Category Archives: Web Search

What’s So Interesting about Google, Anyway

First published July 7, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I just received my review copy of “I’m Feeling Lucky, The Confessions of Google Employee # 59” by Douglas Edwards. That brings to six the number of Google themed books that are sitting on my bookshelf (including one by fellow Insider Aaron Goldman).

That got me to thinking. Are six books a lot to be written about one company?

Well, it turns out that there are more than six. A quick check on Amazon turned up no less than 11 books on Google, the company. That doesn’t include the gazillions of Google-inspired how-to books. So, to return to my original question, are 11 a lot? And if they are, why do authors write about Google? What does Google have that other companies don’t? And how does the Google story stack up against other corporate sagas?

It seems Google actually heads the high-tech pack when it comes to attracting ink. Again checking Amazon, I only found one book on Yahoo and two on Facebook. There were four on Microsoft and seven books on Apple. Of all the tech companies I checked, only IBM equaled Google’s tally, at 11. Of course, IBM has been around for over 100 years, compared to less than two decades for Google.

Google even beats corporate stalwarts like GE (seven), Proctor & Gamble (three) and HP (seven).

In looking at the list, a few things immediately came to mind. First of all, many of the books written about a company are actually written about a founder or chef executive of the company. Half the books written about Microsoft are actually biographies of Bill Gates. The same is true for Apple (Steve Jobs), GE (Jack Welch) and IBM (Lou Gerstner). But none of the Google books I’ve ready are about Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They’re about the company. Certainly, Larry and Sergey have starring roles, but they don’t overshadow the company itself. Google is always front and center.

Secondly, many of the other companies that are the subject of books have gone through massive restructurings or turnarounds, which formed the central theme of the respective books. Google hasn’t hit a slump yet. There isn’t even a lot of conflict in Google’s history to chronicle. Unlike Facebook, Aaron Sorkin (who adapted Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires” for the movie “The Social Network”) would have a difficult time creating a juicy script out of the Google story.  It’s not nearly as “Hollywood” as Facebook’s rise to glory. And Google doesn’t generate near the animosity of a Wal-Mart (20-plus books, most of them about how the retail giant is destroying America) or Enron (the grand Champion of corporate story telling, with over 30 books, all about its ignoble collapse). So, what is it about Google that fascinates us, if it isn’t a rags to riches to rags to riches saga, an inside glimpse at an evil empire, or a superstar CEO?

All the books written about Google are generally complimentary, respectful and, in some cases, even a touch obsequious and over-enthralled. Those who choose to write about Google generally fawn all over the company, the brilliance of the co-founders, the velocity of its growth and the vibrancy of its culture. If there is muck to rake here, potential authors have yet to uncover it. The only other company I’ve found that even comes close to inspiring the sycophantic awe of Google is Disney, with over 20 titles, the majority of them complimentary.

I think the Google story has appeal because Google is something we all use. In many ways, the story of Google is the story of Web search (John Battelle’s approach) — and that has changed our lives in some pretty fundamental ways. It’s Google’s role as a catalyst of change — in how we think about information, in marketing, in how companies conduct themselves, and in a number of yet-to-be determined ways — that compel us to keep turning the pages. This isn’t a story about a company, or a brilliant founder. It’s a story about a society balanced on the cusp of dramatic and massive change.  Google is just the narrative framework many have chosen as the vehicle for their social parable.

Really, if you were going to write a book about search and how it’s changing our world, whom else would you write about?

Different Platforms, Different Ads

First published June 9, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s little argument that mobile’s time has come. According to Google, mobile searches make up anywhere from 5% to 12% of the total query volume for many popular keywords. And for many categories (like searches for local businesses) the percentage is much higher. That officially qualifies as “something to consider” in most marketing strategies. For many marketers, though, the addition of mobile is a simple check box addition in planning a search campaign. In Google’s quest to make life simple for marketers, we’re missing some fundamental aspects of marketing to mobile prospects. Okay, we’re missing one fundamental aspect:  it’s different. Really different.

