Category Archives: User Behavior

The Confluences of Spring Break

First published March 26, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s funny. Given three disparate ideas and enough time out of the office, I can somehow manage to tie it all together into a Search Insider theme. The ingredients for this column? The two books I chose to pack to read on my Spring Break vacation, and a bit of history from Southern Portugal, where I’ve spent the past week.

Odd Man Out

The first book was Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, “Outliers” (chosen primarily because reading Gladwell doesn’t seem like work at all, a key criteria for vacation reading). In typical Gladwellian fashion, he takes a central idea — the outliers that fall beyond the bell curve aren’t there solely because they’re on the thin edge of pure statistical probability — and explores it with a mix of story telling, research and undeniably compelling writing.  If one can excuse Gladwell for his “Just So” tendencies, putting his ideas across from his single perspective, with a rather fast and loose selection of supporting arguments, it made for a painless and fascinating read.

In “Outliers,” Gladwell looked at statistical oddballs as diverse as Bill Gates (in terms of success), The Beatles (again, success),  Chris Langan (a genius with an IQ of 195 who never made it through university), Korean Airlines (for the frequency of crashes in the ’80s and early ’90s), a small town called Roseto in Pennsylvania (where everybody lives longer than they’re supposed to, statistically speaking) and the hockey players that make it to the WHL (Western Hockey League) and eventually, the NHL (like me, Gladwell also grew up in Canada).

Luck is What You Make It

Gladwell’s point, which he makes persuasively, is that these things are not simply a matter of odds or blind luck. There are distinct patterns of influence that tend to create outliers. They include your socioeconomic status, your culture, your upbringing and even your birthday. Here is a smattering of Gladwell’s reasonings:

·     NHL hockey players make the big leagues because they’re born early in the year, physically dominating their age groupings in minor hockey, advancing to rep teams, thereby getting more coaching and ice time.

·     Bill Gates, through a series of lucky occurrences, managed to amass 10,000 hours of programming experience as a child and teen at a time where access to computers was very hard to come by.

·     The Beatles jumped ahead of their contemporary competition because the 8-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week performing schedule in Hamburg ground down their rough edges and smoothed out their act.

·     Korean Airlines had an abysmal safety record because Korean culture made it taboo to question the wisdom of the pilot, even if he had the plane heading directly into a mountain

·     Chris Langan was born with one of the highest measured IQs in America, but was also born poor and disadvantaged, leaving him without the social skills required to successfully navigate through university and on to adult success.

Gladwell’s conclusion Luck, either good or bad, isn’t simply left to chance.  And even inherent gifts, like Langan’s IQ, aren’t a guarantee of success. Luck can be manufactured. The conditions for success can be consciously put in place in a system where the desired outcomes are known. So, what are those outcomes? That brings me to the second book I brought on vacation.

Welcome to Kurzweil’s Singularity

Ray Kurzweil is definitely out there. This is a man who takes 250 nutritional supplements every day and gets seven blood transfusions every week so he can re-engineer his body to live longer. He believes humans and computers will merge in the next few decades, vastly pushing back the known limits of human intelligence, an event he calls the Singularity.

My other book was Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” — a book chosen primarily for its heft of over 600 pages. I knew it would keep my busy through to the end of my two- week vacation. A quick summary of Kurzweil’s predictions from the book might lead one to question his mental stability:

–       Physical bodies will become essentially meaningless in the next century, as we will live in a virtual world with physical representations of our own design.

–       Table top “nanofactories” will create everything we’ll need, atom by atom, from a lump of raw materials.

–       We will upload our personalities to a computer, thereby living forever.

–       Technological evolution has taken over from biological evolution, giving humans the freedom to design our future.

–       Aging and disease are a few decades away from being conquered forever.

–       Nanobots will allow us to control every element of our environment,  eliminating pollution.

Kurzweil is manically optimistic about our future, and that future is not hundreds of years away. Most of Kurzweil’s seminal events happen before 2050. As the title of the book says, the merging of biology and technology is near (starting in 2030).

Just Crazy Enough to be Right

But Kurzweil is far from a quack. The reason for the imminent horizon is the rapid, exponential increase in the rate of technological advancement. Kurzweil is meticulous in pulling together the current state of affairs in areas including nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and neuroscience to build a rock-solid foundation for his predictions.

Kurzweil’s view of the future is positively blinding in its enthusiastic brilliance. He is adamant that there is no problem that can’t be overcome with enough intelligence, a resource that will explode in abundance thanks to the Singularity.  And his track record is sound. Kurzweil’s predictions have been remarkably accurate in the past. It’s hard not to get caught up in his optimism. Even if it all doesn’t come to pass, Kurzweil paints a picture of a future worth striving for.

So, those are the first two ideas that converged over my Spring Break. Luck doesn’t just happen. We’re not held prisoner by some probabilistic crapshoot. And for the first time in memory, I saw a vision of the future that wasn’t predominantly pessimistic. I’ll leave it there for now. Next week, I’ll tell you the story of Portugal’s Henry the Navigator.

Your Brain on Google: Interview with Dr. Teena Moody

This is the full transcript from my interview with Dr. Teena Moody from UCLA’s Semel Institute about the Your Brain on Google Study. Today’s Just Behave column on Search Engine Land has more commentary and analysis of the findings.

Gord:

Why don’t we start with the study where you were comparing activation of the brain using Google versus reading text? What was your original hypothesis going into that study?

Dr. Moody:

Well, we were very interested in two ideas. One was how do the patterns of brain activity differ when you’re doing an internet search versus reading, since computers are such a big part of our lives these days? And then we also wanted to look at different groups of people, people who were internet-savvy and had lots of computer exposure and experience, and compared that to naive subjects – with “naive” we mean people who don’t use computers or the internet very often.

