Category Archives: Web Search

Disney Disses Search – But Misses the Mark

First published March 30, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Fresh from the floors of OMMA in Hollywood…

I was sitting in on the Monday morning keynote address from Albert Cheng, who is ABC’s newly minted executive vice president of digital media. Albert said all the things you would expect him to, including platitudes about embracing new technology, seeing the tremendous promise of digital, and vowing to provide viewers with high quality content, wherever they are, whenever they want to watch, and on whatever they want to watch it on. It went all pretty much according to the script, but halfway through, he made a comment that showed a brief glimpse of raw emotion. Ah… my ears perked up!

First of all, other than in Cheng’s introduction, he barely mentioned ABC. It was the Disney banner that Cheng unfurled and praised for its long-standing dedication to quality content. And he reminded us that this same quality content is not cheap to produce, then proceeded to take a swipe at the search engines. He took exception to the engines seeking to monetize that content through aggregation and disintermediation, echoing a sentiment common with almost all creators of content (see my earlier article, “Is Search a Leech on the Internet?”). But rather than just leave it there, Cheng went on to say that advertising presented by search engines can never hope to be as effective as advertising presented on video.

Whoa there, Albert!

I think you missed a point roughly the size of Walt Disney World. Search advertising doesn’t have to assault the senses or make us feel all warm and fuzzy to get our attention, because it already has that attention: we requested the messages through the act of search.

Cheng slipped back into safe boilerplate corporate speak about how the “halo effect” of advertising presented together with entertainment creates a much stronger response with consumers. He used the placement of Sears appliances and home furnishings in the popular show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” as the example.

There was a major disconnect here that was a little troubling, coming from a vice president of one of the largest media corporations in the world. Cheng was trying to draw a comparison between two wildly different advertising channels, and the attempt to contrast effectiveness was naïve at best.

Later That Same Day…

I was moderating a panel on video search. We speculated for 45 minutes on where video is going, and debated how advertising could be incorporated into digital video. At the end, I wrapped up by saying that search has been one of the very few unqualified successful online advertising channels. It remains to be seen how other marketing messages evolve themselves to engage consumer attention. Video remains squarely in this category. And the reason is simple: search gets one basic concept better than any other channel. Consumer control is hardwired into search. Search has become the embodiment of that control, the mechanism through which we request pretty much anything online. You can have all the quality content you want online, but unless a consumer requests it, typically through a search engine of some kind, you have no audience.

Maybe Albert Was Having A Bad Day…

I don’t blame ABC and Disney for feeling threatened. Every executive at a major traditional media corporation is feeling his empire crumbling beneath his feet. The world has shifted 180 degrees, and power has consolidated itself in the hands of consumers. Yes, Disney has invested billions in creating the machine that can churn out entertainment. But the distribution channels for that content have changed irrevocably. We, the consumers, have millions of options, we have control, and search will be the gate through which we allow that content to flow. That puts search in the driver’s seat.

Search has the tremendous advantage of an audience that’s highly interested in its advertising message. The consumer has requested information, and all the search ad has to do is promise to deliver on the consumer’s intent. In this case, simple text messages perform tremendously well. In fact, the introduction of any other type of advertising, including rich media or graphics, breaks the search paradigm and will likely be ignored. Remember search banner ads?

Now, mind you, getting a consumer’s attention with a search ad is harder than it sounds. Probably no one knows better than I how fleeting the search user’s attention is. But the advertisers’ odds for success are exponentially better than if they’re trying to attract the attention of consumers who are not thinking about a product and have no intention of doing so in the near future.

As long as consumer control is exercised through the act of searching, it will provide the single best opportunity to connect with a highly motivated consumer. There is still much work to be done in how that advertising is presented, as we explore the potential of search marketing, but with 40 percent-plus of online ad budgets swinging to search, I think the channel has pretty much proven itself.

Don’t Get Me Wrong…

I do agree with Mr. Cheng in one respect. I think there’s tremendous potential for online video as an ad delivery vehicle. I wrote as much in last week’s column. And I certainly agree that a halo effect is powerful in brand messaging. But to try to draw comparisons between this very distinct marketing approach and search is like trying to say that the airplane is a more effective means of transportation than the car. Two different applications, two very different beasts.

You should know that, Albert. After all, didn’t Disney once have its own search engine? Oh, that’s right. You couldn’t make a “Go” of it.

Video and the Online Paradigm

First published March 23, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Online interactions are generally ruled by the left brain, the logical side of our intellect. We interact in what is primarily a text-based presentation. We read, rather than feel. We assimilate words, rather than absorb sights and sounds. Any moves to bring the emotions of the right brain to the Web have been feeble at best. Generally, we interact with most Web sites the same way we did in 1996. We read text, we click on links, we glance at the occasional graphic. For the most part, our right brain is idling.

Next week’s OMMA show in Hollywood will be looking forward to the day when our emotions will rule how we interact online (among other things). It marks an oncoming convergence that is far more important than the combining of digital media and the Internet. What will be explored and debated in the meeting rooms of the HiltonUniversalCity is a medium that engages both the right brain and left brain, in equal measure, at the same time.