Last week, I talked about how my behaviors vary across multiple devices. But it’s not just me. It’s everyone. And those differences in behavior will continue to diverge as experiences become more customized. The mobile use case will look significantly different than the tablet use case. Desktops and smart entertainment devices will be completely different beasts. We’ll use them in different ways, with different intents, and in different contexts. We’d better make sure our marketing messages are different too.

Let’s go back to the Jacquelyn Krones research from Microsoft, which I talked about in the last column. If we divide search activity into three buckets: missions, excavations and explorations, we can also see that three different approaches to search ads should go along with those divergent intents.

Excavation search sessions, which still live primarily on the desktop, are all about information gathering. Success ads for these types of searches should offer rich access to relevant content. Learn to recognize the keywords in your campaigns that indicate excavation queries. They are typically more general in nature, and are often aligned with events that require extensive research: major purchases, planning vacations, researching life-altering events like health concerns, moving to a new community, starting college or planning a wedding. In our quest to squeeze conversions off a landing page, we often not only pare down content, but also on-page navigation pointing to more content. For an excavation-type search, this is exactly the wrong approach. Here, the John Caples approach to copy writing might be just the ticket: long, information rich content that allows the user to “create knowledge.”

Missions, especially on mobile devices, are just that. You get in and you get out, hopefully with something useful — that lets you do something else. Successful ads in this environment should do the same thing: take you one (or several) steps closer to a successful completion of the mission. Ad messaging should offer the promise of successful mission completion, and the post-click destination should deliver on that promise. Clean, hassle-free and exquisitely simple to use are the marching orders of mobile advertising.

Perhaps the most interesting search use case is that on a tablet device. I’ve chatted with Yahoo’s relatively new VP of search, Shashi Seth, about this. He believes tablets might open the door for the visually rich, interactive ads that brand marketers love. And Krones research seems to indicate that this might indeed be the case. Tablets are ideal for exploration searches, which tend to be meandering voyages through the online landscape with less specific agendas. The delight of serendipity is one big component in an expedition search. And it’s this that marks a significant departure for most search marketers.

Every search marketer learns the hard way that it’s incredibly difficult to lure search users away from the task they have in mind. When we do our keyword analysis, we’re usually disappointed to find that the list of highly relevant words is much smaller than we thought. So, we extend our campaign into keywords that, while not directly relevant, are at least adjacent to the user’s anticipated intent. If they’re looking for a jigsaw, we might try running an ad for free children’s furniture plans. Or, if they’re looking for a new car, we might try running an ad that reminds them that they can save 15% on their car insurance just by clicking on our ad.

We’ve all been here. In the mind of the marketer, it makes sense to buy these keywords. After all, the two worlds are not so far apart. A new owner of a jig saw might indeed be interested in building a set of bunk beds. And the new car owner will need car insurance. The problem is, neither of those things are relevant “in the moment,” and “in the moment” rules in most search interactions. So, after a few months of trying, we reluctantly remove these keywords from our campaign, or drop the bid price so low they’re buried 3 pages of results deep.

But perhaps tablet users are different. I’m certain the search experience on a tablet will soon look significantly different than it does on a PC. I would expect it to be more tactile and interactive – less rigidly ordered. And, in that environment, given the looser constraints of an expedition-type search, we might be more willing to explore a visually rich distraction. Shashi Seth thinks so. Krones’ research seems to also point in this direction. For this search marketer, that’s reason enough to test the hypothesis. Or, I will test it, as soon as Google, Yahoo and Bing make that possible.

The Segmentation of My Slime Trail

First published June 2, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

My connected life is starting to drop into distinct buckets. Now that I have my choice of connecting through my smartphone (an iPhone), my tablet (an iPad), my work computer (a MacBook) and my home computer (a Windows box), not to mention the new Smart TVs we bought (Samsungs), I’m starting to see my digital footprints (or my digital slime trail, to use Esther Dyson’s term) diverge. And the nature of the divergence is interesting.

