that can help the user in their instance of their search needs that other companies wouldn’t be able to get access to, while maintaining access to everything else.

The way we approached AskCity was a great example of this. We had leveraged a lot of CitySearch data but at the same time, we know that when people go out and want to see reviews, they want to see reviews from AOL Neighborhoods, they want to see reviews from Yelp they want to see reviews from all these other points of view too. So we go and scrape all those and fold them into the CitySearch stuff. We give access to all those results that come up on AskCity. If they’re, for instance, at a restaurant, you can get Open Table reviews and you can get movie reservations through Fandango and other stuff like that. Those companies have nothing to do with IAC. Those decisions were borne from user needs and from us looking as individuals in particular urban areas, and saying “Hey, what would I want to come up?” We know from previous experience from AOL that the walled garden thing doesn’t work. It’s just not what people expect from search and not what they expect from the internet, so that lesson’s been learned. I don’t know how much it would be different if we had some dominant market share over search, but that’s even more reason for us to be appealing to as wide a population as possible. That’s my philosophy right now.

Gord: I guess the other thing that every major engine is struggling with right now is in this quest to disambiguate intent, where is the trade-off with user control? Like you said, just show me a lot of the best stuff and I’ll decide where I want to drill down and I’ll change the query based on what I’m seeing to filter down to what I want. In talking to Marissa at Google and their moves towards personalization and introducing web history, I  think for anyone who understands how search engines work, it’s not that hard to see the benefits of personalization but from a user perspective there does seem to be some significant push back against that. Some users are saying, “I don’t want a lot of things happening in the background that are not transparent to me. I want to stay in control.” How is Ask approaching that?

Michael: The other major thing that’s going on right now is that we have fully revamped how we’re taking this. We developed the Direct Hit late 90’s technology. And then the Teoma technology we acquired. And really, it’s not that we’re taking those to the next level, we got all of that stuff together and over the past three years, we’ve been saying, “Okay, what do we have and what’s unique and differentiated?” There’s a lot of great user behavior data that Direct Hit understands.  We have a whole variety of things there and that’s unlocked, that’s across all the people coming in and out over time but not any personally identifiable type of stuff. And then there’s Teoma, which is good at seeing communities on the web, expertise within the communities and how communities relate. So right now, even though we have personalization stuff and My Stuff and other things that are coming up, we’re investing a lot more in the next version of the algorithm and the infrastructure for us to grow called Edison. And we started talking about that a week ago since A.G. (Apostolos Gerasoulis) mentioned it. Across a lot of user data it understands a lot about the context from the user intention side and because we’re constantly capturing the topology of the web and it’s communities and how they’re related, we then match the intention and the map of the web as it stands and the  blogosphere as it stands and other domains as they stand. Our Zoom product, which is now on the left under the search box in the AskX experience and it’s on the right on the live site, is the big area that we’re going to more passively offer people different paths.

For example, just like with AskX, you search for U2, it’s going to bring up news, and product results, and video results and images, and a Smart Answer at the top of the page. It’s also going to know that there’s U2 as the entity, the music band and therefore search the blogosphere but just search within music blogs. So what it’s doing, over time, is trying to give a personalized experience that’s informed by lots of behavior and trying to capture the structure of the web, basically. So that’s where we are there.

There’s a book that came out in early 1999 called Net Worth, which you might want to read. I almost want to revisit it myself now. It’s a Harvard Business School book that Marc Singer and John Hagel came out with. It talked about infomediaries and it imagined this future where there’d be these trusted brands and companies. They were thinking along the lines of American Express or some other concurrent banking entity at the time, but these infomediaries would have outside vendors come to them and they would entrust all their information, as much as they wanted to, they could control that, both online and offline.  You were talking in your latest blog post about understanding in the consideration phase where somebody is and presenting, potentially, websites that they hadn’t seen yet or ones that they might like at that point in the car purchase behavior. But the way that they were imagining it was that there would be a credit card that might show that someone had been taking trips from the San Francisco Bay area to the Tahoe region at a certain time of year and had maybe met with real estate agents up there and things like that. But these infomediaries, on top of not just web history but even offline stuff, would be a broker for all that information and there would be this nice marketplace where someone could come and say, “I want to pay $250 to talk to this person right now with this specific message”. So it seems that Google is doing a lot of that, especially with the DoubleClick acquisition. But I’m just wondering about the other side of it, keeping the end user aware of and empowered over that information and where it’s at. So Net Worth is a neat book to check out because the way they were describing it, the end user, even to the broker, would seep out exactly what they wanted to seep out at any given time. It wouldn’t be this passive recording device thing that’s silently taping. My experience so far of using the Google Toolbar that’s allowing the collection of history, is that it’s ambiguous to me about how much of my behavior is getting taken up by that system and used. We’ll see where it goes but right now we don’t have strong plans to do anything with that for search.

