Category Archives: Online Trends

Jimbo Wales and People-Powered Search: A Long Shot

First published March 15, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is placing a fairly large bet that people can trump technology in the search engine game. According to a recent report in Yahoo, he’s putting $4 million (of other people’s money) plus an undisclosed “large amount” from Amazon on the line, betting that he can steal 5% of the total search market away from Google with his new project, Wikia.

Wales has called both Google and Yahoo the “black boxes” of the internet, criticizing them for the secrecy maintained around their ranking algorithms, but details on exactly how Wikia will work have been equally scarce. All we’ve heard so far is that an online community with “a distinct and clear purpose — a moral purpose — that unites people and brings them together to do something useful” will work to make Web search a better experience for us all. The “how” of how Wikia will work has been lacking to this point. But it’s likely to follow a similar path as Wikipedia. The online community will act as an army of human editors, ensuring the quality of the results by collectively agreeing on them in some fashion. The theory here is that there is no better filter for results aimed at humans than those same humans.

Human “Signal Noise”

But the minute you put people into the equation, you introduce “signal noise”: in engineering parlance, you add friction between the end user and the desired content. Automated algorithms are relatively friction-free. Results are ranked with mathematical objectivity, based on universally applicable principles. Queries flow through this channel to connect with the content as determined by the algorithms.

People are smarter and more intuitive than the smartest algorithm, but they’re also political. And the reality is, the very segment that Wikia (and Wikipedia) depends most on are those most prone to politics.

Anytime you depend on people to do things out of the “goodness of their hearts” you attract a certain kind of person. They’re community-minded, true, but it’s very much their definition of community. They can also be elitist, obstinate, territorial and dismissive of those “outside the circle.” These people tend to show up in the same places: condo strata councils, nonprofit organizations, PTAs, church groups, and, online, in forums and on wikis. They have the time to contribute, probably because no one can stand them, so they don’t have an active social life outside their chosen cause.

I’m not saying everyone that contributes falls into this category, but come on, admit it, everyone reading this now has someone firmly in mind that fits the above description. They get possessive about their online community, which is both a good and a bad thing. With possessiveness comes politics, and signal noise.

Good Intentions, Bad Results

If you need more evidence, look at what is currently happening in the best-known communities that depend on online “Good Samaritans.” On Digg, the Bury Brigade has been publicly acknowledged by Digg founder Kevin Rose: Any story that doesn’t meet their criteria for what is interesting gets quickly buried, never to rise to the surface again. That’s censorship, and it’s just some of the signal noise you can expect when you introduce people to the equation.

Wikipedia has come under frequent criticism for the same issue, a handful of community elite (with a decidedly left-wing bent) dictating what should and shouldn’t be included as entries.

A Growth Bottleneck

But perhaps the biggest challenge for Wikia is scalability. If you put your faith in people as your competitive advantage, you have to be prepared to accept the restrictions that come with that. If Wales is counting on people to help compile the index and rank it, that introduces a potentially significant bottleneck.

Search engines are different than encyclopedias. Encyclopedias are much less dynamic, even when you have an encyclopedia as fluid and ever-growing as Wikipedia. Search engines have to be much more sensitive to new content. A lower-traffic entry on Wikipedia could probably go untouched for months at a time and it wouldn’t significantly impact the value of that entry. But users of a search engine expect even long-tail queries to bring back fresh and timely results. Given this factor, it would be likely that Wikia would have to have a two-stage approach to including new content. They would need an automated spider and simple index, to be later augmented and edited by humans. This would create a significant divide in the quality of the results, between the edited and unedited entries, especially in newer, less popular segments of the index. And, as Wales himself admits, if the algorithms that power the automated portion are open source, the door is wide open to spammers.

What’s In It For Me?

Finally, we have to look at the motivation on why people contribute to Wikipedia, and ask ourselves if this would translate to a search engine. When you contribute to Wikipedia, you’ve staked your claim in online intellectual territory. You’ve left a mark, speaking to your expertise in a particular area, on a place on the Web where you can point and say, “See, that’s me. I did that!” It may not have your name on it, but it’s visible.

In a search engine, your contribution would be lost in a background process that would leave virtually no trace that you ever trod there. There are no bragging rights. And that’s essential to appeal to the segment of the online community that Wikia needs to survive. If we’re going to take even a few seconds out of our busy days to tag, vote, nominate or whatever else Wales needs us to do, there’d better be something in it for us, or it just won’t fly.

I applaud Jimmy Wales’s ideal of open access to technology and unlocking the “black box” for the masses, but I just can’t see how it will work for search. Much as I love humans, having been one on occasion, I’m not sure they’re the competitive advantage a search engine needs.

Webpronews Video: Who Said What?

I happened to be browsing through Webpronews on the weekend and saw one of their new video news updates. The clips are well produced, professional looking and even have their own attractive newscaster, Nicole Eggers. One I happened to pick, however, left a little to be desired on the accuracy front. As you’re probably aware, I just did a series of interviews with the top usability people at each of the three engines for Search Engine Land and a couple weeks ago I did a recap talking about the differences I saw between each of their philosophical approaches. The blurb on the video appeared to be on the same topic so I decided to give it a watch. If it, Webpronews indicated that search expert Danny Sullivan had talked to each of the three usability people at the engines and had come to the following conclusions:

  • That relevancy was almost a religion for Google
  • Yahoo had a heightened sensitivity to the needs of their advertising community
  • Microsoft was still finding their competitive niche

Huh? That’s exactly what my recap said. They even pulled a few quotes from it and attributed them to Danny. I quickly e-mailed Danny to see if we were doing some kind of weird Cyrano de Bergerac thing but Danny was apparently as out of the loop on this as I was. Anyway a quick e-mail to Webpronews seems to have got it straightened out. They’ve pulled the clip and apparently they’re redoing it.

Not that I mind being mistaken for Danny, but I just hate to be putting words in his mouth. By the way, does anyone else feel like they’re being scolded by Nicole? Again, not that I mind.

A Caffeine Fueled Vision of the Future

This week, for some reason (largely to do with thinking I could still handle caffeine and being horribly wrong), a number of pieces fell into place for me when it came to looking at how we might interact with computers and the Internet in the future.  I began to sketch that out in my SearchInsider column today (more details about the caffeine episode are in it) , but quickly found that I was at the end of my editorial limit and there were a lot of pieces of the vision that I wasn’t able to draw together.  So I promised to put a post on this blog going into a little more detail.

The ironic thing about this vision was that although I’d never seen it fully described before, as I thought about it I realized a lot of the pieces to make this happen are already in development.  So obviously, somewhere out there, somebody also seen the same vision, or at least pieces of it.  The other thing that struck me was: it all made sense as a logical extension of how I interacted with computers today.  Obviously there’s a lot of technology being developed but if you take each of those vectors and follow it forward into the future, they all seem to converge into a similar picture.

Actually, the most commonly referenced rendering of the future that I’ve seen is the world that Spielberg imagined in his movie Minority Report.  Although anchored in pop culture, the way that Spielberg arrived at his vision is interesting to note. He took the original short story by Philip K. Dick and fleshed it out by assembling a group of futurists, including philosophers, scientists and artists, and putting them together in a think tank.  Together they came up with a vision of the future that was both chilling and intriguing.

I mention Minority Report because there are certain aspects of what I saw the future to be that seem to mirror what Spielberg came up with for his future.  So, let me flesh out the individual components and provides links to technology currently under development that seem to point this way.

The Cloud

First of all, what will the web become?  There’s been a lot of talk about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web envisioned by Tim Berners Lee.  Seth Godin had a particularly interesting post (referenced in my column) that he called the Web4.  All these visions of the Web’s future share common elements. In Godin’s version, “Web4 is about making connections, about serendipity and about the network taking initiative”. This Web knows what we’re doing, knows what we have to do in the future, knows where we are at any given time, knows what we want and works as our personal assistant to tie all those pieces together and make our lives easier.  More than that, it connects us a new ways, creating the ad hoc communities that I talked about in my earlier post, Brain Numbing Ideas on Friday afternoon.

For the sake of this post, I’m calling my version of the new Web “the Cloud”, borrowing some language from Microsoft. For me the Cloud is all about universal access, functionality, connection and information.  The Cloud becomes the repository where we put all our information, both that which we want to make publicly accessible and that which we want to keep private.  Initially this will cause some concern, as we wrestle with the change of thinking required to understand that physical ownership of data does not always equal security of that same data.  We’ll have to gain a sense of comfort that data stored in online repositories can still remain private. 

Another challenge will be understanding where we, ourselves, draw the line between the data we choose to make publicly accessible and the data we want to keep for our own personal use.  There will be inevitable mistakes of an embarrassing nature as we learn where to put up our own firewalls.  But the fascinating part about the Cloud is that it completely frees us physically. We can take all the data we need to keep our lives on track, stored in the Cloud, and have it accessible to us anywhere we are. What’s more, everyone else is doing the same thing.  So within the Cloud, we’ll be able to find anything that anyone chooses to share with us. This could include the music they create, the stories they write, or on a more practical level, what our favorite store currently has in stock, or what our favorite restaurant has on for it’s special tonight.  Flight schedules, user manuals, technical documentation, travel journals…the list is endless.  And it all resides in the Cloud, accessible to us if we choose.