Video Search: The Tip of the Iceberg

Next week, I’ll be moderating a session on Video Search at OMMA Hollywood. In assembling the panel, my initial inclination was to bring the latest in video search optimization techniques to the audience, highlighting the tactics that could put you on top of the video search engines. But there was a deeper question here, and one that I wanted to explore.

I’ve written before about interactive video authoring. MSN is working on the technology, and they’ll be talking about it on the panel. After my column ran, other companies such as Vimation (also joining us), Videoclix and Click TV let me know about the work they’ve been doing in the field.

Defining Online Engagement

The whole question of how our brains engage when we act online fascinates me. How do our emotions kick in to frame the context inside of which we’ll interact with a site? How is that initial emotional evaluation (see the 50 Millisecond Judgment) impact our further, more logical interactions with the site, as we begin reading the content and assimilating it? Right now, it appears that in less time than the blink of an eye, the right brain renders an opinion of a site based on its aesthetic appeal, and that opinion is either reinforced by the content, or continues to be at odds with it, as the left brain digests that content.

This is the way we currently interact. One of the questions we’re struggling with in online marketing is defining engagement. My belief is that the most powerful medium for engagement is the one that most fully engages the senses. I believe we’re more fully engaged when our emotions rule us, when the right brain is in control. For my money, there is no more powerful medium than a truly superb movie, seen at a theater. For that reason, it’s appropriate that we’ll be wrestling with this question in Hollywood, the home of movies, in a venue a stone’s throw from Universal Studios.

This is not to say that words aren’t powerful. Novels can move us to tears. Words can find a connection through our intellect, allowing us to render tremendously engaging concepts, made all the more real because we visualize them internally. But the engagement is more subtle, and happens over time. A novel can’t assault our senses the same way a movie can, because the creators of the movie have hardwired the imagery and emotion directly to our senses, rendering the story for us (I leave aside the question of which is the more fulfilling experience). Also, we don’t read online the way we do a novel. We scan, we pick up snippets of information, and we don’t allow ourselves to be immersed in the act of reading. We are multitasking, and there are just too many other stimuli fighting for our attention.

Emotional…and Interactive!

As broadband moves real video online, we suddenly have a platform that engages our emotions in a way that scanning text online can’t. We create emotional connections to the content, the same way we do with movies or television. But what’s really exciting is that now we can make that content interactive. We can click to access more information, or to guide ourselves through a story. Linear narrative can now give way to hyperlinked multiple story threads. Advertising messages can be delivered with the full impact of a visual, emotional medium, then transition seamlessly to a logical information request. Now, we are engaging both our intellect and our emotions at the same time. That could change everything about the way we interact online. And, as always, search will be the connection to that experience. Hope to see you at the session!

The Bold and the Beta: Two Approaches to Search Innovation

First published March 16, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As search innovation rolls out to the user, the beta release has been a tried and true way of testing the waters. Currently, there are dozens of different flavors of search in beta, including a significant portion of Google usability. Beta releases were originally a quality assurance exercise, allowing real users to identify bugs in a new product.

Today, the advantage of beta in search is that it’s a relatively low-risk way to test the appeal of new search functionality and interfaces with real users. Beta release is to technology as a test market is to advertising. A beta interface can be thrown up without impacting the main site, which continues to produce the bread and butter revenue. The hope is, of course, that word of the beta will spread virally through the Internet, and the developer finds its beta release turn into the next big thing online. You pretest with users, find you have a home run, and when the time is right, you throw the switch, incorporating some or all of the new technology into your mainstream product.

The beginning of Google was a classic study in how a beta release can introduce a hot new upstart. Google was in beta forever, and had attracted a significant chunk of the search market before it ever was officially released. Use of Google spread virally like wildfire through the academic and journalist communities, eventually cracking the mainstream as the word spread. The beta campaign worked like a charm, and by the time Google was mainstream, it had so much momentum it never looked back.

Since then, every search player has thrown new technology up as a beta, to see what sticks, and hopefully, takes off to become the next flavor of Google. Notable beta candidates currently are Google’s Froogle (another perennial beta release) and Video Search, Microsoft’s Windows Live Search and Yahoo’s Mindset. Each hopes that it will be the next big thing. Given the stakes that are up for grabs in search, I’m not sure beta release is the best way to get the next big win. Here are some reasons why:

Beta Users Are Early Adopters

The beta user is not your typical animal. They tend to be more risk tolerant  and patient with bugs, and are the early adopters. This audience works well if your beta release objectives are bug tracking, but not so well if you’re trying to gauge a potential market buster.

Search is now mainstream; it’s crossed the chasm. The classic Google success story took place when search was still in the domain of the early adopter. Today, to gain market share, you have to introduce technology that appeals to everyone. I tend to be an early adopter. My wife is a classic online pragmatist. I’ll fool around with new technology, and I think some of the stuff in beta is pretty cool. But it’s not my loyalty you have to win, it’s my wife’s, and she doesn’t even know Google Labs exists, let alone is willing to take the brainchild of a Google engineer for a test drive. If you’re using beta users to pretest market potential, you’re probably getting the wrong feedback.

