Category Archives: Web Search

A Look at What Might Have Been

First published December 17, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve stated before in this column that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is perhaps my favorite holiday movie.  Yesterday, as I was having lunch, I had my own George Bailey moment. I had a chance to see what my life might have been like had I not made the decision to go into search 14 years ago.  I was thumbing through the local newspaper (yes, I still do that on occasion) and the lead story in the business section caught my eye. The title was: “Ad Agencies adjusting to the new economy.”

Kelowna, B.C.  is a small town (although larger than Bedford Falls). It supports three full-service ad agencies. I know the founders of each of them fairly well. A long time ago, in another life, I was one of these agencies, working with a handful of clients, many of which were in real estate.  In 1996, frustrated with the challenges of dealing with small-town budgets and attitudes, I decided to move into the online space, which subsequently took me into the world of search. That allowed me to work with clients outside my market.

I guess, given what’s happened to these three agencies, my decision to move online proved to be the right one. In the last year, one agency has gone from 12 full-time people to just the founder, who has become an independent consultant. Two of the agencies saw a split between two long-term partners and a drastic reduction both in clients and staff.

These are the facts. One can read between the line to get a glimpse of the heartache and soul-searching that came with these very difficult business decisions. At least two of the agency founders said they were going through a personal discovery journey and were looking at pursuing other “more rewarding” professional endeavors in the future. Not to be overly cynical, but I find the frequency of these voyages of “self discovery” are usually inversely related to the success of your business. With a few notable exceptions, not many people reevaluate their professional lives when their businesses are rocking.

Suddenly, Search Seems Rosy

2009 wasn’t a banner year for my company, but compared to these stories, it was a skip down the Yellow Brick Road. We grew top-line revenues by 14%, added nine new jobs, opened a new sales office, maintained or increased client satisfaction levels, gave our employees healthy pay raises and managed to stay on the right side of the ledger sheet.

I paint these contrasts not so much to say how great we are in search, but because they present a microcosmic view of the shift in marketing. While traditional budgets were being ruthlessly slashed throughout 2009, digital and search budgets bounced along and managed to keep from being swamped by the economic storm. I certainly have talked to several search marketers who had a tough year (some of whom are also looking at their own personal “voyages of discovery”) but I would guess that the incidence rate is far less than you would find on the other side of the digital divide.

All Aboard!

The other interesting thing I gleaned from the story in my local newspaper is that all of the agency founders are paying more attention to what’s happening in the digital domain. As the demand for real estate brochures and print ads dries up, they’re only now realizing that something surprisingly robust and healthy appears to be happening online.  Suddenly, strategies including Facebook and Twitter are starting to show up in their pitches to local clients.

Having made my decision to move online almost a decade and a half ago, I would caution these people that becoming a digital “guru” may not be quite as easy as it appears to be. As became abundantly clear at the Search Insider Summit a few weeks ago, we’ve still got a long way to go before we understand the various online gears and levers of a truly integrated campaign. You’re more than welcome to jump on the digital bandwagon, but be prepared — it’s moving a lot faster than you might think!

Could Intel Hardwire Your Brain for Google?

Last week, Roger Dooley had an interesting post on his Neuromarketing Blog (great blog, by the way) about Intel’s efforts to implant a computer chip directly into our brains, essentially allowing us to interface directly with computers. Roger ponders whether this will, in fact, become a wired “buy button”. I wonder, instead, if this is the ultimate Google search appliance? The idea was floated, somewhat facetiously, by Eric Schmidt, in an interview with Michael Arrington on Tech Crunch this year:

Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like…But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just – if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel.

The Singularity and Hardwired Brains

Okay, this crosses all kinds of boundaries of “creepy”, but if we stop to seriously consider this, it’s not as outlandish as it seems. Ray Kurzweil has been predicting just this for over two decades now..the merging of computing power and human thought, an event he calls the Singularity. Kurzweil even set the date: 2045 (by the way, the target date for the Intel implant is 2020, giving us 25 years to “get it right” after the first implant). Kurzweil’s predictions seem somehow apocalyptic, or, at the least, scary, but his logic is compelling. Computers can, even today, do some types of mental tasks far faster and more efficiently than the human brain. The brain excels at computations that tie into the intuition and experience of our lives – the softer, less rational types of mental activity. It the brain was simply a huge data cruncher, computers would already be kicking our butts. But there are leaps of insight and intuition that we regularly take as humans that have never been replicated in a digital circuit yet. Kurzweil predicts that, with the exponential increase of computing power, it will only be a matter of time until computers match and exceed the capabilities of human intuition.