The other really interesting aspect of the Cloud is the functionality it can offer as we begin to build true applications into the web, through Web 2.0 technology. We start to imagine a world where any functionality we could wish for is available when we need it, and where we can buy access as required.  The Cloud becomes a rich source of all the functionality we could ever want.  Some of that functionality we use daily, to create our own schedules, to communicate, to connect with others and to manage our finances.  Some of that functionality we may use once or twice in a lifetime.  It really doesn’t matter because it’s always there for us when we need it.

The functionality of the Cloud is already under development.  The two most notable examples can be found in Microsoft’s new Office Live Suite and in the collection of applications that Google is assembling.  Although both are early in their development cycles, one can already see where they could go in the future.

The final noteworthy aspect of the Cloud is that it will create the basic foundation for all communication in the future.  Our entertainment options will be delivered through the Cloud.  We will communicate with each other through the Cloud, either by talking, writing or seeing each other.  We will access all our information through the Cloud.

For the Cloud to work, it has to be ubiquitous.  This represents possibly the single greatest challenge at the current time.  The Cloud is already being built, but our ability to access the Cloud still depends on the speed of our connection and the fact is right now, our wireless infrastructure doesn’t allow for a robust enough connection to really leverage what the Cloud has to offer.  But universal wireless access is currently being rolled out in more and more locations, so the day is drawing near when access will cease to be a problem.

So, when the Cloud exists, the next question is how do we access it?  Let’s start with the two access points that are most common today: home and at work.

The Home Box

The Home Box becomes the nerve center of our home.  It acts as a control point for all the functionality and communication we need when we’re not at work.  The Home Box consists of a central unit, which doubles as our main entertainment center, and a number of “smart pods” located throughout the home, each connected to a touch screen.

So, what would the Home Box do?  Well first of all, it would inform and entertain us.  The pipeline that funnels our entertainment options to us would be directly connected to the Cloud.  We would choose what we want to see, so the idea of channels becomes obsolete.  All entertainment options exist in the Cloud and we pick and choose what we want, when we want.

Also, the Home Box makes each one of those entertainment options totally interactive.  We can engage with the programming and shape it as we see fit.  We can manipulate the content to match our preferences.  The Home Box can watch four or five sporting events and assemble a customized highlight reel based on what we want to see.  The Home Box can scan the Cloud for new works by artists, whether they be visual artists, music artists or video artists, notifies us when new content is ready for us to enjoy.  If we have an interest that suddenly develops in one particular area, for instance a location that we want to visit on an upcoming vacation, the Home Box assembles all the information that exists, sorted by our preferences, and brings it back to us.  And at any time, while watching a video about a particular destination, we can tag items of interest within the video for further reference.  As soon as they’re tagged, a background application can start compiling information on whatever we indicated we were interested in.  Advertising, in this manifestation, becomes totally interwoven into the experience.  We indicate when we’re interested in something and the connection to the advertiser is initiated by us with a quick click.

But the Home Box is much more than just a smarter TV set or stereo.  It also runs our home.  It monitors energy consumption levels and adjusts them as required.  It monitors what’s currently in our fridge and our pantry (by the way, computers are already being built into fridges) and notifies us when we’re out of something.  Or, if there’s a particular recipe we want to make, it will let us know what we currently have and what we need to go shopping for.

Microsoft already has the vision firmly in mind.  Many of the components are already here.  The limited success of Microsoft’s Windows Media Center has not dissuaded them from this vision of the future.  Windows Media Center is now built into premium versions of the Vista operating system. And the is Smart Pods I refer to?  Each Xbox 360 has the ability to tap right into windows XP Media Center.  The technology is already in place.

The Work Box

Probably the least amount of change that I see in the future is in how we access the Internet at work.  For those who of us who work in an office environment, we’re already fairly well connected to the Internet.  The primary difference in this case would be where the data resides.  Eventually, as we gain comfort with the security protocols that exists within the Cloud, we will feel more comfortable and realize the benefits that come with hosting our corporate data where it’s accessible to all members of the organization, no matter where they are physically located.

But consider what happens for the workers who don’t work in an office environment.  Access to the Cloud now allows them to substantially increase their connectivity and functionality while they’re mobile.  You could instantly access the inventory of any retail location within the chain.  You can see if a parts in stock at the warehouse.  You can access files and documents from anywhere, at any time.  And, you can tap into the core functionality of your office applications as you wish, where ever you happen to be.

Once again, much of the functionality that would enable this is already in place or being developed.  In the last year we at Enquiro have started to realize the capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server and Sharepoint services.  Just today, Google announced new enterprise level apps would be available on the web. Increasingly, more and more collaborative tools that use the Internet as their common ground are being developed.  The logical next step is to allow these to reside within the Cloud and to free them from the constraints of our own internal hardware and software infrastructure.

The Mobile Device

When we talk about tangible technology that will enable this future; hardware that we can see and touch, the mobile piece of the equation is the most critical.  For us to truly realize the full functionality of the Cloud, we have to have universal access to it.  It has to come with us as we live our lives.  The new mobile device becomes a constant connection to the Cloud.  Small, sleek, GPS enabled, with extended communication capabilities, the new handheld device will become our computing device of choice.  All the data and the functionality that we could require at any time exists in the Cloud.  The handheld device acts as our primary connection to the Cloud  We pull down the information that we need, we rent functionality as required, we do what we have to do and then we move on with our lives.

Our mobile device comes with us and plugs into any environment that we’re in.  When we’re at work, we plug it into a small docking station and all the files that we require are interchanged automatically.  Work we did at home is automatically uploaded to the corporate section of the Cloud, our address books and appointment calendars are instantly updated, new communications are downloaded, and an accurate snapshot of our lives is captured and is available to us.  When we get home again we dock our mobile device and the personal half of our lives is likewise updated.

Consider some practical applications of this:

When we go to the gym, our exercise equipment is now “Cloud” enabled.  Our entire exercise program is recorded on our mobile device.  As we move from station to station we quickly plug it into a docking station, the weights are automatically adjusted, the number of reps is uploaded, and as we do our exercises, appropriate motivating music and messages are heard in our ear. At the same time, our heart rate and other biological signals are being monitored and are being fed back to the exercise equipment, maximizing our workout.

When we’re at home, we quickly plug our mobile device into the Smart Pod in the kitchen, and everything we need to get on our upcoming shopping trip is instantly uploaded.  What’s more, with the functionality built into the Cloud, the best specials on each of the items is instantly determined, the best route to pick up all the items is send to our GPS navigation module, and our shopping trip is efficiently laid out for us. While we’re there, the built in bar code scanner allows us to comparison shop on any item, in the geographic radius we choose.

As I fly back from San Francisco, a flight delay means that I may miss my connecting flight in Seattle.  My mobile device notes this, adjusts my schedule accordingly, automatically notifies my wife and scans airline schedules to see if an alternative flight might still get me home without an unexpected layover near SeaTac Airport. It there’s no way I can make it back, it books me a room at my prefered hotel.

The Missing Pieces

I happen to think this is a pretty compelling vision of the future.  And as it started to come together for me, I was surprised by how many of the components already exist or are being currently developed.  As I said in the beginning, it seems like a puzzle with a lot of the pieces already in place.  There are some things, however, we still need to come together for this vision to become real.  Here are the challenges as I see them.

Computing Horsepower

For the mobile device that I envisioned to become a reality, we have to substantially up the ante of the computing horsepower.  The story that led to my writing of the SearchInsider column was one about the new research chip that is currently under development at Intel.  Right now the super chips are being developed for a new breed of supercomputer, but the trickle-down effects are inevitable.  Just to give you an idea of the quantum leap in performance we’re talking about, the chip is designed to deliver teraflops performance.  Teraflops are trillions of calculations per second.  The first time teraflops performance was achieved was in 1997 on a supercomputer that took up more than 2000 square feet, powered by 10,000 Pentium Pro processors.  With the new development, that same performance is achieved on a single multi-core chip about the size of a fingernail. This opens the door to dramatic new performance capabilities, including a new level of artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photorealistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition.

A descendent of this prototype chip could make our mobile device several orders of magnitude more powerful than our most powerful desktop box today.  And when implanted in our Home Box, this new super chip allows us to scan any video file and pick up specific items of interest.  You could scan the top 100 movies of any year to see how many of them reference the city of Cleveland, Ohio (not exactly sure why you’d want to do this), or included a product placement for Apple.

Better Speech Recognition

One of the biggest challenges with mobile computing is the input/output part of the problem.  Small just does not lend itself to being user-friendly when it comes to getting information in and out of the device.  We struggle with tiny keyboards and small screens.  But simply talking has proven to be a remarkably efficient communication tool for us for thousands of years.  The keyboard was a necessary evil because speech recognition wasn’t an option for us in the past.  We can talk much faster than we can talk.