The Competition Can Peek Under Your Kimono

Search is a hot space now. In the original days of Google, search had the advantage of not being under the microscope, so a beta release of a new engine had a chance to build up some user momentum before it was attacked and reverse engineered by the competition. In Google’s case, not only was it not reverse engineered, but Page and Brin couldn’t even sell the technology to the competition. The same is not true today. Literally weeks or days are all it seems to take before the competition jumps on a new development and introduces its own version. As an example, Windows Live Search has its own version of Google Earth satellite imagery built into the interface.

When you’re penetrating a mainstream market, every day you can hold an advantage over the competition is significant. The longer something remains in beta before it becomes a significant advantage to your main user base, the longer your competition has to even the playing field.

There’s Too Much Beta And Too Little Innovation

A beta product will only become a blockbuster if it significantly ups the ante in terms of just plain coolness or usability. Today, everything gets thrown in beta, and, in many cases, there’s just not enough motivation to cause even early adopters to give it a second look. We’re being inundated with new beta releases and I personally can’t keep up. The chance of one of these spinning enough momentum to gain market share is infinitesimal at best. There’s very little that’s really buzz-worthy right now. The last thing I saw that was pretty cool in new search interfaces was Yahoo’s Mindset, but that’s generated virtually no attention even in the search biz. After taking Windows Live Search for a test drive, I found it reasonably buzz-worthy as well, but time will tell if it will gain much attention in its beta release.

It’s Time For Boldness, Not Beta

This might not be the time to play it safe in the search biz. It’s time for locked doors and midnight brainstorming, huge leaps forward and blow-your-socks-off functionality. It’s time for monumental, not incremental, improvements. Spoon feeding us innovation through never-ending beta releases might not be the way to go. The irony is that now, when there’s significant dollars at stake and risk is greatest, the only way to win might be to take that risk head-on and gamble big.

Enough Talk about Search Bubbles!

First published March 9, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Geoff Ramsey from eMarketer is a smart guy. At Search Engine Strategies in New York last week, Geoff said that search marketing is only at 10 percent of its potential size. I’m not sure how Geoff quantified the 10 percent figure, but when it comes to the fact that we’re only scratching the surface of search, I agree wholeheartedly.

There was also a lot of press last week about Google’s share price eroding because its CFO, George Reyes, said he expected slowing growth in the next quarter. So what’s the deal? Is search growing, or isn’t it?

My Breakfast With The Analysts

While in New York for SES, I had breakfast with a number of financial analysts. They wanted me to quote a hard number to try to quantify the growth of search spending quarter over quarter. They wanted the exact impact of click fraud. They were hungry, and it wasn’t for the scrambled eggs and bacon. They wanted numbers to plug into a spreadsheet and try to predict a growth trend for Google. They wanted to eliminate ambiguity, put form to the nebulous and try to quantify a social phenomenon. My panel partner, New York Times / About.com‘s Marshall Simmonds, and I tried to give them what they were looking for, but I couldn’t help but think we were on opposite sides of a communication chasm. We weren’t looking at the industry through the same lens.

Here’s the problem. I tend to be a big-picture, long-term thinker. In that context, I see nothing but blue sky for search. It can’t help but grow exponentially. Meanwhile, the analysts are focused on the next three months and what the next earning report is going to look like. Is there a gremlin lurking out there that will jinx Google’s profitability next month?

I understand the short-term focus. I know it’s vitally important to investors. I am somewhat familiar with how the market works. But I’m just not sure how you micro- measure something that’s perhaps the most significant sociological event in our lifetime. And no, I don’t think I’m overstating the case.

This Isn’t A Bubble, It’s A Tidal Wave!

I’ve said this before, and I’m saying it again. Search is the key to online interaction. It is the connector between intent and content online. And online will soon become the only line. It will be the umbilical cord through which we interact with everything beyond our immediate physical world.

We have no idea how much our lives will change in the next two decades. It will be the most rapid assimilation of sociological change in history. Everything that forms our current reality will be reengineered and reinvented from the ground up. This includes our definitions of community, social relationships, family, communication, our work, our leisure and our very concept of self. The physical and the virtual will merge, and the simple act of searching will become the synapse that connects us to the World 2.0.

That’s a big concept, one that’s hard to constrain with talk of quarterly earnings, bid prices remaining flat and the potential danger of click fraud. These are all valid concerns, but to me, it’s a bit like forecasting the demise of the automobile in 1902 because poor roads caused frequent flat tires and there were no gas stations. Perhaps that dampened sales of automobiles in the short term, but the fact remained that a fundamental wave of change was underway, and any restricting obstacles were eventually swept away by the sheer force of that change. The same is true of search.

