Traffick

How to Increase Browser Market Share: Release an OS

2009-07-08T12:46:00.004-04:00

Wow. A Google Operating System. We all knew it was coming, but it still feels weird to talk about it. It's a major departure from Google's humble roots... but it's a departure that left the station years ago, of course. Where better to read about it first than from Danny at Search Engine Land, though (wait for it) the very first mention of today's news item that I ran across happened to be by a fashion and entertainment reporter I happen to follow on Twitter. Hmmm.

The #1 browser in the market, IE, has long been buttressed by its integration with the world's #1 selling computer operating system. The ever-stronger #2 browser, Firefox, is not similarly blessed, making its rise even more impressive. The #3 browser, Safari, also has tight OS integration as its main beneficiary.

Google's browser, Chrome, is still languishing in fourth spot with 2-3% market share. I predicted they'd reach 7.5% share at least by 2010, and no more than 16%. Their chances of reaching 7.5% increase significantly if netbooks are sold containing the Chrome OS, but there's still a long ways to go. Inertia rules.

One open question facing all of this is: what's the business model with a free OS? Most of Google's lines of business outside of the ad-supported media continue to be cost centers. As the company grows, its profit margins continue to shrink. But perhaps taking over the world -- to say nothing of releasing cheaper, better software -- is more interesting than fat margins.

First dismissive mention of a potential Google OS on Traffick: November, 2003.

Google, The Portal, in New Land Grab

2009-07-07T10:21:00.004-04:00

The portal wars are back! This time around, perennial winner Google isn't battling it out with Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, and, er, Excite and Snap.

Rather, it's left with the rather easier task of sucking the oxygen out of the rooms vertical players like Zillow try to breathe in, and then battling any potential public image drawbacks to its growing status as a vertical-devouring meanie.

In the wake of Google's entry into the aggregation of property listings, Hitwise's Heather Hopkins notes the importance of the vertical: last week, 2% of Google traffic was sent off to listings in the real estate industry.

This brings up the potential contradictions and disingenuousness of the search engines' efforts to tout the merits of what's being called Universal or Blended search. The "death of the ten blue links" is a sexy way of dismissing clunky old search results pages and opening the door to a new age of more context-sensitive search results, to be sure. But when directly asked if the strategy isn't a way to keep more users on their own properties rather than sending them to those "downstream" sites Hopkins et al. spend their careers following, the search engines generally indicate something to the effect that they would never contemplate such a thing, or would "weigh these decisions in light of what's best for the user." Perhaps. But as predicted, Google's moves into blended search have done little to increase traffic (for example) for any video streaming site but YouTube. You can often extend that principle to other elements of these blends.

As Hopkins notes astutely: "The real question for Real Estate websites is whether (and when) property listings will be included in the search engine results page on Google.com." The search engines have plenty of alibis handy for their land grab behaviors -- for example, they've built out a variety of metasearch and aggregation models (such as Google Video and Yahoo Video) that offer due credit to a variety of third party providers. But the real power comes from that first page of SERP's -- the ones we keep such close watch on with heat maps and Google Analytics referral statistics (when they do refer traffic downstream, that is). Google isn't sending you from Google.com to some other provider of news headlines; it's sending you to Google News.

The powerful utility of the new tools tends to soften the fact that the major search engines are essentially moving back to a walled garden concept reminiscent of the old AOL, minus the wall and the subscription fee.

In the meantime, data providers are left with difficult choices: do I give all of this data/power to large centralized players with little hope of a formal agreement, let alone any explicit conversation or setting of positive expectations about outcomes? (In the tradition of Google Base and the public relations strategy around that: "Here it is. It's really important. Go nuts.") It's this ambiguity that has led more observers to refer to Google as little more than another "scraper site".

Ironically, such accusations are sometimes levelled by the purveyors of similar quasi-scraper schemes. It takes one to know one. In real estate as in so many verticals, any land grab is going to be reminiscent of a scene from Goodfellas. Arguably, though, sites like Zillow have made great headway in connecting personably and directly with homeowners; encouraging them to voluntarily join in an information exchange and convincing them persuasively of that benefit. Google has done nothing of the sort.

At the end of the day, I think (hope?) the search engines recognize the dangers inherent in leaving originating data sources and content providers devoid of traffic and income, so it is a matter of how much traffic they continue to send along to third party vertical players, rather than being an all-or-nothing scenario. Taken too far, companies that purport to be dialed into their core competency in "search" -- the implied mission being to send traffic downstream to originating content providers who've made heavy investments in content and community -- would morph back into walled-garden, AOL-thinking portals.

Gian Fulgoni, Where Have You Been?

2009-07-03T16:13:00.004-04:00

Really, it's not becoming my favorite thing to name names in headlines. But in light of Mr. Fulgoni's deliberate (if lighthearted) provocations of online "direct response" lovers, we must fight fire with fire. Or at least, on this statutory holiday, fireworks with fireworks.

When I read that comScore founder Gian Fulgoni yesterday told eMarketer that the "preoccupation with direct response" is "partly a response to so many young people being involved in Internet advertising," I nearly fell off my Big Wheel.

I suggest a different reason for clicks and sales conversions as key metrics in the marketing and advertising industry: they're objective. Much like:

The radar gun that tells the police officer you've been driving 20mph over the limit, in response to your opening salvo: "...but I was just having a nice, zippy day."

The 7.5 second time in the 40-metre dash that tells the college coaches that your son has zero chance to become a wide receiver at that level, let alone the pros, as opposed to "my boy has a big heart -- as big as they come!";

The growth in net profit that helps investors decide whether or not to buy Comscore (SCOR) stock;

The thermometer and hygrometer that tell your furnace, air conditioner, and dehumidifier/humidifier when to turn on and off;

Countless other measures of obvious stuff.

If measures of "brand lift" also prove useful, then so be it. But the interest in measuring the more obvious stuff didn't get dreamt up by some imaginary cabal of literal-minded rave-going Youth. Rather, it appears to be an unholy alliance among people called Clients (the ones with the dollars to spend on more measurable digital media channels, who by the way got burned by brand-speak in Bubble I in 1998-2000); Web Analysts and the inventors of tracking methods, software, etc.; and Customers (who often use online tools like search and classifieds to avoid being bombarded with off-topic commercial messages). The Designers of the Medium Itself (eg. Tim Berners-Lee) and the surfing tools people use to access the medium (eg. Lynx, Netscape) created something called Standards and Conventions that created Expectations in Users, later codified and explicated by the Usability Gods.

Performance-based media? Clients ask for it by name. Customers don't shrink from it. Perhaps that's why upwards of 60% of online ad spend goes to the combination of search and classifieds/local.

If we're going to tout the benefits of "all of the other media that impact a person's psyche," then shouldn't we hold them to account as well as singing their praises -- specifically pointing to their enormous cost, and at least attempting to measure the benefit?

On a serious note: online, there is still a shortage of the types of quality places to engage customers, to start conversations, and to (without making them rebel) place decent "demand creation" messages. Then again, are we conceiving of "online" too narrowly? A celebrity touting a hot new camera will find herself on TV ads and billboards at the ball park. But in my mind, those are all potentially "digital, measurable, targeted, and auction-efficient" media channels.

Creating new kinds of (digital and measurable) demand-creation media spaces isn't as easy as it looks, perhaps because of the conventions and expectations cited above. Nor is it impossible. The Internet isn't TV. It really isn't. That does not, of course, mean that we should close off innovative conversations about what digital might become.

Why Razorfish Divestiture Now?

2009-06-29T09:18:00.003-04:00

Back in 2007, we briefly reviewed the major M&A activity in the digital ad serving technology and digital agency spaces. Many of our panel observers felt that Google and Microsoft should immediately divest themselves of the agency parts of the DoubleClick/Performics and Aquantive/Razorfish acquisitions, to clear out some of the conflict of interest inherent in major agencies owned by the sellers of supposedly performance-based, impartial media platforms.

Google moved relatively quickly to divest itself of Performics, whereas Microsoft held onto the Razorfish business -- until now.

