Craig Bailey.net

Location, Search and Google’s Patent

Craig Bailey — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:01:24 +0000

Google’s patent awarded last week for using location in advertising is interesting news (patent details here via VentureBeat). Not because of the dramatic effect (dun, dun, dah) it might have on the industry . No, the key point here is they submitted the patent for consideration back in September 2003.

This is significant because it shows the foresight Google has.

Sure, the concept of location isn’t new – people have been talking about it (or at least claiming to have talked about it) for more than a decade. And recently the talk has reached mainstream discussion. But most of that talk (myself included) has been about location enabled services.

Google on the other hand – with patents like the one mentioned above – was proactively making monetization plans seven (7) years ago. To put this in perspective time-wise, this is around the same time they launched AdWords.

This is another indication of the gulf between Google and its competitors (Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, etc) when it comes to search. Google has been working on these concepts for so long now, it’s difficult to see how any of their competitors can catch up (especially when we see how primitive Steve Ballmer’s ‘insights’ remain – discussed later).

By the way, don’t get worried about Foursquare, Yelp and other location enabled services, they won’t be affected (contrary to what some blogs misunderstood) since this patent is about using location in advertising delivery. They’re safe. Rather, it’s the companies that use location in their advertising services that should be feeling uncomfortable – for example if Opera uses location information to alter inserted ads in the compressed pages they return.

Aside: Location versus Local Search

BTW, a little clarification on location in search versus local search (since they are often confused). Both are surprisingly complex but here’s a simple overview:

Local search is when a user searches for something specific to a location eg ’sydney airport parking’ and the results that are returned take the location terms (’sydney airport’ in this case) into account.

Using location in search is about search engines using your current location to tailor the results you get eg searching for ‘nearest hospital’ would be a situation where you’d experience this. The search engines have done this for years based on broad location (eg IP address based) and are constantly refining it based on other factors (eg GPS, Wi-Fi and cellular triangulation). And obviously, mobile devices are a particularly appropriate platform for this.

The two can overlap eg when you are physically at Sydney airport and search for ‘nearest parking’ you’ll likely get similar results – often referred to as the ‘where I am versus where I am going’ overlap.

But the big opportunity is when it comes to advertising. Advertisers want maximum control over where and how their ads are shown, and under what circumstances (eg based on the searcher’s specific location, and what they are searching for). Plus in most markets the location will be used for non included keywords (eg searching for ‘nearest dominos pizza’ can return results for other vendor’s locations as well – not just other vendor’s ads).

[BTW it’s not just traditional ads – already we’re seeing Google charge for enhanced organic location results in their 7-packs.]

But back to Google’s foresight…

OK, so we know that location is important, right? Google obviously saw the dollar potential back in 2003.

It’s foresight like this that makes me wonder what Google is working on and patenting now.

By the way, I’ve been following Eric Schmidt a lot more lately. Not that I think he’s particularly charismatic, but I do think he’s fucking smart – even if he still doesn’t get privacy .

No matter what he’s questioned on, he brings an interesting perspective. Take his off-hand comments about Twitter (recorded a year ago) (thanks to Matt Cutts for the link). Most people think about social interaction. Eric thinks about storage and identity. Google is, at it’s core, a data company, and they approach Twitter in terms of data. I wonder what patent they’ve got in play there…

What about Microsoft?

Let’s move on to Microsoft. How will location, mobile advertising and Google’s patent affect them. In fact, how is Microsoft responding in general to the moving target that is Search. Perhaps Steve Ballmer can bring us up to speed…

Unlikely. What a disappointment Steve Ballmer’s keynote at SMX West last week was (embedded below). If you haven’t got time to watch the video (it’s 49 minutes) have a read of Jennita’s summary on this SEOmoz post or Lisa Barone’s excellent coverage on this Outspoken Media post (oh and while you’re there make sure you subscribe to the Outspoken blog – highly recommended).

This could have been *the* opportunity for Microsoft to give us some confidence about their search initiatives; some insights into how they’re going to change the game. But no. Instead Steve trotted out much of the same stuff he spoke about at MIX 08 (yes, two years ago). At the time I’d been impressed with his perspective, today I’m wondering what else he’s going to do… because passing references to personal search, social search, cash back, alluding to game-changer, and an understanding that the ‘search market is still young and we see opportunities’ won’t cut it.

Admittedly, part of the problem was Danny Sullivan’s questions – they were *soft hitting* to say the least. The main problem though is that Microsoft is so far behind the game, and Steve knows they need to focus on growing search share as their highest priority. Perhaps talking about any innovation they’ll be making in search would be construed as them getting ahead of themselves?