Google’s Brain Wave

But Intel’s efforts bring up another possibility, the one posited by Google’s Sergey Brin – what if a chip can connect our human needs, intuitions and hunches with the data and processing power available through the grid of the Internet? What if we don’t have to go through the messy and wasteful effort of formulating all those neuronal flashes into language that then can be typed into a query box because there’s a direct pipeline that takes our thoughts and ports them directly to Google? What if the universe of data was “always on”, plugged directly into our brains? Now, that’s a fascinating, if somewhat scary, concept to contemplate.

Let’s explore this a little further. John Battelle, in a series of posts some time ago, asked why conversations were so much more helpful than web searching.  Battelle said that it’s because conversations are simply a much bigger communication pipeline and that’s essential if we’re talking about complex decisions.

What is it about a conversation? Why can we, in 30 minutes or less, boil down what otherwise might be a multi-day quest into an answer that addresses nearly all our concerns? And what might that process teach us about what the Web lacks today and might bring us tomorrow?

Well the answer is at once simple and maddeningly complex. Our ability to communicate using language is the result of millions of years of physical and cultural evolution, capped off by 15-25 years of personal childhood and early adult experience. But it comes so naturally, we forget how extraordinary this simple act really is.

Talking (or Better Yet – Thinking) to a Search Engine

As Battelle said, conversations are a deceptively rich communication medium. And it’s because they evolve on both sides to allow the conversant to quickly veer and refine the dialogue to keep up with our own mental processes. Conversations come closer to keeping up with our brains. And, if those conversations are held face-to-face, not only do we have our highly evolved language abilities, we also have the full power of body language. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Robert Eccles said in their book Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form and Action:

In contrast to interactions that are largely sequential, face-to-face interaction makes it possible for two people to be sending nod delivering messages simultaneously. The cycle of interruption, feed-back and repair possible in face-to-face interaction is so quick that it is virtually instantaneous. As (sociologist Erving) Goffman notes, “a speaker can see how others are responding to her message even before it is done and alter it midstream to elicit a different response’.”

The idea of a conversation as a digital assistance medium is interesting. It allows us to shape our queries and speak more intuitively and less literally. It allows us to interface and communicate the way we were intended to. In his post, Battelle despaired of an engine ever being this smart and suggested instead that the engine act as a matchmaker with a knowledgeable human on the other site, the Wikia/Mahalo approach. I can’t see this as a viable solution, because it lacks the scale necessary.

This is not about finding one piece of information, like a phone number or an address, but helping us through buying a house or a car. Search still fall far short here, something I touched on in my last Just Behave column on Search Engine Land. In those situations, we need more than a tool that relies on us feeding it a few words at a time and then doing its best to guess what we need. We need something similar to a conversation, in a form that can instantly scale to meet demand. Google, for all it’s limitations in a complex scenario, still has build the expectation of getting information just in time. And the bottle neck in these complex situations is the language interface and the communication process. Even if we’re talking to another person, with all the richness of communication that brings, we still have to transfer the ideas that sit in our head to their head.

So, back to Intel’s brain chip. What if our thoughts, in their entirety, could instantly be communicated to Google, or Bing, or what ever flavor of search assistant you want to imagine? What if refining all the  information that was presented was a split second closing of a synapse, rather than a laborious application of filters that sit on the interface?  Faster and far more efficiently than talking to another human, we could quickly sift through all the information and functionality available to mankind to tailor it specifically to what we needed at that time. That starts to boggle the imagination. But, is it feasible?

I believe so. Look again at the brain activity charts generated by the UCLA – Irvine research team that tracked people using a Google like web search interface, particularly the image in the lower right.

googlebrains

Let’s dig a little deeper into what is actually happening in the brain when we Google something. The image below is from the Internet Savvy group in the UC study (sorry about the fuzziness).

Brainactivity

The front section of the brain (A) shows the engagement of the frontal lobes, indicating decision making and reasoning. This is where we render judgment and make decisions in a rational, conscious way. The section along the left side of the brain (B) is our language centers, where we translate thought to words and vice versa. The structures in the centre part of the brain, hidden beneath the cortex are the sub-cortical structures (C), the autopilot of the brain, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus and hypothalamus. I touched on how these structures dictate what much of our online activity looks like in a post last week. Finally, the area right at the back of the brain indicates activation of the visual cortex, used both to translate input from our eyes and also to visualize something “in our mind’s eye”.  As shown by the strong activation of the language center, much of the heavy lifting of our brains when we’re Googling involves translation of thoughts to words.