Now there are some difficulties in recruiting for this group because so many people have access to computers these days and that was part of our rationale for choosing an older group of participants here, because you find very few 30-year-olds who don’t have computer experience.

Gord:

So for the purpose of this study, what was the definition of “internet-naive”?

Dr. Moody:

A naive person, we were ideally getting someone who had no internet experience, although they could have computer experience. And it turned out we had a self-rating for them – their frequency of computer use, their frequency of internet use, and then a self-rating of their expertise. And it turns out that the net-naive people use the computer usually once or twice a month, and the internet-savvy people several times a day. In terms of the internet, some of them had never actually been on the internet and some maybe used it once a week or once a month for the naives. Again, the savvy people use the internet multiple times a day.

Gord:

Okay.

Dr. Moody:

So we were able to get a very good spread there between the two groups.

Gord:

So what is an fMRI machine? If I was looking at one, what would I be seeing?

Dr. Moody:

Well, it isn’t the same as an MRI machine. It uses, rather than having ionizing energy, you’re using a magnetic field and radio frequency to generate a pattern, and we can look at what’s called the BOLD signal, and that’s the blood oxygenation level dependent signal in the brain, and it is correlated with brain activity. So we’re interested in an fMRI, which is functional MRI, and looking at a pattern of brain activity. And that’s what we were looking at in this study, differences in the pattern of brain activity between savvy subjects and naive subjects, and comparing that when they’re doing internet searches and doing reading…just to see the pattern of activity… if we see different parts of the brain being activated.

Gord:

Okay. So you’re getting them to do different tasks, you’re getting them to read, you’re getting them to actually do online activities. How were the stimuli presented to them, because in an MRI machine, you’re basically in a tube – right? – and you can’t move your head…

Dr. Moody:

Yes. Keeping your head still is very important in an MRI machine. It’s just like if you moved your camera when you’re taking a photo, it will be blurry. So the participants do have to lie in a tube, essentially – they can’t be claustrophobic – and they wear goggles. It’s very much a virtual reality experience. They wear goggles and they have headphones so that we can speak to them and they can speak to us, we hear each other. And before the actual experiment starts, we usually start with a movie to let them become relaxed in the environment and also they’re aware that they are seeing through the goggles. They watch a movie and we take structural images of their brains so that we have references to overlay their functional activity. So usually there are 5 or 10 minutes of structural images where we’re getting detailed information about the structure of each individual’s brain.

Then after that we follow up with the experiment, and it’s very much like playing a videogame. In this case we had a button box where they could press buttons 1, 2, or 3 to indicate their choices for selecting either a book chapter or an internet site. So rather than having a mouse for this first study – we did not have an MRI-compatible mouse – we used a button box for choice of the selection. But it’s very much a virtual reality experience. It would be like playing a videogame, and I use the analogy of, for the button pressing, changing channels on your TV with your remote control. Most of the participants were very comfortable with the situation.

Gord:

Let’s get on to what you found actually in the study. First, I want to start by asking why did you use reading text as the baseline for neural activity in the study as your comparison point?

Dr. Moody:

Well, actually, both for the reading and for the internet and Google searching, we used a different baseline. We had a button-pressing baseline where white bars appeared on the screen and they just pressed the button when a white bar appeared for the location on the screen. And we compared the pattern of activity when they were reading and making… selecting different chapters or when they were selecting Google, from the Google search screen and reading off the internet to that pattern of activity. So our control was more of a low-level control baseline.

Then, in a higher-level analysis, we compared the pattern of activity while they were reading to the pattern of activity while they were doing the internet search. So both tasks had a lower-level baseline control.

Gord:

Okay. So let’s just cover off what you did find. So when you compared the parts of the brain… And we’ll deal first with the internet-naive. When you compared the parts of the brain activated with text reading versus web searching, what did you find?

Dr. Moody:

Well, we found that the pattern of activity was almost identical, and that really frankly surprised me at first because I thought that the internet even for the naive participants would require additional areas, because when you’re searching the internet you are engaging in decision-making, you have to suppress extraneous information, so there’s inhibition required. So I was surprised to find that it looks like in both the internet task and the reading task the subjects are just engaging their language areas, their visual areas, there’s some sensory integration areas as well, but it looks like they’re reading in both cases. And not surprising at all about the areas recruited, because they’re language areas, memory areas, and visual attention areas.

googlebrains

Gord:

But you found something different when you were looking at the internet-savvy group.

Dr. Moody:

That’s correct. And for the internet-savvy group, their reading areas were virtually identical to the reading areas that were activated for the internet-naive participants, but the very interesting part was the savvy group did recruit additional areas and these were frontal areas that had to do with decision-making, cingulate areas that have to do with conflict resolution. It’s not surprising, it’s what we expected, that these additional areas for decision-making would be required and higher-level cognitive function would be required, and that’s what we found in the internet-savvy group.

Gord:

To explore that a little bit, we’re seeing that people are actually cognitively engaging with the results – they have to make decisions, they’re comparing them. What happens there? With the internet-naive, obviously they weren’t engaging with the content nearly at the same level, but the internet-savvy… Is there a certain level of fluency with search where you elevate it to a higher level and you’re using that input to make decisions?

Dr Moody:

Yes, that is certainly one interpretation, and one interpretation that we have for the data – that it does require additional areas and as you practice it, you do become more fluent and more expert at it.

Now there are two different schools of thought on this. One is that when you first learn a task, you require greater activity and more attention, and that one could expect higher levels of activity if you were new at something. People with expertise can actually show decreases in their functional MRI pattern of activity. But what it seems here is that while engaging in internet searching, you are still very actively engaging these decision-making areas and it might be that the naive people are overwhelmed by the situation and are just treating it like a book – you’re still not trying to integrate the information, they’re reading it as though they were reading a book.