But I could hope couldn’t I? Hope to hear about them embracing key growth areas (eg location based search on mobile). Instead we were ‘treated’ to a discourse into regulation, anti-trust issues against Google and advertiser lock-ins before moving onto a few comments about the China situation. Sheesh! At least Steve rightly referred to them as ’sideshows’. I thought we were here to learn about Microsoft’s insights into Search, not their response to agendas set by Google!

Towards the end of the chat, Danny finally gives Steve the gift question when he asks: What is the biggest opportunity in search?

The floor’s yours Steve. Please deliver. Please redeem yourself. Please give us hope.

Despair. Steve answers with a platitude: ‘The biggest opportunity is helping people get done what they need to get done’. Worse, he then outlines some of the problems he personally runs into when searching. Yes, Steve, but what are you doing about it? How are you solving this problem? Give us some substance. Details. Anything that would give us pause to consider moving to Bing. Anything but the stunning insight that you ‘see this as an opportunity’…

This, from the company that will be Google’s biggest competitor in search (as they will be once the Yahoo search deal completes later this year).

Back to that patent

And so we return to Google’s recently awarded patent. Should we be worried? Yes, we should.

When a company has:

The foresight this patent signals
70%+ search market share and online advertising market dominance
Platitudes as the response from their nearest competitor

then we can be reasonably confident/scared they are only going to get stronger.

To this observer it seems that Microsoft is attempting to compete with the Google of 2005. And in the next five years they may even make some in-roads… At which stage they’ll be fighting a Google that is 10 years ahead of them.

Video Ezy Chatswood

Craig Bailey — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:58:09 +0000

Just wanted to give a shout out to our local DVD store: Video Ezy at Chatswood.

They’re just down on the corner of Victoria Avenue and Neridah Street near Chatswood Chase.

Why this post?

Well, two reasons. The first is mentioned in my disclaimer at the bottom, but the second – and most important – is because we want more people to patronise them.

We’ve been happy customers there for more than a decade, and currently take advantage of their $39.95 a month membership. There’s no lock-in, so we can cancel at any time. And we get to hire 4 DVDs at once. Overnight videos need to be returned (or renewed) the next day, but 3 day and weekly hires we can keep as long as we like.

This latter feature is particularly useful for watching TV shows, which we do a lot. Oh, and that’s another thing – they have a great TV show range. Just about every show you can think of (eg The Wire, The Tudors, Life, NCIS, The L-Word, Breaking Bad, Heroes, Bones, Sarah Connor Chronicles, etc as well as all the comedies 2 1/2 men, Seinfeld, Scrubs, How I met Your Mother, etc) are there. In fact they have one of the best ranges of TV shows I’ve seen (and I’ve been to at least one other store ). And bonus, on the older shows hiring the entire series counts as one DVD.

But the best part –> the staff: Matt, Chelsea, Lucy, Jack, Andie, Hannah, Angie, Bec & Adrian – they all rock. Sometimes we go in just to chat to the staff – they should set up a little cafe in there. Flat White with one please!

View Larger Map

[Their other claim to fame is they have the 4th largest blue-ray collection in the state. But this is useless to us since we don’t have a blu ray player. … yet]

(Disclaimer: this post is also part of an experiment)

Sydney WordPress Event at SBTUG

Craig Bailey — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:14:18 +0000

I’m looking for Sydney’s hottest WordPress developers to come and present at SBTUG this month. And to clarify, by ‘hottest’ I mean ‘skilled’ – this isn’t a calendar photo shoot

We’re having a huge WordPress event at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) on Wed 24 Feb 2010, covering all facets of using WordPress as a web platform for business.

We’re planning to have 5 sessions covering:

WordPress as a CMS
WordPress for Blogging
WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
WordPress Customisation & Themes
WordPress Hosting

Plus case studies, plug-in recommendations and integration/customisation tips.

The aim is two-fold:

Give business owners (and developers) an insight into the benefits (and limitations) of using WordPress for their company, along with the ability to meet vendors who provide WordPress services, and
Give WordPress developers and WordPress services companies the ability to network with potential customers

To that end, we’re looking for exceptional WordPress developers/firms to come along and present for approx 20mins each + questions, and be part of a big panel Q+A session at the end. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

UPDATE: To clarify – this event is not aimed at existing experienced WordPress developers. It is aimed at developers and business owners who may have dabbled with WordPress but want to know more. It’s about alerting them to the benefits of using WordPress for their business. It’s about educating people as to how awesome WordPress is. And to do that I need Sydney’s *hottest* WordPress developers to help me!

