Category Archives: Online Trends

Putting Every Book Ever Published One Click Away

is Sherman had an interesting post in Searchenginewatch about a Wired article on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s goal to make every book ever written digital and searchable. While they’ve been working on it awhile, there’s still an immense amount of information to digitize. Chris also talks about the ephemeral nature of the web and wonders if the search indexes could help reconstruct seemingly lost web pages by retrieving crawled versions from their cache.

Almost since the beginning of recorded history, man has dreamed about collecting all the world’s knowledge in one place. Perhaps the closest we ever came was the Library of Alexandria. That was over 2000 years ago. It’s estimated that the Library held over 500,000 scrolls. Today, Google is scanning about 1,000,000 books a year, and that only represents 5% of all the books in print. Obviously, the task is larger than ever, but we may also be closer to realizing it than ever before!

Will Search Become a Duopoly!

Turning the heat up on the Microsoft-Google showdown is causing speculation that smaller players may get squeezed out. The timing is interesting, because I had a great chat with new Ask CEO Jim Lanzone last week. I’ll be posting more about it later this week, but Ask is taking a very down to earth, pragmatic and focused approach to the upcoming search war, and one that resonates with me. Don’t count these guys out yet!

Quintura, Staking the Future on Semantic Mapping

First published May 11, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I pity the poor new entry in the search engine space. How do you possibly stake out new territory in the hottest online space there is? How do you avoid being swept away in the tidal wave of momentum that is going to the industry leaders, Google, Yahoo and MSN? How do you attract enough users to gain a critical mass? Well, you have to offer something different.

A new desktop search tool, Quintura, is betting that a new user interface based on the concept of semantic mapping is just the ticket it needs to win the search lottery. And if semantic mapping sounds familiar, it should. I’ve been talking about semantic mapping for almost two years now. It’s a powerful concept in understanding how people search and something we identified in our previous research. But when it comes to building a new user interface around it, I’m not sure Quintura’s implementation will be taken up by the search masses.

A Semantic Map Primer

First of all, if you haven’t heard me speak about the concept previously, let me introduce you to the theory of semantic mapping.

Whenever we use a search engine, we have a concept in mind. The concept is usually fairly complex, consisting of a lot of pre-existing relationships we have made mentally. I’ll stick to the example I usually use to illustrate the concept. Let’s assume we’re beginning our research for an upcoming digital camera purchase. In this case, our concept will likely include connections with brands we’re familiar with (Nikon, Kodak, Canon, Olympus, etc), features (zoom, number of megapixels, autofocus) and our intent (finding consumer reviews, reading testimonials, finding side-by-side feature comparisons). These connections can be expressed by the words that define them. Together, all the words that define our concept make up our semantic map. It could consist of dozens or even hundreds of words.

But when we go to a search engine, we distill the concept down to the broadest possible phrase, both out of a desire to be inclusive in our search, and out of a reluctance to expend too much effort in constructing our search (which is a diplomatic way of saying we’re lazy). So we search for “digital camera.”  When the results are presented to us, that original concept and its accompanying semantic map is still in place. It plays a vital role in how we react to the listings. We scan listings, and if we happen to find appearances of the words in our map, that listing registers as being a better match to our intent.

Quintura’s Take on Semantic Maps

When I first heard about Quintura, it was like somebody had built a search tool around the Powerpoint slide I’ve been using for the last year and a half to illustrate the concept. Just like that slide, the query used sits in the middle of an actual word map, surrounded by related words that further define the concept. In Quintura, as you click on words that define the concept, they get added to your query, causing the words in your map to update and restrict the focus of your search, allowing you to quickly and graphically structure very specific queries. The theory is that clicking through a semantic map will allow you to spend less time sifting through irrelevant results.

In theory, this should be a huge step forward in the user experience. But, feeling somewhat traitorous to the concept I helped pioneer, I’m not sure it’s the answer for the next big search interface. Here’s the problem…

When All’s Said and Done, We’re Still Lazy…

You’ve been able to structure advanced search queries for ages. But through it all, less than 5 percent of all searches have taken advantage of these capabilities. Quintura’s take is just another way to build the query. The real time updating is cool, and may help refine the search when you’re not exactly sure of the query you should be using, but I’m not sure this is enough. I think it will make Quintura an interesting footnote in the search “also ran” category.