There’s one other interpretation as well, and that is that internet-naive people just have a different pattern of wiring in their brains from those who are internet-savvy – people who prefer using the internet and enjoy that mode of reading are wired differently from the internet-naive people. And we can’t distinguish that in this study, but that is also a possibility.

Gord:

Which is interesting. You say they’re wired differently. Would that be the typical, neural  “fire together, wire together” wiring that happens when we learn anything, or is this something more fundamental in the pruning that happens during the formative years?

Dr. Moody:

Well, certainly in development, you know, we have good evidence that things do wire differently depending upon environmental influences, and definitely there’s evidence now against the old theory that adult’s brains don’t change, but definitely after brain injury there’s been evidence of re-wiring or re-mapping brain regions to overcome deficits. We don’t know what’s happening here. This is a very preliminary study, but one interpretation could be that there was a re-wiring, as people practice on the internet that these areas become more active. But all we can really say is that the pattern of activity is different.

Gord:

So one of the things I’ve suspected, when we’ve looked at behaviours in interacting with search, is as you become more used to using search, more comfortable with the interface, you don’t have to worry so much about navigating through the interface, that becomes more like a conditioned, habitual behaviour. Which means your prefrontal cortex is free to kick in to do those cognitive assessments, to say, “Okay, here’s what Option A offers me versus Option B,” so it’s almost kicking it up to a higher level of processing. Does that seem to make sense? It’s like I said, Google has become a habit and at some point the basal ganglia takes over and runs it as a habit which frees up the prefrontal cortex to do more heavy lifting.

Dr Moody:

Well, our data’s definitely consistent with that interpretation, and I think that that’s what part of our interest is, is how can we enrich our lives as we age, how can we improve our cognitive function or slow cognitive decline? And so yes, that’s an interpretation we would like to have because we would like to say, “Oh, we can do something to make our brains better as we age,” so that’s very exciting and interesting, and it is consistent, however we can’t conclude that. We don’t have any causality here at all.

Gord:

One of the really interesting questions, in reading the maps that came out of the study and looking at the areas that seemed to be lighting up, it looked like as memories were being retrieved or concepts were being retrieved, different cortical areas were being activated. Are you seeing that as people are reading text, there’s corresponding visual activation or auditory activation from those cortical areas that are mentally building the images that correspond to what they’re reading in the search results?

Teena:

Well, we definitely see a huge amount of occipital and visual area activation, and that’s just as we expect because for reading and for the internet you’re looking at visual input. And so that was not unexpected at all, that’s exactly what we would expect.

We don’t have… With fMRI, you don’t have very good temporal resolution, so we can’t… And this was a block study as opposed an event-related study, so we can’t really get into what’s happening second to second in the brain here because we average across these big blocks of 20 to 30 seconds. So we can’t say much about the time course and of what’s happening during the reading and internet searching. I’m sure future studies could do that. So we have good information about what happened in these comparisons, but not in the time domain.

Gord:

But there was a note in the study saying that although the visual stimuli were identical, with internet searching there seemed to be enhanced activity in the visual cortex area. Any ideas what might have caused that?

Dr. Moody:

Well, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that they were attending to it more.

Gord:

Right.

Dr. Moody:

So we’ll probably have to go along with that. But it could be that different areas were recruited and additionally were required, but certainly other studies have shown with attention you do recruit these additional areas.

Gord:

Now one of the things that we’ve seen is when people are looking… And it’s hard because in looking at your study, the layout of the results wasn’t a typical Google result, it was kind of pared down and I think there were only three results shown, right?

Dr. Moody:

Yes. I did some pilot testing and I really had to slim it down for a couple of reasons. One is I just looked into the literature to see how many words a person in a certain age group could read in 30 seconds, so I did have to reduce the amount of information on the screen for that reason. Also, presentation of the information in the goggles in the scanner, we wanted to make sure that everyone could actually read the words on the screen. So when you’re looking in the goggles and you’re looking essentially at something… a very, very small computer screen, we had to limit the number of words. So I did pare down what, you know, would normally be on an internet site. Also, in an early pilot version, I included pop-ups like you would get when you’re actually searching the internet, and that was so distracting for people we, you know, immediately took out the pop-ups. The pop-ups were way too distracting for us to be able to make a legitimate comparison of information presentation, comparing a book format versus the internet format.

Gord:

One of the things that might be interesting, when we’ve seen people scanning search results through eye tracking, it’s very obvious when we look at the saccades and the eye movement that they’re scanning, they’re not reading, and we suspect more of a pattern-matching activity. And that would be interesting to see if they’re scanning it visually to look for matches with the query they just used as opposed to actually reading text and engaging those language centres and the translation of that?

Dr Moody:

Yes, but eye tracking would be a great addition to this type of a study. And also once… You know, now there are MRI-compatible mice so that one could actually do more of a click-around within the internet page itself rather than just making a selection of which site to go to. Those would be great additions for the future.

Gord:

I think what I want to talk about a little bit now.. I think this is going a little beyond the scope of this study, but it ties in with some of Dr. Small’s work. I think you’ve worked with him on some of these ideas of the digital native and the digital immigrant. Moving beyond the group you recruited and looking at the young who have been exposed to technology during those formative neural pruning years and what the differences in brain activity might be. What happens when you’re young and you’re exposed to technology at an early age, as opposed to someone like myself who’s 47? The technology I grew up with was basically two channels of television.

Dr. Moody:

Well, I can only comment on this just from personal experience with my children. I haven’t done research on how children interact with the internet. I’ve read some of the papers but I’ve not done any research on that. But it does seem that, you know, they interact more readily and more fluidly. It’s amazing how quickly your kids can navigate across something on the internet compared to how I do. Of course, I’m pretty computer-savvy, I use the computer hours a day. So I think there is a difference between young people and old people.