Gord: It’s going to be really interesting because, up to now, the tool bar was collecting data but there was no transparency into what it was collecting, and now that they’ve done that, we’ll see what the user response is to that. Now that they can go into their web history and have that initial shock of realizing how much Google actually does know about them.

One other question, and this is kind of a sidelight, but it’s always something that I’ve been interested in. Now that you have the search box along the left side there and it gives search suggestions as you’re typing, have you done any tracking to see how that’s altered your query logs? Have you noticed any trends in people searching differently now that you’re suggesting possible searches to them as they’re typing?

Michael: There are two broad things that are encouraging to us. One is that over time, the natural language queries are down tremendously. Our queries, because we promoted in the late nineties this “ask a question” thing, tended to be longer and more phrase based, more natural language based.  That’s really gone down and is approaching what we would consider normal for an every day search engine profile as far as the queries. And we really think that this zooming stuff has really helped that because it’s often keyword based. You will sometimes see some natural language stuff in there. There are communities on the web that are informing us that there’s an interest in this topic that’s related to the basic topic so it is helping change the user behavior on Ask.

And the other result of that is as people use it more for everyday keyword based search engine, the topics or the different categories of queries that people see are normalizing out too. Less and less they’re reference type stuff and more and more they’re transactional type queries, so that’s a good thing. And that’s just been happening as we rebranded and we presented Zoom.

And then with the AskX experience, we are definitely seeing that even more because of the fact that they’re just in proximity to the search box. We always knew that these suggestions should ideally be close to the search box so that people understand fully what we’re trying to offer them. For instance, on the current site, we do see users that will sometimes type a query in the search box on top and because they’re used to seeing ads on the right rail on so many other sites and because they don’t necessarily know what narrow and expand your search is they think those are just titles to other results or websites. It’s a relatively small portion. Most people get what it is, but there was that liability there. Now in the AskX experience, it’s close and visually grouped with the search box. It’s definitely getting used more and guiding queries and people seem even more comfortable putting general terms in. We’ve made it that you can just arrow down to the one and hit return. It’s definitely driving the queries differently.

Gord: I’ve always liked what you guys have done on the search page. I think it’s some of the most innovative stuff with a major search property that I see out there and I think that there’s definitely a good place for that kind of initiative. So let me wrap up by asking, if you had your way, in two years, what part would Ask be playing in the total search landscape?

Michael: We’d definitely have significantly more than 10% market share. My point of view, from dealing with the user experience, is that I’ve been proud of the work that we’ve done and I really think that we’ve been very focused and innovative with a very talented team here and we’re really hoping that as we look at the rest of the year and we put out Edison and the AskX experience, that we become recognized for taking chances and presenting the user experience in a differentiated way that people have to respond to us in the market and start adopting some of the things that we’re doing. Because of the amount of revenue that Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are dealing with on the search side, they often get a lot of press but our hope is really to take share and to hopefully have a user experience that inform and improve the user experience of our competitors.

Gord: Thank you for your time Michael.

Personalization: Google’s Defensible Trump Card?

A thought that came up in a conversation with Michael Ferguson, Ask’s usability guy (which is probably why I like talking to him. He always greases the mental machinery) was Google’s defensible position that personalization offers.

Google is betting the farm on personalization. And really, they’re possibly the only search engine that can make this work. Here are the required components:

  • A high enough degree of additional user value to convince people to opt in to personalization. As I’ve talked about before, that’s why it’s being rolled out in organic search first. Expect a slew of other value adds in the near future, all powered by personalization and all aimed and getting you to hit the opt in box.
  • An extensive network so you can maintain multiple touch points for the delivery of targeted advertising. Nobody has a bigger network that Google’s AdSense network
  • Critical mass amongst users. With Google’s almost 65% market share and the highest penetration of installed tool bars (42% plus in a recent B to B study we did), Google also has the required components to tap into a significant slice of the available market. And future Gadgets and tools will likely either require personalization to be turned on, or will provide an enhanced level of functionality when they are. Expect Google to get aggressive with forcing adoption in the next year or so.

It came to light when I was talking to Michael about Ask’s algo and whether personalization will play a part (by the way, this is part of an interview that will be on Search Engine Land next week). After the interview, I realized it’s not an option for Ask, at least not at the level that Google’s contemplating. Even if they did move to personalization, they just don’t own enough of the total online user experience to push them to opt into personalization. They’d never gain the critical mass needed to make it work.