Knowing that these are the parts of the brain activated, would it be possible to provide some neural short cuts? From example, what if you could take memories being drawn forward (activating both the hippocampus and the frontal lobes) and translate this directly into directives to retrieve information, without trying to translate into words? This “brain on Google” approach could be efficient at a degree several magnitudes greater than anything we can imagine currently.

By the way, this interface can work both ways. Not only could it feed our thoughts to the online grid. It can also take the results and information and receives and pipe it directly to the relevant parts of our brains. Images could be rendered instantly in our visual cortex, sounds in our audio cortex, facts and figures could pass directly to the prefrontal cortex. Call it the Matrix, call it virtual reality, call it what you want. The fact is, somewhere in an Intel research lab, they’re already working on it!

SIS Sneak Peek: Looking Backward and Forward

First published November 12, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In about three weeks, we’ll be gathering in Park City, Utah for another Search Insider Summit. Between now and then, I’ll be providing a sneak peek at some of the content that will be covered. On Day 1 of the Summit, Jordan Rohan from Clearmeadow Partners and Mark Mahaney from Citi Investment Research will look both backward and  forward six months to help us get a fix on lessons learned and what we should be paying attention to. I asked both Jordan and Mark to provide some hints of what they’re seeing in their rearview mirrors and what’s coming down the road.

Mark Mahaney: The 6 Months that Was….

I’ve talked previously  about the economic belly-flop being the best thing that could have happened to digital marketing. Mark agrees: “I think that the recession accelerated the adoption of digital advertising, because it accelerated the adoption of performance-based advertising.”

In evolution, adversity speeds up the pace of change, and the past 18 months have certainly been adverse for marketers. There has been a lag between the uptake of digital advertising and its potential. Case in point, PEW estimates the average person spends almost 5 hours a day online, more than with any other medium. Yet advertisers have only allocated about 12% of their budgets to digital advertising. Print still dwarfs digital in most budgets, and we only spend a half hour a day with some type of publication in our hands.

The advertisers that move to digital are almost guaranteed some impressive “early entry” quick wins because of this adoption lag. When you start measuring and comparing performance, digital will shine. And search will shine brightest of all. I’m not sure “performance-based advertising” is an inclusive enough label, but it’s the one that’s stuck to this point. And by that measure, digital performs like a rock star.

But if the economy was the dark cloud, and the adoption of digital was the silver lining, there’s still one more nasty surprise hidden inside the silver lining for digital agencies: advertisers’ expectations are higher than ever, and in some cases, they will be impossible to meet: “It’s as if the recession taught us never to pay full retail again, and never to buy CPM again.”

The laser focus on performance may set a standard  that’s so demanding, even search might be hard-pressed to meet it. I believe this is a temporary attitude that will relax over time — but the fact is, the economy hammered several nails in the coffin of traditional advertising attitudes.

Mark Mahaney – The 6 Months to Come

Mark hedged his bets by picking two horses in the upcoming race for the hottest trend over the next 6 months, and neither come as a surprise: “The galloping market share of smart phones has to finally, perhaps, translate into the move to mobile search that we all know is coming. Certainly, the smallest hints of adoption are starting to show up in the search usage logs, but it’s still infinitesimal compared to desktop search.”

And finally, Mark urges us to pay attention to social media advertising. Again, there are a lot of questions still to be answered, but study after study (the latest being FEED 09 from Razorfish) is rolling out now talking about the importance of social in the digital marketplace.

Jordan Rohan – Don’t Look Now, But We’re Recovering…

Jordan had one theme that stretched back 6 months and projects 6 months in the future: growth returns to media (aka: what a difference a year makes). Jordan provides some supporting evidence:

  •       Ford is profitable again
  •       CBS is charging advertisers double the rates (scatter TV ads) of a year ago.
  •       Apple has its most profitable quarter ever, thanks to the sale of 7.4 million iPhones.
  •       Google buys AdMob for $750 million in stock.For more on Mark and Jordan’s crystal ball, join us for the Search Insider Summit in Park City.

In Search of Usefulness

First published October 29, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A few years ago, I interviewed usability expert Jakob Nielsen about where search might go in the future. He shared an interesting insight:“I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems.”