Amazingly, the $6 billion acquisition of Aquantive counted as Microsoft's biggest ever acquisition. Considering its size and clout, Razorfish (formerly Avenue A | Razorfish) has had a relatively quiet two years since then. Perhaps this can be chalked up to this mega-agency's DNA; its first go-round in Bubble 1.0 was in the fast-hiring, website-overbuilding, overvaluation heyday of 1995-2000. And the company still seems to favor slow-loading, expensive-to-build, semi-indexable pages. Like ALPO, a recent client win for Razorfish, could it be that Razorfish represents a previous era of overpackaged, overstrategized goods with the same old ALPO inside the can?

While some may ask why Microsoft is selling this business, Daily Finance reporter Douglas McIntyre proffers: "What it is doing with the company in the first place is anybody's guess."

Certainly, if the long delay in selling Razorfish was helpful in demonstrating that Microsoft's decision-making process was totally independent of industry opinion that they should divest sooner, the delay was effective. Unfortunately, the value of the asset may now be sharply reduced. But so are many assets... such as the parts of Yahoo Microsoft is still considering strategically partnering with or buying.

Click Fraud Perps: Kudos to Microsoft

2009-06-17T23:29:00.002-04:00

Microsoft has gotten us one step closer to the hard-line Traffick stance of jail time for click fraud. Making money by directly yanking money out of advertiser pockets in industries like auto insurance must have felt very good to these alleged fraudsters: until the day they were slapped with a $750,000 lawsuit. Ouch.

Upstream and Downstream Clicks: It's All About the Google (and a little bit about Yahoo)

2009-06-17T08:12:00.003-04:00

A lot of ink gets spilled about everything digital media. And some wonder why those of us in the search side of the industry are, well, a little bit... noisy.

You can see why by visiting Alexa (or if you have a subscription, a service like Hitwise). For your favorite site, check out the tab called "Clickstream". The website that is most visited prior to visiting your favorite site is, of course, Google.

It might look like:

23% Google.com
10% Google.ca

Or it might look like:

15% Google.com
8% Some other site.

Or in some other cases Yahoo actually is still key (though not necessarily Yahoo Search):

12% Google
11% Yahoo

And the "post visit" clicks are also (although, hopefully, less so) to these search engines as well. Users either go back to the search engine right away due to search dissatisfaction, or they use a search engine for something else, after they're finished with one task.

Other common upstream and downstream sites are site closely related to your favorite site, like

icanhazcheezburger.com
pga.com
etc.

Or functionally related ones like:

sphinn.com
wordpress.com
youtube.com

Or, increasingly,

twitter.com

as people tweet what they find.

For some popular sites like cuteoverload.com, Twitter is hitting 2 and 3 per cent of post-visit visits. For this blog, Traffick.com, Twitter clocks in at an amazing 10% of downstream visits!

Still though, Google is at the top of pretty much every list of upstream and downstream clicks for pretty much any website.

Bing.com? The bad news is, the site is too new and too little-used to show up in many upstream lists at all. The good news? Downstream, it shows up in the list for blogs like this, and tech industry publications. Microsoft will need much more than mentions from the likes of us, though, to gain market share.

Google to Hand a Huge Opportunity to Twitter?

2009-06-13T13:45:00.004-04:00

Remember how Yahoo helped Google rise to prominence, then dominance, ultimately obliterating the search and portal brand that gave it that timely helping hand? If you've been in the industry less than five years, you don't. In 2001, Google's future was still far from assured. But the power its brand gained during its two-year partnership to display Google results on Yahoo did serious damage to Yahoo's brand, and bought Google the credibility it needed to move to top-of-mind as the world's leading search engine.

Is Google about to do the same favor to Twitter? On the surface, it seems that adding microblogging search capability that features mostly Twitter results would only benefit Google, by giving it equal or superior capability to the as-yet-to-be-honed Twitter Search. Another feature to solidify the world's leading search brand. So as for whether this helps Twitter do to Google what Google did to Yahoo: probably not. Google today is far more than Yahoo was in 2002-2004. Still, it's interesting to contemplate the possibility that a deal that looks only so-so for Twitter might have a salutary effect on Twitter's already strong brand, and turn out to be the mainstream exposure they needed to go from hot to white-hot.

SES Toronto in Words, Pictures, Video, and Tweets

2009-06-12T10:34:00.004-04:00

Even in a down economy, or perhaps because of it, companies are investing more than ever in performance-based digital marketing. So it's perhaps no surprise that the SES Toronto conference turned in another strong performance this week. I was delighted that so many of the top speakers (too many to name here, really... ok... Mark Evans, Keith Boswell...Miriam Warren... ok I'm stopping...) we invited were able to make it. And if I do say so myself, the tracks (Nuts & Bolts, Corporateville, and Geek) seemed to be working well in getting folks connected with the type of knowledge they need in this fast-moving field.

The demands on marketers have begun to change more rapidly as reputation management, social media, and universal, personalized, blended, local, and mobile search have created a much wider array of relevancy signals and visibility channels. While introducing newcomers to the basics, the theme of the show was intended to expose us to data and debates about what's new in the field. I feel that companies that opt not to show up to these events - especially those constructing digital marketing plans from scratch - may be failing to ask the right questions in planning. It's too easy to fall into the trap of micromanaging tactics based on 2002 assumptions, on one hand, or to concoct hip-sounding but amateurish attempts to bust into social media (the Meatball Sundae syndrome).

For a quick flavor of how the conference went for some, we offer for your consideration a list of tweets about SES Toronto 2009; some of the SES Toronto interviews posted on YouTube; and a selection of the pictorial evidence on Flickr.

Our keynote speakers, Tara Hunt and Emanuel Rosen (who just tweeted that Toronto is now his favorite city in North America!), deserve special thanks for helping us "anchor" digital marketing in real-world reality. Search engines measure relationships and relevance, but in the past have done a poor job of it. Marketers who only focus on the tactics suited to imperfect search technology from the past fail to see the need to create a variety of connections and authentic social capital upon which strong referrals are built.

The opening night party at The Drake Hotel (Acquisio sponsoring, with co-sponsors Page Zero and NVI Solutions) must have been good, too. MJ Lepage of Acquisio (pictured here) convinced me to speak French. I was shy at first, but those Acquisio t-shirts have amazing powers of persuasion.

Twitter Founders: Ain't No Follow-Back Boyz

2009-06-06T11:21:00.002-04:00

Interesting piece at ReadWriteWeb about how the Twitter insiders actually use Twitter. Called out on their idiosyncratic use which doesn't resemble that of some power users, Ev Williams responded directly via email. A highly relevant excerpt, to me, is:

"Many people fall into the trap that you should follow all or most people back out of a sense of politeness or so-called engagement with the community. But the fact is, having more followers does not give you more time in the day (as much as I'd like to sell that). At a certain point, you're not actually reading any more tweets by following more people -- you're just dipping into the stream somewhat randomly and missing a whole lot of what people say.

"That's fine, but I believe people will generally get more value out of Twitter by dropping the symmetrical relationship expectation and simply curating their following list based on the information and people they want to tune in to."

The argument that the developers' own use of a tool affects the company's approach to building the tool, and its sensitivity to different user constituencies, is pretty much specious. I don't expect the developers of Word to be sending memos inside a law firm, I don't expect AdWords product developers to open an online apparel store, and come to think of it, I don't want to know what's on Steve Jobs' iPod, or how often he listens to it.

Interview with Miriam Warren, Yelp

2009-06-04T19:45:00.003-04:00

Miriam Warren, Director of Marketing with Yelp, is speaking on the cool mobile apps panel next week at SES Toronto, moderated by none other than Mitch Joel.

She was generous enough to answer my many questions about all things local and mobile. We've posted the results over at the Search Engine Watch blog.

If your iPhone literally "tells you where to go" (with the help of an uber-reviewer like "Andre D."), rest assured Miriam will be pleased.

Bing: Can a "Popular" Search Engine Become Popular?

2009-06-03T19:16:00.004-04:00

"Go to Bing. Try this?!," I said.

Carolyn and I were in the middle of watching Blue Jays highlights; me, fresh back from the Microsoft Canada demo of the Bing search engine. Her, an intelligent Ph.D. who somewhat knows her way around the Apple OS, fruitlessly trying to use Google to get the answer to a baseball trivia question we were pondering. If Roy Halladay had 14 strikeouts in last night's game in his masterful, complete-game win over the Angels, what's the rundown on the most strikeouts he's ever had in a game?

