At the fall Ad:Tech in New York, there was an abundance of search on the session list. There were search sessions on selecting an agency, selecting search terms, understanding the search consumer (which I participated in), paid search campaign optimization, organic search, local search and even some performance art lampooning search. After the nearly total absence of search from the spring Ad:Tech show, it was a great rebound.

Or was it?

The sessions were hardly standing room only. In many, there were more empty seats than full ones. A sadly defining moment was when Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy raised his expected revenue for search in 2007 by almost 10 billion dollars. This should be huge news. Those of us in the industry did a double take. But the announcement echoed hollowly through an almost empty room. Apparently, the marketing industry didn’t really care.

In a quick conversation with organizers of the show, they expressed frustration at the lack of interest in search. As an industry we had lobbied hard to have a presence at the New York show, and Ad:Tech accommodated. They filled the roster with 9 different sessions that touched on search. But other topic areas drew much bigger crowds.

You Can Dress Search Up, But You Can’t Take Her Out.

I hate to point this out, but search just isn’t sexy. It’s the marketing you have to do, not the marketing you want to do. For those of us that are passionate about search, this is hard to understand. “What do you mean you don’t find my girlfriend attractive? ”

Perhaps the problem is that we tend to be a little myopic in our view. We’re immersed in the day-to-day detail. We can actually get excited about algorithmic changes and new file types being indexed. This is hardly the stuff of great cocktail conversations. There are not many 20-something-year-old marketers who would use their knowledge of dynamic URL rewriting as a pick up tactic at the post-show networking party.

An Hour to Learn, a Lifetime to Master

The other problem is that search is like golf. It’s not that hard to do it halfway right and get results. Grasping the basic concepts is pretty easy, at least on the sponsored side. Most marketers think they’ve got search nailed and there’s nothing more to learn.

But like golf, there’s a whole other dimension to search that almost no one has scratched, and it’s incredibly hard to master. Very few companies have an effective search strategy that spans both organic and sponsored channels. Even fewer have tapped into what I call the missing 40 percent of search strategies, truly understanding the mindset of the search consumer and effectively starting a relationship with them.

The other frustration in trying to paint a more enticing picture of search is that the truly intriguing developments are happening in the research labs of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! It would be fascinating to get these engineers to open up about where they want to take search, but no one is talking. They can’t, because the balance of power in a multi-billion dollar turf war is at stake.

Looking From the Outside In?

Perhaps the answer for Ad:Tech is to look at search from the outside in, rather than the inside out. More and more people from outside search are looking in and trying to understand how they can leverage this extremely effective marketing channel. “We know people use search, so let’s figure out how we can use that to our advantage.”

I know of brand strategists, academics, market research consultants, and consumer behavior experts that are starting to pay attention to the search phenomenon. They’re bringing fresh insights and approaching search from a much more strategic perspective. This outside interest is also indicative of the disappearing distinctions between search and other online ad delivery channels.

As you know, the lack of strategic thought in search is one of my greatest frustrations with our industry. Quit talking about A/B testing, bid gaps, and link building! Tell me about how, when, and why my target consumer will use search. Tell me how to effectively capture that consumer in a prospect pipeline that begins to build a rich relationship. Take a step back and show me the big picture, and how search integrates with it. And tease me with some really insightful discussion about how search will become the functional engine of advertising delivery online, delivering just the right message to the right person at the right time.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I do know that the marketing industry is a long way from knowing everything there is to know about search. I would hate to see search be conspicuously absent from the spring Ad:Tech line up.

First published Sept 14, 2004 in the Search Insider

While the elephants dance, there’s sometimes an opportunity for a mouse to change the world. And that may be just what’s happening in the world of search. In the aftermath of Google’s IPO and the continuous stream of search speculation from Microsoft, a small technology start up named Blinkx may have just changed the way we search.

With over a million downloads in under two months, Blinkx has been a hot topic on the download forums and blogs. Ironically, the big draw for Blinkx has more to do with finding the right piece of information on your desktop than with making the Web easier to search. No matter, the same technology powers both types of searches and introduces a paradigm shift for the entire industry. Almost all of Blinkx’s functionality sounds very similar to projects currently underway in Microsoft’s research labs. The difference is, Blinkx is out there and working right now, not two years from now.

I had a chance to chat with Suranga Chandratillake, one of the co founders of Blinkx and the CTO. It was fascinating.

Concepts rather than Words Blinkx takes the idea of search a step farther than the keyword bound interface used by Google and every other engine. Rather than asking the user to interpret what they’re looking for into a string of keywords and then launch a query, Blinkx examines the context of their current activity and tries to distill the desired concept from it.

For example, if you’re on a Web site about collecting 1970 Volkswagen Beetles, Blinkx will use all the relevant content on that page to create the key concept of what you might be looking for. It will then suggest matching sites based on the entire concept, rather than just two or three words. Chandratillake points out that this gives a much more accurate match, because you’re using the entire text of a page. If you want to restrict the text used to provide the match, just highlight the desired content and Blinkx will refine the query.