There are reasons why we search the way we do, and not being able to think of the words is generally not one of them. We know the words–in fact, we know too many of them. They reside just under the conscious layer, making themselves known when there’s a match in the result we’re looking for. But this is hardly an articulated process. It happens in split seconds, through subconscious connections. It’s almost transparent to us, as we hardly notice it’s happening. It’s one of those things that when you hear it explained, you say, “Yeah, that makes sense. I’m sure I do that,” but you didn’t know you did it.

My theory? If it takes longer than one second and more than one click to refine your search, you’ve excluded 95 percent-plus of your potential market. Quintura’s approach, although undeniably cool, fails on both counts. I still believe semantic mapping is vitally important, but I think search engines have to get better at creating those maps transparently, through disambiguating our intent by getting to know us better. I believe it’s unrealistic for a search engine to expect the user to go to the trouble of building the map for them.

So what about the other 5 percent? The power users, or the searchers who don’t know what they’re looking for and need the prompting of related words? Again, it comes back to critical mass. This might be a welcome addition to Google’s advanced features, but it can’t attract enough attention as a stand-alone to survive. Then again, perhaps catching Google’s attention isn’t such a bad play.

Sorry, Quintura. I feel like I’m disowning one of my children, but unless you’re looking at being gobbled up by one of the big three, I don’t see this as the winning ticket in the great search lottery.

Quintura: Semantic Mapping in Action

I’m beginning to feel like the walls have ears. Just after saying that Ask.com seemed like they were listening to us when we were out preaching usability in search, I happened to see a post for Quintura on John Battelle’s blog today. In it, John talked about creating a “complex query using a map of related words.”

My God, that sounds just like the semantic mapping theory I’ve been droning on about at industry shows for the last year and a half! I had to check this out.

Sure enough, Quintura builds an actual semantic map of related terms graphically for you that tries to better define your concept. As you click on words you add them to your main concept, refining it and the map further updates itself, narrowing the focus on what you were looking for.

I’m going to dig into this more when I have some time and will probably make it the subject for this weeks Search Insider, but it’s an interesting twist. For me, the red flag is that Quintura seems to break the Golden Rule of search usability, if it takes more than a click and a second, it’s too much work for us. But that all depends on if they’re aiming to be a niche or mainstream player. 3 to 4% of the search market is willing to spend the time to refine the query, but for the rest of us, there just isn’t a big enough payoff to justify the time.

Tivo Now in the Search Game

This just in: Tivo is going to let viewers search for the advertising content they’re interested in!

Brilliant! Imagine, letting consumers chose to look for product information when they’re actually interested in it. I think this has far reaching implications. Imagine if we could do something similar with websites..some sort of thing where we could search through all the content on the web so if there was a product we were interested in, we could find the right site. We could call it a…search engine!

But seriously, there is one quote from the story that reinforces everything I’ve been saying about search:

Users will be able to search through ad and product information spots ranging in length from 1 to 60 minutes from five different ad categories like finance, travel, and lifestyle.

See the word “search”? That’s the key. Consumer control absolutely requires search. Whether video search is done through Tivo or a search engine (and search engines will win this battle) the act of searching is the important thing. It’s that simple, fundamental concept that will power the entire future of marketing. It’s the connection that makes everything else possible.

Another interesting tidbit was the major brands jumping on this “brand”wagon. It was probably an easy sell, unlike search branding has been. But then, search isn’t nearly as sexy as being able to tap into a new generation of ad zappers.

DVRs Skip $8 Billion in TV Revenue

Read this morning that JupiterResearch calculates that as much as $8 B in TV revenue could be lost through ad skipping. That’s a little over 10% of the current TV spend. Apparently, 53% of DVR users skip ads, and if they skip 100% of the time, that accounts for the loss. Actually, I’m surprised only 53% skip. I know I do it all the time.