"Bing! dot com," I burbled, helpfully.

"What?," she "replied." No response yet. Apparently "Go to Bing" does not yet resonate as a domestic communique.

I never do this.

"Bing! Really -- try it at Bing.com this time. Type 'Roy Halladay shutouts single game' or whatnot." (We search experts try not to give more precise directions. It makes normal people feel uncomfortable.)

I've seen many demos (by Microsoft, even). But rarely do I do just like the people in Microsoft focus groups did: notice a difference with the engine's usability, and recommend it to someone.

We didn't find the stat quickly.

Then I remembered that the Bing engine has been tuned to offer more orchestrated consumer-friendly results pages when you type in "Roy Halladay" without any qualifiers.

Sure enough, Carolyn saw a pretty useful Roy Halladay search result full of photos, stats, and search refinements... just one notch short of a Roy Halladay shrine.

We try a similar search for "Scott Rolen". A similar result ensued. Carolyn remarked that the page came complete with a "nice BIG picture" of Scott Rolen. It's at moments like these that it hits me out of the blue: women do like men, and will occasionally admit it even in your presence. Then again, it was just a bad head shot. Perhaps she meant he had a fat head in that shot. That's pretty much my take on it, anyway. Kidding, Scott! Love the Gold Glove play out there! Keep it up! Whew, didn't want to alienate that guy.

The top "related query" in the left navigation was Scott Rolen wife. Being a curious sort, and a man, I thought I'd love to know why. I still don't know. The query results lead to some pretty generic looking Ten Blue Links. Undaunted, I tried the image search for the Scott Rolen wife query. Things break down a bit from here: Bing's image search is as unhelpful as Google's often is. The top photos are all of the ballplayer, other ballplayers, managers, shots of dirt, etc. The highest ranking woman pictured is of an Asian bible college student who is not Scott Rolen's wife. I don't ask. In any case, the page is now down.

Wow, search is distracting.

I look over at Carolyn, who seems to be talking. She's talking about how she likes the layout of the search engine, remarking on how useful it would probably be - I coach her a bit to reinforce the idea that it will pull up better pages for these popular queries. She reacts pretty well, contrary to the usual reaction you see to a demo. Basically - she doesn't hate it. And had a few good comments.

This home focus group would have probably produced positive feedback clips on a par with those Microsoft showed us in the demo, of the average cafe or office users giving their take on whether they found it useful: the dainty twenty-something with tattoo-covered arms; the office manager who doesn't like to "re-work" when he's searching for a hard-to-find stat like "World's Best Rapper,"; the affable round-faced chap who "never gives up" when he does his goal-directed searches for things like "nightlife when he's in Italy," but would rather get to what he's searching for faster.

Microsoft's research is impeccable. According to Stacey Jarvis, search lead for Microsoft Canada, a high number of search queries simply do not deliver successful results. She noted, metaphorically if nothing else (since it probably isn't competing with the Print button), "the back button is the most frequently used button in search." So search still sucks? Well, it's definitely unsatisfying a lot of the time. But luckily not quite to the point where users won't keep trying.

Also germane to all of the above users, and you, and me: about 50% of queries are about returning to previous tasks. So we need to get to information more quickly.

One evocative persona was a woman who took 27 minutes and had to retry her search five times to find a retailer for the Merrell shoes she was looking for. You think that sounds painful? That's a US example. In Canada, stock is much spottier and domestic e-commerce players are often harder to find and harder to shop from.

The "managed" results on broad, popular queries I alluded to above are called Best Match. If you type Toronto Blue Jays, you get a schedule, a Wikipedia entry, news, and other "most useful" items... every time.

For search optimizers, this should be a continuation of the trend set in motion years ago by all the search engines. If the door was slowly closing on the opportunity for "just any website with the right SEO strategy" to rank well on broad queries, does this slam it shut? Good for consumers, bad for SEO's? Forget ranking on head terms, folks.

Freshness is a big part of the rolling mandate here. The Toronto Blue Jays result page also shows a current box score with the annoying news that it's 3-0 Angels in the third inning. Whoops, 4-0. Let's hope Casey Janssen settles down: he's got Halladay caliber composure and stuff... minus the extra heat since his injury.

Other useful real-time features are being dutifully built into Bing.

Type "Flight Status" and you get a handy app to look at your flight's status. A bit of inside baseball came up at the demo: Mark Evans asked "Is that part of Farecast you're integrating?" and Travel Ninja Stuart MacDonald interrupted from the crowd to say: "Flightstats isn't Farecast." Apparently, Farecast integration is down the road, if that means anything to you.

Yes! Matthews jr. struck out. Oh no! Janssen hit a guy with a pitch.

Back to this.

Microsoft - and others - are good at researching pain points and they're good at building features. Information retrieval is complex, though. And users are using one main technique to find answers: typing short or long queries into search engines. Repeating queries, trying different results. That's the case on Google as much as it is on Bing.

Bing is following, using more sophisticated technology and database integration, the spirit of the old Ask Jeeves answer engine or the recent thoughts behind Mahalo. Figure out how to be reasonably close to the right intent on the most popular 80% of queries.

For hard-to-find information, it may well be the quality of the underlying results that blocks us from getting there, so is it really up to a search engine to fix that? Well, certainly Wolfram Alpha is trying to get us answers to very specific queries like "what are the highest single-game strikeout totals for Roy Halladay?"

We got to the answer easily in this case only because the headlines told us that Halladay's 14 K's was a personal best. Search engines don't always make it easy to get specialized information.

That just underscores the point of Microsoft's research: many search journeys today still end in frustration. The fact that Microsoft's response will leave some users pleased, and others most certainly frustrated, still seems like progress. The new buzz in the industry being generated by the likes of Bing and Wolfram Alpha is good for consumers, even if they all still offer only very partial solutions to the problem of finding exactly what we "want."

So if Bing's flavor is to do well on popular queries with an unsophisticated "mass" audience, does it follow that it will gain in popularity, backed by an $80mm advertising campaign? When specifically asked, Stacey Jarvis was candid that Microsoft's current search share in Canada is 4.9%. But no one at the company is willing to stand behind any boasts about concepts like "switching search engines," market share, and (with some exceptions, like in the focus group videos) "Gooogle." They're united behind what is evidently a very good product that can improve more with refinement. And quite rightly, daring to predict widespread consumer adoption of Bing isn't in the Microsoft script at the moment. Do they have a plan here, or just a solid product?

It's now 5-0 Angels, with the Jays still hitless. But I probably won't watch the rest of the game on a search engine. It's off to the gym, where I hope Dr. Phil isn't showing on the TV's.

Note: Stacey Jarvis, Search Lead for Microsoft Canada, will speak on the Orion Panel on the Future of Search at SES Toronto, next Monday, June 8.

Inauspicious Bing-inning?

2009-06-03T16:42:00.004-04:00

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, is now live in Canada, one of three countries (the US and the UK are the others) to get full access to the engine out of beta. I attended an impressive launch demo last night in downtown Toronto.

Before getting to the serious nitty gritty review -- you knew this was coming right guys? -- I have to mess with the Microsofters a little bit. Bad news first, full review (mostly good) later this evening.

The bad news is, you can't search Bing to find any relevant results on the query "microsoft canada bing launch." Looking at the screen shot below, that isn't the worst of the problems. The worst problem is that the familiar old eBay dynamic keyword insertion ad made it to the top of the right rail on that long tail query!

Canada
Fantastic prices on Canada. Buy &
Sell today

Love it! Always loved it!

Ha, and here I thought our dollar was making a comeback. :(

To their credit, on my favorite "embarrass the ad-engine" query, [schnauzers], the Bing result is really nice - with no ads, and helpful refinements in the left nav.

This does highlight a key issue with Bing - both a strength, and proof that there is much left to be done. There's a gap between the satisfaction you'll likely receive from popular queries -- the Microsoft team is optimizing results to provide quick answers to people's questions on the most popular generic queries -- and the not-much-improved functionality for longer tail queries.