Consumer Control

Here’s just one concept that has been irrevocably altered forever. The individual is now in control. We can connect instantaneously with other individuals, and ground swells of societal change can happen literally overnight. We no longer mindlessly accept what is given to us, we take what we want. And search is the mechanism we use to find what it is we want. It used to be that vast power constructs were required to form the pipelines required to get goods, services or entertainment to us. The Internet has made those power constructs unnecessary. The infrastructure now exists for any company to connect to any consumer. But, and this is a fundamental concept, the consumer now chooses to connect with the company, not the company with the consumer. The agenda lies totally in the hands of the individual, and that agenda usually includes search, in any of its various forms.

Defining Online Interaction

The biggest issue facing search now is not flattening bid prices or click fraud, it’s in quantifying the value of search in the context of complex online interactions. At Search Engine Strategies I had the privilege of being on a panel with Greg Stirling from the Kelsey Group, Alan Rimm-Kaufman of the Rimm-Kaufman Group and Diane Rinaldo from Yahoo. In the Q&A after the session, Greg and I both stated that we suspect online interactions are much more convoluted and messy than we might think. We don’t navigate online in a considered way. We click quickly, make split-second decisions and use the “back” button extensively. Somewhere in this soup of online interaction, we work our way through our own buying funnel, but this could happen in one distinct session, or it could happen as fragments of several sessions spread out over months.

In there somewhere are our interactions with search. And when I say search, I use the term in its broadest context, not a clearly defined interaction with Google, Yahoo or MSN. Search for me is any user-initiated request for information, so it could be internal site search, vertical search or general search. To me, it’s the concept of search as the user-controlled online connection that holds the promise, not any individual property. I’m sure Google, Yahoo and MSN are all smart enough to realize the potential and are all working on ways to capture as big a share of this fundamental activity as possible.

To try to extricate the search activity and tie quantifiable value to each touch point from this tangled mess of online interactions becomes tremendously challenging. That’s why most search marketers only measure the end, the click that leads to the final transaction. It’s easy, but it’s not capturing the value of search along the way. And if, as I suspect, search is a essential element in online navigation, then the value is significant.

So I return to Geoff Ramsay and his prediction that we’ve only so far seen 10 percent of the potential of search. Absolutely! It’s like standing with your feet in a puddle while you watch a tsunami coming your way. It’s not a question of if you’re going to get wet, but rather, when.

Ask.com – The Dark Horse in Search?

First published March 2, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Barry Diller likes long shots. He’s built a career betting on the long shot. Climbing from the mail room of the William Morris agency to network exec was business as usual for Diller. Taking ABC from a perpetual also-ran to challenge the dominance of CBS and NBC was not out of the realm of the doable. And Diller’s Fox is the once impossible fourth network. So don’t be too quick to bet against him.

 

Today, Diller is stacking his chips for a run at the lucrative search market, and he’s betting that history can repeat itself. Fresh from killing off his venerable butler, Jeeves, Diller showcased the new Ask.com at the New York Search Engine Strategies show.

In a keynote conversation with Danny Sullivan that opened the show, Diller made it clear that he’s in this for the long haul. Diller knows it will take time and significant improvements in the user experience to wrest market share from the Google juggernaut. And Ask.com just might have the goods to add another underdog win to Diller’s already impressive CV.

Good Core Functionality

Behind the Ask interface lies some pretty impressive technology. The Teoma back end that Ask purchased in 2001 is arguably every bit as good as Google’s vaunted relevancy algorithms, and many industry insiders argue that their core concept of expert communities or hubs is actually a step ahead of Google’s link-based approach.

But good relevancy is just the price you have to pay to play in this game. It should be a given. Relevancy algorithms won the game once (for Google) but the playing field has evened. The next step is an improved user experience, and it’s here where Ask has a couple of significant advantages that might give it a shot at taking on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Deeply Vertical

The search engines are moving to deeper vertical experiences. They are trying to interpret intent based on the search query, and delivering a richer set of results in the appropriate category. So, if the search engine knows your query is local in nature (because of the inclusion of a city or zip code) it will try to deliver local search results, complete with addresses and maps showing the location. It’s a closer match to what your intent is, which is to locate a local business. The goal of the search engine is to get you closer to the information you want, and minimize the number of clicks you have to take to get there.

Diller’s IAC includes some well established vertical properties, including CitySearch, Hotels.com and Match.com. It makes tremendous sense to use Ask as the portal into these vertical experiences. Already, the new Ask features CitySearch ratings on many local results. Diller indicated that increased verticalization is likely in the future, but it has to be integrated in a way that makes sense, “We have an enormous amount of vertical data, but we’re never going to give a bad user experience.”

Betting Big when You Have Nothing to Lose

Perhaps Ask’s biggest advantage is the fact that it has nothing to lose. The company’s market share sits at about 2.5 percent (according to Nielsen NetRatings), so it can afford to fine-tune an interface.

Google is no longer the brash newcomer in the search biz. When you have 50 percent-plus market share and your entire revenue channel is dependent on maintaining that share, you have to step very carefully. This is not usually the corporate climate that fosters discontinuous innovation. And discontinuous innovation is the only thing that’s going to unseat the leaders in the search space. As Diller said in his keynote address, “We’re not looking for Ask to be another search engine, we’re looking for it to be an alternative to the other engines.”