I recently was introduced to Dragon Naturally Speaking for the first time.  I’ve been trying it for about three weeks now.  Although it’s still getting to know me and I’m still getting to know it, when it works it works very well.  I found it a much more efficient way to interact with my computer.  It would certainly make interacting with a mobile device infinitely more satisfying.  The challenge right now with this is that speech recognition requires a fairly quiet environment, you’re constantly speaking to yourself, and mobile devices just don’t have enough computing power to be able to handle it.

We’ve already dealt with the computing horsepower problem above.  So how do we deal with the challenge of being able to get our vocal commands recognized by our mobile device? Let me introduce you to the subvocalization mic.  The mic actually picks up the vibrations from our vocal cords, even if we’re only whispering, and renders recognizable speech without all the background noise.  New prototype sensors can detect sub vocal or silent speech.  We can speak quietly (even silently) to ourselves, no matter how noisy the environment, and our mobile device would be able to understand what we’re saying.

Better Visual Displays

The other challenge with a mobile device is in freeing ourselves from the tiny little 2.5″ x 2 .5″ screen.  It just does not produce a very satisfying user experience.  One of the biggest frustrations I hear about the lack of functionality with many of the mobile apps comes just because we don’t have enough screen real estate.  This is where a heads-up display could make our lives much, much easier.  Right now they’re still pretty cumbersome and make us look like cyborgs but you just know we’re not far from the day where they could easily be built into a pair of non-intrusive eyeglasses.  Then the output from our mobile device can be as large as we wanted to be.

Going this one step further, let’s borrow a scene from Spielberg’s Minority Report.  We have the heads-up display which creates a virtual 3-D representation of the interface.  We could also have sensors on our hands that would turn that display into a virtual 3-D touchscreen experience.  We could “touch” different things within the display and interact with our computing device in this way.  Combined with sub vocalization speech commands, this could create the ultimate user interface.  Does this sound far-fetched?  Microsoft has already developed much of the technology and has licensed it to a company called eon reality.  Like I said no matter what the mind can envision, it’s probably already under development. As I started down this path, it particularly struck me how many of the components under development had the Microsoft brand on them.

If you can fill in other pieces of the puzzle, or you have your own vision of the future, make sure you take a few moments to comment.

Marissa Mayer Interview on Personalization

marissa-mayer-7882_cnet100_620x433Below is the full transcript of the interview with Marissa Mayer on personalization of search results. For commentary, see the Just Behave column on Searchengineland.

Gord: It’s a little more than two weeks ago since Google made the announcement that personalization would become more of a default standard for more users on Google.  Why did you move towards making that call?

Marissa: We’ve had a very impressive suite of personalized products for awhile now: personalized homepage, search history, the personalized webpage and we haven’t had them integrated, which I think has made it somewhat confusing for users. A lot of people didn’t know if they had signed up for search history or personalized search; whether or not it was on.  What we really wanted to do was move to a signed in version of Google and a signed out version of Google.  So if you’re signed in you have access to the personalized home page, the personalized search results and search history.  You know all three of those are working for you when you’re signed in.  And if you’re signed out, meaning that you don’t see an email in the upper right hand corner that personalized search isn’t turned on.  If anything, it’s a cleaning up of the user model, to make it clearer to users what services they’re using them and when they’re using them.

Gord: But some of the criticism actually runs counter to that.  One of the criticisms is that it used to be clearer, as far as the user went, when you were signed in and when you are signed out.  There were more indicators on the Google results page whether you were getting personalized results or not.  Some of those have seemed to disappear, so personalized results have become more of a default now, rather than an option that’s available to the user.

Marissa: If you think about it as default-on when you’re signed in, I think that it’s still as clear on the search results page.  We removed the “turn off the personalized search results” link, but you still see very clearly up in the upper right-hand corner whether or not you’re signed in, your e-mail address appears, and that’s your clue Google has personalized you and that’s why that e-mail address is there.  I do think, based on our user studies and our own usage at Google, that we’ve made the model clearer.  We were actually ended up at the stage with our personalized product earlier this year where, at one point, Eric (Schmidt) asked “am I using personalized search?”  And the team’s answer as to whether or not he was currently using it was so complicated that even he couldn’t follow it.  You’d have to go to “my account”, see whether or not he was signed up for personalized search, make sure that your toggle hadn’t been turned off or on, and there was no way to just glance at the search results page and easily tell whether or not it was invoked.  So now it’s very easy, if you see your username and e-mail address up in the upper left-hand corner, you’re getting personalized results and if you don’t, you’re not.  So effectively there are two parallel universes of Google, per se.  One if you’re signed out where you see the classic homepage and the classic search results and one where you’re signed in, where you get the personalized home page and…you’ll be able to toggle back and forth, of course…and then the personalized search results page and the search history becomes coupled with all that because that’s how we personalize your search.

Gord: So, to sum up, it’s fair to say that really the search experience hasn’t changed that dramatically, it’s just cleaning up the user experience about whether you’re signed in or signed out and that’s been the primary change.

Marissa: That’s right.  Before you could be signed in and be using one of the three products or two of the three products but not all and, of course, because people like to experiment with a new product, they forget whether they signed up for personalized search.  Had they signed up for search history?  This just makes it cleaner.  If you’re signed in you’re using and/or have access to all three, if you’re signed out, you’re on the anonymous version of Google that doesn’t have personalization.

Gord: We can say that it cleans up the user experience because it makes it easier to you know when you’re signed in or signed out, but having done the eye tracking studies, we know that where the e-mail address shows is in a location that’s not prominently scanned as part of the page.  Do the changes mean that more people are going to be looking at personalized search results, just because we’ve made that more of a default opt in and we’ve moved the signals that you’re signed in a little bit out of the scanned area of the page.  Once people fixate on their task they are looking further down the page.  This should mean at a lot more people are looking at personalized search results than previously.

Marissa: Actually, I don’t think it will change the volume of personalized search all that much, not based on what we’ve seen on our logs and usage.  It makes it cleaner to understand whether or not you’re using it and I do think that over time, what it does is it pushes the envelope of search more such that you expect personalized results by default.  And we think that the search engines in the future will become better for a lot of different reasons, but one of the reasons will be that we understand the user better.  And so when we think about how we can advance towards that search engine of the future that we’re building, part of that will be personalization.  I do think that when we look five years out, 10 years out, users will have an expectation of better results.  One of the reasons that they have that expectation is that search engines will have become more personalized.  I think that in the future, working with the search engine that understands something about you will become the expectation.  But you’re right in that we believe that for users that are signed in, who find value in the personalized search results, over time as those users know they are signed in and that there search history is being kept track of, that their search results are being personalized, and they don’t need to look at every single search task to see whether or not they are signed in because that’s what their expectation is and they’re expecting personalized results.  So I do think we won’t see a drastic increase of volume right now of the use of personalized search but that it will hopefully change the user’s disposition over time to become more comfortable that personalization is a benefit for them and it’s something they come to expect.

Gord: There are a number of aspects of that question that I’d like to get into, and leave behind the question of whether you’re signed in or signed out of personalized search, but I have one question before we move on.  We’ve been talking a lot about existing users. The other change was where people were creating a new Google account and they got personalized search and search history by default.  The opt-out box is tucked into an area where most users would go right past it.  The placement of that opt-out box seems to indicate that Google would much rather have people opting into personalized search.

Marissa: I think that falls in with the philosophy that I just outlined. We believe that the search engines of the future will be personalized and that it will offer users better results.  And the way for us to get that benefit to our users is to try and have as many users signed up for personalized search as possible.  And so certainly we’re offering it to all of our users, and we’re going to be reasonably aggressive about getting them to try it out. Of course, we try to make sure they’re well-educated about how to turn it off if that’s what they prefer to do.

Gord: When this announcement came out I saw it as a pretty significant announcement for Google because it lays the foundation for the future.  I would think from Google’s perspective the challenge would be knowing what personalized search could be 5 to 10 years down the road,  what it would mean for the user experience and how do you start adding that incrementally to the user experience in the meantime?  From Google’s side, you have invested in algorithmic work to categorize content online. I would think the challenge would be just as significant to introduce the technology required to disambiguate intent and get to know more about users. You’re not going to hit that out of the park on the first pitch. That’s going to be a continuing trial and error process.  How do you maintain a fairly consistent user experience as you start to introduce personalization without negatively impacting that user experience?