Microsoft has an outside chance through Messenger, but it would be a long shot. Yahoo also has a long shot at it (although better than Microsoft’s) but they’d have to start gaining market share, and there are a number of huge obstacles in their way. Google is by far the best bet to force personalization on the market and have it be adopted at significant rates.

So what are the options for the other engines? Well, again, there’s an interesting twist there as well. One thing that’s touted heavily by the contenders is social search. I have severe doubts about the scalability of anything that requires a human element, and I’ve written about this in the past. But then I realized that personalization gives Google social search in a way that others just can’t touch.

If Google is collecting both web and search history, they’re collecting implicit votes for the quality of every property on the web. They create their own community, and with every click, that community votes for the quality and relevance of every site they visit. It’s social search in a very powerful and completely transparent form. In this form, social search requires no additional action on the part of the user (one of the critical risk areas of social search) and is completely scalable, because there’s no human bottleneck (the other critical risk area).

The more I think about personalization, the more I think that Google has just trumped the entire search space…again.

The Three Cs of Search

First published May 10, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Since most of the Search Insiders are in Bonita Springs this week, chances are that you’ll be hearing a lot of what’s happening down here in the Florida Everglades (other than the brush fires which appear to have us surrounded). Aaron Goldman shared his Buzz-o-meter with us on Tuesday, where he measures the words that seem to be dropped with the greatest frequency. It appears that my opening remarks set a tone that has been picked up in a number of sessions, and two words breaking into the top 10 are “connection” and “community.” Aaron added a third “c”: “content.”

To me, these words sum up a transition that’s happening in search. Expect the activity of searching on a search engine to gradually disappear, to be replaced with the functionality of search as an underpinning to the workings of many things on the Web. Search will become the engine that drives the semantic web, which Esther Dyson talked about in her keynote. She’s looking for search to move beyond “search and fetch” to her ideal, “deliver, act and transact.”

Search will be the connector between what we want and what best matches our want out there on the Web. And rather than a singular task (i.e. go look for this query) it will become a self-guided series of tasks, with intelligent agents in between to set search on its new direction. An entire trip, include flight reservations, hotel bookings, ground transportation, notifications of friends in the area and restaurant reservations, could be booked by intelligent Web agents, powered by search. And as came up in a panel discussion with the Search Insiders, when the presentation of commercial messaging appears in this context, it’s not advertising, it’s a helpful recommendation.

The piece that drives this is personalization, and that’s why Google’s moves are potentially so important. They take us much closer to the semantic web that Dyson envisions. This is the first “c”: connections.

Redefining Community

The second “c” speaks to the very transformation of our society: community. The way we relate to each other is being totally rewired by the Internet. By sheer physical necessity, communities have previously been defined by geography. We shared a common space, which enable communication, which created community. But today, the Internet has made physical distance irrelevant. Our communities are now defined by commonly held ideas or interests. Communities form around ideas, and search connects us to those communities. Every time we do online research for a product or service, we step into a community. In the course of a day, we can belong to several different communities. They are constantly shifting, as people move in and out of them, depending on the longevity of the engagement with the idea that forms the community.

Content Trails

And a third “c,” content, is the trail that the other members of that community leave behind through their conversations. These are the telltale signs that someone has already gone this way, and left a permanent record of his or her engagement with the community. Every Wikipedia entry is part of a community, as are many MySpace pages, blog posts and other virtual outposts. Search is the thread that loops them together at the user’s initiative. In fact, the algorithm of the engine is the de facto definer of community with each given search. The engine goes out, defines the landscape of community, and connects you with the citizens of that community and the content trails they leave behind.

It’s a fascinating world, which is being born as we speak. It’s a sociological experiment of vast magnitude in the making, and I don’t think we know what the repercussions will be. Whatever they are, it’s too late to turn back now. Technology moves fast, but people move slowly, and not in one mass. Small degrees of technological change can create seismic shifts in the sociological landscape. And we’re subjecting ourselves to a degree of technological change unparalleled in history. Who knows what we’ve unleashed?

 

Thoughts on Yahoo and Microsoft Merging

Note: This was actually written on Friday, but I haven’t had a chance to post it til now. I’ve been travelling and access has been an issue. But I just came back from the opening reception at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit and the latest seems to be that the hype of this deal is far ahead of any actual discussions. That said, I think my comments are still valid, because as we’ve learned, things can happen fast in this industry.

Friday, May 4

The big news this morning as I was burning off some calories on the stair climber was the possible acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft. I was actually in New York when I heard the story break, and one of my meetings today was at the Microsoft New York office, so I thought it would be interesting to ask my contact there what she thought. She indicated that this story has been going on for years now, but apparently they’re going back to the table. As we were chatting in a conference room, someone walked by outside asking somebody else if they had bought Yahoo stock. The media speculation was good news for Yahoo stock, not so for Microsoft.