Ask has already introduced some interesting new features to the search experience. Their “Narrow” and “Expand Your Search” suggestions usually prove helpful. The new Ask also features an editable tool palette on the home page that immediately adds new and deep functionality, such as local, maps, shopping, dictionary and encyclopedia, images, news and weather. Desktop search has also been incorporated. When I attempted to take some of the features for a test drive, the results were mixed. I was told a number of times that the volume of searches being done prevented Ask from delivering local results.

Search and Tools Don’t Mix

When the tools worked, they did seem to deliver pretty good results and some impressive new functionality. Perhaps moving this to the home page will encourage more people to try them. But based on our observations of search user behavior, few of us want to take one second longer than necessary to fine-tune our searches. This has been shown by the anemic percentage of users that have historically taken advantage of existing advanced search features. With Ask, to launch a local search, you have to hit the tab, which introduces another search box where you add the city or zip. Sound’s pretty simple right? But users are notoriously lazy when it comes to search. Add one more click, just one, and you seem to eliminate the majority of the audience. Ask’s features are simple and intuitive, but time will tell whether users embrace the additional functionality.

I think Ask is heading in the right direction, but the first version of Ask shows tweaks to the accepted search paradigm, not the shake-up that’s required for the big win. Perhaps Diller and his search team have more surprises up their sleeve.

Barry Gets The Last Word

Diller also shared more philosophical moments in his conversation with Danny Sullivan. “I’ve spent my whole life telling stories in the narrative,” he said. “I’m fascinated by the interactivity of online, by what’s possible in a screen. I’m still curious about the potential of this radical revolution.” He also took the opportunity to take some shots at his main rival, Google. “The whole idea of ‘don’t be evil’ is a little pretentious. I don’t believe the vast majority of corporations are out there setting up evil empires.”

One thing that was interesting to note on the floors of SES was the continuing shift in attitude towards Google. Resentment towards its domination of search is growing and becoming more vocal. We want more competition in the search space, and many attendees would like to see Google’s gargantuan corporate ego get knocked down a few notches. It seems that MSN is stumbling in its efforts to get the job done, so perhaps it’s time for the guy who’s always placed his money on the long shot.

Is Search a Leech on the Internet?

First published February 23, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Search is rapidly turning from the darling of the Internet to a demon. The latest attack, brought about by search’s phenomenal financial success, is that search is sucking all the value out of millions of Web sites by scraping content in bite-sized pieces and doling it out to searchers, at the same time monetizing traffic that’s being driven by content created by the site owners, not the search engine.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen ran a post on his site a few weeks back taking the engines to task for fostering dependency on search traffic, while at the same time enjoying the impact of ever-escalating bid prices. A few analysts have also started to intimate that perhaps it’s time for marketers, especially those in direct response, to look beyond search, as click prices move the cost per acquisition beyond what’s reasonable.


Usability: Too Much of a Good Thing?

In a somewhat ironic twist, Nielsen illustrates how improved usability can be a big factor in driving up bid prices. When a new online search market emerges, bid prices usually settle out based on the relative conversion performance of the main bid contenders. Based on their current conversion and closing rates, the smarter search marketers determine what they can afford to pay per lead. But let’s say that one of the contenders suddenly makes its site a better conversion vehicle, doubling their capture and close rate. Suddenly, that marketer can bid twice as much and still end up with the same per unit ROI. It becomes more aggressive in bidding, and eventually, its competitors wake up, figure out what happened and launch their own improvement cycles. Bid prices escalate as marketers optimize every aspect of their campaign, and the search engines double their revenue by doing nothing. In this scenario, not only are engines leeches on the content of the Internet, they’re also sucking the blood out of the entire search marketing industry. The better we get, the more money they make.

Now, before we round up the lynch mob for the engines, there are a few things that have to be said on their behalf. In cases like what was described above, search acts as the initial matchmaker between a site and a prospect. True, if it’s a one-time transaction, search can skim off a substantial portion of the value realized from sale, but if it’s a situation where lifetime value is a multiple of the first sale, the returns from that search lead will far outweigh the one-time cost. Nielsen also acknowledges that traffic generated from organic referrals doesn’t add anything to the search engine coffers. While he dismisses this traffic source in one brief mention, I think it should be realized that search engines have continued to provide this service, devoting a substantial portion of their page real estate to organic listings. 3 out of every 4 users are still clicking on these listings.


Search: Providing Quick Answers

Another concern expressed by Nielsen, which has also been vocalized, very loudly, by the World Association of Newspapers (http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d0e8cf3e-928d-11da-977b-0000779e2340.html) is that many users use search as an answer engine. They need a quick answer to a question (i.e., what movie had Brad Pitt’s first starring role?) and often they don’t have to go any further than the search results page to find it. The answer is often contained in the snippet of text that comes from the listed site. If you did the search above, you’d find that the site tiscali.co.uk has the answer (“Dark Side of the Sun,” by the way). The content came from that site, answered your question and you’re merrily on the way, arguing about who played the corpse in “The Big Chill.” But that’s far from the experience the owners of tiscali.co.uk wanted. They pay for their site by selling advertising. On the page that snippet came from are three separate ads. You didn’t see any of them, but you did see the ads the engine chose to show you.