PageRank Sculpting is Dead? Good Riddance

2009-06-03T09:30:00.005-04:00

Danny Sullivan reports on an update in Google philosophy and algorithmic emphasis. As I interpret the story, at one point Matt Cutts didn't rule out the idea that you could slap nofollow tags on some internal links on your pages to conserve "link juice" for your important pages. Hence, the practice of "PageRank sculpting" was born. SEO's had another cool story to tell their clients, and each other.

Danny's interpretation of this is that making this kind of technique available, and then taking it away, is a violation of a broad principle of "backwards compatibility". Shame on Google, he implies, for making the advanced SEO's scramble to undo what they already did now that Google's algo has supposedly undergone this massive shift and a page with ten links passes only 10% link juice to each link on the page, rather than, say, doubling the juice on the remaining links if you nofollow half of them.

I don't think I agree. Here, Danny is standing up for the constituency of advanced SEO's, many of whom are currently attending SMX Advanced. My take is that SEO's taking actions on speculations about the algorithm are themselves building the new "features" that lack "backwards compatibility." This is especially the case when the "features" (tactics) address no known principle of third-party trust or relevancy of sites or pages.

But for those of us who don't believe all of Matt Cutts' stories and non-stories, and take a holistic view of business strategy, information architecture, audience development, and traffic growth, we had a lot of lower-hanging fruit to work on than using a short-term fad method of "telling" Google which pages are important.

Long term, search fails when site owners try to "tell" search engines which pages are important, short of burying the unimportant ones in their architecture so they're literally invisible. Importance shouldn't be arbitrarily determined by site owners, though certainly users and engines appreciate it if they provide indications.

Search Engine Land itself has undergone a surge of traffic in recent months, all no doubt a product of holistic audience development. I'd love to hear Danny's take on how much of that improvement in fact resulted from deliberate PageRank sculpting. None? A lot of it?

No matter: holistic brand building and audience development and overall quality content, combined with sound organization/architecture of the content, are what gave Search Engine Land its mojo - not short term tactics. And that's how most companies should look at the SEO exercise.

What was supposedly "given" to advanced SEO's in the short term has now been taken away. Nofollow and for that matter XML sitemaps are just supplements in a much more important larger "grand scheme of things." PageRank sculpting turns out to be just another time-waster that contributed mainly to "Advanced SEO" bragadoccio on the barstool. It's gone now? Boo hoo.

If you spend your life hanging on Matt Cutts' words about SEO, well then mark these words: you will, in turn, find yourself annoyed with Matt Cutts.

In conclusion, I propose a new tag that should only be used by Advanced SEO's - square brackets used so as not to screw up the HTML on this page: [this page is really frickin' important] [/as you were]

Rand Fishkin, in a spiffy flow chart, seems to approximately (and diplomatically) agree with my take, highlighting the key low hanging fruit that comes before frivolity like PR Sculpting: content development, information architecture, link acquisition, internal link structures, and conversion rate optimization. But as for Rand's example of a site that is a large one with many deep URL's, as an example of one that might benefit from the sculpting, this might depend on the query we hope to rank for. Overall, I've seen no major problem ranking very deep pages on relevant long tail queries (for example, at HomeStars.com). Those pages rank or don't rank for a variety of reasons, as many as the tail is long. And from what Cutts is saying today, the point is moot anyway, as the provisional tactic/loophole has now been closed. Back to working on the important parts of the business.

Hmm, and I'd love to think my take on this is just common sense and uncontroversial, but the statistics out there seem to indicate (even outside of major sites like Wikipedia) that there was a massive rush to play with the nofollow tag among the "SEO community". Like Rip van Winkle, I slept peacefully through the stampede.

Amid Bing Hype, Blekko Wants To Be Left Alone

2009-05-31T13:03:00.005-04:00

Blekko, a stealth search startup headed by Rich Skrenta, is doing its best Greta Garbo impersonation while getting this sort of "glowing non-coverage" over at Techcrunch.

Like them, I respect the reclusive starlet (sorry, startup's) interest in privacy while they develop the product and the strategy.

In the next couple of weeks I will finally have the time to demo both Bing and Blekko.

But perhaps I can "leak" a couple of ideas I've gleaned from the past year or so of sporadic conversations with Rich.

You don't need the blogosphere to tell you, they're pretty serious about this one, and their idea of A-Level Talent doesn't just mean product managers with search engine names attached to their resumes, or business development folks with same. Along with those, they seem particularly focused on attracting high end engineering talent. You'd have guessed that anyway if you looked at the investors who have seeded the company, such as Marc Andreessen (to say nothing of Skrenta himself).

Although Screenwork reports they're "happy with the name Blekko," if you were a stealth startup, wouldn't you say that? They'll probably change it.

While not speaking directly to Blekko's own functionality, I've found Skrenta's (perhaps offhand) criticisms of search engine innovation in the past couple of years to be very telling. Skrenta told me last summer that users don't really want all these stage-managed "blended" results nearly as much as the major search engines let on. He's also been quoted as saying that PageRank wrecked the web, and implying that Google is out of answers when they begin threatening people with penalties and begging them to use web conventions in the "right way," instead of fixing their algorithms. Let's explore a bit more where these thoughts lead us... Bing may be a quintessential example, but Ask, Cuill, and the major search engines themselves (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) have all been engaged in an overwrought effort to display search engine results in panes; variegated search results that purportedly guess at 'intent' (sometimes they do a great job); and other bells and whistles that speak to a broadening of the terms of what constitutes 'search' to convince us that search engines need to be good at finding, classifying, ranking, and displaying all 'objects', not just pages of information. "Ten Blue Links" has rapidly become code for "obsolete search engine design". "A page with panes and pics" is code for what "users really want today". Supposedly. Unfortunately, this leaves a gaping hole in what search engines used to do, or try to do: to be really good at providing relevant results for specialized queries, and getting the rank-order right. The fact that you get a bunch of panes and distractions instead of a really relevant list of links to serious content may be seen as some kind of evidence that search engines have given up on their core mission, and are engaged in a massive attempt to change the subject, whether consciously or not. And this kind of overwrought "integrative thinking" has apparently begun to pervade these companies' thought processes on other products. In terms of workflow and productivity, users shouldn't be satisfied with steady efforts to improve upon GMail functionality, integrated calendars, and IM integration (plus a to-do list that is a bland and clunky offering at best)? Instead of perfecting the core functionality, let's change the subject, and invent a new tool that assumes people want to share data and shift modes of communication willy-nilly. Google Sea of Distractions, as it were.

In that spirit, then, will Blekko turn out to be one part Kicking it Old School (no pretty panes, but going back to the fundamentals of serious searches for the right information, and rank-ordering serious results well, in a way that does a better job of keeping spam out without over-rewarding a handful of brands?), and one part Kicking it Up a Notch (soft-innovating in the information retrieval field, and leaving the portal guys to pretty up the planet with panes and pics)? Let's hope so. That would be one of the most noteworthy entry into the "serious consumer" web search space in the past five years. It might even turn out to be the type of search engine a librarian could love again. I'm looking forward to a deep dive... and launch later this year. As the other analysts have implied, maybe this won't be for everyone. What great product is? But the appeal also has to be wide enough to matter, and I hope that's true, too.

Blodget Blase on Bing

2009-05-29T10:44:00.002-04:00

Although I currently lack 4,000 words to match his analysis, (and 10,000 to match Danny's), I agree with Henry Blodget's answer to Microsoft's search problems, I think. In case you somehow missed it, I also roughly believe that it's a good idea to spin Bing and MSN into Yahoo, in exchange for a major share in the company. (Add a Bartzian Boatload of $ to that, for good measure.)

Still and all, a lot of folks have an ever-optimistic take about what money can do for market share. Not everyone agrees with our grizzled search analysts' take that says: the money won't move the needle. Folks I had dinner with last night said "$80mm in marketing has to do something." You would think constant TV ads would get to people somehow right?

Many of us have seen this movie before, and we disagree. Users try out the new thing, the traffic spikes incredibly for one or two weeks, and then it goes right back down to where it was and people resume using Google. This has happened with Ask, Hotbot, A9...