Obviously, there’s a lot to mull over here. Rumor has it that Steve Ballmer is not taking Google’s DoubleClick scoop lightly. In fact, he’s downright pissed. And he may be preparing to make Terry Semel an offer he can’t refuse. Semel’s played hard to get before, but this time the shotgun marriage just might take.

The obvious question is how the two search properties will combine. In this case, it might be a case of two wrongs not making a right. Yahoo has managed to keep their search share from eroding too badly with Google’s domination, but Microsoft has been sputtering out of the starting gate from day one. The problem is that Yahoo and Live search duplicate each other in many ways, rather than complement each other. The biggest problem with both engines is too much focus on revenue generation and not enough on user experience. They each have their different flavors, but the combined Microhoo (or YahSoft) is in no way a Google killer. In fact, with the turmoil of a merger and the inevitable awkwardness of combining search teams, I see the focus on the user suffering even more. Both engines desperately need a clearly focused user champion to revamp the search experience (ala Google’s power usability troika, Larry, Sergey and Marissa) and this deal just doesn’t produce that.

I think the rationale of the deal has much less to do with search and more to do with a rather petulant online land grab. Yahoo does bring some interesting assets into the Microsoft fold. Microsoft is definitely eyeing the Asian market, and Yahoo has dominates in most of these markets, with the exception of China, and that’s a whole other story. Yahoo also brings a lot of users and online real estate as well, with roughly double Microsoft’s user base. This move looks like a strategy to bolster the front line for a head to head confrontation with Google in the ad serving space. Of course, it could just be the Ballmer has a lot of cash burning a hole in his pocket and everytime he goes to spend it, Google snatches the acquisition away from him. Steve wants to buy a ball he can actually take home.

One really interesting aspect of this is what it will do in the search space. While I really don’t think Yahoo’s search assets are the impetus for the deal, the potential combining of Live Search and Yahoo cleans up the search landscape a bit, and my guess is there will be significant user fall out from this. This will not be good news for the users of these two engines in the short term. But it could be extremely good news for Ask.

I just did an interview with Michael Ferguson, Ask’s usability point person (coming in Search Engine Land next week) and the IAC team are doing some really smart and relatively innovative things with their engine. And they’re probably the least aggressive in jamming ads on the page right now. Diller has provided a big enough bankroll to allow Jim Lanzone and his team to take a long run at capturing marketshare and this just may be the break they need. Based on what I’ve seen, Ask is paying a lot of attention to the user experience, and they may well pick up some converts and some pretty significant marketshare lift because of that. Perhaps Microsoft employees should be eyeing IAC stock. Or perhaps Steve Ballmer is starting to jot them down on his shopping list. After all, Google will probably scoop Yahoo out from underneath him at the last minute anyway!

What’s Hot at the Search Insider Summit? Two Words: Sep Kamvar

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

I was fortunate enough to be asked to MC the Search Insider Summit in Bonita Springs, Fla. in a little over a week from now.  As the MC, I get to open each day with a few pithy comments and hopefully insightful observations about the emerging trends and notable events in the search engine space.  Let me give you, as a faithful reader of this column, the inside track on at least one of the names I’ll drop regularly. In fact, take a moment to go find yourself a pen to jot this name down, because it will become vitally important to you in the next year or two… Sep Kamvar.

Who, you ask?  As I was writing this I took a quick scan of the regular search marketing columns, including this one, to see how much ink Sep has received in the past week.  It’s a great injustice that when Kevin Federline launches his own search engine we all rush (and I use first-person plural intentionally, I know I wrote about it too) to add our insightful commentary to the buzz surrounded this relative nonevent.  But when perhaps the most important announcement to be made in the search space in years occurred last Thursday, it passed with nary a whisper.  A quick search on Google News showed that the only blogging about this announcement, other than Google’s official post, was a couple of blogs I did on my own site that got picked up in a few other places.  Danny Sullivan also wrote a fairly lengthy post on the announcement. But other than that, not a ripple on the normally turbulent waters of the Internet.

But Sep Kamvar could become one of the most important people at Google very quickly.  In fact, his name could become as well known as Larry and Sergey.  Last Thursday, Google announced that they were adding Web History to their search personalization algorithm.  Sep is the guy behind the algorithm.  I’ve been blogging and writing about personalization for the last few months, telling everyone that they have to pay attention to this.  But other than a handful of people that I’ve spoken to recently, I don’t think that most search marketers or users get how important this potentially is, not just for search but for online marketing in general.The lack of pickup on Google’s announcement is evidence of this.

