Category Archives: Web Search

Personalization: Google’s Defensible Trump Card?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Three Cs of Search

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

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

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

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

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

Redefining Community

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

Content Trails

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

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

 

Thoughts on Yahoo and Microsoft Merging

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

Friday, May 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Food for Thought on Google’s Web History Announcement

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Food for Thought on Google’s Web History Announcement

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sea-Level Change for Search

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

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

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

Greg Jarboe’s Gentrification Theory

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

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

Anne Kennedy’s Epiphany

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

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

Is Google Too Big for Search?

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

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

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

Why Search Deserves a Second Look

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

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

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

Google Adds Your Click Path to Search Personalization

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

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

google1

 

 

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

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

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

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

Will Search Become Google’s Forgotten Child?

Everyone’s jumping on the “Google dominating the advertising universe” bandwagon.  BusinessWeek ran a article today speculating on Google’s omnipresent domination with their acquisition of DoubleClick plus some recently announced deals with EchoStar’s Dish satellite TV network and Clear Channel’s radio network.  The primal fear even has its own acronym now, FOG, or “Fear of Google”.  But in BusinessWeek’s article there’s one telling quote (emphasis mine):

“To date, Google has had one gargantuan advertising success. It developed an online auction platform enabling businesses, even those with little marketing experience, to easily bid for space to serve tiny text ads related to information Web surfers wanted at a particular moment. Most of these ads—which exist primarily to drive traffic to Web pages and, ultimately, generate sales—run on Google’s own search results pages.”

And there you have Google’s dilemma in a nutshell.  The more aggressive they are extending their network reach into new channels, the more they come to rely on what, for them, has been the golden egg, their search engine.  The “gargantuan advertising success” has actually been search engine marketing’s success.  Google has been riding a consumer initiated wave as buyers have found an incredibly effective new channel to do their research on.  The success that Google has enjoyed by riding that wave has more to do with the concept of search then it has to do with any particularly brilliant Google strategy.  Google has keyed into that success by providing a very effective search tool.  And if you’re looking anywhere for the secret to Google’s success, look no further than their obsession about user experience on their search engine.  They’ve kept it clean, they’ve kept it relevant, and they’ve kept it a favorite choice of millions and millions of search users.  That has given them the ability to monetize a tremendous amount of traffic and flow that money straight into the corporate coffers, enabling them to go on a shopping spree of unprecedented proportion.

I don’t begrudge Google for thinking big and planning to dominate the universe.  It’s really the only direction they can go.  But I would like to hear more people acknowledge the fact that Google success is built completely on the emergence of search as an essential online activity.  And the emergence of that activity is due to a lot of pioneers in the area, not just Google.  In its present form, search is best represented on Google but the very act of searching owes a huge debt to dozens of other companies, including current also-rans like Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Overture, and the historic footnotes like Infoseek, AltaVista and All the Web.

Because of that I get a little frustrated when search does not get its proper due.  Personally, I believe there is huge untapped potential still in search.  But everyone is so focused on Google’s extension of its empire that I don’t believe search is getting the respect it’s due.  It’s not getting respect from advertisers, it’s not getting respect from agencies and lately, it’s not even getting respect from Google.

I know that Google has some exciting plans for search, primarily wrapped around personalization and I look forward to hearing more about this.  I hope that Google search team remains engaged pursuing the potential of this tremendously effective channel and doesn’t become diverted from this goal by the glitz and glamour of Google’s new marketing channels.  I know the sales teams at Google are very much focused on the network and the other opportunities, seeming to take the power of search, which is currently buying all the lava lamps and free lunches at Google, for granted.

Telltale Signs of a Chasm Crossing from NY

It was an incredibly packed week (and hotel) at SES NY. As you’ve probably noticed, I didn’t get a chance to do any blog posts while I was there. But the good news I had a chance to sort through my inbox and set aside some post worthy tidbits that I’ll try to catch up with in the next week, so I’ll try to make up for lost time.

One of the things I chatted with a few friends about was a strong undercurrent of change in the industry. On the last day of the show I had lunch with Greg Jarboe and followed that up with a Guiness or two in the lounge with Chris Sherman and Matt Bailey. Besides the obvious (Google’s purchase of DoubleClick, IPG’s purchase of Reprise and the recent purchase of Global Strategies by WPP) there’s just a feeling of transition to a new stage for the SEM biz. Jarboe referred to it as the “gentrification” of the business (Greg is so erudite!).

After, in a quick chat with Shari Thurow (yes, we ironed out the wrinkles of our spat) and Anne Kennedy, Anne nailed it for me. We’re crossing the chasm. Isn’t it funny. I’ve written at least one column saying this was the case and did a series for MediaPost indicating we were in for sea level change, but I had to be reminded about it.

Perhaps it was the validation of being surrounded by a bunch of other SEMs. For most of the time, I’m somewhat isolated from the SEM community here in Kelowna. From this vantage point, I speculated that we were ready to cross the chasm but I had the comfort of being somewhat removed from the day to day machinations of the industry. But last week, I was in the thick of it and in the flurry of activity, I was wondering what was going on. It took Anne to point out to me that it was just what I had postulated on a few months earlier. Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees!

There are a few symptomatic indicators that seem to indicate a chasm crossing is ready to happen:

The mainstream is adopting search, but they’re not sure where it should live. More and more companies are testing the search waters, but they’re hesitant to partner with an outside firm. Their answer, at least in the short term, is to build an in-house team to handle the campaigns. I’m getting this from all sides.

The major agency holding companies have all acquired search expertise. In order to try to stem the in-house tide, the IPG’s, WPP’s and Omnicoms of the world have all gone shopping for SEM expertise.

Awareness of search has moved up the C Level. For the first time, SEMPO’s Market Survey found that the executive team is not only aware of search, but keenly interested in it. This has been an ongoing frustration in the past for search marketers.

With all of the above happening, it’s going to be an interesting time in the search biz. Ironically, just as we’re waiting for the 800 pound gorilla to be crowned, another interesting observation I made last week was for the established search players to be rushing towards the next big thing. Google is stumbling over itself to rush past search, moving a lot of its focus to display, video and every other channel under the sun. I’m not so sure it’s wise to turn the spotlight from search. My gut feeling is it’s finally search’s time to shine.

Anyway, more posts to come this week..finally!