One interesting twist with Bing is, well, the bling. If there is any segment that is amenable to switching, it's customers who will subscribe to loyalty programs for cash or points. I'll tell ya, I'm a pretty big points addict (Aeroplan miles) and that would almost get me to switch. So I think if Microsoft is absolutely dead set on spending cash to build market share, they might be able to build it one customer at a time and one giveaway at a time, and keep market share holding steady just north of 10%. With weak profit margins, but at least in the game and gathering valuable data.

So with all that being said, Bing is a major search product and it therefore deserves our full attention - some people (I think they'd need convincing with some points or cash, though) will use it if it's actually good. With that in mind, I'll be attending a demo and gathering notes for a review next week.

Pre-SES Interview Blitz Continues: Digital Marketing U

2009-05-28T15:06:00.002-04:00

I'm grateful to Marty and Manny over at aimClear for allowing me the chance to ramble in this interview.

I am, however, a bit uncomfortable with the term "intellectual". In my experience, intellectuals are people who attend plays, read literature, and go out to debates on foreign policy. By that standard, I ain't no intellectual: I've been too busy running a business for the last few years.

It is important to have foresight and some kind of framework for understanding digital media, though. So I'm glad our field has so many "intellectuals lite" mixed in with the genuine articles. Almost every scribbler who can be counted as a quality blogger is an intellectual, in my book. Digesting the deeply-researched and principle-profound books produced by folks like Tara Hunt and Emanuel Rosen the past couple of weeks (I mention them as they're are SES keynotes for Toronto), I know how powerful a message can be when it's more than just observations, but backed by some kind of scientific research and historical knowledge. In both Tara's and Emanuel's case, I come away from their work not just feeling "smart," but with urgent tactical priorities for my business.

Yahoo?: Redesign Follies Continue

2009-05-27T12:03:00.010-04:00

Careful, Yahoo. Your on-again, off-again home page redesign saga risks crossing over into "Microsoft's new, new, new search engine" ridiculousness.

In March we heard of your plans to once again revamp the Yahoo home page. Now we hear you plan to revamp the home page revamp, based on "user feedback":

"...We recently started testing some new designs based on your feedback. We recognize that many of you like your homepage just the way it is, thank-you-very-much, so the overall look and feel of the page will be familiar. But take a closer look, and you�ll see that we�ve made some fundamental improvements and packed in features that are easy to use and easy to make your own � things you have told us you want."

When you hear the phrase "packed in features," you should be very afraid. My Spidey sense tells me this is less about user feedback and more about ... well, something else probably (trying to better monetize the home page, maybe?).

Maybe instead of tweaking the edges, it's about time Yahoo scrapped the whole cluttered portal approach and started thinking more like The Google. As any longtime Traffick reader knows, we're well aware that these "portal" brands thrive in part because of the comprehensiveness of their offerings, and believe that they will continue to thrive due to their ability to connect these services. And search-based navigation will continue to anchor the user experience with these major digital destinations.

Yahoo has plenty of excellent properties and, understandably, they want to expose you to them. On the other hand, Google has properties-a-plenty, too, and has never had any trouble getting users to adopt them, despite having a spartan home page that makes you work to find many common features. In the past, Andrew has called for Yahoo to make a bold statement by adopting a scaled-down, search-based home page in the past. Is now the right time for Yahoo to take the plunge?

Perhaps a direct copycat approach isn't the best way to go, but surely Yahoo can come up with a more original home page. They can and should find a way to apply the "New Marketing," as Seth Godin might say in Meatball Sundae, rather than going the tired old banner ad route. It seems funny to associate a former trailblazer like Yahoo with Old Marketing, but that's what they're doing, at least on the home page.

Regardless of the approach, Yahoo isn't going to reclaim market share with an evolutionary home page redesign. I say it's time to go bold -- especially now that Microsoft is set for an advertising blitz to promote Kumo, Bing, or whatever their latest attempt at building a viable search engine will be called.

Will Microsoft's Search Ad Campaign Work? (Groundhog Day... All Over Again)

2009-05-25T11:34:00.004-04:00

So via AdAge, we're told that Microsoft is readying an $80mm+ advertising campaign, and that it will promote yet another brand of their search technology, this time, called Bing?

Further to Cory's piece about potential reasons for consumers to switch to Yahoo Search, now we have evidence that Microsoft plans to put not only persuasion, but money, into the "getting people to switch" effort.

What a shame, though, that these two companies don't get serious about working together to achieve that goal.

We can only be excited about the potential for Microsoft to create better technology in the space. Competition is good. But it's already a concern when the story is shaping up to be more about the promo of the alternative to Google, as opposed to the technology it actually offers. That's certainly been the case with the various lavish Ask campaigns (and I still won't forget when their PR people wanted me to write about the "significance of getting rid of the butler," as they saw it), and we all know that all that money didn't move the needle on market share.

The premise is that search technology doesn't matter all that much, and that brand does: you put a Google skin on other people's search, and consumers still prefer the Google. Sure, but how did Google build that brand? Through innovation, focus, and technology... not advertising. And by keeping the *same* brand for ten years. I don't think consumers are going to be compelled by the "meta-story" of how Microsoft is (again) spending a lot of money to make (another) stab at the search space.

Microsoft and Yahoo are already working together on some cross-promotion efforts. But the $80mm standalone campaign for the Bing technology seems to work at cross-purposes with that.

With one major search engine (Yahoo, say) benefitting from the largesse of toolbar love from 96% of browser share (IE, Firefox, + Safari, say), a real alternative could be created organically out of how consumers already behave, and how they already think about online brands.

So rather than waste breath casting aspersions on the potential cash sinkhole that could be opened trying to build the Bing brand, I'll vote again for the only major brand alternative to Google that makes economic and emotional sense to a wide cross-section of consumers: Yahoo.

Could Anti-Google Choices Re-Energize Yahoo?

2009-05-22T15:46:00.023-04:00

Can declarations by tech celebrities (the technorati, as it were) start a snowball effect that impact the usage patterns of regular people? It doesn't always happen, but such sentiments can galvanize the crowd in certain cases, especially when attached to widely shared sentiments of fairness, transparency, and equity that have given rise to significant shifts in the locus of high tech power in recent years (such as, no less, the Open Source movement).

In other cases, falling well short of embracing open source models, consumers become more open to a second-place private-enterprise power because they see it as, at least, an "alternative." In the search space, that's why so many have continued to hope that Yahoo! stays solidly on the map.

Gina Trapani, the influential founding editor of Lifehacker, one of the most popular blogs around, says she's dumping Google search in favor of Yahoo! search. While this isn't exactly the equivalent of Jay-Z dropping Cristal and throwing his support to Dom Perignon, it may well be the start of a trend.

Before going down that road, it's worth noting that various pundits have previously predicted Google backlashes before, in 2007 and even 2003, and it seems to be a recurring theme every few years. Who knows, maybe we'll be saying the same thing two years henceforth in 2011.

But this time it feels a bit different.

As Google's supremacy over its rivals has quickened and as the Big G has begun intruding more aggressively on others' turf, concern over a potential Google monopoly is growing in many corners. This has caused many people to step back and ponder the consequences of an ascendant Google.

Recently, Ralph Tegtmeier (aka fantomaster aka the Dark Lord Voldemort of Cloaking) wrote a compelling piece comparing Google's burgeoning hegemony to the Kraken. Andrew and I debated it internally for quite a while, trying to decide whether concerns over Google are about to cross over from conspiracy theory territory into full "Google is actually becoming evil" land. Even the most forgiving of Google fans would have second thoughts of entrusting so much personal data to one company after reading fantomaster's take.

This unease with putting too many eggs in one basket is part of the reason why I've decided not to use Google Chrome as my primary browser, even after Chrome gets full extension capability similar to Firefox, which many people predict will lead to a mass abandonment of Firefox for Chrome. For similar reasons, I've also uninstalled the Google Toolbar from Firefox now that many Toolbar features are available inside the browser (I didn't really use the Toolbar much anyway). There's just too much data being beamed back home to Mountain View than seems necessary.

We've seen this sentiment repeated in other ways.

One of our clients at Page Zero opted not to install Google's Sitemap Generator due to data privacy sensitivity, despite the fact that they happily fork over their site activity to Google through Google Analytics. Their belief was that GSG acts as a network "switch" of sorts, with all server requests coming and going through GSG, and believed this would give away far too much sensitive information.