Three weeks ago I wrote a column called “Google’s Gargantuan Footprint.”  A key piece of that puzzle was Google’s ability to move towards behavioral targeting, and I speculated on how that might happen.  I mentioned the Google Toolbar and its PageRank feature as one of the key elements.  Less than two weeks later I got an e-mail from one of my favorite PR people at Google, Katie Watson, letting me know that Marissa Mayer wanted to chat with me about the company’s plans for personalization.  Sep Kamvar would be joining her on the call.  I juggled my schedule so I could make that call, because I knew it was going to be important.  I was not disappointed.

Google is now offering an opt-in choice for users to include Web History (all the sites you’ve visited) as a data set that will power their search personalization.  Thinking into the near future, you can see that the implications of this are vast on several different levels. Being able to roll Web History into Search History and monitoring a user’s click stream to help refine search results is a huge step toward disambiguation that will substantially alter our individual search experience.

The question for users is: are they willing to make the trade-off necessary by providing all this clickstream data to Google with their consent?  The fact is, if you have PageRank enabled on your toolbar, this information is being sent to Google anyway.  But Google’s recent move toward opting into Web History increases the level of transparency into what information the company is gathering — and how it will be using that information to refine your search experience.

But it’s not the personalization of search results that makes this a sea change.  It’s the ability for Google to close the loop around one individual based on his online behavior — and use that to offer multiple advertising opportunities across their network.  For the interactive marketer, this represents targeting nirvana.  And if one considers Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick combined with its contextual network and the ever-spreading Web of touch points that Google now controls, my speculation about the gargantuan footprint that Google is leaving on the online landscape moves several steps closer to reality.

I simply cannot speak enough about how important this is to every search user and every search marketer out there.  At the user level, there will probably be very little in the way of noticeable change for the immediate future.  Google’s move was simply to give Sep and his team a nice clean opt-in database that they can play with to improve the personalization algorithm.  But as Sep and his team begin to refine personalization, expect it to be aggressively rolled into multiple aspects of your Google experience.  It’s the engine that will power the future of Google for the foreseeable future.  It will eventually surpass the PageRank algorithm in importance, giving Google the ability to match content to very specific and unique user intent on the fly.

And for that reason, Sep Kamvar is a name to pay attention to.

More Food for Thought on Google’s Web History Announcement

Yesterday’s announcement from Google about including Web history in search personalization marks a fairly significant development in disambiguating intent on Google.  Consider the implications.  One of the issues I had with the initial implementation of search personalization was that it really only worked when there was existing search history.  That really only covered one in five searches for most of us.  That also meant that personalization showed up most often in areas where you tended to do a lot of searching.  For example, if you search within your industry a lot and tend to go to the same sites over and over again, you would find the site lifted on to your top page of search results.  Of course, if you were doing the typical “vanity” search to see where you rank and you end up clicking on your own site, this would have the effect of lifting your site into the top 10 results.  If anything, this implementation of personalization works to make navigation search a little more efficient.  But I’m not sure it went too far in disambiguating intent, which is the holy grail for any search engine.

With the introduction of Web history, it’s a whole new ballgame in disambiguating intent.  This allows Google to move far beyond the well tred search path and actually taps into your current browsing behavior to try to determine what’s on your mind right now.  If Sep Kamvar’s personalization algorithm is as powerful as I suspect it is, this could dramatically alter the results that you’re seeing.  The promise of personalization is greatest when it can be applied in areas that are new territory for you.  It helps Google interpret just the kind of site you want to see, given your behavior at the present time.

Let me give you an example.  Let’s say you’re looking at buying a new vehicle.  Let’s further say that you’re fairly early in the consideration phase and your visit a lot of sites like Edmunds.com and Autobytel.  This tells Google that you’re looking for information and you’re probably looking at sites that could be comparing your alternatives.  If you’ve already visited sites like Edmunds.com, Google would probably lift those sites into the first search results page.  If Google’s algorithm truly makes a move towards a recommendation engine, what it can then do is find similar sites you may have never considered, based on the characteristics of the sites you have been visiting and make you aware of these sites.  That’s where the real win for the user comes in personalization.  It’s not just providing you a shortcut to sites you are already aware of, it’s in making you aware of new sites you never knew existed, ranked and prioritized according to the PageRank algorithm.  With Web history, Google can track your progress through the buying cycle to be able to match the information site you’re looking for to where it believes you are, based on your current click stream data.