Forecasts of DVR penetration vary, but one report predicts that integrated DVR (incorporated into TV’s and satellite and cable boxes) sales will grow to 27 million by 2008. Currently, it seems that DVR penetration is around 8% of the market, but all agree that it will grow rapidly. Let us remember that any version of Vista with integrated Windows Media Center turns your PC into a DVR. So let’s say that between integrated DVR, stand alone sets and PC based DVR’s, 50% of the homes have DVR’s by 2010. Of those, 53% skip. That’s the erosion of a lot of advertising revenue.

Ironically, I also received a research brief that shows clicks on sponsored search ads continue to climb. Google say a 50% increase in the number of searches that included sponsored advertising and Yahoo had a 30% increase. What’s even more interesting is that across all searches, on Google, almost 12% of the clicks were on sponsored ads, and on Yahoo, it was 11.4%. Remember, those percentages are for all searches, including the ones where sponsored ads don’t show. In our studies, we see between 20 and 35% click through rates on SERPs were sponsored ads show. A recent study saw 30% click throughs on the top sponsored ads alone, not even including the side sponsored ones.

So, a little comparison here. When we’re watching TV, given the choice, over half of us would not ever want to see a commercial, let alone react to one. But when people are using search for commercial purchases, almost 3 out of 4 of us spend some time looking at the ads (by our choice) and 1 in 3 of us are actually clicking on them. That’s the power of consumer controlled engagement. Yet TV is a $80 B market, and search is a $5.5 B market.

Here’s a thought. Take the $8 B you’re spending on ads that people are spraining their thumb trying to skip by, and invest that money in advertising messages that people are actually looking for!

Ask’s New TV Ads

There’s not a great track record for search engines running TV ads to increase market share. Let’s see, some of the ones who have tried it include Snap.com (when they were NBC), Go.com (courtesy ABC and Disney), Altavista and most recently, MSN. It’s yet to be successful. In Microsoft’s case, market share actually shrunk by 3 points, while Google, sans ads, increased their market share in the same time period by over 6 points.

Ask.com is unveiling a new campaign in the U.S. Pundits (what makes a pundit a pundit anyway?) are already casting aspersions on the strategy. But I think there’s one key difference that should be noted. The purpose of the campaign is to get people to try the search engine..once. After that, it’s up to the search engine to keep them coming back. In every previous case, the advertised search engine just wasn’t very good. And nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.

Ask is different. It’s pretty good. Some might say it’s damned good. At least, it’s good enough that it has a fair shot at getting people back.

Ask’s problem is that it isn’t a huge leap forward. I tried it right after the butler was whacked. I liked it. But it wasn’t a earth shaking experience.It didn’t register strongly enough with me to shake my Google habit. And a lot of us have a Google habit. It’s just what we do. As I write this, I can offer no better reason why I haven’t used Ask more than the fact that I just didn’t think of it.

If this campaign doesn’t work, it won’t be the fact that Ask is running TV ads that will be the downfall, it will be that Ask didn’t up the user experience ante enough. Time will tell.

Google and Microsoft Going to War: Is the User the Casualty?

Bill Gates said it, so it has to be true. Microsoft and Google are going to war.

When you read the NY Times article, Saul Hansell and Steve Lohr mention the difference in business models, required server farms, browser default settings and a lot of other tactical considerations. There’s one thing missing: the User Experience.

If Microsoft wants to win the search engine wars, they have to come out with a search engine that people want to use. In the usability tests we’ve conducted with MSN Search, it has failed miserably when going head to head with Google, EVEN WITH MSN USERS! Give a better user experience, and you’ll win. Screw it up, and even locking IE on MSN Search won’t help you.

There’s a fundamental issue that everyone seems to be missing here. The user is in control. We keep seeing stories of how big companies are trying to remove or at least subvert customer control by reducing choices or applying technology.

The Internet creates a fluid market. It can shift alliances almost instantly. It can follow the most desired path in the blink of an eye, and word of new paths can spread virally in an incredibly short time period. Look what happened with illegal downloading of music. The music industry kept trying to plug technological holes and new ones kept appearing. It’s like using duct tape to keep a crumbling dam together. Accept the fact that it’s gone and get your butt to higher ground! Throw around legal threats and awareness ads about piracy all you want. Ultimately the only way the music industry will win is to accept the fact that the days of obscene profits and centralized power are gone and embrace the digital distribution paradigm. Use its efficiencies to give us the music we want at a price that we want to pay. We’re inching towards that, but we’re not there yet.