That stuck with me. Relevance, as determined by search algorithms, and usefulness are not the same thing. And then, John Battelle touched on the same topic in a blog post a few months back:  “So first, how would I like to decide about my quest to buy a classic car? Well, ideally, I’d have a search application that could automate and process the tedious back and forth required to truly understand what the market looks like.”

Navigating Complex Decisions

Again, this concept of usability comes into play. Let me give you another example. As my regular readers know, I love to travel with my family. But the available travel sites still require the tedious back and forth that Battelle talks about.

We’re not big on hotels or restaurants. We love home exchanges or renting apartments and homes directly from the owner.  We tend to fly on mileage points. We don’t take bus tours, but we do rent cars. We prefer staying in smaller towns rather than big cities. And our first day in a new location always involves a trip to the nearest grocery store.

There is no online destination that brings all the usefulness I need together into one place. I manually pull information from VRBO.com, Homeexchange.com, TripAdvisor.com, Kayak.com and a dozen other sites.

Planning a family holiday is a lot of work, but I’m willing to do it because it’s fun for me. What about tasks that aren’t as much fun? What about the planning that has no inherent reward, like a complicated purchase for your company, or a forced move to a new city? The title of Battelle’s post was “Search Frustration: It’s Still Hit or Miss on Complex Decisions.” I can relate.

This was the approach Microsoft decided to take with Bing.com, the “Decision Engine.” I think their instincts and strategy are right, but the execution is off. If I search for Bristol, England (we’re doing a home exchange there next summer) on Bing, I still see a pretty standard search results page. It’s not that useful to me.

I agree completely that there’s a strong need for more usability in search. Google’s Achilles heel at this point is its focus on relevance at the expense of usability.  We need a much deeper, more useful experience. Relevance is a poor proxy for usefulness. It still leaves all the heavy lifting up to the user.

Search or Decision Engine? Just Decide!

“Usefulness” is a difficult trick to pull off. It’s a tough road that Microsoft has chosen. But if you’re going to do it, commit fully to it. Don’t play the safe middle ground. This is not the place for half measures.

Whether by design or by luck, I think Microsoft picked the one area where Google is most vulnerable, but right now there isn’t enough differentiation between the two. If Microsoft truly wants to be a “decision engine,” its strategists have to build from the ground up to offer more usefulness.  I’m now four clicks into Bing for “Bristol, England” and still haven’t found anything particularly useful to me. Four clicks are way too many. The information forager in me would have already moved on to a new destination.

The next three years in search will be about aggregation of information and incorporating usefulness. Search will do much more than just organize the world’s information; it will allow you to do something with it. Search will become the ultimate mash-up. And increasingly, those intersections will happen on mobile devices. Microsoft is the only one of the major players to have declaratively set sail in that direction. My advice? Forget what search is today and move with all possible speed to what search needs to become tomorrow.

Marissa Mayer: Digital Promiscuity and Digital Loyalty

It was a one minute exchange (via the Valleywag) at the San Francisco Web Summit between Google’s Marissa Mayer and managing WSJ editor Robert Thomson..but it spoke volumes

Thomson accused Google of promoting “digital promiscuity” by devaluing “digital loyalty”. The bone of contention? Google’s font size for quote attributions. People get the info they’re looking for and may never see the contributing source. Moderator John Battelle quipped that he never thought he’d be moderating a panel where the debate was about font size – “Can we reach detente at 7 points?”

One might think that a quibble about font size seems inconsequential, but there’s a lot at play here. First of all, let’s explore this from the user side.

The user is looking for information and they go to Google, because that’s what they always do. They take the fastest and most reliable route to information. In the results, they see what they’re looking for. Now, one of two things is going to happen. Either they’re satisfied with the information they received on the Google results page, or they need more information and they’ll choose the best link. Thomson’s contention is that the font size is too small to allow users familiar and loyal to the WSJ brand to quickly identify the source and to weigh that in their decision. Fair enough, I guess. See for yourself. Here is a screen shot of Google News for the query “Sri Lanka”:

Screen shot 2009-10-23 at 3.09.07 PM

So, here’s where the digital promiscuity charge comes in. Each story has many potential paths to go down, most or all of them away from the original source. The user is free to choose where they go..and I suspect putting the attribution quote in 12 point type won’t really change that. I’ve looked at enough eye tracking to know that. The user is going to follow the strongest information scent, the link best aligned with what they were looking for. Google actually does the contributing source a big favor by putting that link top and in the most popular eye scan path. Mayer would know far more so than Thomson the significant advantage this gives the official source. We’re incredibly lazy when we make our online choices. A .5 inch move of the cursor is a wall too great for many users to bother climbing over.