Take Netflix, for example. It’s finally come to Canada, although with a depressingly small number of movies to choose from. My Netflix account stretches across all my devices, but the things I watch on my iPad are quite a bit different than my choices on an iPhone. And there is yet another profile for the things I choose on my MacBook (mainly when I travel). On the iPad, it’s typically an episode of “Arrested Development,” “Fawlty Towers” or, if I have a little more time, “Mad Men,” (and yes, I realize those three choices create an interesting psychological profile of myself) that offers some respite when the women of my household commandeer all available TV sets. On the new Samsung, it’s usually a movie intended for viewing by myself and at least one other member of my family.

Kindle offers a similar divergence of reading patterns — again, one application that’s spread across multiple devices. And, like my movie watching, my reading habits vary significantly depending on what I’m doing the reading on. I almost never read on my laptop, but it’s my preferred platform for research and annotation. My favorite reading device is my iPad, but it’s primarily used at home. I only take it on the road for extended trips. My fall-back is the iPhone, which gets called into duty when I have time to kill when traveling or in between my kid’s volleyball games.

Jacquelyn Krones, from Microsoft, did a fascinating research project where she looked at search habits across multiple devices. She found that our searches could be grouped into three different categories: missions, excavations and explorations.

Mission is the typical task-based single interaction where we need to get something done. The nature of the mission can be significantly different on a mobile device, where the mission is usually related to our physical location. In this case, geo-location and alternative methods of input (i.e. taking a picture, recording a sound or scanning a bar code) can make completing the mission easier, because the outputs are more useful and relevant in the user’s current context. This is why app-based search is rapidly becoming the norm on mobile devices. Missions on the desktop tend to be more about seeking specific information when then allows us to complete a task beyond the scope of our search interaction.

Excavations are research projects that can extend over several sessions and are typically tied to an event of high interest to the user. Health issues, weddings, major travel, home purchases and choosing a college are a few examples. The desktop is the hands-down winner for this type of search engagement. It provides an environment where information can be consolidated and digested through the help of other applications. Krones calls this “making knowledge,” implying a longer and deeper commitment on the part of the user.

Finally, we have exploration. Explorations are more serendipitous in nature,  with  users setting some fairly broad and flexible boundaries for their online interactions. While excavation can become a part of exploration, the behaviors are usually distinct. Exploration tends to be a little more fluid and open to suggestion, with the user being open to persuasion, while excavation is more about assembling information to support an intent that is already decided upon. Tablets seem to be emerging as a strong contender in the exploration category. The relaxed nature of typical interaction with an iPad, for example, supports the open agenda of exploration.

What this means, of course, is that the trail I leave behind on my mobile device starts to look significantly different than the trail on my laptop or tablet. Each fits a different use case, as they start to become tools with distinct capabilities, over and above the fact that they’re all connected to the Internet.

Captiva Eve: Three More Sneak Previews of the Search Insider Summit

First published April 28, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

One week from today, the formal part of the Search Insider Summit will be kicking off on Captiva Island. Here are three more of the presentations you’ll be catching if you’re lucky enough to be joining us in Florida.

Reinventing the Agency

Yesterday I received an email from Advertising Age asking whether we should consider nixing the term “ad agency” all together. The “ad” part of that label, once a badge of honor held aloft along with a martini glass and a Gucci watch, has been pretty much stricken from the marketing vocabulary. But the email, which was an invitation to take part in a poll, was suggesting that we may want to consider throwing “agency” into the dustbin along with it. It brings home unflattering images of a Don Draper gone to seed.

Three different presenters will be tackling the question of what an agency might look like in the future. Dave Tan from Google, Lucinda Holt from Click Equations and fellow Search Insider Rob Griffin from Havas Digital will each peer forward into the not-so-far-off future to see how agencies, or marketing firms, or whatever we’re called, can add true value to the market in the future. Accountability, transparency, micro-measures of performance and the forging of a new type of relationship with clients are all sure to be factors of the equations being explored on stage.

Moving Beyond “What” to “Why”

Anyone who has ever heard me speak, read my writing, bumped into me in a Starbucks line or come within my 50-yard “bubble zone” knows I’m a huge fan of qualitative research. It’s not that I don’t think quantitative research is important — after all, crunching numbers is an essential part of marketing. It’s just that I find our industry hugely biased towards spreadsheet jockeying. We spend so much time with data, but we often forget to speak to the people on the other side of the data. Data can help us identify “what’s” happening, but we actually have to spend some time with real living humans to understand “why” it’s happening.