Could I ask you to please spread the word.

If you are interested, or able to recommend someone – please contact me at craig@craigbailey.net

The price of a useful enhancement

Craig Bailey — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:16:32 +0000

What larks!

I wonder what metrics Microsoft uses to calculate the benefit of a new feature. Take the new battery notifications messages added in Windows 7 for example. On paper, and during testing, that must have seemed like a useful feature to have in the product – it certainly seems useful to me.

Instead, when the feature actually worked as it was supposed to it turned out to be a mini PR issue for the company, as sites reporting that ‘Microsoft is investigating battery notification issues…’ steadily appeared.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with reporting that there might be an issue (thankfully it didn’t turn into the sky-is-falling fiasco of the T-Mobile data hiccup), but I shudder to think how much time and energy Microsoft had to invest into investigating the reports, speaking with partners and then conducting testing into the occurrences. And that’s not even counting the gynormous cost of Steven Sinofsky (his hourly rate must be up there) writing his clarification post over on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. Great post by the way!

I can imagine the next meeting of the ‘Windows 7 Battery Notification’ team. ‘Hey great feature folks. Nice work. But unfortunately we’ve had to make you all redundant. Steven’s post was charged to our cost center and the budget for the next year is all gone…’

I wouldn’t be surprised if a quiet Windows Update in the next month or two just simply removes this feature altogether. There, problem solved!

Let this be a sobering thought to all developers out there unlucky enough to be tasked with estimating the cost of a simple new feature:

Specification of feature: 4 hours
Cost of development: 12 hours
Testing and deployment: 8 hours
Investigation into and write up of supposed problems caused by the feature: 2,396 hours

Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit

Craig Bailey — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:16:24 +0000

If you are interested in knowing a little more about the IIS SEO Toolkit (I give it the big thumbs up), I’ve written a little review over on my XEN SEO blog (note I originally wrote the review based on the beta version, but it has been updated based on the release in mid Jan). Plus, as mentioned in my previous post, I also discussed the SEO Toolkit with Andrew and Michael on Frankly Speaking last week.

And if you are in Sydney tomorrow (Wed 10 Feb), I’ll be presenting on it at the Sydney Windows User Group (here’s the SWUG post with details). Tomorrow will be a big night – its the first SWUG meeting for 2010 and Nick (@aussienick) has some great prizes lined up including a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. He’s also presenting on the latest Entertainment Technology news straight from the horses mouth – Robbie Bach that is – and an update on the latest Microsoft product releases. See you there! You can RSVP for the meeting here.

Frankly Speaking on SEO

Craig Bailey — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:06:40 +0000

A big thank you to Andrew Coates and Michael Kordahi for having me on their Frankly Speaking podcast to chat about SEO. You can listen to it here.

Frankly Speaking (for those who aren’t yet familiar with it) is an Australian Tech podcast (or perhaps even an Australian Microsoft podcast) and listening to it should be on your weekly To-Do list.

SEO is a big topic of course so we only scratched the surface, but here’s a summary and links to the various items we touched on:

Danny Sullivan on SEO for Bill Gates – in which Danny reviewed Bill Gates’ new site The Gates Notes and provided a bunch of suggestions for how he could improve his search engine rankings. (By the way, in the podcast I referred to Danny as the grandfather of SEO, I meant to say the grandmaster of SEO )
Bill Gates on Twitter: @BillGates
Search innovation – Google releases 100-120 experiments each quarter
Ranking factors – I recommend this Ranking Factors article from SEOmoz for a full run down of important items to consider, and for simple basics that you can action today take a look at my SEO for bloggers overview.
Plus make sure you read Google’s SEO Starter Guide (PDF download here)
Ego surfing: Michael Kordahi on Bing, Michael Kordahi on Google and of course: google street view nude
ASP.NET 4.0 improvements for SEO – see Scott Guthrie’s post here
Self hosted WordPress
Topsy – WordPress plug-in for showing Twitter mentions as blog post comments
IIS SEO Toolkit – Recommended for analysing issues on your site and highlighting problems. You may be interested in the full IIS SEO Toolkit review I did over on the XEN SEO site.
To check how many people are searching particular keywords try the Google Keyword tool or the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Excel plug-in (review here)
Google analytics – other analytics tools I use include: Clicky, Chartbeat, ClickTale and Mint (note: Mint is self hosted and requires PHP & MySQL)
Mark Vozzo (on Twitter) <- SEO guru
Building a niche – Copyblogger article
Link building – excellent overview by Aaron Wall (from SEO Book) <- highly recommended
There’s tons of good SEO resources out there (and plenty of noise as well). Here’s a list of the main SEO resources I recommend for getting up to speed.