Search Engine Land has been chronicling the various anti-trust concerns associated with Google lately, concerns that seem to be proliferating more every week. For its part, Google is proactively attempting to blunt the momentum of this movement with their recent "charm offensive." Whether they succeed in fending off anti-trust actions in the future remains to be seen.

One thing seems certain. Just as the U.S. government's inquiries into Microsoft's business practices in the late '90s gave organizations like Red Hat and Firefox a vital opening, something similar is bound to happen with Google if it gets too big for its britches.

Could the main beneficiary of this be an old-timer like Yahoo?

It's conceivable that some shrewd moves by Yahoo! could lead to a reversal of Yahoo's declining search market share, and perhaps a resurgence to something on the order of 25% search share in the next few years.

Recall that Google's search distribution deal with Firefox expires in November 2011. It's a safe assumption that Google won't renew it due to their increasing support of Google Chrome. Or another way to look at it is, with Firefox's market share hovering around 20%, and perhaps headed to over 30%, Firefox might feel emboldened to be the one dictating terms. Regardless, Google must be a bit worried about Chrome's meager market share, as they've begun running TV ads for Chrome, a first for Google.

Mozilla could soon be in a position to be a quasi-king maker. They're independent-minded and, having emerged as a credible alternative to Internet Explorer even among mainstream users, they seem to be on a mission of sorts. If they decide to place a crown on Yahoo's proverbial head, things could get very interesting. Maybe we'll once again see a more diverse search landscape sooner than we think.

By the way, it's worth noting that last year Yahoo acquired the popular search-based extension Inquisitor, which I find myself using on a regular basis these days. It's a fine tool that I highly recommend to every FF user. Oh, and guess which search engine is set as the default? Yep, Yahoo.

Ultimately, I'm all for personalization and targeted advertising, and I don't really have a beef with Google knowing a lot of information about me. But there comes a point when too much is enough. When I realized just how much I rely on Google's services, it hit me like a slap in the face from Moe the bartender. Like Gina Trapani, I think there's nothing wrong at all with spreading the love around.

Is Guy Kawasaki Singlehandedly Ruining Twitter? (Part 2)

2009-05-19T15:04:00.005-04:00

I said a lot of overly theatrical things about Guy Kawasaki in my last rant about him: Is Guy Kawasaki Singlehandedly Ruining Twitter? (Part I). Included in these were suggesting that Kawasaki was a "politician" who should never run for office any higher than "small town mayor"; that his tactics could turn Twitter into a "digital trailer park"; that he was like the regional manager of a vacuum cleaner direct sales organization; and that he would soon grow a mustache and begin smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

And for these indiscretions, I would apologize if asked. But not for stirring up the serious underlying debate about the unfortunate potential for Twitter's brand to degrade every time some spammy tactician auto-follows me, or you.

Is there a more charitable interpretation of Guy Kawasaki's Twitter antics than the one I put forward? Yes, there is a more charitable interpretation. If you choose to interpret it this way, I'd understand. It's how I choose to approach certain other seemingly annoying personalities myself. Here's an overview of how the argument might go.

Kawasaki's heartfelt personal insights (recent, and longstanding) combined with the range of favorable accounts of his accomplishments and personal qualities inevitably humanize a figure that in Part I, I'd only sought to demonize.

[Please keep in mind that I didn't set out with the intention of demonizing any individual. My complaint with him was actually pretty specific: his material in the SES keynote, and the approach to marketing it encouraged. It's one thing to be a well known underachieving spammer, telling people how to spam. Audiences know how to read that. But to see someone considered an eclectic, cultured, community-savvy leader and to turn around and violate both the spirit and letter of marketing ethics -- and to encourage others to do the same -- was bizarre to me. I've been to dozens of SES conference keynotes. Many have been provocative. A couple have violated basic keynote etiquette by being, umm, boring. But none (though Jason Calacanis came close) have been so hypocritical, self-serving, and silly as Kawasaki's Twitter advice. It was a keynote only because of his prominent name. The talk would have been more or less fine had it been a rank-and-file panel at Pubcon, for the gotta-learn-all-the-tactics crowd.]

The Case for Kawasaki as Ethical Showman

So thinking about the real human being that lurks behind the current public persona, I was reminded of a couple of people who have made millions being showmen and who are well known for being intelligent, cultured, thoughtful, and caring -- behind the scenes. (And I'm not even counting Howard Stern, probably the most polarizing example of someone like that you can think of.)

To go with one example, I've always been a fan of the financial analyst Jim Cramer, and remain so to this day. The Cramer many people know today was the sheepish fellow who was recently called on the carpet by Jon Stewart, made to atone for his pro-Wall-Street cheerleading, picking bad stocks on his show Mad Money, and all manner of other damage he'd done under the cover of showmanship, propped up by an endless bull market.

The general crowd reaction to this Cramer, I felt, was unfair. They didn't "get" Cramer. The real Cramer who was always the slightly disadvantaged Harvard boy who never quite fit in on Wall Street. The one who left Wall Street. The one who started up TheStreet.com (how many people can point to an accomplishment like that, for heaven's sake), which despite many ups and downs remains as one of a tiny percentage of "dot com" IPO's that has remained independent and solvent to this day.

When Stewart "outed" Cramer for telling people about shady tactics that Wall Street commonly used to create false futures activity overseas in order to fool the opening markets just long enough to help a trader liquidate a large position, the assumption was that Cramer advocated shady tactics. But that's an overly literal, "flat" way of listening to a smart man who is nuanced in how he communicates. I interpret Cramer differently, because I feel like I get him. I think in many cases, he's been out there trying to warn people: this is what Wall Street is really like! Don't be scammed. Buyer beware.

How does it benefit Cramer to be so transparent about Wall Street's (and his) shady tactics? It doesn't. It's a public service.

(So there, I do see an interesting parallel between Cramer and Kawasaki. Kawasaki jokes: "I may be a spammer, but I'm a transparent one." In the SEO world, there have been a few folks like that. Name your favorite transparent spammer SEO.)

The attention people suddenly paid to Cramer as a villain was nothing less than silly. Ultimately, The Daily Show taking a one-day interest in Jim Cramer's antics on Mad Money was something agreed to by both Cramer and Stewart for one reason alone: further showmanship leading to ratings. I imagine Jon Stewart is aware that there are worse villains to pay attention to than Jim Cramer. After Bush and co. left the scene, it got harder to fill air time with progressive rantings against the powers that be. And Stewart is paid millions of dollars a year to fill air time.

After the dust settles, I'm convinced that Jim Cramer will continue to be two things: (1) a decent man with a lot of talent who has more courage and scruples in his little finger than most folks on Wall Street; and (2) a brilliant opportunist and showman who (much like a Bill O'Reilly, Jon Stewart, or Howard Stern) has risen to a position where he can make serious coin and in some way "get back at" the people and system that didn't afford him the same opportunities as his wealthier peers. And he has every right to be both.

Kawasaki, like Jim Cramer, is a bundle of contradictions; a hero to some, a villain to others. On the positive side, Kawasaki's antics serve as a canary in a coal mine to help Twitter regulate itself before it's eaten alive by abusers. Already, Twitter is tightening up its rules, formal TOS, and API policies, angering some third party developers but pointing towards an ideal of "normal" Twitter usage as opposed to "spammy" usage. In that regard, Kawasaki's massive Twitter presence can be seen as doing the growing company a great service... almost like ethical hacking.

Opt Out??

Like any would-be plague on society, as many commenters on this debate to date have implied, the pivotal question is: can you opt-out? If a few stupid people choose to subject themselves to bad ideas, interruptions, etc. - it shouldn't affect me, right?

On that count, we still have a debate on our hands. That's how I've always felt about Jim Cramer's "work"; just as how I've always felt about people buying ineffective contraptions and cheap jewelry on The Shopping Channel. If it's not for you, don't do it, right? Unfollow, unsubscribe, opt out. Change the frickin� channel.

But: what if, after unsubscribing, unfollowing, and opting out, the problem is still getting worse?

One smart reader of the last column referred to the problem as �digital blight.� Take digital blight, and accelerate it through social media contagion, and you�ve got a recipe for disaster.