Recruiting for this study, there were some people… finding people who were internet-naive, we could find them but they really had no interest in learning how to use the computer either. You know, it was very difficult to find naive people who really wanted a chance to participate in a study about the internet. So young people, I think they’ve grown up with it, they accept, you know, MP3 players, cell phones, visual impact touch screens – all that is so natural to them and some of us are still trying to figure out how to program our DVD players.

Gord:

Right. But I guess there’s speculation too that as they become more comfortable with technology and it becomes more of a natural extension of how they communicate, there’s potentially a trade-off there. I mean, the whole concept of pruning is that you get better at what you do all the time and you gradually lose capabilities in the things you don’t do very often. And so might this mean, for instance, that the young are losing the ability for face-to-face communication or more kind of focussed reasoning over a longer period of time.

Dr Moody:

You know, I think that’s a very real concern, and I know that people are looking at some of those issues, attention in particular. The studies that I’ve actually looked at have used computer gaming to enhance visual attention. So we know that you can actually enhance attention using internet gaming practice. But it might be, as you say, that you also have a negative impact for longer periods of attention, like being able to read an entire article versus clicking around and having this immediate visual gratification of changing very quickly. So I’m not aware of the studies that have looked at the negative impact on attention. I’ve actually been looking more on the positive end of how attention has been enhanced and how people are developing computer packages to help children with ADD for instance be able to focus for longer periods of time. But certainly, just it seems that young people have shorter attention spans. I’m not aware of the research, however.

Gord:

So let’s step back within the scope of the study that we were talking about. I’ve got a couple more questions. One is we’ve also seen fairly significant differences in men versus women when they’re doing information foraging basically, when they’re going out and looking for information. Did you notice any differences in this study?

Dr Moody:

You know, unfortunately we had fewer males in this study. Every study you have limitations in terms of funding and timeframe, etc. And so we did try to recruit more males. Some of the males were the ones unfortunately that had head motion during the scan and we weren’t able to keep them in the final results. So we didn’t have enough male participants to make any kind of comparison male-female. And anecdotally, I can’t really say anything different about the two groups.

Gord:

All right. There was actually a post I ran into after I did a preliminary article on this by a cognitive psychologist by the name of Bill Ives and the point he made in this study was that because we saw that as you become more comfortable or learn tasks that you activate more parts of the brain, he said really what the study shows is that once you know what you’re doing, it increases brain function, you generally engage with the content at a greater level. You’re doing this research to find ways to possibly improve cognitive function. What is it that’s most exciting about internet activity as opposed to learning to do any kind of other complex puzzle-solving or mental activity?

Dr. Moody:

Well, I think that because we have a situation where almost everyone has access to a computer, it can make this almost universal. Especially as we age, we’re not getting out there as much to walk around and some people don’t have the ability to go to senior centres and interact with other people, but that you could do something in your own home without requiring great mobility is very exciting. Also, there would be so much choice, there’s so much variety on the internet, it can be individually tailored to your personal preferences. So in this study I tried to pick topics that might be interesting to older adults – you know, walking for exercise, Tai Chi, health aspects of eating different types of food. I think that if it’s enjoyable for someone and if you don’t consider it to be a job to get out there and stimulate your brain, that people will do it more frequently. So that’s part of what’s exciting about it, is that it should be easily accessible to people once they know how to turn on the computer and activate the internet.

Gord:

Okay. So this is an easier path potentially to mental exercise?

Dr. Moody:

I think that it can be, yes.

Gord:

For the purpose of this interview, I’ll wrap up by asking you what’s next? What are the questions you’d like to explore further?

Dr. Moody:

Well, we would like to see what the impact of internet training might be on people who have no internet experience or very little internet experience. So that’s our next direct path. We’d also like to look at interventions for specific groups. If people have memory issues, is there something we could do to improve that? I think Dr. Small, Dr. Brookheimer, and myself are very interested in improving memory and improving people’s lives as we age, so that part of it would be a great bonus if we can discover techniques that might improve memory or enhance cognitive function. So the next step will be to look at training, and then we could look at patient groups, and I personally have interest in developmental learning too and we’ll probably look in young people as well.

Gord:

Okay. Well, fascinating topics to explore. Thank you, Teena, so much for the interview. It was fascinating to walk through it with you.

Search a Real Downer

The latest numbers from comScore show how the mood of the nation has shifted, and how it’s being reflected in what we search for. This is a topic I’ve talked about numerous times, so rather than spout it all again, I’ll just provide a few links to past posts. But I think one of the tables from the comScore release paints a pretty sobering picture:

Growth in Search Terms Related to Economic Downturn
December 2008 vs. December 2007
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore Marketer
Search Term 
Total Searches (000)
Dec-2007
Dec-2008
% Change
“Coupons”
7,637
19,921
161%
“Unemployment”
2,688
8,214
206%
“Discount”
6,271
7,928
26%
“Mortgage”
4,518
7,756
72%
“Bankruptcy”
1,012
2,589
156%
“Foreclosure”
824
1,373
67%
“Unemployment Benefits”
215
748
247%
“Online behavior has come to reflect the interests or concerns of Americans, and we are certainly seeing this manifest itself with respect to the economic downturn,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Search volume using terms relating to the economy has ballooned over the past year as Americans have become increasingly concerned over their economic wellbeing.”
Gian and I talked about this almost a year ago at the Search Insider Summit in Florida. That lead to a column in Search Engine Land talking about how whatever is top of mind for us translates into search activity – Battelle’s Database of Intentions. Ironically, this same tendency is one of the reasons why I think Search will do particularly well in the current economic meltdown – the subject of another Just Behave column.