 

Michael Holmes, the Director of Insight and Research at Ball State University, will join us on stage to help put a little more balance into how we approach research, explaining the role qualitative methodologies could and should play.

Is IBM’s Watson the Future of Search?

Several weeks back, we reached out to our Insider roster of past presenters and explained what we had in mind for this year’s Summit. Many rose to the challenge of RE:Invention by suggesting provocative and intriguing topics, but one of my favorites came from Josh Dreller, Vice President of Media Technology at Fuor Digital.

On Feb. 16, IBM’s Watson eventually triumphed over human challengers Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter to become the all time “Jeopardy” champ. This may seem like a throw-away story on “Entertainment Tonight,” but Josh found something much more intriguing in the Watson challenge. “Jeopardy” was purposely chosen as a type of Turing test for IBM’s DeepQA technology — which combines a computer’s ability to index vast reams of information with a way of navigating the vagaries of human language. The linguistic twists presented by “Jeopardy”‘s way of framing questions proves to be a daunting challenge for the rigid structures of digital processing. Although some of the rounds proved too much for Watson, it eventually emerged victorious by amassing over three times the winnings of it’s human competitors.

Is DeepQA the future of search? Josh Dreller thinks so, and he’ll explain why next week in Captiva.

See ya in a week

Countdown to Captiva: Reinventing the Organization

First published April 21, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Aaahhh…I can almost feel the warm tropical breezes of Captiva. We’re getting very close to the Search Insider Summit and, as promised, I wanted to preview some of the sessions we have lined up for the agenda.

As a quick reminder, the theme is RE:Invention. I’m particularly looking forward to a number of sessions we have scheduled that will explore the reinvention of the organization.

I spend a good part of my time talking to marketers challenged with guiding  their traditional organizations through the massive transformations required to compete in a digital marketplace with totally new rules. It’s a topic that’s particularly fascinating to me. Most of the brands we know today were built in a marketplace that favored size and scale. The ability to have a presence in as many locations as possible was key, so complex market distribution networks quickly sprung up.

But today, thanks to a digital paradigm shift, the marketplace is defined differently. Physical fulfillment is being outsourced, allowing the smallest E-Bay vendor to sell globally, and the importance of physical “shelf space” in a brick and mortar store is being challenged by new virtual shelves (i.e. search listings, e-commerce sites and other online destinations). Also, manufacturers, who, because of scale and the complexity of their distribution networks, found themselves further and further away from the end consumer, are suddenly rediscovering a new intimacy with these customers.

These challenges will be explored in a trio of presentations at the Search Insider Summit:

IBM and the Agile Revolution

Massive scale and nimbleness tend to make odd bedfellows. But that’s exactly the balance required at many organizations to compete in a new real-time marketplace. Ben Edwards, VP of Digital Strategy at IBM, will look at how new “agile” methods have begun to spread from the software development industry to other forms of white-collar work, bringing with them work rituals and artifacts that are able to negotiate accelerated market change and uncertainty.

The Power of Design

I remember Amy Curtis-McIntyre, who has handled the marketing efforts of JetBlue, Hyatt Hotels and, most recently, Old Navy, saying that good design was a necessity, not a luxury.  That’s where Lance Loveday of Closed Loop Marketing picks up for his presentation on the Search Insider stage.  Lance believes that good design can be the essential difference between success and failure (or, even worse, mediocrity). He’ll follow the rather large design footsteps of Apple, Virgin and IDEO. What is really different about companies built around good design — and what are some ways you can discover your own inner Steve Jobs?

3M: Back to the Digital Smokestack

In the 109-year history of 3M, they’ve had to reinvent themselves several times, but one thing has remained constant: the DNA of 3M springs from innovation in the workplace. By mixing and matching their core technologies (numbering 40, including adhesives, abrasives, coatings and moldings) 3M has been providing industrial solutions since they first glued sand on paper. Internally, this innovative intimacy is called “back to the smokestack” — and Interactive Marketing Group Manager David Reynolds-Gooch will share how 3M is now looking at how to leverage digital technology to make these collaborations faster and more effective than ever.