Also, what is Google doing wrong here? Google’s job is to provide the best information source alternatives for the user. Period. Google is doing the WSJ or any other traditional publication a tremendous favor by indexing their content and introducing that content to the huge number of people that use Google every day. Yes, they get the content, but the WSJ gets the opportunity to grab the eyeballs. Obviously, traditional journalism hasn’t figured out how digital information seeking works in the 21st century.

Which brings me to why Thomson has his knickers in a knot. It’s a elephant sized case of not “Getting It”. This isn’t about digital loyalty. This is about looking for information. This is a transition of power into the hands of the user. The WSJ or any other paper no longer has sole control over a loyal readership, giving it license to push its editorial viewpoint as in days past. It’s not promiscuity..it’s freedom. Freedom to choose the path that suits the user best. Google is simply playing the role of the emancipator here. Here’s something else to ponder. Google would not be in the position to threaten anyone if we had not already made the decision that it is the place we will go for our information. And that includes all those “loyal” readers.

Thomson is in a snit because the WSJ’s revenue models are seriously out of sync with their readership’s preferences. That’s not Google’s fault. I’m guessing the blame lies in the failure of publishing to realize their day in the sun is over. And the only one to blame for that is the public. We’ve moved on. Get used to it.

And Now: The New News Regime

First published October 8, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week, I moderated a session at SMX about real-time search. Personally, I find the convergence of social and search to be perhaps the most significant trend of 2009. Social adds an entirely new dimension to search. Traditionally search has been used to find “what” you wanted to know more about. Social adds the dimension of time. Suddenly, relevance isn’t the only measure. Search now needs a “stale date,” a measure of the freshness of the results.

Flying Rumors

There were a number of interesting things that came up in the panel. Presenters used a few recent examples to show how stories broke online: the death of Michael Jackson, the elections in Iran and the emergency landing of a United flight in Iceland.  It was fascinating to see where people turned as news broke. Not surprisingly, behaviors followed age-old grooves, but now those behaviors played out over a brand new landscape, the digital one.

For example, Jeremy Crane from Compete showed how, as we learned the news of MJ’s death, we first turned to Google and news sources for confirmation. But as time went on, we took new online paths. We turned to Twitter, to real-time search engines, to YouTube and other richer media sources as we worked our way through the process. If you were to look at how humans deal with loss, these paths really aren’t surprising. First we want confirmation from an authoritative source, and then we have to participate in our own ways. We need to talk about it (Twitter) and we need to reminisce (watching old videos on YouTube). We need to participate in some way in the experience to reach our own measure of closure. Funerals are never really for the departed; they’re for the ones left behind.

If It’s Not New, Is It News?

But the most interesting question came from out of the audience, right at the end of the session. The internal SEO manager for ABC asked a huge question: As news increasingly breaks online, how do traditional news publishers stay nimble and relevant? How do the New York Times and ABC News keep up in a world that includes Twitter and TMZ? That, indeed, is the question.

A few columns back, I gave my own example of real-time search, as forest fires encroached on my home town of Kelowna, BC. There I touched on the new speed of news. But the ABC’s staffer’s question brings up some added dimensions to that. The answer is not as cut-and-dried as it used to be.

Traditional news channels, with their journalistic checks and balances, can never be as nimble as rumor. It’s a game they can’t play; yet they feel they must. They have a decades-old tradition of being not only the official and credible source of the news, but also the first place most people hear news as it breaks. Now, however, we often hear about the news while it’s still a rumor, perhaps several rumors, as they bounce around the Internet.

The New Regime?

What we have here is a discontinuous shift in the industry. As one of the presenters quipped, public relations is now really about the public. News spreads through millions of instaneous connections, rather than tightly controlled and edited channels. Often, the traditional news publishers are relegated to a role of listening to and verifying online buzz, trying to sort what is true from what is social gossip. It’s a middle ground they’re having a difficult time adjusting to.

The news industry is in the middle of what Christopher Freeman and Carlota Perez  called a Regime Transition. When technology shakes the very foundations of society and its supporting institutions, there is usually a resulting passing of the torch from what was to what will be. My suspicion is that what we were talking about in that session is pointing to a regime transition of epic proportions. We are defining the new reality of news by where we turn to be informed. The traditional players have no choice but to see if there will be a place for them here — when the dust settles.