Hyperlinking Reality

First published January 29, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Fellow Search Insider David Berkowitz (David, it’s been too long since we riffed on each other’s columns!) allowed his curiosity to wander down some fascinating potential directions search may evolve in a couple of recent columns, first looking at Ford’s plans for integrating GPS-enabled voice search  in all its  vehicles, and then speculating how one search could be launched in 17 different ways, both today and in the future. One of his speculations is what I wanted to explore further today:

“Instead of entering a query, Penny may be able to put on a special set of glasses and scan her surroundings for store names and reviews. The headsets and eyewear from Vuzix now link up to other portable devices such as iPods and camcorders, but they keep including more functionality within the gadgets themselves.”

Picture This…

Sound far-fetched? Not according to the MOBVIS (Mobile Attentive Interfaces in Urban Scenarios)  project in Europe. In a nutshell, the MOBVIS technology allows you to take a picture of your surroundings with your camera-equipped mobile device, then MOBVIS recognizes aspects of your environment and places hyperlinks on the items where it has relevant information. So, if you take a picture of a bus stop, MOBVIS can retrieve what buses stop there and what the schedule is. Assuming city buses are equipped with GPS and telemetric units, it could also tell you how long you have to wait for the next bus.

Currently, the MOBVIS project is visually mapping and testing in three European cities; Graz, Austria; Ljubljana, Slovenia; and Darmstadt, Germany). Geo-referenced imagery tied to streetscapes from these three centers is online and available to the scientific community. One has to imagine that Google would be paying particular attention to this, as it’s a natural tie-in with its Street View project.

Say Cheese and Search…

So, let’s imagine what MOBVIS could do. First of all, it could be an incredible interactive guide, bringing mountains of information about your surroundings to just one click away on your mobile device. Dining reviews, items on sale in local stores, entertainment schedules and reviews, transit schedules, self-guided tours, could all live on the other side of the MOBVIS linking icon. Now, all that is theoretically available through GPS positioning, but in urban pedestrian applications, GPS has some functional limitations. It’s difficult to get an accurate enough fix to narrow your location to even a half block radius, especially in the downtown “urban valley” core. MOBVIS allows you to restrict your information quest to exactly what you want to include in your viewfinder, making it a much more specific query tool. Also, MOBVIS could be tremendously useful for the visually impaired, allowing them to scan their surroundings and retrieve information.

Making Reality More Useful

What MOBVIS does, along with all the other search permutations mentioned by David, is point the way of search’s future. I’ve always said that search is not about the destination, whether it’s Google, Yahoo or Live. It’s about the functional engine that sits behind the portal. It’s about the ability to link people with relevant information and, more importantly, timely functionality. Search is about letting people do what they have to do. MOBVIS is just one more way to establish the link. It’s a pretty amazing way that opens up some intriguing possibilities, but what makes MOBVIS exciting is its potential for helping us navigate our current reality. David’s 17 ways to search, Aaron Goldman’s past speculations about ambient findability, and my ongoing exploration of search as an expression of us reaching for our goals all share a common theme: search enhances our ability to do things.

In a recent post, Silicon Valley writer Sarah Lacy speculated that Google might be nearing the end of its reign as online’s Golden Child. She used some dubious logic about usage and traffic to posit that the mantle is ready to be passed to Twitter or Facebook. What she missed is the central premise of Google’s mission. It’s not about driving traffic to Google.com. It’s about connecting us with what we’re looking for. What Google has been doing through Google Maps, Street View, Universal Search, personalization, Google Mobile and yes, even the lowly but ubiquitous Google Toolbar, is weaving together the functionality needed to deliver on that mission. It remains to be seen whether Google will be successful in doing so, but it’s certainly well in the lead. And that’s the power of Google’s potential. It’s about providing the infrastructure to connect all the dots, both online and in the real world. It’s not about being one of the dots.

Your Brain on Google Update

I had a chance to read through the fMRI study from UCLA, Your Brain on Google, on a plane ride down to visit with..you guessed it..Google. Pretty interesting stuff…here are a few quick highlights:

  • In the Internet Naive group..there was little difference in brain activity between searching on Google and reading text. The reason, I suspect, was that the group was just reading the search results.
  • But in the Internet Savvy group..a totally different story. Suddenly, many more parts of the brain started lighting up, including the parts governing decision making and the visual cortex. What this shows is that these users were using the results to help make decisions. They were fluent in search.
  • One other interesting note. The increased activation in the visual cortex may indicate that searchers see the information differently. The information presented was exactly the same, with the same stimuli, but in the search savvy group, when they were scanning the visual stimuli as search results, they seemed to be more visually rich. I suspect that as we get more savvy with results, we scan more and read less, treating the results more like a picture.

Just a few tidbits for now. I’m setting up an interview with researcher Teena Moody to dive deeper, which will probably become a Just Behave column. Also, don’t be surprised if it’s what I talk about at SMX West in Santa Clara.

Got the UCLA Googlized Brain Study!

Thanks to UCLA, I just got a copy of the UCLA fMRI study of what happens to people’s brains when they use Google. This is fascinating..well..it is if you live in my skull.

The study was done by Dr. Gary Small, Dr. Susan Bookheimer and Dr. Teena Moody. Just got it so I haven’t had a chance to read through it, but I’m looking forward to it. As chance would have it, I just finished Gary Small’s book – iBrain – last night. The most interesting part of the book was references to several fMRI studies done around the world, showing what parts of the brain fire in given situations and while we’re undertaking different tasks. When it comes to searching, I have my own theories..which I talked about here and in my Search Insider Column. I’d like to see if the UCLA results match up.