I know that Microsoft is starting to pay a lot of attention to the search experience, but they should have done more out of the gate. The first versions of MSN search have suffered from fundamental design flaws, lack of relevancy in sponsored search results and some other glaring mistakes. I expected more from the Redmond gang.

Speaking of paying attention to the user experience, I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Ferguson from Ask’s usability team at SES Toronto. For those of you that have heard me speak before you know I’ve taken some pretty big swipes at Ask Jeeves in the past, mainly for the blatent bloating of sponsored ads at the top of the organic results. Like I mentioned to Michael, it’s like somebody was listening at Ask. The new version seems to have taken into account a lot of the things we’ve been saying for awhile, including the practice of Semantic Mapping (Ask’s “Narrow” and “Broaden Your Search” options) and use of the anemic right rail real estate to add some true functionality. Ask is paying attention to the user experience, and I’m guessing it’s going to pay off for them in increased market share. They don’t have it all right yet, but at least they’re listening to the right people: the users.

By the way, this blast isn’t all for MSN. I’ve reserved a little bile for Google. In their rush to create multiple fronts on which to attack Microsoft, they may be overlooking where the battle will ultimately be won. In Danny Sullivan’s own rant, 25 Things I Hate about Google, the underlying theme was, get search right first, then worry about conquering the world. Google is a pretty good search experience, but we’re still talking version 1.0 of search. There’s a lot of work to be done, and so far, I haven’t seen world beater innovation coming out of Google labs.

To me, Google Search is a little like the reliable piece of production equipment that’s been doing a good job for a long time, but it’s long overdue for an overhaul. The problem is, you can’t shut it down because you need to keep production up. I’ve said for some time that Google is a victim of its own success, a common malady for many hot start ups. Before you’re on the radar you can be bold and come out with a new product that blows everybody’s socks off. It becomes wildly successful and generates your main revenue stream. You become a public company. Suddenly, that revenue stream becomes a sacred cow. You can’t follow up on the first act, because the first act guarantees your survival as a company.

Google has a dilemma. It can’t survive in the long term unless it comes out with the next big innovation in search in a very bold way. It has to knock our socks off again. But it can’t survive in the short term, especially with the eyes of every financial analyst in the world on them, if it jeopardizes its current revenue channel by messing around with it. An unenviable position to be in, even if Sergey and Larry have enough money to buy everyone in the world a Segway.

This puts Microsoft and Ask in an interesting position. They aren’t solely dependant on their search revenues. They have relatively deep pockets. And they can afford to be bold.

So be bold, but base innovation on an incredibly deep understanding of what we want in a search experience.

New Mobile Study Out

Isobar and Yahoo released a new study looking at the mobile web and it’s impact on our lives.

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=42755&Nid=20041&p=264406

Some interesting things to note here:

I agree that mobile isn’t ready for primetime. The study mentions bandwidth and long download times. While I think that is certainly one hurdle, I think the interface challenges are probably even greater obstacles. The screen and the keyboards are just too small to lend themselves to a satisfying user experience. We have to have a better way to input our information into the device, and a more compelling way to get the information out. For example, a reliable voice interface and a heads up display built into a funky set of glasses..a wearable mobile device. Now, that would be cool, although I shudder to see what an airport would look like with everybody talking into their phones and wearing strange sunglasses. On second thought, that’s pretty much what airports do look like.

Probably the more interesting tidbits from the study had to do with the respondent’s attitudes towards mobile advertising: too boring, too irrelevant, too irritating. I think this marks a really interesting turn in attitudes towards advertising. We are expecting advertisers to be smarter, by knowing what we want, or at least serving ads relevant to the content they’re being served with. Customers have been conditioned by search and behavioral targeting to expect on target delivery of ads, and anything less just irritates the hell out of them. Hallelujah…it’s about frigging time marketers start getting that message.