Marissa: I will say that there are a lot of challenges there and a lot of this is something that’s going to be a pragmatic evolution for us.  You have to know that this is not a new development for us. We’ve been working on personalized search now for almost 4 years. It goes back to the Kaltix acquisition. So we’ve been working on it for awhile and our standards are really high.  We only want to offer personalized search if it offers a huge amount of end user benefit.  So we’re very comfortable and confident in the relevance seen from those technologies in order to offer them at all, let alone have them veered more towards the results, as we’re doing today.  We acquired a very talented team in March of 2003 from Kaltix.  It was a group of three students from Stanford doing their Ph.D, headed up by a guy named Sep Kamvar, who is the fellow who cosigned the post with me to the blog. Sep and his team did a lot of PageRank style work at Stanford.  Interestingly enough, one of the papers they produced was on how to compute PageRank faster.  They wrote this paper about how to compute page rank faster and it caused a huge media roil around the web because everyone said there are these students at Stanford who created an even faster version of Google.  Because the press obviously doesn’t understand search engines and thinks that we actually do the PageRank calculation on the fly on each query, as opposed to pre-computing it.  Their advance was actually significant not because it helps you prepare an index faster, which is what the press thought was significant.  Interestingly enough, the reason they were interested in building a faster version of PageRank was because what they wanted to do was be able to build a PageRank for each user.  So, based on seed data on which pages were important to you, and what pages you seemed to visit often, re-computing PageRank values based on that. PageRank as an algorithm is very sensitive to the seed pages.  And so, what they were doing, was that they had figured out a way to sort by host and as a result of sorting by host, be able to compute PageRank in a much more computationally efficient way to make it feasible to compute a PageRank per user, or as a vector of values that are different from the base PageRank.  The reason we were really interested in them was: one, because they really grasped and cogged all of Google’s technology really easily; and, two, because we really felt they were on the cutting edge of how personalization would be done on the web, and they were capable of looking at things like a searcher’s history and their past clicks, their past searches, the websites that matter to them, and ultimately building a vector of PageRank that can be used to enhance the search results.

We acquired them in 2003 and we’ve worked for some time since to outfit our production system to be capable of doing that computation and holding a vector for each user in parallel to the base computation.  We’ve been very responsible in the way that we’ve personalized Search Labs and we also did what we called Site Flavored Search on Labs where you can put a search box on your page and that is geared towards a page of interests that you’ve selected. So if you have a site about baseball you can say you want to base it on these three of your favorite baseball sites and have a search box that has a PageRank that’s veered in that direction for baseball queries.

So, the Kaltix team has been really successful at integrating all these Google technologies and taking this piece of theoretical research and ultimately bringing it to life on the Web.  And as it’s growing stronger and stronger and our confidence around the Kaltix technology grew, we’ve been putting it forward more and more.  We started off on Labs through a sign-up process, then we transitioned it over to Google.com and now we are in effect leaning towards a model where for people who use Google.com and have a Google account, they get personalized search basically by default.  If you look at the historical reviews of the Kaltix work it’s gotten pretty rave reviews.  The users that have noticed it and have been using it for a long time, like Danny (Sullivan), they’ll say that they think it’s one of the biggest advances to relevance that they’ve seen in the past three years.

Gord: So when you the Kaltix technology working over and above the base algorithm, obviously that’s going to be as good as the signals you’re picking up on the individual.  And right now the signals are past sites they visited, perhaps what they put on their personalized homepage and sites that they’ve bookmarked. But obviously the data that you can include to help create that on-the-fly, individual index improves as you get more signals to watch.  In our previous interview you said one thing that was really interesting to you was looking at the context of the task you are engaged in, for example, if you’re composing an e-mail in Gmail. So is contextual relevance another factor to look at.  Are those things that could potentially be rolled into this in the future?

Marissa: I think so.  I think that overall, we really feel that personalized search is something that holds a lot of promise, and we’re not exactly sure of the signals that will yield the best results.  We know that search history, your clicks and your searches together provide a really rich set of signals but it’s possible that some of the other data that Google gathers could also be useful. It’s a matter of understanding how.  There’s an interesting trade off around personalized search for the user which is, as you point out, the more signals that you have and the more data you have about the user, the better it gets.  It’s a hard sell sometimes, we’re asking them to sign up for a service where we begin to collect data in the form of search history yet they don’t see the benefits of that, at least in its fullest form, for some time.  It’s one of those things that we think about and struggle with. And that’s one reason why we’re trying to enter a model where search history and personalized search are, in fact, more expected.  And I should also note that as we look at reading some of the signals across different services we will obviously abide by the posted privacy policies.  So there are certain services where we’ve made it very clear we won’t cross correlate data. For example on Gmail, we’ve made it very clear that we won’t cross correlate that data with searches without being very, very explicit with the end user.  You don’t have to worry about things like that.

Gord: One of the points of concern seems to be how smart will that algorithm get and do we lose control?  For example, when we’re exploring new territory online and we’re trying to find answers we’ve refine our results based on our search experience.  So, at the beginning, we use very generic terms that cast a very wide net and then we narrow our search queries as we go. Somebody said to me, “Well, if we become better searchers, does that decrease the need for personalization?”  Do we lose some control in that?  Do we lose the ability to say “No, I want to see everything, and I will decide how I narrow or filter that query.  I don’t want Google filtering that query on the front end”?

Marissa: I think it really depends on how forcefully we’re putting forth personalization.  And right now we might be very forceful in getting people to sign up to it, or at least more forceful than we were. The actual implementation of personalized search is that as many as two pages of content, that are personalized to you, could be lifted onto the first page and I believe they never displace the first result, in our current substantiation, because that’s a level of relevance that we feel comfortable with.  So right now, at least eight of the results on your first page will be generic, vanilla Google results for that query and only up to two of them will be results from the personalized algorithm.  We’re introducing it in a fairly limited form for exactly the reason that you point out.  And I think if we tend to veer towards a model where there are more results that are personalized, we would have ways of making it clearer: “Do you want to explore this topic as a novice or with the personalization in place?” So the user will be able to toggle in a different filter form.  I think the other thing to remember is, even when personalization happens and lifts those two results onto the page, for most users it happens one out of every five times.  When you think about it, 20% of the queries are much better by doing that, but for 80% of the queries, people are, in fact, exploring topics that are unknown to them and we can tell from their search history that they haven’t searched for anything in this sphere before. There’s no other search like it. They’ve never clicked on any results that are related to this topic, and, as a result, we actually don’t change their query set at all because we know that they need the basic Google results.  The search history is valuable not only because it can help personalize the results but they’re also valuable because we can tell when not to.

Gord: There’s two parts to that: one is the intelligence of the algorithm to know when to push personalization and when not to push personalization, and two, as you said, right now this is only impacting one out of five searches where you may have a couple of new results being introduced into the top 10 as a result of personalization.  But that’s got to be a moving target.  As you become more confident in the technology and that it’s adding to the user experience, personalization will creep higher and higher up the fold and increasingly take over more of the search results page, right?

Marissa: Possibly.  I think that’s one of many things that could possibly happen, and I think that’s a pretty aggressive stance.  I look at our evolution and our foray into personalization, where we’re sitting here three or four years in, with some base technology that several years old already and it still has been very slight in a way that we have it interact with the user experience.  Mostly because we think that base Google is pretty good.  As it becomes more aggressive, certainly I would be pushing for an understanding of the ability of the user to know that these results are, in fact, coming from my personalization and not background and if I want to filter them out and get back to basics, that that would be possible.  One thing that we’ve struggled with is if we should actually mark the results are entering the page as a result of personalization but because team is currently and frequently doing experiments, we didn’t want to settle on a particular model or marker at this exact moment.

Gord: The challenge there is as you roll more personal results into the results page and get feedback from some users that they would want more control over what on the page is personalized and the degree of personalization and introduce more filters or more sophisticated toggles, it complicates the user experience. And as we know, that user experience needs to be very simple. Is it a delicate balance of how much control you give the user versus how much do you impact the 95% of the searches that are just a few seconds in duration and have to be really simple to do?

Marissa: There are two thoughts there.  One, even if we introduce them to filtering on the results page, it wouldn’t be any more complicated than what you had two weeks ago, so we already have that filter.  Two, we put the user first, and people have varying opinions about whether their search results page is too complicated, but the same people who designed that user experience will be the people who will be tackling this for Google, so I think you can expect results of a similar style and direction.

Gord: In the last few weeks, Google has introduced some new functionality, related searches and refine search suggestions, that are appearing at the bottom of the page for a number of searches.  To me that would seem to be a prime area that could be impacted by personalization opportunities that are coming.  As you make suggestions about other queries that you could be using, using that personalization data to refine those. Is that something you’re considering? And how long before personalization starts impacting the ads that are being presented to you on a search results page?

Marissa: Refinement is an interesting but a neophyte technology from our perspective.  We are finally now just beginning to develop some refining technologies that we believe in enough to use on the search results page.  A lot of people have been doing it for a lot longer. When you look at the overall utility, probably 1 to 5% of people will click those query refinements on any given search, where most users, probably more than two thirds of users, end up using one of our results. So in terms of utility and value that is delivered to the end user, the search results themselves and personalizing those are an order of magnitude more impactful then personalizing a query refinement.  So part of it is a question of, it’s such a new technology that we really haven’t looked at how we can make personalization make it work more effectively.  But the other thing is on a “bang for the buck” basis, personalizing those search results get us a lot more.

And as to ads, I think there are some easy ways to personalize ads that we’ve known for some time, but we’ve chosen at this point to focus on personalizing the search results because we wanted to make sure to delivered the end-user value on that, because that’s our focus, before we look at personalizing ads

Gord: So, no immediate plans for the personalization of ads?

Marissa: That’s right

Gord: Thank you so much for your time Marissa.