There are other implications that are very interesting to advertisers.  Click paths tend to indicate the life events that you’re currently in the middle of it.  The life event could be a major purchase, planning a holiday, buying a new house, planning for a wedding, or graduating from university.  In each of those instances, there are a number of linked consumer needs that tend to go together.  There’s been a significant amount of research done on how life events generate predictable consumer patterns.  Web history gives Google a window into exactly what is happening in your life right now.  I had written a column about how surprised I was with the glimpse that search history provided into my mindset at any given time.  If you combine that with Web history, you would have a very finely detailed snapshot of both big and small events in my life for any time period.  It gives Google the ability to precisely target search results based on exactly what’s happening to me right now.

But let’s face it, it’s not the search results that Google is focusing on.  Google is altruistic enough to make organic search results the testbed to play with the personalization algorithm, but the monetization opportunities in this are mind-boggling to say the least.  When you combine the ability to precisely target and interpret the mindset of any given consumer with the multiple touch points that Google now owns to provide advertising messaging to that prospect, you have a marketer’s dream scenario.  When I asked Marisa Mayer about this she made it clear that organic results are what they are working on now, but they don’t want their advertising network to be too far behind the curve.  I’m still working my way through the interview making notes but I did want to get this post up because I think from a user perspective there’s some important information here.  For me, the promise of personalization is moving Google to be a true recommendation engine when it gets confident in disambiguating my intent based on my current behavior.  Folding Web history into search history moves Google a quantum leap forward in being able to do this reliably and consistently.

The interesting question will be to see what kind of user pushback comes from the privacy concerns.  Danny Sullivan touched on this a little bit in his post.  Will the trade-off of increased search accuracy be enough to have lots of users opt in? Obviously this is what Google is counting on and that’s why they’re introducing the enhancement in the organic results first.  If they can provide a clear win to the user, than the trade-off seems a lot less formidable.  And when they’re introducing that usability lift in something as benign as organic search results, it seems a little less ominous and invasive.  If they can get us using Web history by giving us a win-win on our search functionality, is a greater likelihood that we’ll leave Web History turned for when they do decide to start rolling it in to their advertising presentation algorithms. Enough users will have it turned on it will give them the critical mass they need to appeal to the early adopter advertisers who want a take it for a spin.

More Food for Thought on Google’s Web History Announcement

Yesterday’s announcement from Google about including Web history in search personalization marks a fairly significant development in disambiguating intent on Google.  Consider the implications.  One of the issues I had with the initial implementation of search personalization was that it really only worked when there was existing search history.  That really only covered one in five searches for most of us.  That also meant that personalization showed up most often in areas where you tended to do a lot of searching.  For example, if you search within your industry a lot and tend to go to the same sites over and over again, you would find the site lifted on to your top page of search results.  Of course, if you were doing the typical “vanity” search to see where you rank and you end up clicking on your own site, this would have the effect of lifting your site into the top 10 results.  If anything, this implementation of personalization works to make navigation search a little more efficient.  But I’m not sure it went too far in disambiguating intent, which is the holy grail for any search engine.

With the introduction of Web history, it’s a whole new ballgame in disambiguating intent.  This allows Google to move far beyond the well tred search path and actually taps into your current browsing behavior to try to determine what’s on your mind right now.  If Sep Kamvar’s personalization algorithm is as powerful as I suspect it is, this could dramatically alter the results that you’re seeing.  The promise of personalization is greatest when it can be applied in areas that are new territory for you.  It helps Google interpret just the kind of site you want to see, given your behavior at the present time.

Let me give you an example.  Let’s say you’re looking at buying a new vehicle.  Let’s further say that you’re fairly early in the consideration phase and your visit a lot of sites like Edmunds.com and Autobytel.  This tells Google that you’re looking for information and you’re probably looking at sites that could be comparing your alternatives.  If you’ve already visited sites like Edmunds.com, Google would probably lift those sites into the first search results page.  If Google’s algorithm truly makes a move towards a recommendation engine, what it can then do is find similar sites you may have never considered, based on the characteristics of the sites you have been visiting and make you aware of these sites.  That’s where the real win for the user comes in personalization.  It’s not just providing you a shortcut to sites you are already aware of, it’s in making you aware of new sites you never knew existed, ranked and prioritized according to the PageRank algorithm.  With Web history, Google can track your progress through the buying cycle to be able to match the information site you’re looking for to where it believes you are, based on your current click stream data.

There are other implications that are very interesting to advertisers.  Click paths tend to indicate the life events that you’re currently in the middle of it.  The life event could be a major purchase, planning a holiday, buying a new house, planning for a wedding, or graduating from university.  In each of those instances, there are a number of linked consumer needs that tend to go together.  There’s been a significant amount of research done on how life events generate predictable consumer patterns.  Web history gives Google a window into exactly what is happening in your life right now.  I had written a column about how surprised I was with the glimpse that search history provided into my mindset at any given time.  If you combine that with Web history, you would have a very finely detailed snapshot of both big and small events in my life for any time period.  It gives Google the ability to precisely target search results based on exactly what’s happening to me right now.

