Category Archives: Web Search

A Conversation with Ask’s CEO, Jim Lanzone

First published May 18, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I had the chance to spend some time talking to Ask’s new CEO, Jim Lanzone. The first thing that become very clear is that Lanzone is tired of his company’s being compared to Google, MSN and Yahoo. I immediately slipped into the trap of asking how Ask intends to fight the big G and the two other contenders. It was obviously a question that he has heard all too often in the past. “Let’s begin by resetting the framework for the question,” Lanzone replied. “We don’t want to climb Everest right now. We’re not planning on knocking out Google. Our goal is to take our 20 million users, who are currently using us twice a month, and bump that up to four times a month. That doubles our market share,” he said.

“Search is not a zero sum gain,” Lanzone continued. “Americans use about 3.2 engines a month. We want to get on the list. We want to offer an alternative to Google.” As he pointed out, it’s much easier to post impressive market share growth percentages when you’re starting with a relatively small slice of the pie. “For Google to move the needle even a few points, they have to attract huge numbers of new searches,” he said. “We can achieve huge growth just by getting people to use us a few more times each month.”

Focusing on the User

Ask has come out of the gate strongly since the rebrand and the removal of Jeeves. The focus has been squarely on improving the search experience for its existing user. “We want to put the right tool in the right place at the right time,” said Lanzone. “We want to be waiting for the user when they need us.”

Distancing Ask from the helpful butler has proven itself to be difficult. “People are much more aware of us as Ask Jeeves than Ask. It will take time,” he said. For right or wrong, the efforts of Ask Jeeves to brand themselves as a natural query engine have stuck. A long-time member of Ask’s usability team, Michael Ferguson, pointed out the challenges of trying to change how people search. “For years, we’ve been telling people to ask us a question. We’ve perhaps been a little too successful in encouraging them. I once asked a lady what was the last thing she searched for on (then) Ask Jeeves. She was disappointed in the results she got when she typed in ‘Midnight basketball programs are more successful in LA than in St. Louis. Why is that?'”

I had written some time ago that I believe we’ve become used to truncating our search intent into a few words. Apparently, Ask now agrees. Rather than trying to accommodate natural language, Ask now takes a more standard approach to query construction.

Tools When You Need Them, Where You Need Them

Even the physical layout of Ask’s new home page tried to ease the transition from the once ubiquitous butler. Ferguson said, “We put the new tool palette where Jeeves used to be. It’s about the same height and size, so visually it has the same balance.”

The palette is a big part of the new usability focus of Ask. Lanzone explained, “We have some great tools, and we wanted to move them more upfront for the user. We didn’t want to hide them with tabs, which no one clicks on. With the palette, it’s right there, waiting for them.”

Based on initial numbers, people are using the tools more than ever before. Usage on most of them has doubled, with some, like image and map search, posting far higher gains.

Another change was a rethinking of how to use the real estate of the search results page. “The ads from the right rail are gone,” said Lanzone. “We’ve replaced that with something searchers can use, the ‘Narrow’ and ‘Broaden’ your search suggestions. Rather than 1 or 2 percent click-throughs on ads, we’re getting 30 percent click throughs on those suggestions. We know that search is an iterative process, so why not help make it easier by helping the user get to the right search faster?”

Another cleaned up area of the SERP is the top-sponsored ads. It used to be that organic results were pushed right off the page by far too many sponsored listings. Top-sponsored listings have since been restricted to three, in line with other major engines, with the rest shown at the bottom of the page. This used to be one of my pet peeves with Jeeves, and apparently I had plenty of sympathizers in the Ask usability team. “We were a public company, responding to demand for profits,” Lanzone explains. “A lot of us never agreed with that.” Kudos to parent company IAC for eventually listening to the champions of the user experience.

Not Bolder, Just Better

I wrapped up by telling Lanzone that I believed Ask was in a good position to become the bold innovator in search. Unlike Google and Yahoo, it isn’t solely dependent on a huge revenue stream from search, so it can afford to take some risks in testing new interfaces and developments. He replied, “You know, we’ve never considered what we’ve done, or plan to do, as being bold. It just has to be right for the user. All the changes we’ve made were done because in our testing, it felt right. We’re not chasing technology for its own sake. We have a laser focus on the user experience. We just want to do search right.”

I’m a huge believer in focused strategy and feet on the ground, practical user-centricity. They’re two commodities that are in drastically short supply in the current heated search space. If Ask sticks to its guns, it just may just get a shot at the big dogs in search.

Search Supercharges Ad Platforms but What’s In It for the User?

Seems like all the innovation lately with the search engines has been in rolling out sophisticated ad targeting platforms. Yahoo’s the latest to blow their horn about their own back end (and I realize that paints an ugly picture).

I’m a search marketer, and I love the advances that are being made in being able to target geographically, demographically and behaviorally, but I can’t help but think, “Who are we targeting?”. While the engines try to woo advertisers with better tools, what good is it doing if their market share is dwindling because they’re not giving the user a reason to use the engine?

I have not seen a significant improvement to the every day search user experience from any of the big 3 in years. One may argue that if you take advantage of search history or other enhancements that have debuted in beta, it offers more value to the searcher. But that does nothing for the vast majority of searches that happen every day on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Nobody has upped the ante. Ask is the only engine I’ve seen that made some significant changes on the interface (more about that later today).

As a search marketer, it’s all about market share. It takes time to target and strategically plan a campaign, and while the new platforms offer some impressive capabilities, they also add time required to manage them. Am I going to use that time to target 11% of the search market, 23%  or 50%? It just makes sense to use your time where it gets you the biggest return.

A word of advice. Worry about getting the users first, then worry about the tools to target them.

Putting Every Book Ever Published One Click Away

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

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

Will Search Become a Duopoly!

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

Quintura, Staking the Future on Semantic Mapping

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

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

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

A Semantic Map Primer

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

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

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

Quintura’s Take on Semantic Maps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quintura: Semantic Mapping in Action

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

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

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

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

DVRs Skip $8 Billion in TV Revenue

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

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

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

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

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

Ask’s New TV Ads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Search May Not Fragment

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

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

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

Creatures of Habit

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

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

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

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

Deep Pockets

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

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

Integration

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

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