I Have Seen the Future (Thanks to Regular Coffee)

First published February 22, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Why do epiphanies always happen in the middle of the night? Why can’t they be more conveniently scheduled during regular business hours, say between 10 and 11 in the morning or right after afternoon break at around 3: 30? But no, they usually occur somewhere between 2 and 4 in the morning. The fact that I was in a semiconscious state for this particular epiphany has everything to do with the fact that we ran out of decaf at the office yesterday, and I figured I could squeeze in just one cup of regular coffee without serious side effects. I was wrong.

Intel’s New Super Chip

This particular epiphany was catalyzed by a short news story about the new research processor chip that Intel is working on. It promises to be a performance breakthrough of breathtaking proportions and while it’s destined for supercomputers, the trickle-down effect to our everyday computing requirements is inevitable. Moore’s Law just keeps rolling along.

So, I asked myself, sometime between 2:45 and 2:49 a.m., with processing power set to take another leap forward, where would this new technology change our lives the most? The answer: mobile computing.

More Horsepower for Mobile

Some time ago I wrote a column about my frustrations with the limitations of mobile computing as it currently sits. But if you can pack enough horsepower into your average mobile device to facilitate things like speech recognition and more robust support for virtual displays, the mobile computing experience becomes much less frustrating. And when that happens, our entire interaction with the Web changes with it.

Right now the majority of our access probably happens in two places: at work or at home. Mobile access is generally limited to checking e-mails right now, and even that is a truncated experience where we’re scanning subject lines to see if there’s any fires we have to put out.

Godin’s Web4

Another thread that went into the weaving of this epiphany was a post I read on Seth Godin’s blog about a month ago, a post he called Web4. In it, Seth talked about the Web as our personal assistant that helps shuffle our schedule, introduces us to new interests and businesses, and generally makes our lives better in a number of helpful ways. For the Web4 that Godin envisions to happen, our computers have to know where we are, always be connected to the Internet, have a quick and easy way for us to communicate with it, and generally fit our lifestyle much better than the current boxes on our desks, whether they be at home or at work.

Living in the Wireless “Clouds”

Here’s another thread. Microsoft’s Live suite has one purpose: to put the functionality of Microsoft apps at your fingertips no matter where you are, no matter what your connection to online is. It “unhooks” you from the desktop and lets you move around and live your life with wireless freedom.

Computing and online access have to fit us, not the other way around. There are times during the day when we tend to stick in one spot for a while. When that happens, it makes sense for us to have a static access point and computing platform with some of the advantages that a little more elbow room could offer. Two places that come to mind immediately: our workplace, and when we sit down at home to be entertained. The rest of the time our computer should move with us.

The Home Box

At home our computers could become the oft-predicted convergent box that provides our entertainment options, but does more than that. It plugs into our home-based activities and keeps them organized for us. It becomes a communications center, our security system, an energy usage monitor, a recipe book and shopping, but most important, it’s our primary link to all our information and entertainment alternatives, allowing us to interact with those alternatives in ways never previously possible.

The Work Box

If we tend to stay in one place at work, it also makes sense to have a static access point to our corporate networks and the Internet. But the minute we get up from our seat, a mobile device would become the access point and computing platform of choice. All the data and functionality that defines us, the things we want at our fingertips, have to travel with us. When you get home you quickly plug it into your home system and the required information would be quickly transferred and the necessary updates would be done. When you get to work, you plug it in to your corporate network and again the required work-related information would be seamlessly transferred. The rest of the time, this little engineering marvel that knows where you are, what you like and what you have to do today would become your primary connection to the wired world.

Search as the Common Thread

When you look at this always-on, always-wired lifestyle, one can only imagine the dramatic uptick that would happen in all types of search activity. Once again, search becomes the common thread that runs through all that. It’s what allows us at home to search through all our entertainment options and find precisely what we would like to watch or listen to right now. At work, it’s what allows us to sift through the mountain of corporate data that resides either on our internal network or on vast online data repositories to find the file we need right now. And when we’re out there, interacting with the real world, it’s our trusted shortcut to the relevant content on the Web.

I happen to think this vision of the future is pretty darn cool. Unfortunately I’m already pushing the editorial boundaries of this column. There still seems to be a fair amount of regular coffee coursing through my veins, so check out my blog for some additional posts on the topic.

Bill Wise Leaving Did-It

Apparently Bill Wise and the Did-It Frog have had a difference of opinion.  The story this morning says that Bill Wise will be stepping down from the CEO position at Did-It but future plans haven’t been announced.  The split seems to be amicable at this point, but the two spokespeople are Bill and Kevin Lee and they’re both very diplomatic gentleman.

The split seems to come about from differing views of where Did-It should go in the future.  This is the challenge facing many SEMs and SEOs now as the industry continues to evolve at breakneck pace.  Of course, Did-It is also at the eye of the storm regarding the SEO/SEM controversy.

I had the privilege of being able to speak on a panel once with Bill Wise and was impressed with his clear view of search marketing strategy and the industry in general.  He’ll do very well no matter where he ends up. Good luck Bill.

Brain Numbing Ideas on a Friday Afternoon

I can’t help but get the feeling that when we look at online marketing, we tend to get blinded by the technology and lose sight of what’s really important: how it affects people.

Right now there’s a flurry of attention surrounding YouTube because of copyright issues and other factors.  And YouTube isn’t alone in this.  The majority of things I did in my in box focus on technology.  What will be the next killer platform?  I see mobile search, I see online video, I see social networking. It’s hard to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s really important.  I find it useful to step back a little bit and see how these things affect real people: people not like you and I, who are caught up in the promise of technology, but people like my daughter’s principal, people like my mom, people like my next-door neighbor.  People who are wary about technology and who will only embrace it if it makes their life better in some way.  This is not to discount the importance of technology, because it truly has turned our lives inside out in the last decade.  But there’s a distillation, a time when we have to get comfortable with change.  The dotcom boom and bust was not because of the lack of technology or its inadequacy.  To technology all things are possible.  But to people, it’s all about what’s in it for me.  And that, ultimately, is the success factor that has to be considered in all this.

So, is YouTube hot?  Is online video hot?  Is social networking hot?  All these things are, but not because of the technology that lies beneath, but rather because of the social change that they empower.  Consider online video for example.  A couple of items in my in box talked about how, at this point, we won’t watch television online.  Even the person at Google who was responsible for online video admitted that at this point, even with Google’s tremendous resources, online video at the quality that we’ve come to expect is not a scalable proposition. 

We interact with video in a far different way online.  For example, YouTube is all about the viral spiral.  It’s all about that cute little two to three minutes of video: something that is either funny or outrageous or awful.  There’s no tremendous requirement for engagement for this.  YouTube is the repository for a million different “in” jokes.  It’s the basket where we collect what titillates the fancy of our collective consciousness at any given time.  It gives us an easy reference point so we can take what interests us and forward it to others if we think they are interested as well.  We’re not ready to watch a one or two hour documentary on the web, simply because we’re not used to interacting with our computer screen in that way.  Our computers are things we do things on, not things we watch passively.  A commitment of two to three minutes to watch a little video screen is fine, but we don’t look to the Web for passive entertainment.  That’s not to say we won’t, some day, as connectivity and convergence moves our channels beyond the current paradigm and as we evolve and learn to interact with them in new ways. 

And it’s there that we start to pick apart at what truly makes technology, at least as far as it’s manifested on the web, really interesting.  It stitches together the fabric of our society.  It’s a synapse that allows our collective brain to fire more effectively than it did before. Communications can zing back and forth between us at a far faster rate.  What we find interesting, what we find intriguing, what we find funny, what we find painful to watch is now available for anyone to see.  It’s cataloged and categorized for our convenience.  It occupies a finite space in the virtual world that we can point to and say, “Look at this, it impacted me and I think it will impact you to.”

I recently had the opportunity to watch Dr. Gary Flake from Microsoft talk.  He started his presentation with the claim that the information technology revolution that we’re currently in will be more significant, as far as the change factor for our society, than anything that has gone before.  More important than the Industrial Revolution, more important than the invention of the printing press, more important than television.  To me the real power of the Internet is that it’s rewiring our society in ways we could never dream of and in ways we never anticipated.  To focus on the wiring or the technology of the Web is to take the mechanic’s view of the world.  To a mechanic or a car buff, a vehicle is a wonderful thing because of the internal combustion engine, because of the horsepower and how fast it can go from zero to 60.  They focus on what it is.  But when you look at how the automobile has affected our society, it’s not about what it is, it’s about what it does.  The automobile brought the world closer.  It allowed us to travel and see new things.  It allowed us to live in one place and work in another.  The macro change that the automobile engendered had nothing to do with how an internal combustion engine worked, it came from moving people from one place to another quickly, cheaply and efficiently.  It mobilized our society in a way that never existed before.

Likewise, the Web is not powerful because of Web 2.0 technologies, or speed of connection, or the ability to host video.  It’s important because it connects us in new and different ways.  It moves power from where it was stuck before into new hands.  It breaks down existing power structures and distributes that power amongst all of us.  It puts the individual in control and allows one individual to connect with another, freely and without paying a poll to the previous power brokers.