Search Suggestions in any Application The content used to create the concept doesn’t have to be a webpage. It could be an e-mail, a text document or even a spreadsheet. Once Blinkx is installed, it will take a screen shot of whatever you’re working on and quietly suggest both local files and web sites that seem to match the key concept of your file. The Blinkx tool bar loads icons on the top right of the toolbar and when it finds a match, the appropriate tab changes color. Blinkx has tabs for 7 different channels, including News, Products (shopping), Web, E-mails, Video Clips, Blogs and Local Files. The suggested links appear in a window when you roll over the tab.

Now Serving Suggestions Daily One of the interesting results that Blinkx found with the original users is a dramatic increase in the number of links chosen in a day. Traditionally, most users may turn to a search engine 5 to 10 times a day. This means most users might see 50 to 100 links. But when Blinkx is always there, suggesting relevant links, the number of links seen by the user rises dramatically. The average Blinkx user generally sees 200 to 250 links a day. As Chandratillake is quick to point out, this opens up some real potential in the area of search marketing. “When search is ubiquitous, users will look at it more. They don’t have to stop what they’re doing, go to the Web and search. We’re always there, making suggestions.”

Do the Elephants Care? Chandratillake is the first to admit Blinkx isn’t perfect. “There are still a lot of bits to figure out. The biggest hurdle for us right now is the size of our index, but that’s improving every day.” Small interface and usability issues aside, the question is how will Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft respond? This is potentially the biggest innovation in search in the past eight years. And the fact that it came from a small start-up rather than a major player indicates that the frontier of search is still alive and well. Copernic reportedly has a similar search appliance coming out soon.

Blinkx will have to find its place, and search users will have to understand this paradigm shift. But I’m betting those two things are inevitable. As Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue their dance, they’ll have to pay attention to this mouse, because it’s changing the tune of the entire search industry

First published August 19, 2004 in the Search Insider

Ahh…our fledgling little industry is growing up.

The little search marketing companies are unfurling their new wings and peering over the edge of the nest. Suddenly, venture capital firms are looking at search marketing technology with stars in their eyes. It’s beginning to seem that a few people are going to make a lot of money in this industry. And we’ve even got internal politics. All signs of an industry that’s finally ready for a run at the main stage. All of the signs became more apparent at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose this month. This event, for right or wrong, has become the regular group therapy session of search. It doesn’t seem to matter where it’s held, you’ll see all the familiar faces at Search Engine Strategies. “If it’s August, this must be San Jose!” We come, we bitch, we share…and then we go home, just to do it all again in a few months.

With each new show, the latest hot topic spreads from table to table at the networking lunches and cocktail parties. In Chicago (December) it was Google’s Florida Update. In New York (March) it was Yahoo’s unveiling of SiteMatch. And this time, for a change, it didn’t have anything to do with one of the big engines. This time, it was our own little industry and its new professional organization (SEMPO) that stirred up conversation along the hallways of the San Jose Conference Center.

It’s not easy to gain maturity. Lord knows it’s still a struggle for me. As search tries to claw its way onto Fortune 500 marketing budgets, the driving forces of the industry still have to figure out where it is they’re driving too. Is search still a cottage industry, a loose amalgam of hundreds of small shops, or is it starting to become big business?

Will search marketing be overseen by internal departments in the biggest companies and advertising agencies? Will the best of the little guys be gobbled up in the next few years, with the rest left to find a niche to survive in, or wither on the vine?

To make prognosticating even more difficult, we still have to wait for the technology to mature before we can see where the industry could go. Something like providing results targeted to geographic locations can have huge implications for us all.

The biggest thing I saw in San Jose was the beginning of a chasm developing in our industry. A handful of more sophisticated and forward thinking search marketers are starting to really explore what can be done in search. They’re thinking research and strategy, rather than linking tactics and meta tag optimization. They’ve refocused their vision to look at the large and emerging picture of search. In their wake, they’re leaving the more traditional firms behind. The firms are usually quite small and are still using tactics from 4 or 5 years ago.

One of the things that have frustrated many about our industry was the lack of differentiation between search marketing firms. Despite the huge spread in prices, we all pretty much said we offered the same things. The minute we started talking to a potential client, we started spouting works like organic optimization, link building, landing pages, bidding strategie, and ROI tracking. All of this is relatively unique to our industry and reflects an exclusively tactical approach.

In San Jose, I noticed a few search marketing companies starting to use a different vocabulary. Not new, different. It’s terminology that comes from marketing and is strategy based. We’re beginning to talk about customer profiling, identifying attitudes, the nature of the buying cycles, and the role of brand awareness. It’s a new way of speaking aimed at marketers, not Webmasters.

I believe years from now that the 2004 San Jose show will be a milestone in the industry. I think it will mark the beginning of a year that will dramatically alter the nature of the search marketing industry. We will grow up, and that will mean significant pain for many. Search will become much more sophisticated, and the price of entry to play the game may prove to be too expensive for many smaller providers. Alliances will form and total solutions will begin to emerge. Google and Yahoo! will have to address the huge amount of time and effort required to manage a large, sponsored search campaign. Real money will start to be invested and made.

And to think, one day I’ll be able to say I was there.