The Ebbs and Flows of Market Share

First published July 16, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s been just over six weeks since the birth of Bing. While I didn’t actually say Microsoft’s new search baby was ugly, I was less than optimistic about its chances of unseating Google in a popularity contest. So, with every measurement panel carefully following Bing’s debut, I think it’s time to see just how the little engine is doing in the search (oops, make that “decision”) sandbox.

Let the Record Show

First of all, much acrimonious commentary has been attributed to me about Bing. I just want to say I never said Bing was a failure, a bad search engine or a step backwards on Microsoft’s part.

I simply said Bing would not break the Google habit, despite 100 million dollars of advertising.

In fact, here’s exactly what I said would happen. Driven by the advertising, people would temporarily disrupt the playing out of their habitual Google script, try Bing and find that it wasn’t all that different from using Google: better in some ways, worse in others. Without having a compelling reason to consciously break the Google habit (which is hard cognitive work) they would just go back on autopilot and continue to use Google. A temporary blip upwards for Bing would soon disappear, at roughly the same time as Microsoft’s $100 million ad budget, and we would all go back to mindlessly Googling what we’re looking for.

Survey Says...

So, what’s happening in terms of market share? Well, the various numbers seem to show that Bing has gained a small uptick in market share (the exact amount is difficult to determine, but Compete puts it at a 0.3% gain in share), Google’s up as well, by about half a percentage point, and Yahoo and Ask are both losing ground in what seems to be an irreversible death spiral.

If you just look at the Google and Bing numbers, the words “I told you so” naturally spring to mind. And this is still with the $100 million tap fully open. Google could come out of this with the biggest net gain, paid for by Microsoft’s ad budget.

But the story gets much more interesting, and more compelling for Microsoft, if you look at what’s happening with Yahoo and Ask. This is something I didn’t think about in my original forecast, but the logic seems clear in hindsight.

26% Still Up for Grabs

When Bing debuted, there was a 26.7% percent of the U.S. search market not owned by Google, again according to Compete. At the end of June, that shrunk to 26.1%. And that’s the share that Microsoft should be paying close attention to. Don’t worry about breaking the Google habit. Concentrate on picking off the weaker contenders. And right now, when it comes to search, Yahoo and Ask are lying limp and lifeless on the side of the road, easy pickins for a Bing drive-by. In the past year, Yahoo is down in market share by almost 3 and a half points, and Ask is off by a full point. All of this has gone to Google, plus some. They’re up almost 10 full share points in the past year.

Is Google Domination Inevitable?

If these are the trends, is it inevitable that Google will eventually own the entire search market? No, because we always like alternatives. We get nervous when there is a de facto monopoly, so we’ll keep even a weak contender on life support just to give us an alternative. At the height of the Window’s OS dynasty, Mac still managed to hold onto 4.5% of the market and Linux 0.5%. Since then, Mac has come back to take almost 9% of the market and Linux almost a full point (according to Net Applications).

That’s the other thing to remember about humans. If we have a viable underdog, we’ll throw it more than its fair share of support. Case in point: the browser wars. In 2004, Explore owned 91.35% of the market. The fledgling Firefox was its biggest competitor, at 3.66%. But over the past five years, the balance had shifted decidedly in Firefox’s favor: 65.85% for Explore vs. 22.39% for Firefox. The fact that Firefox improved its product at a much more aggressive rate than Microsoft didn’t hurt either.

I believe Google is getting very close to its natural market share cap. And the stronger the alternatives, the lower that cap will be. Yahoo and Ask have lost their appetite for competing in the search arena, but Microsoft has a viable contender in Bing. I still don’t expect it to break a Google habit, but it could well become our No. 1 alternative when we’re ready for an occasional break from our habitual search rut.

How ironic! Microsoft’s Bing playing the White Knight to Google’s Evil Empire!

Why Wolfram Alpha is Important

First published June 18, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the new Bing-enabled world, search is hotter than ever. Your entire Search Insider lineup has been trading quips and forecasts about the future of search. Aaron Goldman thinks Hunch may be the answer to my call for an iPhone of search. Today, I want to talk about why Wolfram|Alpha is very, very important to watch. It’s not an iPhone, but it is changing the rules of search in a very significant way.