The really interesting thing about the Internet is the underlying social current, the groundswell of change that is redefining us and how we live together.  These fundamental factors are exerting a tremendous force within our day-to-day lives.  They’re precipitating change so fast that we haven’t been able to step back and see what the full impact to us will be.  We can’t see the trickle down effect of the things that are happening to us today.  The Internet is changing the very DNA of our society, and we are unable to take a long-term view of what those current mutations will mean for us.  One only has to look at the generational difference between the 45-year-old parent, myself, and my 13-year-old daughter, the first generation that has been fully immersed in online technology.  She interacts with the world in a completely different way.  She searches for information in a different way and evaluates it differently.  She takes these things for granted because she’s never known any other way.  What happens when this entire generation emerges as the shapers of our society?  What happens when they take control from us, with their innate understanding of what the Web makes possible, and redefine everything?

Here are three things that I believe are the foundations of social change being pushed by the Internet:

Access to Information

The amount of information we currently have access to is mind-boggling.  Never has so much raw information lived so close to us.  You can now think about any given topic in the universe of our consciousness, and that information exists just a mouse click away.  And, as the saying goes, information is power.  It empowers each one of us to take a more active role in our destiny.  This information has completely changed how people buy things.  It’s completely changed the relationship between vendors and buyers.  More and more, we go direct to the source, as educated, knowledgeable buyers who know exactly what we want and what we will pay for it.  The challenge on the Internet is that not all information is created equal.  There’s good information and there’s bad information.  However, we are becoming extremely good at being able to differentiate between the two.  We’re becoming amazingly adept at being able to recognize authenticity and we can sniff out BS.  In picking through the multiple threads of information that are available to us out there, we can recognize the scent of truth and quickly discount hype, spin and sheer lies. 

Again, as we begin to recognize the shifting of power to the consumer, the full impact has not shaken out yet.  When we can buy anything online, quickly, easily and confidently, will what will that mean for the entire bricks and mortar retail world out there?  Will there be shopping malls in 20 years?  Will there be stores at all?  Will we buy directly from the manufacturers, cutting out distributors, wholesalers and retailers?  Or will distribution of products to the world of consumers lie in the hands of a few mega, long tail retailers such as Amazon?  I certainly don’t know, the future is far too murky to be able to peer down this path.  And I don’t think it’s important to be able to predict the future, but I do think it’s vitally important to consider the quantum change that is likely in the future.

Searchability

As the amount of information available to us continues to multiply exponentially, the ability to connect with the right information at the right time becomes more and more important.  I’ve always maintained that search is the fundamental foundation of everything that will transpire online.  It is the essential connector between our intent, and the content we’re looking for.  But more than just the connector, the sheer functionality of search, both as it is today and as it will be in the future, creates another catalyst for change in our society. 

We are becoming used to having the answers just a few mouse clicks away.  We are becoming a society of instant gratification.  In the past, we accepted that we couldn’t know everything.  In divvying up the world’s knowledge, some of us were experts in one area and some of us were experts in another.  Some of us were experts in nothing.  But we held no pretensions that we would become experts in areas where we had no previous experience.  There was no path to follow so there was no reason to start the journey. 

But today, you can become an instant expert in anything, depending on how you define the scope of that expertise.  Within 30 seconds I can tell you every movie that Uma Thurman ever appeared in.  I can look up a medical condition and have access to the same information, likely more information, that a doctor 20 years ago would have access to, based on his own experience, education and reference materials.  But again, what is the impact of this?  Does having access to the information about a medical condition makes me an expert in treating that condition?  I have the information but I have no context in which to apply it.  As we gain access to information, will we use that information wisely without the experience and domain expertise that used to accompany that information?

And how will instant access to information alter education in the future?  I remember hearing an observation that if we had a modern day Rip van Winkle, who had gone to sleep 20 years ago and suddenly woke up today, the one place he would feel most comfortable would be in the elementary classroom.  While the outside world is changed dramatically in the past 20 years, the classroom in which your child spends the majority of their day has changed very little.  When I help my children do their homework, there isn’t much difference between the textbooks and the worksheets I see today and the ones I saw 30 years ago.  I recently had to explain to my daughter’s principal the difference between a Web browser and a search engine.  The classroom is like a backwater eddy in the rushing torrent of technological change that typifies the rest of the world.  And it’s not just elementary school where this is an issue.  We often speak to students who are currently going through marketing programs at the university level and are always aghast at how little they’re learning about this new world of marketing and the reality of consumer empowerment.  They’re learning the rules of a game that changed at least a decade ago.

So to bring the point home once more, what will the organization of the world’s information mean for our society?  As search gets better at connecting us to the content that we are looking for, what are the ripple effects for us?  Will our children’s and grandchildren’s brains be wired in a different way than ours are?  Will they assimilate information differently? Will they research differently? Will they structure their logic in a different way?

Creation of Ideological Communities

The Web has redefined our idea of community.  It used to be the communities were defined along geographic lines.  You need a physical proximity to people in order to create a community because physical proximity was a prerequisite for communication.  Communities could exist if there was two way communication.  That’s the reason why community and communication are extensions of the same root word and concept. 

Perhaps the most powerful change introduced by the Internet has been the enabling of real, two way communication between people where physical proximity was not required.  Consider the chain of events that typifies online interaction.  You become aware of someone who shares an ideological interest, usually through stumbling upon them somewhere online.  You initiate communication.  Depending on the scope of your shared interest, you may create the core of the community by inviting others into it.  The Internet gives us the platform that allows for the creation of ideological communities.  We see this happen all the time on properties such as YouTube or MySpace.  Ideological communities are created on the fly, flourish for awhile, and then fade away as interest in the idea that engendered them also fades away.  The Internet, at any given point in time, is a snapshot of thousands, or perhaps millions, of these ad hoc ideological communities.  They form, they flourish and then they disappear.

But in our real world there was physicality to the concept of community.  The way our world is built, our political boundaries, come from physical considerations.  There are distinct geographic boundaries like mountain ranges, oceans and rivers that, in the past, prevented the flow of people across them.  Because of the restricted ability to move, people spent long enough together to share ideals and create communities.  As time moved on these communities became larger and larger.  Transportation allowed us to share common ideals over a greater expanse and nations became possible.  The more efficient the transportation, the larger the nation became.  But throughout this entire process, the concept of geography defined communities and defined nations.  Our entire existing political structure was built around this geographic foundation.

With the Internet, geography ceases to have meaning.  It’s now a virtual world, and I can feel closer to someone in China with whom I share one particularly strong mutually held belief then I might with my next-door neighbor.  More fundamentally, I can belong to several different communities at the same time.  Again, the restraint of the physical world usually restricted the number of interests we had that we could share with those immediately around us.  Our sphere of interest as an individual was somewhat dictated by the critical mass each of those interest areas had within the community in which we lived.  If we thought particularly strongly about one interest we could physically move to a community where there were more people who shared that interest.  So we tended to move to communities that felt “right” ideologically as well as physically.  But with the Internet, does that need for ideological “sameness” where we live eventually disappear?  Does our physical need for community decrease as our ideological need for community is fulfilled through the Internet?

And, if this physical definition of community begins to erode, what does that do for the concept of nationhood and all the things that come along with it? Increasingly, communication and commerce travel along lines not defined by geography.  The idea of a nation, as we currently understand it, is inextricably bound to the realities of geography.  Politics, trade, laws and defense are all concepts that are rooted in thinking developed over the past several centuries.  In the past 30 years we’ve seen the erosion of the concept of nationhood through the creation of common markets and free trade areas.  The very breakdown of the Soviet Union comes from the inability to isolate the population from the concepts which flourished in the free world.  And that was before the Internet ever became a factor.  What happens when we take this movement, already afoot, and add the tremendous catalyst that is the Internet?

It’s in these macro trends that the true power of the Internet can be seen.  It’s not about an individual technology or even the cumulative power of all the technology.  It’s about how the sum of all that affects us as individuals, how we interact with the world around us and how we connect with other individuals.  The seeds have been planted, we can’t turn back, and we can’t foresee what will be.  The world is evolving and truly becoming a global community.  We are entering a time when change will accelerate faster than our society may be able to keep up.  There will be costs, certainly, but my hope and belief is that the rewards will far outweigh the costs.

The Inevitability of Personalized Search

First published February 15, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Google’s announcement a little more than a week ago that it would be showing personalized search results to more people through a change in the sign-in/sign-out default signaled perhaps the most significant change in search marketing in the past few years. Fellow Search Insider David Berkowitz dealt with some of the SEO implications in his column on Tuesday. Today I’d like to deal more with the user side of the story. Although Google’s announcement heralds a relatively minor change in terms of user experience, at least for the present time, it represents a step down a path from which there is no return. This path marks a dramatically different direction for search that will have far-reaching implications, both for advertisers and users.

Google Gets Personal

First, a brief recap of Google’s announcement and what it means to users right now. Here are the details: Now, everyone signing up for a Google account gets Search History enabled by default. The opt-out box is positioned so that most people would likely not even notice it during the sign-in process.

Whether or not you have Search History enabled, you get personalized search turned on by default. This means that Google will subtly change your results, based on various “signals,” like what you have on your personalized Google Homepage and what sites you’ve bookmarked as Google favorites. Of course, if you have Search History enabled, this is the main “signal” for personalized search

 

Finally, and probably least significantly, everyone gets his or her own Google Home Page when s/he signs up for a Google account.