Have a listen here.

BTW I wanted to apologise for the volume of my voice being low at times. This is due to one of the following reasons (I’ll let you decide which):

I’m really shy and talk softly
I have bad microphone technique and even though Michael spent a while giving me tips at the start and then repeatedly gesturing for me to speak closer to the microphone throughout the interview I kept moving away from it.

In any case, they did a great job boosting up my volume in the final cut. Thanks guys.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, congrats to Christian Longstaff on baby number #2 arriving this week.

Putting the boot in to Microsoft

Craig Bailey — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 04:45:26 +0000

Apparently February is ‘put the boot into Microsoft’ month. I must have missed the memo. Or perhaps it only got sent to the ex-senior-management@microsoft.com mailing list. In any case it’s been good to see that some have taken the directive to heart. Oh hang on, cancel that – there actually hasn’t been much said by former softies at all. Instead it’s just all the noise of journalists (and Microsoft!) reporting on what one or two (and perhaps three) former softies said.

If you haven’t yet written your own second-hand post about the internal woes of working at Microsoft and how they are doomed to failure, you’d better get started. Otherwise people will think you’re behind the times in reporting what Dick Brass in the New York Times outlined as Microsoft’s main ‘problem’: making billions of profit every year from the same products (it’s sooo not cool).

Thankfully we have Mary Jo Foley to sprinkle a little common sense around and Todd Bishop to put it into perspective.

Search as an Experience

Craig Bailey — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:10:29 +0000

It’s easy to think of search (ie searching on Google or Bing) as simply a (boring) research activity. And in turn, to think that all the innovation in search is about providing a ‘better’ result. But what does ‘better’ mean when it comes to search?

Joseph Pine’s TED talk on what consumers want is a good insight into how the search game is changing (and hat tip to Michael Gray for the link and thought). Joseph’s talk is from 2004, but his point is relevant now. It’s essentially this: people want an experience. And they want an experience with authenticity.

Consider how the UX and designer communities have grown in the last few years and you’ll have in an insight into how people want to interact with their programs/gadgets/sites… even their line of business (LOB) apps. They want a pleasurable experience. Something that they can relate to.

Why should search be any different? When searching, we want an experience. It’s why Bing added pretty pictures, flyouts and visual search, and why Google is pushing things like personalised search and social search (to name just a few examples – the rate of innovation in the engines is huge). It’s more than just the results. It’s how we relate to the results that matters.

Search market increases in 2009

Craig Bailey — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:39:00 +0000

It should come as no surprise that search engine usage is increasing – but perhaps the rate of increase will (come as a surprise that is). comScore figures released this month show that search usage (note: includes search engines and related properties) increased by 46% in 2009. Google sites were in the order of 58% increase.

That’s significant. How many industries do you know (or work in) that have that kind of increase? Whether you take the numbers as a threat or an opportunity is up to you, but either way you should be acting on them. It’s rare to find a business these days that doesn’t have at least some exposure via the web.

If you are a web developer (or web designer for that matter) SEO should be part of your core skill set (and not left to high priced consultants). Sadly though it tends to get neglected, or even worse, discouraged. On the positive side however, I’m glad to see that SEO questions on stackoverflow.com are increasing, even if some of the answers that get voted up are unhelpful (in my opinion). Part of the problem is that SEO performed on sites is hard to immediately test. If you’ve got a question on javascript you’ll get an answer you can test and know straight away if it solves the problem. But with SEO you’re in the dark for a while until the results start to show (via analytics, rankings, conversions or other metrics). It’s a difficult scenario for analytical types to accept. But with the increased importance of search optimisation (even Bill and Steve are getting it now) it’s a mindset developers need to foster. Start experimenting yourself (here’s some simple seo suggestions) and make a point of learning more (here’s some recommended seo resources).

(via Aaron Wall’s excellent post this morning on Selling Hope to the Hopeless)

Angus McDonald discusses Watir

Coding Kihon

Craig Bailey — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:56:26 +0000

I loved Sara Ford’s thoughts about coding katas. Yes, most coding should really be referred to as coding kihon (as you practice daily), and coding kumite when you’re deep in a project. Nice one. I also enjoyed Steve Andrew’s post on Shotokan Development that Sara linked to.

Oh, and good luck in your new role Sara.