The upshot is: I do still think Kawasaki is a spammer. And thousands of people are deliberately following his tactics. Many others are accidentally following them, or advocating them, because they haven't taken time out to think it through (or they didn't see the puerile SES keynote).

A friend of mine, someone with a lot of respect in the business world, followed me back recently when I followed him. His automated message pointed to a series of Twitter tips posted by Kawasaki last November. Without even trying, within seconds, I was able to discredit three of the five tips as spammy and/or contradicted by what Kawasaki actually does. 60% of the advice is easily refuted, and yet this is a "great article" that my friend sends to every single person who follows him (thousands to date)? "Great"? How about something by Malcolm Gladwell, maybe? Why was an otherwise smart person bamboozled into shilling for the King of Shill? Peer pressure, maybe? Or perhaps respect for Kawasaki's past accomplishments. Or the jokes about penis size and shiitake mushrooms were oddly disarming.

Maybe there's more to say about the problem of digital blight. Time allowing, I'll complete that thought in a Part 3. In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts.

Ads Vs. Conversations, Revisited

2009-05-19T09:42:00.003-04:00

It's worth coming back to this subject.

Cited by John Battelle, comScore analyst Gian Fulgoni points out that the slowing growth in paid search clicks can largely be attributed to a decline in search coverage (proportion of searches monetized), and that's largely attributable to deliberate search quality and user satisfaction initiatives taken by all three major search engines. 100% right!

Fulgoni then points to a trend chart that might also contain an explanation: a rather slight increase in the average number of words used in a query, from just over 2.8, to just over 3.0.

From this, Battelle interprets very loosely, speculating that people are using search engines more like "natural language" tools and that Google is having trouble "matching advertiser demand to increasingly complex queries."

That's a bit rich. At the very least, it's an overly high-level, general explanation for users' increasing reliance on the new query-sensitive talents of Google and other engines. People's queries didn't get that much more complex in two years. Insofar as they're evolving, Google and other engines do a better job of tailoring the whole page to user needs. That may mean, for now, a slight shift towards the organic results being more compelling to users on informational queries. But that's exactly what Google wants. They want people to embrace, not ignore, the ads when they do appear. In part, they do that by keeping ads out of people's faces when they're inappropriate to user intent.

One reason you and I might type in a longer query is a higher expectation of getting an excellent local search result from Google, and then carrying on to look at restaurant reviews, maps, movie listings, etc. So to be sure, as confidence levels rise in the versatility of search technology, we're actually typing in more functional queries about movie times, the location of the local Home Depot, or even just our city name followed by "roofing contractors." Some of those merit ad coverage and lead to users clicking on ads; others merit query-sensitive local information results, not so easily monetizable.

Again, this is deliberate on Google's part. They're serious about search intent and the use of the engine as "functional software" -- at least when people use the engines in that way. For example, if I use the Google Search calculator function or the currency and measures conversion tool in my Firefox toolbar to type something like "2000 GBP in CAD," I get (today) the result "2000 British pounds = 3,582.69061 Canadian dollars." There is little point in showing an ad here. Usually you'll see zero ads, or maybe a single ad, on such queries.

That sort of behavior is of course growing. So the number of unmonetized queries is growing faster than the number of monetized queries.

The reality is, there are multiple things happening. Fulgoni's principal analysis is accurate. The search engine results pages are turning to enticing universal & blended search formats, highlighting video and local content. Even when they show no images, the organic SERP's often point to video content. Funny: long term, Google will be monetizing video and local just as well as they monetize search, so it's likely a net wash for them.

Longer term, our propensity for real-time search, conversations, and peer trust networks may indeed put a cap on how much advertising is appropriate in our "sacred areas" digitally. But that's always been the case, even when advertisers tried to invade/spam it. For some thoughts on where search is headed generally and how it might affect paid search advertising, check out Mona Elesseily's recent column on Search Engine Land: Important Questions You Should Ask About Where Search Is Headed.

Related note: I think it's too early in its life cycle for Wolfram Alpha to be showcasing sponsorships. They may soon find that it's tougher to monetize search than it looks... especially with a small number of users. The appearance of ads might also be a public relations distraction for a young product.

A Hitwise Report Does Not a Financial Report Make

2009-05-17T18:51:00.004-04:00

The recent Hitwise report as related by analyst Heather Hopkins should have been vital reading to anyone into digital marketing or search technology. Paid search clicks, the cash cow that almost entirely drives the industry leader, Google, were being portrayed by those reporting on the item as "down 26%" year over year in Q2. Easy conclusion: "the meltdown" has "finally hit paid search."

Economic weakness affects the click auction, no question about it.

But given the potential economic bombshell this represents, it's eye-opening to see the lack of actual responses to these reports. Look at any of the main stories reporting on the item, and they range from the misleading, to the credulous, to the snarky. Cade Metz's snarky response was at least an attempt at analysis. Hundreds of others linked to the story or retweeted it, without it apparently entering their heads for a second that flipping a link up of an oft-retweeted story isn't giving us any more insight than we had pre-re-tweet.

This has actually been a typical pattern. A few weeks after Google's financial reports for a quarter give us real insight into how the business has been going, everyone seems to go back to not understanding how the business works. Speculations on the next quarterly report tend to predict imminent doom, for whatever reason. We're in that "dark, suspicious" period now. We'll wait for next quarter to see if all the weird speculation was based on reality.

Since last year's misleading comScore report that tanked Google's stock before producing a clarification from comScore, it seems that no one's prepared to offer much of an interpretation of third party data at all. So into the void of no analysis, rushes headlines that seem to say paid search clicks are down 26% year over year. Or more accurately, the proportion of overall traffic referrals to (the subset of) websites (in Hitwise's sample), among all sources, that comes from paid search, has dropped by that much.

What can we make of this, really? Here's a stab at it.

1. The data may not be accurate.

1a. Or at least, the data might not be insightful because it treats a click as a click as a click. Some clicks are expensive or meaningful; others are not. There's a whole host of potential reasons for skew.

2. Why are we paying so much attention to travel sites? They do spend a lot. They may be spending a bit less. Their sector has been hard hit. It's hard to say, unfortunately, how the stats on clicks affect the dollars being spent on those clicks (see below). We do know from a study put forward in a webinar offered by Google that travel searches are holding pretty steady, but conversion rates are down. You can certainly see how in a sector like this, with massive overcapacity developing and brand-building efforts in the distant past, dozens of travel sites like travelocity, Expedia, Hotwire, and others, may be scaling back campaigns, and bids. They're one of the top paid click generators, ergo that looks pretty bad for Google on the surface, until you look at the financials overall. Does this mean, then, that the "sky is falling" on the "Google money machine"? That the sky is falling for the travel websites? I doubt it, for either. The much bigger problem is at the end of the suppliers - the hotels and airlines - who are being forced to go to thin and negative margins to fill rooms and seats.

3. The theme that came to light with misinterpretations of last year's comScore numbers has yet to be digested fully by observers: 0verall, the nature of Quality Score keeps more white space on the page more often. (Google's overall monetization rate, % of pages with ads on them, remains relatively low.) Many conventional advertisers are barely affected, though they've been annoyed by arbitrarily high "reserve" prices on less competitive phrases and keywords that supposedly aren't relevant. Many conventional advertisers are still seeing growth in paid clicks; some in weak economic sectors are seeing appropriate declines. Google's purge of affiliate marketers and click arbitrageurs has been widespread, so it removes a lot of low-quality, low-priced ads from the system entirely. Financially this is only a short-term hit for Google. It increases satisfaction with search results and maintains pricing on keywords with high commercial intent. Granted, pricing power is diminished as smart advertisers take this opportunity to lower their bids, but the decline in sheer volumes of paid clicks isn't purely due to a weak economy, but rather, the side effect of a deliberate Google policy that was still going strong throughout 2008.

4. Has Google experimentation with various blended search results and page layouts actually resulted in more people clicking on SERP's, local results, and video content as opposed to looking at paid clicks? This is a pretty bold move on the surface, but owning local business relationships and video ads in the future is part of the overall strategy, so it's perhaps expected that Google will be willing to see users click on the paid ads slightly less often. If it was a shift that terrified Google, I don't think they'd continue pressing forward as aggressively with the changes.