Seven Years as a Search Insider

First published April 14, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“Ahh…our fledgling little industry is growing up.”

And with those words, I became a Search Insider on August 19, 2004, writing my very first column for MediaPost. Today, six years, seven months and 26 days later, I’m writing my 300th Search Insider column.  And yes, our little industry is still growing up.

As the senior Search Insider (both, I suspect, in terms of output and age) I’ve seen and written about a lot of things over the almost seven years I’ve been doing this. In that very first column, I forecast that we were a tipping point in the industry. Search was going to move from the cottage industry category to big business. Based on Google’s every-increasing balance sheet, I’d say that happened, but search is still an amazingly small world. At a recent search conference, a few of us (Bruce Clay, Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan and some other “pioneers”) mentioned how we feel like a village elders council amongst more and more unfamiliar faces. Yet, for every new face encountered, these search events still feel a lot like a high school reunion.

I’ve been fortunate to be blessed with a lot of editorial leeway in what I choose to write about in Search Insider. Many have dealt with the world of search, but ironically, some of the most popular columns (at least, in terms of reader response) have been much more personal in nature. Columns about my family, our various family vacations and the loss of people dear to me (my wife’s grandmother and, more recently, my Uncle Jim) have all struck a chord with the Search Insider audience. For me, search has been an integral part of my life for the last decade and that has been reflected in my columns. It’s always been the human part of searching (or doing anything online) that I’ve found fascinating, and I’ve done my best to share that. I guess you could call it the recurring theme of the Thursday slot on the Search Insider line up.

For me, the fact that my daughter learned how to crochet on YouTube, or that my wife discovered that mobile computing can actually make a difference in her life, or that a long-haul truck driver that loved family embodied the very same ideals that we see in Facebook at its very best — these are the things we should care about. As I’ve said many, many times, technology is transitory, but people and their behaviors are what endure. At the end of the day, technology is just a tool.

I wanted to spend part of this milestone column thanking Ken Fadner, Phyllis Fine and the rest of the MediaPost editorial staff. Writing a weekly column can sometimes be a real pain when I hit Wednesday afternoon and come up completely dry on ideas. But I’ve also found that this forum has been tremendously rewarding for me personally. It reinforced for me that my internal thoughts and views become more valuable when they’re shared. You may not agree with me (and I can be pretty contentious at times, as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask and the Canadian marketing community at large can all attest to) but the discussions generated through this column have always been fascinating. And each time I’m out somewhere and someone tells me they read my column, it reinforces the value of the time I’ve spent generating some 180,000 words of content over the last seven years.

With that first column, I never imagined it would continue for as long as it has. There is no contract in place to secure the relationship. I suppose if I really wanted to quit writing tomorrow, I could. But week in and week out, I have to say that Thursday has become my favorite day. In fact, this column has been the most consistent part of my entire career in search. So I’ll be back next Thursday. And, most likely, the Thursday after that.

Why stop when you’re having fun?

Captiva: 27 Days and Counting

First published April 7, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As of today, we’re  27 days away from the kick-off of the Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla. Yesterday, after several weeks of going through pitches, we locked down the agenda.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, we’re trying to put a little more vertical in our perspective for this summit, taking our view to a higher level than is typical at most search-based conferences. The theme is Re:Invention, with sessions on the Re:Invention of Marketing, Organizations, Customers, the Search Experience and pretty much everything else.

The format is the same we field-tested last spring — think TED for Search.  In total we have 39 sessions spread over the 3 days, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes each. I’ve asked presenters to be thought-provoking, future-focused — and, if appropriate, even controversial. For those three days, we’ll ponder how everything we know may be reinvented in the very near future and what it means for each of us.

We’ve worked to bring different perspectives to the stage. We have publishers speaking (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook will all be there), as well as agencies, academics (Wharton and Ball State) and a few vendors. But we also have marketers. In fact, almost 20% of our agenda is marketers talking specifically about their experiences and their view of the future, including presenters from IBM, 3M and Logitech.