Is this a grey area? Absolutely. But the organizations that are investing in the production of that content that the engines so nonchalantly pilfer are getting tired of contributing to Google’s ever increasing bank accounts. While publishers (including book publishers) acknowledge that the search engines are necessary for connecting users with their content, they don’t want those same users stopping at the search results page, having found what they were looking for. Gavin O’Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers, summed it up, “We need search engines, and they do help consumers navigate an increasingly complicated medium, but they’re building (their business) on the back of kleptomania.”


The New Golden Rule of Online

While I understand the frustration, I think it’s time for a reality check. The fact is, it’s the new User Rule for online: Those that have the users, make the rules.

Search works. Users know that. With that come some positives, and some negatives. The way I see it, search brings much more to these content sites than it takes away, so it’s not a parasitic relationship. Would these sites be happier if the search engines didn’t index their content at all? If so, that’s doable with a simple robots.txt file. If not, quit your whining and get used to it!

Pssst, Try My Search Engine and I’ll Give You a Turkey!

First published February 17, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The twains have met. Back in the dark recesses of my past, I used to toil in the radio biz as a copywriter. I had thought I left that industry far behind when I started working in the search marketing game. But, zounds, suddenly the search player’s strategy is starting to sound like it was devised by Herb Tarlek (for those of you under 40, Google “WKRP in Cincinnati.”).

Search’s Turkey Bomb?

In radio, you could know instantly when you were in a ratings period by the frenetic one- upmanship of radio stations giving away trips, prizes, cash (or dropping turkeys out of a helicopter at a mall–a memorable episode of “WKRP”) in the hopes of luring listeners for those all important few weeks when the ratings were being tallied. The logic of simply offering programming that people might actually want to listen to seemed to be lost in a flurry of promotional bribery. It always struck me as a tainted sort of lunacy.

Now, here I am in the pristine world of search, where we’re above that sort of thing. Well, we were, until this week.

Both Yahoo! and MSN appear to be willing to bribe users to use their search engines. Apparently Google’s ever rising market share has pushed them to the point of desperation. With MSN’s Search and Win (http://www.msnsearchandwin.com/), a search on selected keywords could win you a gift certificate, MP3 player, digital cameras or rather substantial donation to your favorite charity. Yahoo has also polled some of its e-mail users to see if a bribe could bring them into the Yahoo search fold.

The Smell of Desperation

To me, this seems like outright capitulation to the acknowledged dominance of Google in search. Ironically, Google is currently being punished by shareholders for being a one- trick pony–but the fact is, this pony has legs. More and more people are searching, and Google is being used by most of them. Yahoo and MSN’s share has been consistently sliding, and in MSN’s case, is dangerously close to being classified as a second-tier player, while Google is pulling in about half of all Web searches.

The desperation shown by Yahoo and MSN represents their admission of the importance of search in the new online ecosystem. I recently mentioned to someone that MSN has already conceded the first round of the search game to Google. MSN has deep enough pockets that lost search advertising revenue isn’t a critical concern. While search revenue is of much more concern to Yahoo, I suspect its principals have also realized that they can’t beat Google head to head on search as it currently sits. But MSN and Yahoo are looking beyond round one to what search will become. Increasingly, search will become more integrated, personalized and verticalized. It will extend beyond the desktop and will be the primary online connector. And it’s in this evolution of search where the stakes get incredibly high. Neither MSN nor Yahoo want to concede that territory to Google, so the concept of critical mass becomes a key factor.

Critical Mass for the Tornado

As the next round of search begins and as the search experience is redefined, there has to be a large enough user base to ensure rapid adoption of new developments. We’re in the middle of Geoffrey Moore’s market adoption tornado (as described in his book Inside the Tornado : Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley’s Cutting Edge), and delays of even a month or two can be fatal in deciding who the emerging gorilla will be. MSN and Yahoo need to build a user base that’s at least in the same neighborhood as Google. The odds of winning it all are dramatically lower if you’re beginning with a single-digit market share, no matter how great your product is. For proof, just look at the long struggle of Apple to gain dominance with its Mac line.

While I can’t fault Yahoo’s and MSN’s wisdom in recognizing they can’t continue to let their market share slide, I do question this particular strategy. Iwon.com has been trying to bribe search users with giveaways for years now, and their current market share is a paltry one half of one percent (according to recent Nielsen numbers). MSN has stated that this is just a way to get users trying MSN search. Presumably, they’ll be so impressed that they’ll keep coming back. I remain unconvinced, for reasons that I stated in last week’s column, The Search Experience has a De Facto Standard (for Now). My recommendation for Yahoo! and MSN? Work on the user interface. Tweak the relevancy of your results. Give people a reason to give up Google that’s more compelling than a chance at a Baby Gap gift certificate. I don’t think you’re there yet, and until you are, bribing might win you a pair of eyeballs for a search or two, but it won’t win the hearts and minds of new users.