But let’s face it, it’s not the search results that Google is focusing on.  Google is altruistic enough to make organic search results the testbed to play with the personalization algorithm, but the monetization opportunities in this are mind-boggling to say the least.  When you combine the ability to precisely target and interpret the mindset of any given consumer with the multiple touch points that Google now owns to provide advertising messaging to that prospect, you have a marketer’s dream scenario.  When I asked Marisa Mayer about this she made it clear that organic results are what they are working on now, but they don’t want their advertising network to be too far behind the curve.  I’m still working my way through the interview making notes but I did want to get this post up because I think from a user perspective there’s some important information here.  For me, the promise of personalization is moving Google to be a true recommendation engine when it gets confident in disambiguating my intent based on my current behavior.  Folding Web history into search history moves Google a quantum leap forward in being able to do this reliably and consistently.

The interesting question will be to see what kind of user pushback comes from the privacy concerns.  Danny Sullivan touched on this a little bit in his post.  Will the trade-off of increased search accuracy be enough to have lots of users opt in? Obviously this is what Google is counting on and that’s why they’re introducing the enhancement in the organic results first.  If they can provide a clear win to the user, than the trade-off seems a lot less formidable.  And when they’re introducing that usability lift in something as benign as organic search results, it seems a little less ominous and invasive.  If they can get us using Web history by giving us a win-win on our search functionality, is a greater likelihood that we’ll leave Web History turned for when they do decide to start rolling it in to their advertising presentation algorithms. Enough users will have it turned on it will give them the critical mass they need to appeal to the early adopter advertisers who want a take it for a spin.

A Sea-Level Change for Search

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

After spending a week with thousands of search marketers in New York last week, I think I’ve figured out what search’s problem is.  It’s suffering from low self-esteem.

I said before that search is crossing the chasm.  That certainly seem to be true last week, but to be honest, it took me a little while to figure it out.  It wasn’t till the last day of the show, having lunch with my friend Greg Jarboe, that we hit it, with a little help from Anne Kennedy.

Greg Jarboe’s Gentrification Theory

Both Greg and I felt like the industry was adrift.  It was going through something that hadn’t quite defined itself.  We certainly felt that a sea change was imminent, but we weren’t sure what was entailed in that change.  Greg referred to it as the gentrification of search.  A new wave of bright, shiny respectability was coming to the hard-working but plain-Jane neighborhood of search, first established by people like Greg and myself.  For me, this new influx encapsulated some of what I was seeing — but there was something else here.

One of the noticeable trends I’ve been seeing is the tendency for large organizations to want to ramp up their search efforts internally.  They want to jump into the search pool, but they’re afraid to take the leap with any of the search vendors currently in the space.  They’d rather try to figure it out themselves.

Anne Kennedy’s Epiphany

On the way out of the coffee shop of the New York Hilton, we happened to spot Anne Kennedy, a fellow pioneer of SEM, who put everything in perspective.  Search was moving from early adopters to the mainstream market.  Search was crossing the chasm!

I should’ve seen it much, much earlier.  After all, I’ve written columns right here in the Search Insider saying that this is happening.  But those columns were written from the vantage point of my office in Kelowna, for all intents and purposes a location far removed from the search industry.  Sometimes it’s easier to see a clear picture when you’re standing back a little bit.  When I was in the middle of search, surrounded by it in New York, it was hard to get my bearings.  I knew I was surrounded by a flurry of activity, but I wasn’t sure what the point of all that activity was.  It took Anne’s comment to put it in its proper context.

Is Google Too Big for Search?

The irony here is that as search is gearing up for what should be its finest moment, its time in the spotlight, it seems like the companies that have the most to gain are the ones rushing headlong to leave search behind.

Consider the irony of the two big announcements at the show last week.  First of all we have IPG, one of the gargantuan holding companies in the advertising world, announcing that it has purchased Reprise Media for an undisclosed sum.  Again this is part of the trend for the large advertising companies to quickly ramp up their search efforts in anticipation of the coming firestorm of demand in the search space.  This is the way the chasm crossings work.  If you can successfully make the leap from early adopters to mainstream, there’s a resulting crush of demand that everyone has to rush to meet.

But then you had the big news of the show, Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.  The closer that search gets to the mainstream market, the more intent Google seems to be to build up its rapidly expanding portfolio of non-search marketing channels.  It’s like Google is saying, “Sure we’ve got search.  But search isn’t sexy. It’s utilitarian. It’s direct marketing.  Online video, that’s sexy! Cable TV, that’s sexy!  Auction-based print and radio, that’s sexy!” Google wants to get its hands on those branding dollars — and doesn’t think that search is the way to do that.  To use Jarboe’s gentrification analogy again, just when everyone seems to be considering a move into the inner city neighborhood of search, Google has its eye on buying new property all over town.