Over the next few columns (with the exception of next week, but more on that then), I’m going to spotlight some of the presentations that will take the stage at Captiva:

Sharon Drew Morgen: Buying FacilitationTM: A New Sales Paradigm

I met Sharon Drew Morgan (virtually) last year and was instantly astonished by the clarity of her view of the sales process. Sharon has been working on understanding the decision process of buyers for most of her professional life. Her Buying Facilitation approach is one of those astoundingly logical frameworks that almost everyone overlooks. I guarantee it will forever change how you think about marketing, nurturing and sales.

Roger Dooley: Neuromarketing: The Brain on “Buy” 

Neurosciencemarketing.com is one of my “must read” blogs. Its author, Roger Dooley, has been covering the science of neuromarketing pretty much from day one.  We share a fascination for how the brain works, especially in a marketing context. Roger will bring us up to speed on where neuromarketing is at these days, and speculate on how it might reinvent marketing in the future.

Aaron Goldman, Craig Danuloff and Matt Lawson – The Slippery Slope of Privacy 

These are actually three presentations with one common theme: What are the implications of privacy, and how will it impact advertising? Fellow Search Insider (and rapper) Aaron Goldman kicks off with exploring the differences between privacy and personalization. Then Craig Danuloff unpacks a fascinating idea we chatted about recently at another show: how might your digital “footprint” change the way we look at personalized marketing? Finally, Marin’s Matt Lawson explores Apple’s view of privacy, a timely conversation considering how intimate we’re getting with the company’s various devices.

Of course, as with every Summit, it’s not so much what happens on the stage as what happens off it that defines the value of the show. Count on departing Saturday feeling challenged and better connected than ever.

A Search History of TED

First published March 10, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I always find it interesting to look at a cultural phenomenon through the lens of search. Search provides a fascinating and quantitative look at the growth of interest in a particular topic. Having spent all last week immersed in the cult that is TED (I was at TEDActive in Palm Springs, Calif.) I thought that this was as good a subject as any to analyze.

TED’s Back Story

The TED story, for those of you not familiar with it, is pretty amazing. TED was originally held in Monterey, Calif. in 1984, the brainchild of Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks. Some of the content on that first TED stage? The unveiling of the Mac, a rep from Sony demonstrating the compact disc, Benoit Mandelbrot talking about fractals and Marvin Minsky speculating on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Due to its proximity to Silicon Valley, the conference had a decidedly tech-heavy focus. The first one lost money, and Wurman didn’t attempt another one until 1990. It was then held annually in Monterey.

In 2001, Chris Anderson took over the show and broadened the focus, adopting a more philanthropic approach. Technology still figured prominently on the TED stage, but the conference became an intellectual smorgasbord of content, with a single session known to veer from musicians to world adventurers, scientists to CEOs.

Probably the biggest change in the fortunes of TED, however, came in 2006 when the world was invited to share what happened on the TED stage. The talks were videotaped and made freely available online. And it’s here where our search story begins.

TED:TSI (TED Search Investigation)

If you use Google Insights (as I did), you see something interesting begin to happen in the search activity surrounding TED. Through 2004, 2005 and 2006, most of the search activity for TED was about the conference. There were peaks every February when the conference took place, but other than this, the volumes were pretty consistent. There was little year-over-year growth. TED remained an exclusive club for the intellectually elite. The rest of the world had never heard of it.

In 2006, when the videos were launched, a new trend began. By the end of the year, more people were using search to find the TED talks themselves than to find out about the conference. The gap continued to widen until in 2011, the search popularity of the Talks themselves is almost 3 times as much as query volume for the conference. But volumes for both have seen impressive growth. The conference rode the wave of the popularity of the videos, with query volumes over 10 times the levels seen in 2006. The videos fueled the growth of TED, making it the must see conference of the year.

The Global Mapping of TED

Another interesting trend has been to see how TED has become a global phenomenon. TED talks are most popular in Canada, followed by New Zealand, the U.S. and South Africa. They’ve also shown impressive growth in South Africa, Singapore, Australia and India. And it’s this global popularity that led TED to announce TEDx, in 2009. These are independently organized shows held around the world, with some mentorship and guidance from the TED mother ship. They have been tremendously popular — and now search volumes for TEDx have surpassed queries for the main conference.  Epicenters of the TEDx tidal wave include the Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, India and Argentina.