How Gender Affects Search: Part One

First published January 4, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A recent PEW Internet study exploring how men and women use the Internet points out some interesting differences between the sexes. This caught my attention because in every study we’ve done, we’ve tried to break out results by gender and explored the different usage patterns. It’s been fascinating to see how millions of years of conditioning and the differences in our respective genetic wiring have impacted our use of a new technology. The PEW study echoed a lot of what we had seen. What I’d like to do over the next two columns is explore this further. Today, I’ll present some of the more interesting findings from the PEW study and ours, and next week I’ll provide my thoughts on why we may be seeing what we’re seeing.

Comfort Levels:

The PEW study found that men are slightly more intense Internet users than women, and seem to be more engaged when on line. Men are more likely to go online on a daily basis and tend to do so a little more frequently. Men are also a little more likely to have a high-speed connection at home.

When we add age breakdowns to the mix, an interesting anomaly occurs, with older men (65 and over) more likely to be online than older women, but younger women (18 – 29) more likely to be online than younger men.

What They Do Online:

Men and women have very distinct reasons for going online. Men tend to retrieve information, such as weather, news, sports scores, and financial information. They also download software, listen to music (or download it), research products, look for jobs, find out how to repair something, or educate themselves on a topic.

For women, the Internet is first and foremost a communication vehicle, with e-mail a prime reason for usage. Women also look for health, medical and religious information, and support for health or personal problems.

Some gender stereotypes never die. Women are still more likely to look for maps and directions online than men. Once a guy, always a guy!

The Sexes and Search:

It used to be that there was a distinct male bias towards search usage. That is rapidly disappearing, but is still apparent. In earlier studies (done in 2003 and 2004) PEW found that 35 percent of men and 25 percent of women were likely to use a search engine on a typical day. In 2005, usage on both sides of the gender divide soared, but men still edged out women, by 43 percent to 39 percent.

In our research, we found that men were more likely to use Google, which dominated as the engine of choice. For women, although Google was still the number-one choice, it was closely followed by MSN and Yahoo.

We also found that men were more likely to use advanced search queries. They also tended to spend a little less time actively reading listings, and made their decisions to click faster. Women tended to be a little more deliberate in their search sessions. Men scanned more of the search results page, but women spent more time with the page.

We found that women were more influenced by what they read in the listing, when men seemed to be a little more conditioned to trust the first organic listings. This usually translated into slightly higher click-throughs on the sponsored results for women.

Perhaps the most interesting thing we found, despite the differences noted above, was this: when men and women interacted with almost every type of site online, there were distinct differences in how they assimilated information, navigated sites and responded to visual cues. When we looked at how they interacted with a search results page, the differences, while present, were much more subtle.

Why?

Hang onto that question, and I’ll hazard a guess next week.

We Are What We Search? Hopefully Not!

First published December 29, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

To judge from the various most-popular-search lists that are showing up as the year draws to a close, the average search user is a pubescent male, with an IQ that hovers in the low 90’s, and who spends an unhealthy amount of time in his room. I have said, on several occasions, that our search patterns are a reflection of our society. If that’s true, our society’s intellect is about as deep as the ring left by a Starbucks coffee cup.

When I saw the first list come in my e-mail, I don’t know why I was surprised. After all, Pamela Anderson holds the record as the most searched-for term for the past decade, and Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are breathing down her neck. But come on; are we really as shallow as our searches seem to indicate?

Lycos has just released its list for the past year. The top 10 terms for 2005 are:
Paris Hilton
Pamela Anderson
Britney Spears
Poker
Dragonball
Jennifer Lopez
WWE
Pokemon
Playstation
Hurricane Katrina

There we have it, the greatest depository of information every assembled, instantly accessible to all who seek knowledge and enlightenment, and Paris Hilton is the best we can do? And Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, (although arguably, Paris, Pam and Britney all qualify in this category) barely made the list?

Maybe it’s just Lycos users that are scrapping the bottom of the online barrel. So I checked out Google’s Zeitgeist and Yahoo! Buzz.

Yahoo!’s Buzz is at least a little more balanced on gender. The top 10?
Britney Spears
50 Cent
Cartoon Network
Mariah Carey
Green Day
Jessica Simpson
Paris Hilton
Eminem
Ciara
Lindsay Lohan

Still not a fertile recruitment bed for MENSA, I’m guessing.

Google doesn’t publish the overall top 10, instead breaking them up into categories and top gainers. Perhaps this is their way of defending their users’ intellectual reputation. But if the top news searches are any indication, there are very few Google users following in Edward R. Murrow’s footsteps. Topping the list was Janet Jackson, with such compelling news stories as xbox 360, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Michael Jackson and yes, the omnipresent Ms. Spears also making the list.

And Newton Minnow called commercial television a vast wasteland!

But wait a minute. Yahoo! Buzz lets you see what other cultures are searching for. How does the U.S. stack up against the world?

