TL;DR: For search to evolve to the next level it needs to use more senses in the user/engine conversation.

It is incredible what people will put up with because they accept certain standards to be just that – standards – and thus they learn to be content with the solutions provided to them at the time inside of what current thinking and or technology defines as the limits of said standard.

This was true before the invention of the wheel, before Johannes Gensfleisch started the “Printing Revolution” and fast-forward to today it is true for what search has done to the information age replacing the directory. All these inventions and their subsequent evolutionary steps have helped to shape today’s world.

Sometimes making the next step and evolve to the next higher level can be hard, because we have come to accept the world we live in.

In his book Sophie’s World the author Jostein Gaarder explains the issue with this “acceptance” so much more brilliantly that I could ever  – so here it goes:

“The only thing we require to be good philosophers [replace with pretty much any other occupation] is the faculty of wonder.”

 

To summarize briefly: A white rabbit is pulled out of a top hat. Because it is an extremely large rabbit, the trick takes many billions of years. All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit’s fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick.

But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling back up the fragile hairs again.

Only philosophers [again replace] embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink.

 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” they yell, “we are floating in space!” But none of the people down there care.
“What a bunch of troublemakers!” they say. And they keep on chatting: Would you pass the butter, please? How much have our stocks risen today? What is the price of tomatos?

But back to the issue

Lately if you look at what happens in search it seems like a lot of running around deep inside the fur of this well oiled money making machine worrying about the equivalent of the current price of Tomatoes.

You might rightfully think now – “well that’s all good and true but we need to care about those things that are just a reality” and you are right. I’ll admit there is a need to worry about things like that but with regards to search we have been worrying about these minor things for ten or twelve years now – that is enough – search has to evolve.

From strip-search to a conversation – oh the signals

I don’t remember who said that first, but today the interaction with the search engines feels much like strip-search or a scene from Full Metal Jacket. We “scream” words not sentences at the machine and retrieve back a list of documents that have a relationship to the phrases we used.

But the way this works is fundamentally flawed because of the lack of signals we have available to gage the relevancy of the response in general and it only gets worse if we look at the relevancy for the individual.

Page and Brin stumbled on a brilliant thing when they discovered that in the way  the number of citation a scientific paper would get much like websites are connected through links is an additional signal to help gage a documents authority within the system.  Later they found that looking at anchor texts you could even make assumptions of the document topic without having to look at the document itself. But in essence “all” they did is to figure out that you could significantly increase the quality of results by incorporating signals that were outside the confined space that had been accepted as the standard back then.

Seeing this in action was a marvel at the time and today it still is part of the core of what search engines use to rank their results.

Over the last couple of years social Signals made their entry to the web and maybe a year or two ago found their way into the pool of signals used.

This is a pretty fundamental change to the search world, much like the before PageRank and the after PageRank world.

Why? Well because in todays web you get signals from a billion people as compared to the pre social world where website owners were the “only” people sending these signals in the form of links. If you think about that it is pretty huge!

But although this brave new signal world from the social web is exciting for search on a certain level it is still worrying about Tomato prices.

So what’s next? Why is search so limited and how do we get at least some way up the hairs of the rabbit?

You see search historically has always been a conversation. If you were looking for information you would ask someone whom you think knows best. And more so you would have a back and forth that search engines try to mimic with filters in todays search interfaces.

The search-filters however are kind of flawed as the web is a HUGE junk of data that is pretty much unstructured if you look at it horizontally.  By the way – the fact that todays search players ask you to structure your data better, so they can make sense of it, seems much like the efforts of Hollywood trying to protect their failed business and distribution model.

What might seemingly work in some vertical scenarios like category type searches in say the “Yellow Pages” world just doesn’t scale to areas where data is less structured.

But back to the conversation, where a human interaction in real life has a myriad of signals that are consciously and unconsciously shared.

The players in search have decided to ignore most of the human senses much like the three monkeys we all know.

Sight, Hearing, Taste, Smell, Touch, Balance, Temperature, Pain

What seems to be surprising here is that the industry only looks for new signals within the confines of its limited space while ignoring the rest.

Just a simple example to illustrate – today a search engine acts as if nothing matters but the words you put into the form field.

[I know that they all want your user history, profile information etc. but in large they don’t know – at least not for sure – as on the Internet you can be a dog]

It doesn’t care if you are a man or woman, if you are 5 or 105, if you are drunk or sober, if you are rich or poor, if you are a banker or a magician. The list goes on and on.

You could say – well for once everyone is equal – right?  But the issue with that is searchers aren’t equal. And therein lies a problem/massive opportunity.