On a tangential but somewhat related note, I read last week about a Phillips patent that could force TV viewers to sit through commercials without being able to zap them.

http://www.clickz.com/experts/brand/emkt_strat/article.php/3601411

Columnist Dave Evans thinks this is a good thing, as it can provide viewers with two choices, either a free model supported by advertising, or a paid model without ads. At the first read of this, I was raging, with visions of Alex in a Clockwork Orange, his eyelids clamped open to force him to watch scenes of extreme violence.

Now, I’m somewhere in the middle. Like Evans says, this technology could be used to help enforce consumer control, but I fear the temptation will be to use it for less altruistic goals. Regardless, I think this is a continuing shift towards holding advertisers accountable for delivering relevant advertising, that actually adds value to the consumer experience, rather than detracts from it.

Phillips was quick to say it has no plans to use the technology. This is simply a IP protection issue. Yeah..right!

Why Search May Not Fragment

First published April 20, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

On April 5, fellow Search Insider Max Kalehoff wrote about the likelihood of search continuing to be dominated by three players. Max, very convincingly, argued that our search activity could fragment over a number of properties, some of them vertical engines that offer more functionality, some of them alternative online properties, like social networking sites.

As search becomes an increasing important online staple, I believe the question of where all that activity will take place also takes on increased importance. For that reason, I’d like to play devil’s advocate (in this case, the devil being the established search players, Google, Yahoo and MSN) and offer some reasons why we might continue to consolidate our search activity on these familiar partners.

Creatures of Habit

Generally speaking, our paths are well worn online. We tend to frequent the sites we know, only seeking out new sites when our familiar ones don’t offer what we’re looking for. This is true of most humans.

I’ve written before that online is going through a social evolution, as the early adopters who pioneered the virtual landscape are increasingly being joined by the pragmatic main market. This makes the fact that we tend to frequent sites we know and trust even truer. While viral growth still happens at an amazing pace online, it’s the early adopters, or, in this case, the online mavens, who tend to fuel the viral growth.

And rapid growth is a relative term that we tend to regard disproportionately. If you’re reading this column, my guess is you’re an early adopter. In our social circles, almost everyone we interact with is an early adopter. It’s why we’re in the industry we’re in. So we tend to blow up the importance of the viral growth of new emerging sites. Chances are, everybody you know is aware of Youtube.com, Myspace.com or Technorati.com. But everybody you or I know is an uber-savvy online geek, at least, compared to my mother. Ma’s never heard of Youtube.com. To her, Googling something is still a task to be approached with caution.

For search properties to gain the critical mass needed to safely cross the chasm, they have to attract mainstream users. Otherwise, they’ll become stranded on the leading edge, there to wither and die.

Deep Pockets

Here’s another advantage of the mainstream players. While promising new technologies can gain some significant venture capital cash, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the billions available to MSN, Google or Yahoo. So, the big three can wait to see which search or online technologies shows the promise of cracking the mainstream market, offering some compelling reasons to use them, and they can swoop in and snap them up.

All things considered, if a Google, Yahoo or MSN can offer equivalent functionality to some hot-as-a-pistol start-up, it’s just easier to stick to one place, rather than hop around the cyber neighborhood. There were image search engines, news search engines and shopping search engines around before the big three started integrating that functionality, but now that they have it, we’re starting to keep our searching under one banner. There is one important thing to note here though; the big three have to at least offer comparable functionality. It doesn’t have to be better, but it has to be just as good. We are not very tolerant of bad user experiences.

Integration

Finally, and I’ve said this over and over again, search is heading for a ubiquitous, transparent future. We will soon see search functionality integrated seamlessly into our applications and operating systems, toiling away on our behalf in the background. In order to make this integration happen, you have to have your foot in either the OS or app world. Microsoft has this in spades, Google is quickly assembling a portfolio of apps and signing up partnerships with potential platform providers, and Yahoo is working the social networking and entertainment integration angle. All of these publishers know what it’s going to take to win the big search war, and they’re already staking their territory. My guess? It would almost be impossible for an emerging player to gain enough ground to challenge their positions.

For the reasons above, I believe that our search activity will continue to consolidate with the big three. The one dark horse I include is Ask.com, which has the potential to gain some significant market share with its new interface. I love underdogs as much as the next guy, but in this case, I think they’re a little late to the dance.