Small’s discussion of Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants is really interesting as well, and something I want to take a much deeper dive on in future posts and articles. Briefly, natives grew up with technology, so their brain basically molded itself with hard wired capabilities, while immigrants learned their tech skills after the brain had largely formed itself. Think of the difference between growing up with a language and learning it as an adult. Digital natives are fluent in technology..for the rest of us, it will never be our native tongue. Small does make one serious transgression in the discussion which drove me nuts. He keeps swapping out neuroplasticity for the word “evolution”, giving the impression (which he never bothers to clear up) that genetic evolution can happen in one generation. It just doesn’t work that way.

That said, it’s pretty fascinating research and a question that seems to be of interest to many. I did a Search Engine Land article on it called “Are Our Brains Becoming Googlized” which picked up a healthy number of Diggs and became one of Search Engine Land’s most read articles. I’m trying to land an interview with one of the researchers. If successful, I’ll let you know how to access.

I’m very happy in my own nerdy little neuro-world!

Entertainment vs Usefulness – Which Builds More Loyalty?

On Wednesday, I talked about how digital marketers always tend to jump on fads, assuming they’ll become trends. I called it digital fluff. My position was that something has to become useful before it will have staying power. And our judgement of usefulness takes time. We have to get beyond the initial obsession with novelty. Marketers jump on channels when they’re still a novelty, which creates churn when the majority of these channels die away because they’re just not useful to the average person.

Lance Loveday posted a great comment and in it he brought up another potential factor of audience longevity and loyalty: entertainment value:

I’d add “entertaining” to usefulness as a requirement for achieving sustained behavior. TV and video games aren’t very useful, but they’ve definitely made sustained behavior status. I can only assume it’s because they’re entertaining.

Hmmm…the Psychology of Entertainment. Sounds like a good topic for a further post. In fact, I’m thinking a series of posts: How Our Brain responds to Entertainment.

After Lance’s post, I started doing some digging. In short time, I dug up a fairly rich vein of research into how our brain responds to entertainment. My goal is to find out why some types of entertainment have more staying power than other types. And then, once we discover the psychological underpinnings of entertainment, lets look at how that applies to some of the digital trends I disparaged: things like social networks, microblogging, mobile apps and online video. What role does entertainment play in online loyalty? How does it overlap with usefulness? How can digital entertainment fads survive the novelty curse and jump the chasm to a mainstream trends with legs? Why are we continually attracted to bright shiny objects to begin with? And is that trait universal or is it just a function of the early adopter tendencies of the current online audience?

I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to go through the research, but already, some interesting titbits have come to the top that present some compelling questions:

Why Does Fiction Typically Outsell Non Fiction?

If you look at the best selling books of 2009, or any year for that matter, you’ll almost always find that fiction tops the list. And, when you do get down to the fiction books, you’ll probably find that close to the top is a book by Malcolm Gladwell. Why? Well, in both instances, we’re suckers for the appeal of a story. We enjoy narratives much more so than rhetoric. Gladwell is a master of this. He wraps his points (and he always has a point) in a rich tapestry of anecdotes and stories.

Why do humans love stories? Well, it appears it’s a hardwired trait. Research seems to indicate our brains process narrative differently than rhetoric. This is one area I’ll be diving deeper into.

What Makes some TV Shows Great and Some Flashes in the Pan?

Lance brought up the example of TV as a bed for sustained behaviour. There is probably no source of sociological data richer in the past half century than our TV viewing habits. I’ll be taking a look at what separates a one season wonder from a multi season success story.

What is the Appeal of a Video Game anyway?

Lance’s other example was video games. Here there’s a psychological buffet of hardwired enticements. In fact, some psychologists are worried that the jolt received from video games may be addictive – a mainline hit of dopamine producing stimuli wired directly to our pleasure centres.

Why Do Boys play Video Games Much more often than Girls?

Video games may be addictive, but the danger seems to be much greater with males than females. We’ll explore why.

What is the Entertainment Value of Social Networks?

Of all the trends playing out currently online, that of social networks seems to be the most prevalent. Are social networks useful, or simply entertaining? Are they in transition from entertainment to usefulness? What is the future of social networking?

Can Online Compete with TV for Entertainment Value?

When we look at where our entertainment comes from, we’re definitely a culture in transition. Increasingly, more and more of our video consumption is online. So, if we find that entertainment and usefulness are both factors in online audience loyalty, what does this mean for future marketing?

The Difference Between Entertainment and Usefulness in Targeting Strategies?

At some point, I’ll have to address the fundamental question raised by Lance: If entertainment is also important, what are the implications for marketers? What mental modes are in place in both instances? This gets to some of the fundamental questions I’ve been wrestling with in marketing – the nature of engagement, the role of intent, the question of attribution. What is the difference in a strategy for search (usefulness) vs a strategy for Hulu (entertainment). And, does online bring about a significant paradigm shift as the worlds of usefulness and entertainment come closer to merging?

Lance..you got me thinking. Stay tuned!

David vs. Goliath Brands on the Search Results Page

First published December 4, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about branding on the search page, effectively intercepting the user during consideration. Certainly if you’re a household brand name, you have to be at or near the top of searches for your product category if you want to defend your position in the prospect’s consideration scent. But what if you’re a new entry into the market or a relatively unknown brand. Can you still effectively play in the category? Yes, but you have to be smarter than your behemoth competitors. Fortunately, in most cases, that’s not too hard to do when it comes to search.

The Strategy: Play Broad, but Think Niche

First, it’s important to know the common behaviors of the searcher. We start at the top left and scan the results in the “Golden Triangle” first. Only after this will we look at the ads on the right. We look for relevance, based not just on the query we used, but the implicit labels we carry in our mind. We will start with the simplest query that we feel will yield acceptable results with the least amount of investment. And, we will click through on two or three results to compare the information scent on the landing pages. So, given this behavioral pattern, what can you do to catch the attention of prospects with broad generic queries?