The guy in the DIY store today is infinitely better at getting you from DIY idea to done than today’s search engine can. Why? – Because he interacts with you on so many levels/senses in parallel even before you talk to him. He can tell a lot by looking at your appearance height, weight, clothes, age and so on. Once you start the conversation part, the signals continue to flow. He can tell if you e.g. are new to DIY very quickly by “analyzing” your vocabulary and will adjust his accordingly.

It gets even more obvious if you think about a doctor’s appointment. He can tell more based on seeing that you look pale, cough a lot etc. than he might if you just gave him a call or worse just write him an e-mail – probably closest to the search offerings today.

Being a non-native English speaker myself – add to the scenario what happens when there is a language barrier. Without the use of senses a doctor can’t do his job well and so can’t search engines.

The search for answers – especially more complex ones – can be an order of magnitude more efficient if it would use more senses.  

Now I know that most of the players have at least started to dip their toes into what could lead to progress in this field.  Google’s speech search, Microsoft’s Kinect etc.

But it still seems mindboggling that in the last 12 years we have not seen more significant advances in these areas and even less so in the mass market.

Unless of course you think about two things

1. 1.     Who the players are
2. Money

You can actually skip 1. And go straight to 2.

The current business model of advertising in search won’t work in the “sense search world” – at least not in the way it does today.

And as much as today’s players would probably like to get to the next evolutionary step – they are public companies, out there to increase the shareholder-value and under enormous pressure to look great in the next earnings call.

Sure they all have R&D facilities but if I had to make a bet – I would put my money on a new player winning the race. And it is a race that IMHO is not going to have an all American starter field.

What do you think – when will we get sense powered search?

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

The dawning age of sense powered search – or how the three monkeys ruin search for us

But first things first; I still have love for Bing, my Windows Phone, my Xbox and last but not least Microsoft as they have been an exceptional employer. Much like Yahoo! had been for me in the past.

I will sincerely miss the folks from our search technology centers in Munich and London. Jordi, Mike, Antonio, Andreas, Travis, Nick, Ian, Eddie, Geoff, Jasmina, Simon, Thomasz and the others who are working their butts off to make Bing better every single day. And it is tremendous to see where Bing in Europe is today compared to where it has been 3 Years ago.

We/They all know that there is still a long and exciting way ahead, but what has been achieved with the resources at hand is truly remarkable. You guys rock!

Same goes for my local team here – they are a great bunch! Christian who ditched us for Hotmail way too soon – never thought I could get along with someone from the land of crafty road thief’s and home of the most uninspired flag in the world. Not having Christoph sit next to me and nodding and giving good advice when I complain/whine how unfair and mean the world is, will send me in a state of withdrawal.

As to Anton – what can I say – “hod scho passt” which is a Bavarian expression of understatement meaning that it was really great – but a Bavarian would never say let alone write something that extreme.

Well now that you know all is fabulous and shiny you ask why leave then?

There are a few things that are crucial for me in a job. One very important thing is learning new things and getting better at what I do. That was the exact reason to join Microsoft three years ago. I have held multiple product roles in the past and wanted to sink my teeth more into the marketing side of things.

And Bing has been a fantastic place to learn more about this. We launched a global new search product and had and have incredibly smart/clever campaigns running.  Have you seen the Jay-Z campaign????

Witnessing, with and inside out look, how marketing is done on scale is a truly fascinating thing. But now I feel I have learned quite a bit about that and am excited to move on.

Just as important as learning new thing is the craving I have to make an impact.

And as far as my local organization is concerned I was very much encouraged to pursue that. And we did. I’m especially proud of all the work we have put into learning from and enabling the search community in Germany. We have made countless friends over the course of the years and have gotten great insights that we then shared with our engineers to help make Bing better.

Thanks to everybody involved. Special Thanks got to Stefan Weitz, Prof. Dr. Mario Fischer, Marcus Tandler, Uwe Tippmann, Stefan Fischerländer, Alan Webb, Marcus Schöberichts, Sandra Finlay, Pascal Fantou, Marco Janck, Martin Missfeldt, Johannes Beus, Hanns Kronenberg , Thomas Bindl, Daniel Melanchton Colm Bracken, Rand Fishkin, Niels Dörje, Prof. Dr. Franz Guenthner, Cedric Chambaz and everybody I’m forgetting now.

As to what’s next… stay tuned!

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

True – I’m leaving Microsoft

Microsoft has released a new SEO Toolkit for download. It comes with a nice set of features and I definetely think its worth checking out.