Why Search Deserves a Second Look

If this is Google’s thinking, it may be too quick to discount the value of search. To me, there’s vast untapped potential here still.  All the research we’ve done seems to indicate that search is the crux of online activity.  We just haven’t done a very good job of assigning value through the entire buying cycle to the various points where consumers reach out and interact with search.  Online consumer research and brand engagement is a Gordian knot, a complex map of intertwining click-stream paths, winding through various properties and doubling back on itself.  When you start to look at that click stream, one thing becomes very apparent.  Search is the connector that holds it all together.  As we move from point to point and continue to build our brand awareness, we are connecting the dots through a search.  There has to be value to each one of those connections — and as we get better at defining and quantifying it, I believe we will find more and more reasons to shift our budget to some form of search.

It’s almost as if Google (or at least, parts of Google) takes search for granted in its rush to secure the entire landscape of consumer interaction.  With more and more advertisers starting to look at search seriously, maybe it would be a good idea for Google to do the same thing.

Addendum: I wrote a similarly themed post on Tuesday in my blog. Matt Cutts was quick to comment that Google’s search team remains as dedicated as ever and has some great things in store. I hope so, because I think search’s finest hour has yet to arrive.

Google Adds Your Click Path to Search Personalization

You know how when you install the Google toolbar and enable the PageRank feature, it gives you the warning on the EULA that this is not your typical legal  Yada yada?  Ever wondered what they were doing with all that information that’s being streamed back to a Google server somewhere?  Well, today Google announced just what they intend to do with it.  They’re going to use it to personalize your search results.  At least that’s what they’re going to do today. Tomorrow, who knows?

I just had a walk-through with Marissa Mayer and Sep Kamvar of Google’s new plans for personalization.

google1

 

 

In a nutshell, it will take the information gathered through the Google toolbar and use that, in combination with your search history, to personalize your search results.  Up till now only your past search history was used.  Enabling Web history, which is what Google is calling this, is very much a “opt in” process.  Google wants to get a small beta test bed of users so they can get a data set large enough to let Sep Kamvar, the person behind Google’s personalization algorithm, see what he can do with this additional rich set of data. Marissa indicated that this would increase the transparency of the data that Google was collecting about you. Based on the below screenshot you should be able to see exactly the sites that you visited in the past.

google2

If you want to see the nitty-gritty on what it means to sign in  or sign out of web history and what it will look like on the search results page, I would suggest checking out Danny Sullivan ever growing blog post on Searchengineland.  This is breaking news so I haven’t had much of a chance to put my thoughts together.  Like Danny, I’m “growing the post” as I find out more.  I’m going to be going back over my notes with Marissa because I think there’s some pretty significant implications for both users and advertisers in this.

In a column earlier this month I talked about Google moving towards behavioral targeting across their network and this is a huge missing piece.  I asked Marissa specifically about whether behavioral targeting of advertising based on the data collected through the toolbar would take place.  In her words, they want their organic search results to be “a little bit ahead of the curve” but overall, they want their search ads and their search results to be aligned in relevance, which means they need to be listening to the same signals.  Increasingly these will be coming from Google’s personalization algorithm.

Until I get a chance to blog more, here’s a little food for thought.  I had previously posted about Google moving towards behavioral targeting.  For me this makes all kinds of sense.  And there I speculated about what Google might be doing with all that data it collects through the PageRank toolbar.  Again, I seem to be reading my crystal ball into the future because just a few weeks later I got the call that Marissa wanted to talk to me.  And when Marissa Mayer wants to talk to you, you should listen, because it generally means something important is happening at the Googleplex.  So when you start putting pieces together, including this new move to personalization with including Web history, Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick, and the ability to behaviorally target people across both are contextual and DoubleClick network, not to mention the search results page, you start to get a picture of where they may be taking this.  There’s a lot more thought required here and I’m going to be trying to carve some time aside tomorrow morning to do another post on this.  I obviously want to look at this from the user perspective.  I think, although they’re limiting this to a beta and it’s very much an opt in process, this will renew the calls against personalization that have been coming from critics around the Web.  Marissa indicated that right now they’re going to be sticking to their threshold of two personal results per page, never knocking out the number one organic results, but she made it clear that that’s a “for now” call and will likely change in the future.  Google will move more aggressively towards personalization on more types of searches and they will impact more results.  A few months ago when I did the original post I said that once the gates are open on personalization the dam will burst and there will be no holding it back.  Today’s announcement ups the ante significantly.