First of all, you have to target your messaging with exquisite precision in the title of your ad. This is no mean feat, because the limit is 25 characters, including spaces. Each one of these characters is precious, because this is the part of your ad that will get read. At best, you’ll get spot scanning of your description (bonus hint, move your most important “hot button” words in your description so they’re in the line right under the title and near the front. And don’t be afraid to put prices in. They’re a disruption in the text-based pattern and so stand out to the eye).

Rule of thumb, start with the query (hit bolding of the query is an important relevancy cue) and then laser focus on the primary hot button for your niche target. Don’t be afraid to identify the target. If you’re on a broad category, but your target is B2B buyers, say so. If the differentiator is benefit, move it into the title. One example, laptops that are durable enough to stand the rigors of road warrior treatment: The query you’re bidding for could be “laptops,” but your title should be: “Rugged Laptops.” Because your brand is unknown to the prospect, don’t worry about putting it in the title.

Pick Your Spot

Secondly, in a broad category, you want to avoid unqualified clicks. So you’re going to have to move down the right rail, preferably targeting the #4 or #5 spot. Eye-tracking studies show that this spot gets decent visibility (because of how we move over to the right rail when we reach the bottom of the golden triangle) relative to the rest of the ads, yet doesn’t pull a lot of unqualified clicking. This position, together with your targeted message, stands a decent chance of catching the prospect’s eye without capturing ROI-deflating gratuitous clicking. The challenge will be fighting the tendency of Google’s quality score to push you off the first page of results.

Plan Your Tactics in Context

All too often in search, we plan our messaging without paying attention to the user context that leads to engagement. Your ad will be appearing together with a number of other ads and organic results on a search page. Users will be scanning through those ads and making their choice based on not just what your ad says, but what all the others do as well. Additionally, there will be at least a few clicks through to competitive landing pages. You’re going to have to plan your messaging relative to what your competition is doing. Do a query yourself and see what the landscape looks like, through the eyes of your prospect. What other choices are available? How effective is the landing page experience, again, with your prospect’s potential intent firmly in mind? If you adopt this mindset, you’ll be amazed at how the biggest brands in the business (any business, yours included) routinely fumble the ball when it comes to delivering what the prospect is looking for on the search page. Unfortunately, non-targeted messaging and irrelevant landing page experiences seem to be the rule rather than the exception. There’s plenty of room for smart search marketers on the average results page.

Measure, Test, Optimize and Repeat

If you’re playing in the high traffic but generic keyword space, devote a lot of time to testing and tweaking. Find optimum positions and wording. Carefully watch your ROAS metrics. Capture the micro-conversions. Be smarter than the competition and you’ll find that search page where you can pull off a victory, even when you’re faced with David vs. Goliath odds.

A Cognitive Walk Through of Searching

First published October 23, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Two weeks ago, I talked about the concept of selective perception, how subconsciously we pick and choose what we pay attention to. Then, last week, I explained how engagement with search is significantly different than engagement with other types of advertising. These two concepts set the stage for what I want to do today. In this column, I want to lay out a step-by-step hypothetical walk-through of our cognitive engagement with a search page.

Searching on Auto Pilot

First, I think it’s important to clear up a common misunderstanding. We don’t think our way through an entire search interaction. The brain only kicks into cognitive high gear (involving the cortex) when it absolutely needs to. When we’re engaged in a mental task, any mental task, our brain is constantly looking for cognitive shortcuts to lessen the workload required. Most of these shortcuts involve limbic structures at the sub-cortical level, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus, thalamus and nucleus accumbens. This is a good thing, as these structures have been honed through successful generations to simplify even the most complicated tasks. They’re the reason driving is much easier for you now than it was the first time you climbed behind the wheel. These structures and their efficiencies also play a vital role in our engagement with search.

So, to begin with, our mind identifies a need for information. Usually, this is a sub task that is part of a bigger goal. The goal is established in the prefrontal cortex and the neural train starts rolling toward it. We realize there’s a piece of information missing that prevents us from getting closer to our goal – and, based on our past successful experiences, we determine that a search engine offers the shortest route to gain the information. This is the first of our processing efficiencies. We don’t deliberate long hours about the best place to turn. We make a quick, heuristic decision based on what’s worked in the past. The majority of this process is handled at the sub-cortical level.

The Google Habit

Now we have the second subconscious decision. Although we have several options available for searching, the vast majority of us will turn to Google, because we’ve developed a Google habit. Why spend precious cognitive resources considering our options when Google has generally proved successful in the past? Our cortex has barely begun to warm up at this point. The journey thus far has been on autopilot.

The prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory, first sparked to life with the realization of the goal and the identification of the sub task, locating the missing piece of information. Now, the cortical mind is engaged once again as we translate that sub task into an appropriate query. This involves matching the concept in our minds with the right linguistic label. Again, we’re not going to spend a lot of cognitive effort on this, which is why query construction tends to start simply and become longer and more complex only if required. In this process, the label, the query we plugged into the search box, remains embedded in working memory.

Conditioned Scanning

At this point, the prefrontal cortex begins to idle down again. The next exercise is handled by the brain as a simple matching game. We have the label, or query, in our mind. We scan the page in the path we’ve been conditioned to believe will lead to the best results: starting in the upper left, and then moving down the page in an F-shaped scan pattern. All we want to do is find a match between the query in our prefrontal cortex and the results on the page.

Here the brain also conserves cognitive processing energy by breaking the page into chunks of three or four results. This is due to the channel capacity of our working memory and how many discrete chunks of information we can process in our prefrontal cortex at a time. We scan the results looking first for the query, usually in the title of the results. And it’s here where I believe a very important cognitive switch is thrown.