Search is more than skin-deep. To most users, a search engine is only skin (or GUI) deep. And anyone who’s taken Wolfram for a spin has judged it based on the results they get back. In a few cases, Wolfram’s abilities are quite impressive. But that’s not what makes Wolfram|Alpha important. For that, we look to what Stephen Wolfram has done with the entire concept of interpreting and analyzing information. Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t search data, it calculates it. That’s a fundamentally important distinction.

Unlike Bing, which is promising a revolution that barely qualifies as evolution, Stephen Wolfram knows this is the first step on a long, long road. He says so right on the home page: “Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.”

Words are not enough.  Wolfram’s previous work with Mathematica and NKS (New Kind of Science) shatters the paradigm that every search engine is built on, semantic relationships. As revolutionary as Google’s introduction of the linking structure of the Web as a relevance factor was, it was added to a semantic foundation. PageRank is still bound by the limits of words. And words are slippery things to base an algorithm on.

The entire problem with words is that they’re ambiguous. The word “core” has 12 different dictionary definitions. It’s very difficult to know which one of those meanings is being used in any particular circumstance. Google and every other engine is limited by its need to guess at the meaning of language, one of the most challenging cognitive tasks we encounter as humans.

Potential advancements in relevance require gathering additional signals to help interpret meanings and reduce ambiguity. Personalization is one way to do this. Hunch, Aaron’s nominee for the iPhone of Search, requires you to fill out a long and rather bizarre quiz about your personal preferences. All this is to learn more about you, making educated guesses possible. If you’re going to stick with a semantic foundation, personalization is a great way to increase your odds for successful interpretation.

Another way to interpret meaning is to go with the wisdom of crowds. By overlaying the social graph, you can make the assumption that the one meaning people like you are interested in, is also the meaning you might be interested in. Again, not a bad educated guess.

Knowledge as a complex system. But what if you could do away with the messiness of language entirely? What if you could eliminate ambiguity from the equation? That’s the big hairy audacious goal that Stephen Wolfram has set his sights on. If you look at the entire body of “systematic knowledge,” you have a complex system — and in any complex system, you have patterns. Patterns are abstractions that you can apply math against. In effect, knowledge becomes computable. You don’t have to interpret semantic meaning, which is intensive guesswork at best.  You can deal with numbers. And unlike language, where “core” has 12 different values, the number “3” always has the same value.

Wolfram|Alpha is not important because it provides relevant results for stocks, cities or mathematical problems. It’s important because it’s taking an entirely new approach to working with knowledge. It’s not what Wolfram|Alpha can do today; it’s what it may enable us to do tomorrow, next year and in the year 2015.

Wolfram|Alpha could change all the rules of search. Keep your eye on it.

Hold Up the Bing Bandwagon

First published June 4, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I seem to be in the minority. Everybody (including fellow Search Insider Aaron Goldman) seems to be jumping on the Bing bandwagon. It’s generated some good initial reviews, and Aaron goes as far as to say, “Bing is far and away the most serious challenge to Google that anyone’s ever posed.”

I’m not so sure. Don’t get me wrong. Bing is a good step forward for Microsoft. It shows they’re serious about search. But unlike Aaron, I don’t think Bing is going to make a significant difference in market share numbers. I think Microsoft will get a temporary blip, causing everyone to rush to pronounce Google’s imminent death, and then everyone will go back to searching the way they did before: on Google.

Wanted: Revolutionaries!

Search needs an iPhone. Bing is a Razr. Bing is a repackaging of the same old experience, the same blue links. Microsoft has added some filters and additional navigation. But at the core, there’s nothing revolutionary about it. It won’t break a habit.

Here’s the fundamental problem. Microsoft says search is broken, and Bing is the answer. If Bing is the answer, it must mean that search wasn’t really that badly broken. In fact, it must have been barely scratched. Because the Bing experience really isn’t that different than my Google experience. Bing narrowed the gap, but they didn’t jump to the other side. It seems to me that it wasn’t search that was broken. It was Live Search that was broken. And, if we agree on that, than Bing is a pretty effective band-aid.

What We Need is an iPhone of Search

But what if Microsoft is right (as I suspect they are), and search is broken? What if we could have a significantly better search experience? What would it take to deliver that? It requires scrapping all preconceived notions and starting over. It requires an approach like the iPhone.

The iPhone isn’t a mobile phone, it’s a mobile Web and computing device. The phone is secondary. The iPhone is in the middle of changing the way we interact with online. We squeeze, spread, stroke, tap and shake. The iPhone also opened up an ecosystem of functionality. The App Store is the true genius of the iPhone: little bits of integrated functionality, making our lives more fun, more productive and more connected. Apple never intended to catch up. It intended to vault over the competition, changing the rules and opening a new marketplace. Apple strategists had nothing short of revolution on their minds.