The End of One Page for All

Let’s leave aside the privacy issues of Search History right now. That’s a topic that deserves a column by itself. It’s the end of the universal search results page that I want to touch on today.

There has been significant dissent voiced about Google’s move to personalized search, and it’s coming primarily from one source: search engine optimizers. In opposing personalized search, they’re saying it degrades the user experience. I responded by saying that it was the wrench that personalized search throws into their SEO plans that was raising their ire. But let me set aside my jaundiced view of the search world for a moment and chronicle its concerns (excluding privacy issues), as near as I can understand them:

 

  • Taking control away from the user by making personalized search a default and making it more difficult to toggle on and off 
  • Fear of anomalous browsing patterns (i.e. going to visit a number of humor sites on a whim or the invite of a friend) unnaturally biasing search results 
  • The “machine learning” algorithms that power personalized search not being smart enough to really provide more relevant resultsI’ve come out as saying that personalized search is inevitable; the day when all of us see the same page of search results is rapidly coming to a close. To me, this just seems obvious. But still, there are those that protest. Here’s one example from Michael Gray, a well know SEO Blogger: “I’ve never met a business owner who’s said, ‘Man, you know what, I wish the search engines could create anarchy by making sure no two people got the exact same results for the exact same search — that would be the best thing since sliced bread.'”

    In fact, Michael’s beef seems to be a consistently recurring theme among the dissenters, that a move to personalization suddenly seems to open the door for chaos on the results page. I believe the opposite is true.

    Every Search is an Island

    I am an individual, with unique interests, experiences, values and goals. My intent when I search for hybrid vehicles, or New York hotels, or Smart Phones, or any of the hundreds of other things I search for monthly, will be significantly different than all the other people that launch those same searches. I want a search engine smart enough to know that. I’ve always said that humans are complex, far too complex for a simple search box to get it right. That’s why personalized search is inevitable. If we want search to move to the next level, to get smarter, more intuitive, more relevant, we need to leave standardized search results behind.

    Does this mean Google will get it right out of the box? No. It will take baby steps towards what personalization eventually needs to become (although I believe those steps will be in rapid succession, because Google can hear the competition hard on its heels). Yes, there will be many who find that in the early stages, personalization may be more frustrating than it is useful. But for search to mature, these are growing pains we’ll have to endure.

    I’ve been labeled as an early proponent of personalization. I’m not sure this is necessarily the case. To me, it’s not a question of liking or disliking the recent moves by Google. To me, fighting search personalization is as pointless as refusing to accept today’s weather.

Personalized Search Brouhaha

Predictably, Google’s announcement late last week about pushing more users to personalized search results has created a lot of buzz in the blogosphere. There’s a lot of “what the hell does this mean” questioning going on out there. This will continue for the forseeable future as more engines move down the personalization road.

Normally, I’d be right in there swinging, but I have been on vacation this week, so I’m somewhat looking from afar. However, I do think that we can debate personalized search all we want in the SEM/SEO circles, but Google is going to do what Google is going to do. So, to that end, I’m reaching out to the two people who really have a say in this. Matt Cutts and I have been chatting about this for some time, but Matt wanted to defer an official interview until later this month (due, no doubt, to the timing of Google’s recent accouncement). I’m just confirming a time with Matt now. More details on this soon.

The other person I need to speak to is Marissa Mayer, on what this means for the Google search experience. Again, the wheels are in motion and I’m hoping to jump on this as soon as I get back (next week, reluctantly–I mean reluctantly returning to work, not reluctantly interviewing Marissa, which is always a delight!).

Which leads me to a lot of the buzz that’s currently happening. There’s a lot of talk about user experience. Honestly, most of the opposition I’ve heard to personalized search results are coming from SEO’s, and I have to question whether their motives are pure as they take up the UI banner here. Graywolf has been one of the most prolific critics, including posts on my blog. Here was one:

Let’s take personalized SERP’s a bit farther, let’s imagine we have something like digital books that can rewrite themselves based on user preferences. Instead of Hermione Granger being a brown haired slightly bookish student at Hogwarts, she’s a buxom blonde in a mini-skirt because I’ve demonstrated a preference for that in the past. For someone else she’s a raven haired gothic princess, for another she’s more of a debutante prom queen.

Sure the example is bit over the top but that’s not that far in concept to what they are doing. The top 10 listings in a SERP are pretty similar in concept to the main characters of a book, making them different for everyone is like having a different book for everyone.

Not sure I get the analogy here. It’s a stretch to try to compare SERP’s with a book. It doesn’t work on a number of levels. The average person spends a few seconds on a SERP, several hours with a book. And the goal is to spend as little time as possible on the results page.

Also, the nature of engagement is totally different. I’m looking for one link, the best one, on a SERP, not delving into the nuances of a character, whatever her appearance.

I do agree that Google is making it more difficult to know if you’re signed in, which is not ideal, and the current level of personalization is pretty watered down, but ultimately if personalization increases relevance to me, that’s a good thing.

Here are the challenges for Google in the personalization path they’re going down. Right now, the introduction of a few organic listings doesn’t really make a significant difference for the user. To significantly change the user experience, someone has to be bolder with personalization. And that means you have to be pretty confident that you’ve disambiguated intent. Google currently uses sites you’ve visited in the past as the indicator. As Danny said in his post, the net effect of this is your own sites, which you visit regularly, will enjoy a boost but other than that, I don’t really count this as personalization, at least not to the level I want.

What if you use the immediately preceding clickstream, as in behavioral targeting? What if you start identifying themes in the clickstream data and become bolder in grouping related search suggestions. What if you do, as Marissa Mayer suggested in her interview with me, and start mixing in contextual relevance based on your current task, as determined by Google desktop search or another Google plug in. And what if you use all this to drop the user into a much richer experience?

Let me give you an example. I’m currently on my way to Kauai, Hawaii. I’ve been doing a lot of searching for things to do, especially in the area around our hotel in Lihue. We’ve been looking for family beaches, places to go snorkeling, places to rent a bike, local events in the time frame we’re there, etc. This could have all been captured in my search history. Now, let me go to Google and launch a search for Kauai Restaurants. What would be cool is if Google presented me with restaurants close to my hotel, preferably with maps. Also, it could suggest other geographically targeted results or suggested searches. That’s personalization.

I do believe Google needs to allow users to toggle any type of customized results, with clear controls. One of the current user issues I have with Google is their transparent geo-targeting of results in Canada. When I search using a non-geographically specific query, as in “search engine marketing”, I see different results in Canada than I would in the US, favoring sites based in Canada. But 99.9999% of users in Canada would never know this, as there is nothing on the results page to indicate this. I only know it because we need to see results as they appear on both sides of the border and so use US based proxies a lot to fool Google into thinking we’re searching from the US.

For a lot of searches from Canada, it probably makes sense to push Canadian based sites higher in the result set, but for others, it doesn’t. Whatever the search, Google needs to be clearer when they filter results based on a criteria the user might not be aware of, such as personalization or geographic location.

For the search user experience, it comes down to two significant issues, and whoever can do this best will win:

Relevance Aligned to Intent: I’ve always said that search is the connector between intent and content. The more successful you can make that connection, the better. Take my intent and by whatever means necessary, personalization, demographic targeting, behavioral targeting, social targeting, give me links to the content I’m looking for. Be the best at doing that and you’ll win. And you simply can’t do that with universal search results. Personalization is inevitable.

User Control: If I have a quibble with what Google is doing, it’s in the taking control from the hands of the user. What we don’t want here is the “Google knows best” attitude that the company has been guilty of in the past. Always leave clear options for the user to navigate and tailor the results to their preferences. If you go to personalized results as a default, indicate how the user can toggle the option on and off.

We can debate whether personalization is a good or bad thing. Honestly, I think it’s a moot point. The next generation of search is impossible without personalization, in one form or another. In three interviews with usability people at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, when I asked them about the biggest challenge to overcome, they all pointed to getting away from the current paradigm of a query box and a standard set of results. Everyone acknowledges that search is in it’s infancy. By saying that we shouldn’t go down the personalization path, it’s like saying we always want our baby to remain 9 months old. Sure, they’re easier to control at that age, but it makes it a little difficult for them to realize their potential as a human being.

The Personalized Results are Coming, The Personalized Results are Coming!

Okay, sometimes the temptation to say I told you so is overwhelming. Danny has a nice long post in Searchengineland about Google’s changes to Personalized Search, making it more of a default and less of an option for millions of users. Danny details it more than I intend to, so please check it out.

As Danny says, he’s been talking about personalization for years, but up to now, it never materialized. After interviews with head user experience people at all three engines, I felt the time was right for personalized search to roll out (check The Future of SEO in a Personalized Search Interface and The SEO Debate Continues). And it appears my sense of timing was bang on. Much as I’d like to claim to be prescient, it’s really just common sense. You could see all the engines inching towards it. Now, Google has just upped the ante a little.

There are two major implications to this: what it means for search marketers, especially organic optimizers, and what it means to users. I’ll deal with each in turn.