If we drill down to the U.S., we find the greatest concentration of TEDsters (the official moniker of members of the TED community) in Oregon, Washington and Vermont. Surprisingly, California, where the conference is held, doesn’t even make the list of top TED states. Massachusetts, New York and Hawaii all beat it out. The top 10 TED states are all solidly blue (based on the last presidential election) — except for Montana.

And because Canada is such a TED hotbed (TED has an office in Vancouver) I’m proud to say that my home province of B.C. has perhaps the greatest concentration of TED fans in the world, followed by Manitoba, Alberta (which would be the Canadian equivalent of Montana) and Saskatchewan. According to Google, the TED world capital should be Victoria, B.C, which has the highest concentration of TED-related searches of any city, anywhere. The U.S. Capital? Portland, Ore. For some reason, TEDmania is very much alive and well here in the Pacific Northwest.

TED has legs!

Finally, you may ask if the wave of TED popularity is sustainable. I had this very conversation last week with another TEDster in Palm Springs. If you look at the growth of all search volumes so far in 2011, I would say the TED wave has barely begun. Volumes have skyrocketed this year in every category I looked at.  If you compare the query volume graphs to a typical S-shaped adoption curve, you would conclude that TED is just beginning a massive growth spurt.  Get used to hearing about TED, because that will be happening a lot in the future — especially if you’re visiting Victoria or Portland.

How Smart Do We Want Search to Get?

First published February 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Imagine if a search engine was smart enough to be able to anticipate your needs before you know you need them. There it sits, silently monitoring your every move and just when you get a hankering for Thai food (burbling up to the threshold of consciousness), there it is with the hottest Thai restaurants within a 2-mile radius. You didn’t have to do a thing. It was just that smart!

Sound utopian? Then take a moment to think again. Do we really want search to become that smart? Sure, it sounds great in theory, but what would we have to share to allow search to become truly prescient?

The odd thing about humans is that we want our lives to be easier, but we don’t want to sacrifice control in the process. Well, to be more precise, we don’t want to sacrifice control in some situations. It all comes down to our level of engagement with the task at hand and the importance of gut instinct.

Humans have a mental bias towards control. We are most anxious when we have no control over our environment. In fact, even when we have very little control over outcomes (such as in a casino) we fool ourselves into thinking we do. We believe that the way we toss the dice on a craps table (or the hat we’re wearing, or the color of our underwear) has some impact of which numbers come up for us. Factory workers on an assembly line are much happier when they have a button that can stop the line, even if they never use it. We love control and are loath to relinquish it.

Even if a search engine had a 100% success rate in anticipating our intent, chances are we’d feel anxious about surrendering control of our decisions. In fact, this issue has already played out once online. At the height of the dot-com boom, billions of dollars were invested in creating friction-fee online marketplaces. The theory was that certain buying purchases, especially in the B2B marketplace, could be totally automated.  In a magazine article for supply chain management in 2000, an industry consultant saw a bright future for e-procurement: “”As long as you understand the business rules for making decisions, there’s no reason why you can’t automate.  Why can’t two computer systems – with built in rules – talk to each other?” 

It sounds completely rational, but ration has little to do with what we want. We want to feel in control. B2B buying didn’t become automated because we have too much investing in making buying decisions, even when we’re buying widgets for the assembly line, a bank of servers or copy paper in bulk. We don’t trust machines, no matter how smart they are, to make our decisions for us.

What we want is a search engine that guides us, but doesn’t push us. We want a smarter search experience, but we think of it as a filter rather than an arbitrator. Ideally, we want a concierge, who can make informed suggestions that we can then act on.  

