Category Archives: Web Search

What Sport Rules on Search?

I’ve been meaning to post on this for awhile, but you know how things go.

Anyway, Google Trends is pretty fun to play with. Being in Canada in hockey playoff season, I thought it would be interesting to compare the big 4 sports in North America.

Here’s the results:

So…over all Football rules in terms of search volume, with very regular peaks in basketball during playoffs.

On the top graph, hockey doesn’t look too impressive, but check out the search volumes in the cities. Hockey rules! Even in Minneapolis, the lone US city to make the list, they’re still looking for hockey. To be honest, we consider Minnesotans honourary (notice the Canadian spelling?) Canadians anyway.

Winnipeg is die hard hockey heartland, and they haven’t had a NHL team in 10 years (the Jets moved to Phoenix and became the Coyotes).

I’m not sure whether to be proud of our national obsession, or a little embarassed.

And in the interest of being topical, here’s how searchers cast their votes in April (the latest month available) for American Idol contestants. Hmm..this was almost a full month before the finals. Could search be the crystal ball for reality TV?

MySpace #6 in Search, Google Still #1

ComScore just released their April search market share numbers, and for the first time, they’ve added MySpace on the list, debuting at a respectable number 6 with 43 million searches and a 0.6 share.

This is an interesting generational development. Kids always need to carve out a space for their own that doesn’t seem controlled by adults. Online, this appears to be happening at MySpace. Will this territoriality change the search habits of a new generation? I can admit I’m way past this generation, so I don’t “get” MySpace but I’ll be watching with interest anyway. 43 million searches is nothing to sneeze at.

Other numbers from the ComScore release.

Google gained market share in the US for the ninth consecutive month, with 43.1 percent. Yahoo came in second with 28 percent and MSN third with 12.9 percent. Yahoo has dropped almost 3 points in the past year, and MSN dropped 3.2 points.

Despite my admiration for Ask’s new interface, it appears that not many are sharing my enthusiasm. Their market share has also dropped slightly in the past year, from 6.1 % down to 5.9%. By the way, I can’t say I’m a big fan of the Apostolos Gerasoulis commercials that Ask is running. In their attempts to position Ask as an alternative to Google, the message comes off a little desperate. And as cute as Apostolos’s son Eli is, I’m thinking this is the kid everybody asks for help with homework, but who probably won’t get invited to many parties in high school. (I may or may not have personal experience being this type of kid). Anyway, see what you think.

It does appear that we’re searching more than ever, with total search volume up to 6.6 billion queries a month for the US. That’s a 4% increase over March.

Overall gist of the numbers? Playing it safe won’t beat the Google juggernaut. Time for some bold strategies.

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.