5. Some - maybe many - large-company CEO's are ganging up on Google, informally, as this "don't buy your brand clicks" meme seems to spread. While that adds up to quite a few clicks, those are inexpensive clicks anyway. Brands' refusal to buy those clicks hurts them, in my opinion, more than it hurts Google. Anecdotally talking about "ranking on those terms in the organic results anyway" is not an accurate way to measure the incremental sales lift from those keyword ads, for a host of reasons, including a 2003 view of what it means to "rank in organic". Some folks will continue to try to pinch pennies in the digital channel in spite of the waste going on in other channels; others will get over it and go back to putting more profit in the till with straightforward direct marketing to searchers, including those parts that focus on brand terms.

6. By quasi-organizing against Google and collectively angling to take revenue out of Google's pocket on brand terms (despite Google playing nice by policing trademark in a variety of ways), it appears the Moose Lodge of CEO's may have incurred Google's revenge.

Google may have grown tired of being handcuffed in monetizing those terms by both the rhetoric of trademark holders and Google's own editorial policies. They've launched the first major initiative in the direction of re-opening that monetization avenue, especially in the U.S., starting in June. (Although it refers specifically to ad text, I believe the announcement may also signal a shift in overall stance towards trademark terms.) It almost feels like the Hitwise report spurred Google's timing of the announcement. Insofar as the Hitwise report did a good job of showing that many brand keywords got taken off the board year over year, Google's response is going to be to put them back on the board. IMHO that means not only less editorial squelching of ad copy, but a relaxing of punitive Quality Scores on brand terms. Maybe Cade Metz's verbiage is apropos here: Google's going to "turn the dials" on something they had dialed way back on (largely to avoid the nuisance of legal squabbles and CEO's carping). "Turning the knobs" back towards a more relaxed setting for brand keywords should mean more paid clicks back on the board, more fun and profit for some qualified and creative advertisers, and more revenue for Google.

To put it another way: if you don't want to pay a few dollars here and there for your brand keywords, not only will we let someone else do it, but we'll let them use your name in their ads, as long as it's legal. So there.

No doubt, advertisers and search marketers today need to shift to a more comprehensive strategy of being visible in searches across various search "forms" as search behavior shifts and new blended search formats emerge. But that said, the fact that Google's stock hasn't dropped much on reports of a supposed 26% decline in paid search clicks indicates that investors, at least, now understand that the paid search auction is highly predictable, still a real cash cow for both advertisers and Google alike, and user behavior in clicking on ads remains surprisingly resilient, even in the worst period of negative economic growth seen in most of our lifetimes.

Paid Search Click Decline Caused By Longer Queries? Nah.

2009-05-16T10:56:00.003-04:00

Too much interesting stuff happening late week and this weekend, including Wolfram Alpha going live, data about paid search, and Google's trademark policy change. And a long weekend here in Canada to boot!

Anyway, I think I agree with Michael Arrington. Recent reports suggesting that declines in overall paid click volume (or, the proportion of referrals that came through a paid search click) year over year cannot be explained away by consumers typing longer searches that are less monetizable. The change in search behavior (towards longer queries) has not been that abrupt, and all advertisers didn't suddenly start using more negative keywords and exact match options all at once.

That said, bad economy aside, the explanation for the paid search data is a little more subtle than "bankrupt advertisers." I'll have to get back on here in between bouts of barbecue cleaning and hootin'-and-hollerin' for the Blue Jays, to offer a more comprehensive explanation and to catch up on the pressing news items that came out late week.

Google Hurdles Headlong Into Real-Time Search

2009-05-13T10:51:00.006-04:00

As widely reported in connection with their Searchology event, Google has introduced a feature to allow you to set the results to display "past 24 hours" (similar in a way to the feeling you would get searching Twitter, or Google News by recency). As the screen shot below shows, that same pane opens up a variety of other advanced search options. Once viewing recent results, you can switch the sorting mechanism away from "by relevancy," to "most recent."

In Marissa Mayer's and Jack Menzel's post about the new features, they also allude to the increased use of "rich snippets" to display review content graphically, for example. (Similar to Yahoo's Searchmonkey initiative.)

These developments open up a new type of search behavior - further solidifying the notion that many different users will see more and more different results pages with content differently ordered. Although not unfolding exactly as described long ago in these pages, the principle of users taking charge of the "algorithm" (or at least becoming more comfortable with displaying search results in a form that is more useful to them) is gradually taking hold.

An excerpt from Traffick's post in 2004:

So that's the future as this glassy-eyed pundit hopes to see it: a search engine that works like a sophisticated flight simulator, with a bunch of dials and instruments formerly available only to classified personnel. But to the extent that your settings become comfortable to you, it would be a flight simulator operated largely on autopilot. Now that would be one sweet ride!

Keep in mind, though, that at that time, Marissa Mayer flatly stated in a Q&A at SES that hardly any users wanted to use advanced features. What seems to have happened is that Google sometimes believes behavioral data about what people actually do, rather than looking at possibilities that don't show up in straightforward tests. As such, Google can be a reactive company despite its labs and vast resources. No one would debate that the current focus on real-time search and rich snippets was moved up on Google's agenda by the popularity of Twitter and Yelp, and flashes of innovation shown by competitors like (yes) Yahoo.

Reactive business, arguably, is smart business. Who, after all, could have predicted the Twitter phenomenon?

Takeaways for search marketers, aka business owners thinking about their search visibility:

1. Marissa is right: a small percentage of users access advanced search features. That will continue to be the case. 85% or more of searchers will continue just typing words into toolbars, the search box, or the address bar, and "play around." Only a small percentage will be using the advanced features.

1A. As such, fresh content and the like matters, but don't be obsessed with the idea purely for the algorithm's sake. 100% of users aren't going to be switching on the Twitterizer when they perform a search on Google.

2. That said, Google may begin to infer your preferences and turn those features on for you, or flash different types of content in oneboxes and so on. SERP's will look different for every user. The notion of where your company ranks on certain keywords becomes ever more fluid. More sophisticated assessments of search referral analytics are a must to gain insight into your user behavior (but then again, you'll need to think about how to gain insight into the users who aren't finding you, and figure out why).

3. A diversity of content production and community-facing PR strategies are needed to be seen by a variety of searchers. Algorithm-literal SEO strategies are dying. Comprehensive SEO strategies are on the rise. And in contrast to the awkwardly-named Orion Panel we're putting together for SES Toronto in June (Is PageRank Broken? The Future of Search), PageRank is not broken per se. It's just becoming increasingly irrelevant. (The name of the panel is my fault.)

4. The more things change... the more they stay the same
: The ads always seem to stay prominent, don't they? Google doesn't seem to be sweating about the revenue impact of making changes to how search functions.

Not a takeaway, but fascinating anyway: it's even more interesting today to ponder who is going to acquire Twitter (Microsoft or Google), or whether they can really stick it out alone. Does Google not want Twitter? Does Twitter not want Google? Does the world not want Twitter inside Google? Are they haggling on price or not talking? Are you as curious as I am?

50 Ways to Use Your Hover (Part 1?)

2009-05-11T16:49:00.003-04:00

Method 1: Make that link right, Dwight.

After getting sort of hooked on Twitter and seeing the clear need for the URL shortening & forwarding services such as bit.ly, I really don't know why anyone would use anything other than Hover to shorten and share long URL's. With this service, you get a dashboard that makes it easy to manage all of your URL "Hovers" (forwards), but it's with your own personalized domain.

I've found it fun and useful on several fronts, but one feature is really handy. Several times, I've put the wrong link in, then posted the forward to Twitter telling everyone about some article or post. With Hover, it's easy to correct my mistake. I go into my own domain's back end, click on the edit icon, and fix up the forwarding info for the URL I've posted. Now the public forward goes to the correct (long, unwieldy) URL; problem solved.

Disclaimer: Hover is a client! I didn't quite twig to how cool it was first either (I made them explain it patiently a few times, at least). Although it works best with your own domain or domains (and gives you an incentive to find cool shorter ones to call your own), you can give it a spin for free using Hover's domain. Did someone say "no risk free trial"?