What Bing has done is heated up the search race again, and that might be the best thing that comes out of its launch. The amount of ink generated already shows that we all want a more competitive search space. Google has had it relatively easy for a long time.

Catching the Wave

Ironically, the most exciting thing I saw last week got lost amongst all the buzz about Bing.  Google’s Wave does for email what I am proposing for search: it takes the current status quo and completely shatters it. Wave may be an integral piece in a new, richer world of online functionality, delivered to you through the Chrome Browser. Google is slowly assembling a critical mass of SaaS applications that threatens to change our concept of how we do things digitally. As those pieces come together, count on search to be at the core of it.

If I were Microsoft, that’s what would be keeping me up at night. Its empire was built on a foundation that’s over 20 years old: the concept of desktop applications. It has struggled to move into the new world of SaaS. But Google seems to be getting it and building a new world order around it. Now, that’s a revolutionary concept.

Conversations from Northwest Flight 033

First published May 28, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“So, what is it you do?”

Oh, no! It was the question I dread. I froze.

The question was posed by a very nice woman in her mid-50s who was returning to Bellingham, Wash. from a one-month trip to Europe. She was my seatmate on yesterday’s flight back from Amsterdam.

Since I got into search, I’ve hated that question, mainly because I don’t know how to answer it. I’ve tried several times, and it’s never been a terribly satisfying experience.

There was my mom, who was trying to understand what her eldest child did. I believe really, truly, she asked with the best intentions.  But this was before she had a computer and Google was just one of those words you hear that has no frame of reference, like antebellum, Shevardnadze or Hezbollah. You know the word is important to someone, just not you. 30 seconds into my answer, I knew it was hopeless. “I work with computers, Mom, on the Internet.”

“Oh, my friend was talking about that. She’s having problems with her computer. Could you fix it?”

“Sure, Mom.”

Then there was the U.S. customs agent in Sumas, Wash., who asked me the question while I was trying to gain entry into the country to go talk at a Google sales conference.

“So, you work with Google?

“Kind of. I’m not an employee of Google, but our clients use them.”

“To search?”

“No, to advertise.”

“Advertise? Where?”

“On the results page.”

“There are no ads on Google.”

“Well, actually there are.”

The conversation could have gone two ways here. I could have explained the entire monetization of search, or I could have looked for the nearest available exit from the conversation. I opted for the latter. I gained entry into the U.S., but never did convince the agent that Google sold ads.

Just to be clear: I hate the question, not the answer. Search has been extraordinarily generous to me. It’s not a job. It’s not even a chance at a multi-million-dollar buy-out. It’s the passion. It’s a chance to wake up every morning and discover something nobody knew before. It’s knowing that your opinion counts just as much as anyone’s, because we’re all figuring it out and none of us, not even all those Ph.D.s at Google, are experts yet. It’s getting the chance to explore the potential with some of the most exciting companies in the world, around the globe. And it’s the absolute blessing to be able to spend your time doing that and make enough money to provide your family with a good lifestyle. I’m not rich, but I am very happy.

Search allowed me to exceed my dreams. I started off wanting to be Darren Stevens, the ad exec working for the big agency. Sometime in my mid-20s, twenties, I decided I was less of a Darren Stevens and more of a Michael Steadman. If that name’s not familiar, Michael Steadman was Ken Olin’s character on “thirtysomething.” I wanted to be co-owner of the Michael and Elliot Company, a small but dynamic ad agency with a handful of talented and dedicated employees, cranking out great creative for regional advertisers.

Today, my company has over 30 employees and a brand new sales office in San Jose, Calif., and we work with major accounts globally. My opinion is respected in an industry I love. I travel and speak all over the world.  In fact, a research contract with Europe’s biggest telecom and a speaking gig with Google’s U.K. team were what led me to my plane ride back from Amsterdam yesterday. Based on what my life goals were, search allowed me to whiz by them some time ago and there’s still no end in sight.

But still, there was that damned question: “So, what is it you do?” 

Oh, what the hell…

“I’m a search marketer.”

“Mmm. That must be interesting.”

Wow! She got it. She knew what I was talking about. It was just as if I said I was an accountant or a lawyer.

“Yes. It is. Very interesting.”

She went back to her book. Perhaps it was on the Hezbollah, or a biography of Shevardnadze.