You’ll be happy to know the French are just as boorish, with the regular suspects, Britney, Jennifer Lopez and Paris (the scantily clad debutante, not the city) showing up on their list. Toss in Jessica Alba for good measure. The Germans show a disturbing dichotomy in their search habits, with half of the terms showing Teutonic practicality and the other half being just plain kinky. On one hand you have “trip planner,” “weather” and “cheap flights,” and on the other you have “erotica” and “partner swapping.” Interestingly, the Germans don’t seem as star-struck as the rest of the world. The only celebrity to make the list was Sarah Connor, a German pop star.

How about my fellow Canadians? Well, I wish I could report differently, but our national stereotype seems rooted in fact. For seven months out of 12, we’re searching for Hockey.

The Google AOL Deal: Commentary from the Cheap Seats

First published December 21, 2005 from Mediapost’s Search Insider

 

‘m from Canada, and up here, we examine every hockey trade in minute detail. We look at who got what for whom, how the trade adds or detracts from the respective team’s talent pools, and who came out the winner. So, the recent AOL-Google deal caught my attention. Why does Google want AOL? What’s the strategy? Where’s the win?

AOL: Hanging On.

From AOL’s perspective, the deal makes tons of sense. AOL is an anachronism in a fast-changing world. It’s a dial-up service that’s trying to carve out a niche in the new broadband landscape. It’s been struggling to survive as an online portal, with its once mighty subscriber base dwindling by 33 percent (we’ll come back to this subscriber base in a minute). Time Warner has pretty much hung AOL out to dry, reducing it to running TV ads saying you should continue to use AOL because it will protect you from online viruses. Come again? If that’s your most compelling differentiation strategy, alignment with the current online Golden Child can’t be a bad thing.

With the deal come a couple of strategic promises to AOL. First of all, it gets a guaranteed position in Google’s sponsored search ads. Rumor has it that the last right-side sponsored position on page one is now AOL’s. Anyone who’s looked at our eye tracking report on Google knows that this is hardly prime real estate. In this spot, you can expect to be seen by about 10 percent of the visitors to the page, and capture less than 1 percent of the click-throughs.

But, this deal does mark a departure from Google’s existing model, where there are no guaranteed spots and position is determined by a combination of click-through and the price the advertiser is willing to spend. Even though the placement on the page is hardly ideal, AOL’s guaranteed slot now means someone gets bumped to page two of the search results, which means an immediate 80 percent to 85 percent reduction in the number of people who will visit that page. This is not the democratic advertising model that Google originally envisioned.

Church/State revisited.

Another rumor had Google apparently offering advice to AOL on how to get its content pages to rank better in the organic results. Again, this appears to call into doubt Google’s constant fallback position on the church/state divide, where the organic results will never be subject to any commercial influence.

My sense is that this line is getting more and more difficult for Google to define, and this trend can only continue. I’m not so sure this is a bad thing. If you read my previous column on Matt Cutts, the Google engineer that heads up the spam squad, you know that Google has been reaching out to the Webmaster community more and more. The once-locked doors appear to be opening, even if it’s just a crack. Based on my company’s experience, if you can present Google with a case where the indexing of a site isn’t going as expected, it is usually responsive in offering some advice. To me, this form of technical troubleshooting is a win/win. Google gains some insight that could help to improve the entire index, and you can find out why the hell your site isn’t being indexed properly by Google.

What is less clear is when Google passes on “optimization” advice, which is what the AOL deal appears to promise. Here, the church/state line is pretty much obliterated by the tap dance that Google is performing on top of it. And it becomes a question of whom Google is offering this advice to. Is it everyone? Is it the biggest advertisers? Is it only companies that they own a piece of? If this is indeed part of the deal, expect a lot of blog and forum fodder on this topic.

What’s in the deal for Google?

First of all, Google locks up AOL’s sponsored search business for another five years, effectively locking out Microsoft. When this currently accounts for approximately 11 percent of Google’s gross revenue, that could be reason enough. Also, financial analysts expect an imminent transfer of ownership with AOL, which could trigger a quick liquidity event for Google, minimizing its long-term risk.

But I believe the strategic value of the deal lies in AOL’s user base. True, it’s smaller than it used to be, dropping from a one-time high of over 32 million down to a current level closer to 20 million, but it’s still the largest base available anywhere. Comcast is the next closest at around 8 million (based on ISP Planet numbers). And AOL’s base is 20 million people that the company knows something about.

One of Google’s challenges has been in getting users of its tools to surrender profile information that could be used to better target advertising messages. MSN is already offering targeted search advertising, which means Google is desperate to even the playing field. Microsoft has the advantage of having years of profile information accumulated through users signing up for Hotmail or Messenger accounts. Google had to catch up, and quickly. This one deal may have helped the company do that. The one question mark is that AOL’s user base is notorious for their lack of online sophistication, being relatively new to the Internet. Does this user base come with a demographic profile that will appeal to Google advertisers?

On the face of it, the AOL deal appears to be another smart move on Google’s part. For a relatively small investment, the company seems to gain all the strategic advantages it was looking for. Google captures a large block of users with some existing profile information, it locks up an important revenue stream, and it gains access to a very important portal property without jeopardizing its current wildly successful search site. As they say up north: good trade, eh?