You can find the download here: Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

Site Analysis Features

• Fully featured crawler engine
• Configurable number of concurrent requests to allow users to crawl their Web site without incurring additional processing. This can be configured from 1 to 16 concurrent requests.
• Support for Robots.txt, allowing you to customize the locations where the crawler should analyze and which locations should be ignored.
• Support for Sitemap files allowing you to specify additional locations to be analyzed.
• Support for overriding ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ metatags to allow you to analyze pages to help improve customer experience even when search engines will not process them.
• Configurable limits for analysis, maximum number of URLs to download, and maximum number of kilobytes to download per URL.
• Configurable options for including content from only your directories or the entire site and sub domains.
• View detailed summary of Web site analysis results through a rich dashboard
• Feature rich Query Builder interface that allows you to build custom reports
• Quick access to common tasks
• Display of detailed information for each URL
• View detailed route analysis showing unique routes to better understand the way search engines reach your content

Robots Exclusion Features

• Display of robots content in a friendly user interface
• Support for filtering, grouping, and sorting
• Ability to add ‘disallow’ and ‘allow’ paths using a logical view of your Web site from the result of site analysis processing
• Ability to add sitemap locations

Sitemap and Sitemap Index Features

• Display of sitemaps and sitemap index files in a simple user interface
• Support for grouping and sorting
• Ability to add/edit/remove sitemap and sitemap index files
• Ability to add new URL’s to sitemap and sitemap index files using a physical or logical view of your Web site
• Ability to register a sitemap or sitemap index into the robots exclusion file

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

New SEO Toolkit from Microsoft

Bing Europe or better the STC (Search Technology Center) Europe has opened some new head counts in their engineering department. For all of our three locations Munich, Paris and London we are looking for Program Managers, Software Development Engineers and Software Development Engineers in Test.

The Munich STC is focusing on core web search relevancy, the Paris one focuses on local search challenges while the London STC focuses on the frontend and the user experience part of what makes Bing such a great thing.

Job opportunities at the STC Europe

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Bing is looking for Smart(est) Minds – Developers and Program Managers

Since yesterday Stefan Weitz is back in Germany and we had the pleasure to be guest @ the mediaplex. Where the Mediadonis was co-hosting the webmasterradio.fm show webmasters on the roof. Marcus and Stefan talked a lot about Bing, where search is heading and what Bing is doing to fight spam. Plus some great insights on how CTR might be used to rank organic listings. Really worthwhile to listen in – the first half hour of the show is in German but the second 30 minutes are pretty much in English.

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Bing on the Roof

It’s been a while… a pretty busy one. But I wanted to share a couple of upcoming events I’ll be at. First one will be PubCon in Las Vegas. Just booked my flights and Hotel today and am really looking forward to meet a lot of people and spend some “quality time” at the casino PubCon will be all networking for me – so nothing to organize and 100& free schedule till now. Please do let me know if ur attending and want to meet for a chat or a coffee or just say hi.

Next up will be SES Berlin just the week after… (dammed that’s pretty close) Stefan Weitz will be here in Germany again. First in Munich for a Münchner Kreis  appearance and a couple of surrounding events including an exclusive dinner event.  There will be a lecture of Stefan at the FH Würzburg as well as an DPE event here at the Microsoft offices in Munich. After the weekend we will be off to SES Berlin where Stefan will be speaking. I’m kind of still working on organizing a booth and some giveaways – any good idea drop me a line (am thinking Bing Shirts till now).

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

SES Berlin & PubCon in Las Vegas

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Bing TV ad – start ur engine …

Live was going to be bing and now bing is live

Go check it out! Bing.com

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Bing is Live now – in the open…

When Stefan was here last week he did give a couple of interviews. One was recorded on video linked below.

Click on the questions to see the videos:

• Why shouldn’t people be happy with their search results?
• Which search engine changes are necessary to satisfy the needs of users?
• How will online search change in the future?

The full article is in German and can be found here.

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Video Interview: Stefan Weitz talks about the future of Search

This is a short clip of the SMX Munich Keynote held by Stefan Weitz last week.

The two facts that did stick in my head the most were that 65% to 80% of all people were happy with their search engine. Quite a difficult situation when you want to get into a market like that. And fact number two was that 53% of all the people that are so happy with their search engine expect to be disappointed when trying to complete certain tasks with a search engine.

Stefan asked the audience what they would do if their car would only start 1 out of two times – that nicely illustrates how almost bizarre the situation with search efficiency today is. Almost like what has been described as Stockholm syndrome – we the users/hostages would love the search engine although it continues to disappoint us – weird.

-Frank

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Stockholm Syndrome – 53% of users expect to be disappointed but still love search