The “Pop Out” Effect

When we structure the query, we type it into a box. In the process, we remember the actual shape of the phrase. When we first scan results, we’re not reading words, we’re matching shapes. In cognitive psychology, this is called the “pop out” effect. We can recognize shapes much faster than we can read words. The shapes of our query literally “pop out” from the page as a first step toward matching relevance. The effect is enhanced by query (or hit) bolding. This matching game is done at the sub-cortical level.

If the match is positive (shape = query), then our eye lingers long enough to start picking up the detail around the word. We’ve seen in multiple eye tracking studies that foveal focus (the center of the field of vision) tends to hit the query in the title, but peripheral vision begins to pick up words surrounding the title. In our original eye tracking study, we called this semantic mapping. In Peter Pirolli’s book, “Information Foraging,” he referred to this activity as spreading activation. It’s after the “pop out” match that the prefrontal cortex again kicks into gear. As additional words are picked up, they are used to reinforce the original scent cue. Additional words from the result pull concepts into the prefrontal cortex (recognized URL, feature, supporting information, price, brand), which tend to engage different cortical regions as long-term memory labels are paged and brought back into the working memory. If enough matches with the original mental construct of the information sought are registered, the link is clicked.

Next week, we’ll look at the nature of this memory recall, including the elusive brand message.

Picking and Choosing What We Pay Attention To

First published October 9, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In a single day, you will be assaulted by hundreds of thousands of discrete bits of information. I’m writing this from a hotel room on the corner of 43rd and 8th in New York. Just a simple three-block walk down 8th Avenue will present me with hundreds bits of information: signs, posters, flyers, labels, brochures. By the time I go to sleep this evening, I will be exposed to over 3,000 advertising messages. Every second of our lives, we are immersed in a world of detail and distraction, all vying for our attention. Even the metaphors we use, such as “paying attention,” show that we consider attention a valuable commodity to be allocated wisely.

 

Lining Up for the Prefrontal Cortex

Couple this with the single-mindedness of the prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory. There, we work on one task at a time. We are creatures driven by a constant stack of goals and objectives. We pull our big goals out, one and a time, often break it into sub goals and tasks, and then pursue these with the selective engagement of the prefrontal cortex. The more demanding the task, the more we have to shut out the deluge of detail screaming for our attention.

Our minds have an amazingly effective filter that continually scans our environment, subconsciously monitoring all this detail, and then moving it into our attentive focus if our sub cortical alarm system determines we should give it conscious attention. So, as we daydream our way through our lives, we don’t unconsciously plow through pedestrians as they step in front of us. We’re jolted into conscious awareness until the crisis is dealt with, working memory is called into emergency duty, and then, post crisis, we have to try to pick up the thread of what we were doing before. This example shows that working memory is not a multi-tasker. It’s impossible to continue to mentally balance your check book while you’re trying to avoid smashing into the skateboarding teen who just careened off the side walk. Only one task at a time, thank you.

You Looked, but Did You See?

The power of our ability to focus and filter out extraneous detail is a constant source of amazement for me. We’ve done several engagement studies where we have captured physical interactions with an ad (tracked through an eye tracker) on a web page of several seconds in duration, then have participants swear there was no ad there. They looked at the ad, but their mind was somewhere else, quite literally. The extreme example of this can be found in an amusing experiment done by University of Illinois  cognitive psychologist  Daniel J. Simons and now enjoying viral fame through YouTube. Go ahead and check it out  before you read any further if you haven’t already seen it. (Count the number of times the white team passes the ball)

This selective perception is the door through which we choose to let the world into our conscious (did you see the Gorilla in the video? If not, go back and try again). And its door that advertisers have been trying to pry through for the past 200 years at least. We are almost never focused on advertising, so, in order for it to be effective, it has to convince us to divert our attention from what we’re currently doing. The strategies behind this diversion have become increasingly sophisticated. Advertising can play to our primal cues. A sexy woman is almost always guaranteed to divert a man’s attention. Advertising can throw a road block in front of our conscious objectives, forcing us to pass through them. TV ads work this way, literally bringing our stream of thought to a screeching halt and promising to pick it up again “right after these messages”. The hope is that there is enough engagement momentum for us to keep focused on the 30 second blurb for some product guaranteed to get our floors/teeth/shirts whiter.

Advertising’s Attempted Break-In

The point is, almost all advertising never enjoys the advantage of having working memory actively engaged in trying to understand its message. Every variation has to use subterfuge, emotion or sheer force to try to hammer its way into our consciousness. This need has led to the industry searching for a metric that attempts to measure the degree to which our working memory is on the job. In the industry, we call it engagement. The ARF defined engagement as “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding media context.” Really, engagement is better described as smashing through the selective perception filter.

In a recent study, ARF acknowledged the importance of emotion as a powerful way to sneak past the guardhouse and into working memory. Perhaps more importantly, the study shows the power of emotion to ensure memories make it from short term to long term memory: “Emotion underlies engagement which affects memory of experience, thinking about the experience, and subsequent behavior.  Emotion is not a peripheral phenomenon but involves people completely.  Emotions have motivational properties, to the extent that people seek to maximize the experience of positive emotions and to minimize the experience of negative emotions.  Emotion is fundamental to engagement.  Emotion directs attention to the causally significant aspects of the experience, serves to encode and classify the ‘unusual’ (unexpected or novel) in memory, and promotes persisting rehearsal of the event-memory. In this way, thinking/feeling/memory articulates the experience to guide future behaviors.”

With this insight into the marketing mindset, honed by decades of hammering away at our prefrontal cortex, it’s little wonder why the marketing community has struggled with where search fits in the mix. Search plays by totally different neural rules. And that means its value as a branding tool also has to play by those same rules.  I’ll look at that next week.