What it Means for Search Marketers

The “Is SEO Dead? Rocket Science? A Scam?” Debate has been winding it’s weary way through several blogs in the past few weeks. My take was that SEO is, and will continue to be, vitally important as long as organic search results continue to be important to the user. Based on what I’m seeing, that continues to be very much the case. But, organic optimization now has a completely new rule set, which will irritate the hell out of many organic optimizers. The disgruntlement is already beginning to show. Michael Gray, better known as Graywolf, was the first to post a comment on Danny’s story:

Just because I ordered my coke with extra ice last time doesn’t mean I want it that way this time. I hate personalized SERP’s, I despise it even more that they don’t tell me they are personalized, and I loathe not being able to turn it off. I also have extreme antipathy for not being able to keep my search history on and not be part of personalized search.

Let me have it the way I want, not the way you think I do. I don’t want SERP’s that work like Microsoft programs that try to anticipate what I want to do, because more often than not it’s wrong. Bring back truth, purity, and clarity to the SERP’s.

Graywolf is complaining as a user, but I can’t help thinking that the more significant pain he’s feeling is as an organic optimizer who’s world suddenly just became a lot more complicated. “Truth, purity and clarity to the SERP’s”? In whose eyes? Come on. Personalization is being implemented because it enhances the user experience. It doesn’t take a “Rocket Scientist” (sorry, couldn’t resist) to see that one set of search results is not the best way to serve millions of users.

As Danny said, there’s now an explosion of new fronts for the organic optimizer to consider. Right now, Google is only injecting a few personalized results into the search page, but expect that threshold to gradually creep up as Google gains confidence in the targeting of the results to the person. The days of the universal results page are numbered. Which means that the days of the reverse engineering approach to SEO are equally numbered. I’m sure people will try to figure out ways to spam personalized search, but as I’ve said before, reverse engineering requires a fixed constant to test against. Up to now, the results page and the other sites that appeared on it represented that fixed constant. That’s gone now.

So where does that leave SEO? Well, it’s certainly not dead, but it has dramatically changed. You can’t optimize against a results set, but you can optimize against a user. Let’s use an analogy that’s often been used before to describe SEO. Think of it as Public Relations on the Web. If you launch a PR campaign, you don’t target a particular position on the front page of the NY Times, you target a type of audience. You plan your release distribution and messaging accordingly. And you give reporters what you think will catch their attention. Most of all, you have to wrap your campaign around something that’s genuinely interesting. Then, you hope for the best.

Now, SEO becomes the same thing. You don’t target the first page of results on Google for a particular term. You target an end user. You wrap your site messaging in terms that resonate with that user. You write in their language, you give them a reason to seek you out, and you sure as hell don’t disappoint them when they click through to your site. You do all this, and you remove all the technical barriers between your content and the indexes you need to be in. Then, you hope for the best.

The problem with SEO has always been that it’s been treated like some magical voodoo that can be applied after the fact, like some “secret sauce”. And yes, that was what the infamous Dave Pasternack has been trying to say. He just went several steps too far. The fact is, with universal search results, you could actually do this. Thousands of affiliates have made millions of dollars doing it. Link spamming, cloaking, doorway sites..the fact is, up to now, this bag of tricks has worked. It’s gotten harder, but it’s worked. Site owners looked to SEO to help them hi jack traffic that wasn’t rightfully theirs. They hadn’t done the heavy lifting to create a site that justified a place in the top rankings, and they tried to take an easy short cut.

But now, organic optimization means that you have to do the heavy lifting. It has to be integrated into the entire online presence. What Marshall Simmonds has done with About.com and the NY Times is a perfect example of the new definition of SEO. Get to the front lines, to the people who are churning out the content, and teach them about what search engines are looking for. Make sure SEO best practices are baked right into the overall process flow. Work with the IT team to create a platform that entices the spider to crawl deeper. Work with the marketing team to crawl inside the head of your target audience and figure out the who, the when and the why. Don’t worry so much about the where, because you can’t really control that any more. It’s a tough paradigm to break. We’ve been struggling with our clients for the past year or so. They’re still fixated on “being number one” for a particular term. We’ve been trying to ease them into the new reality, but it’s not easy.

I guarantee this will create an identity crisis for the SEO industry. As recently as a few months ago I was moderating a panel that was talking about analytics, and in the Q&A someone asked the panel, who had a few very well known SEM’s on it, about what they used for ranking reporting. The names of various options were thrown out and people started scribbling them down. I saw this and thought I had to comment.

“You know, the whole concept of ranking is quickly becoming irrelevant”

Nobody lifted their head, they were still busy writing down tool names. Maybe they hadn’t heard.

“As search engines move to personalized results, there will be no such thing as ranking. It will all be relative to the user.”

That should get their attention. Nope, nothing.

One of the search marketers said, “Yes, but knowing how they rank is still important to people.”

Huh? Am I speaking a different language here? I shook my head and gave up.

So, does this mean SEO is dead? Absolutely not. It becomes more vital than ever. Here are a few things that remain to be true. Preliminary results from the new SEMPO survey say SEO continues to be the number one tactic in search marketing. Yes, people want to bring it in house, but they recognize it’s importance.

Why do they think it’s important? Because it kicks ass in ROI. Here are the results from another recent study by Ad:Tech and MarketingSherpa, asking advertisers about the return they get from various marketing channels.

080569

The biggest jump from year to year? SEO. Now, let’s look at where marketers plan to spend more money in the next year.

080570

SEO, from flatlined last year to looking to spend 25% more this year. So SEO definitely isn’t dead. But it is moving to a new home. Here’s some early results from the SEMPO State of the Market Study (by the way, final results should be available next week. Look for them):

SEMPO2a

It’s true that most companies would far rather bring SEO in house, if they could. And when we consider the new definition of SEO, it probably makes sense for SEO to be integrated into the internal work flow. But the problem is that there’s not a lot of SEO expertise out there. If SEO was so easy, why don’t more companies do it, or do it well? Contrary to Pasternack’s argument, it’s not a “set and forget” type of tactic. It requires a champion, buy in and diligence.

I think the future is bright for SEO as a skill set, but we’re talking a modified set of skills. I talked about this in a recent SearchInsider column and a follow up online debate with Andrew Goodman. My view of the future for the really good SEO’s out there fall into three categories:

Get a (Really Good) Job

As companies bring this in house, there will be a firestorm of demand for skilled SEO Directors, but ideally as employees, not consultants.

Broaden Your View

Become an expert in how consumers navigate online and help your customers with the big picture, including the new reality of SEO.

Adapt and Survive

Find a new online niche where your search honed skills give you an advantage.

User’s View

Okay, this is already a much longer post than I intended, so I should probably talk about personalized search from the user’s perspective now.

Personalized search is a big win for the user. Don’t judge by the first few tentative steps Google is taking. Personalization is a much bigger deal than that. Google is easing us in so the experience isn’t too jarring. By the end of 2007, all 3 of the major engine’s results pages will look significantly different than they do today. Personalization will be like a breached dam. Right now we’re seeing the first few trickles, but there will be a wave of much deeper personalization options over the next several months. Search will become your personalized assistant, tailored to your tastes. As you search more, your results will draw more and more away from the universal default and closer and closer to your unique intent. Immediately after your query, you’ll be dropped into a much richer search experience. Disambiguation will become much more accurate, and you’ll find that you will pretty much always find just what you’re looking for right at the top of your page, without having to dig deeper. Here’s how I see it playing out at each of the big three:

Google

Google has a religious devotion to relevance, and as they gain confidence with personalized search and their ability to disambiguate, this will manifest itself with a laser focus on relevance above the fold. They will continue to maintain a good balance of organic results, but these results will not just be the current web search results. They could be local, image, news or a mix of each. And ads. Yes, you won’t escape ads, but Google will be the most judicious in what they show. Expect more stringent quality scoring, down to the landing page level and a high degree of relevancy in the ads that do show. Google will be the most concerned of the three in disambiguating intent.

Yahoo

Yahoo will put their own spin on personalization by wrapping in Social Search. They will continue to leverage their community, as they currently do in Yahoo! Answers so when you’re logged into Yahoo, you’ll be plugged into their community and that will impact the search results you see. Relevancy will be determined more by what the community finds interesting than what you find interesting, although it will be a mix between the two. Yahoo will target two types of searches, serendipitous search, where you’re looking to discover new sites, and what I call “frustrated” search, where your own efforts to unearth the data online have come up empty and you want the help of the community. When it comes to monetization, Yahoo will be the most aggressive, pushing more ads above the fold into Golden Triangle real estate. These ads will trail Google’s in terms of relevance

Microsoft

Microsoft will use their targeting capabilities and probably tie in some behavioral targeting to personalize their search results. Also expect personalization in the Microsoft product to be integrated at a deeper, more ubiquitous level, into apps and OS. This probably won’t happen in 07, but it will be a long term goal. When it comes to ad presentation, Microsoft will fall somewhere between Google and Yahoo in both the number and relevance of the ads being presented. The heaviest investment will be in building out the platform to manage and model the ad program, rather than in policing the quality of the ads themselves.

It promises to be a very interesting year in the Search Marketing biz!