Could a search engine become smart enough to predict our wants and desires before we’re even aware of them? Possibly, but the other part of that trade-off may be one we’re unwilling to make. How much privacy do we have to give up in order for the engine to know us that well? One of the hottest growth markets is in the area of personal technology. These little bits of tech live with us day in and day out. Consider the Fitbit, a sophisticated motion sensor that tracks our daily movements as long as we keep it with us. This daily diary of our activity (even how restless our sleep is) can be fed directly to the Web. The idea is intriguing, but the reality is a little disconcerting, especially when you think where this technology may go in the future. 

As we embed more and more technology into our everyday lives, there is the opportunity to collect signals that could help a search engine (but at this point, the label “search engine” seems wholly inadequate), track behaviors and make very educated guesses about what we might be interested in.  Our dreams and desires could potentially be crunched into just another algorithm. Practical? Perhaps. Desirable? I suspect not.

Finally, slumbering just below this discussion is the lurking presence of ultra-targeted advertising, and it’s this that we may find most troubling. If technology someday succeeds in reading our very minds, how can we use that same mind to say no?

A “Page” from Google’s PR Book

First published February 10, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Somehow, I’ve gotten myself squarely in the middle of Bing and Google again. Sometimes I should just keep my big mouth shut. The latest brouhaha is Google calling Microsoft a bunch of “cheaters” for copying search results. I called it “silly.”And it is. Pretty much everyone in the search universe (outside Mountain View) agrees that this is much more about Google trying to give Bing a black eye in the media than any serious threat to intellectual property. But somehow, as Google was swinging, it’s the one that ended up with the shiner.

If this were a one-off incident, I’d put it down to some misplaced indignation and bad PR “spin” advice. Google is within its rights to bring it to Bing’s attention. I just think Google didn’t have to be so pissy about it.

A New Attitude (and it ain’t pretty)…

But I don’t think this was a misstep. I think it’s all part of a new attitude, and a sad one at that, for Google. I wrote about this almost a year ago, in April, when I found Google becoming increasingly brittle and defensive in its public face:  “The humility is disappearing and hubris again rules the day. It’s almost as if, now that Google is the king of the hill and is drawing more than their fair share of scrutiny, much of it negative, they’ve gone into defensive mode. They’ve circled the wagons and drawn more inside.”

Apparently I’m not the only one who’s noticed that. Kara Swisher, in a post titled “Google’s Bing Attack Has Larry Page Written All Over It,” says Google’s new attitude comes right from its new CEO: “I would wager that we’re about to see a lot more of this pugnacious, in-your-face tone from Google under Page’s leadership, which could have far-reaching implications for the company.

While I have no idea if it was his decision to let loose the dogs of algo-war on Microsoft, many with knowledge of how Google manages its public persona observed to me this week that this was just the kind of popping off that the outgoing Schmidt often tried to mitigate and soften.

Google on a Ram-Page…

I now suspect that Google’s increased hubris (that I mentioned in last year’s column) was caused by Page flexing his influence within the organization. I trust Swisher’s take on the mood at Google. I’ve heard similar stories of Page’s “nerdily indignant voice” from others unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a tirade. Now, however, it’s permeating the company, and that’s sad.  Recently, I did a pretty extensive series of posts on where search might be heading. I had open and free- ranging conversations with Microsoft and Yahoo, but Google was “too busy” to have a real interview. I had to submit my questions by email and Google choose simply to ignore some of them because the company disagreed with my premise. Undertones of “how dare you question us?” rang clearly through my communications with the Big G.

I miss the days when Google was much more open-minded and accessible. I actually could get Marissa Mayer on the phone to talk about Google’s search interface. I could pick Peter Norvig’s brain about the future of the industry. Once I even had Eric Schmidt ask me “what [he] needed to know.” But that was then, and this is now.

I suspect there is much we don’t know about the transition from Schmidt to Page. The cracks are beginning to show in the Googleplex. I would guess the brittle bravado we’re seeing on the outside is masking a very un-Googlelike nervousness in Mountain View. Aaron Goldman nailed some of the symptoms in yesterday’s Search Insider.  Last April, I said, “I have no idea what this means in the big picture, but I do know that the tone and temper of an organization is a pretty reliable indicator of future success.” The signals I’m seeing with increased frequency indicate trouble ahead, and quite possibly, the most spectacular flame-out in high-tech history.