Search is the Internet OS!

More Than 40 Speakers Will Present On Local Search And Mobile Marketing At SMX Local

noreply@blogger.com (Arnaud Fischer) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:57:00 +0000

Speakers for this year’s Search Marketing Expo – SMX Local & Mobile are now posted. More than 40 thought leaders and internet marketing pioneers will be presenting July 24-25 in San Francisco. SMX Local & Mobile provides tips, tactics and strategies.

Targeting Locals in a Blended Search World
Cracking the Code: Inside the Black Box of Local & Mobile Search Algorithms
Local & Mobile Paid vs. Natural Options & Tradeoffs
Blended Search in a Mobile World
Neogeography: Opportunities in Mapvertising
Managing a Local/Mobile Search Marketing Campaign

See all of the details at the SMX Local & Mobile agenda.

Speakers at SMX Local & Mobile include a keynote address by Frazier Miller, General Manager of Yahoo! Local. Just a few of the speakers you’ll hear from are:

Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land
Brian Kaminski, Managing Director, iProspect San Francisco, iProspect
Jonathan Ashton, Director of SEO, Agency.com
Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence
Brad Geddes, Director of Search, LocalLaunch
Benjamin Rudolph, Interactive Media Buyer, Search Discovery, Inc.
Cindy Krum, Sr. SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works, Inc.
Jordan Kasteler, Senior SEO Analyst, Overstock.com
Chris Silver Smith, Lead Strategist, Netconcepts LLC
Steve Espinosa, Director of Product Development, eLocal Listing
Gib Olander, Director of Business Development, Localeze
Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping, Inc.
Heath Clarke, CEO, Local.com
Perry Evans, Founder and CEO, Local Matters
Ted Morgan, CEO & Founder, Skyhook Wireless

...and more than 25 others.

National Brands Marketing Local

noreply@blogger.com (Arnaud Fischer) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:31:00 +0000

As consumers become more sophisticated and targeting and tracking capabilities continue to evolve, local search is becoming a more critical channel for all marketers. In this webcast, analyst Greg Sterling will discuss the latest developments in the Local Search landscape, and how brand marketers – of any size – can take advantage of this evolving channel. The majority of consumer transactions take place offline, yet the Internet influences more of them every day. This is the true opportunity for “local search”: tying consumer Internet research to offline conversions.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - 1:00 PM EDT (10:00 AM PDT)

As consumers become more sophisticated and targeting and tracking capabilities continue to evolve, local search is becoming a more critical channel for all marketers. We are, in many ways, in Act II of Local Search. According to a recent comScore study, 82% of Local Searchers follow up offline via an in-store visit, a phone call, or a purchase. Of these, 61% end up making a purchase.

The implications for marketers is significant: how do you track offline conversions that began in an online search? How does a large, national brand take advantage of search at the local level? As consumers become more adept at searching online, how do marketers keep up with the shifting behavior? Are Internet Yellow pages the way to go - or should you consider a combination of print and online advertising to maximize your offline sales?

In this webcast, Greg Sterling will discuss the latest developments in the Local Search landscape and how brand marketers — of any size — can take advantage of this evolving channel.

Greg Sterling, local and mobile search correspondent for Search Engine Land, has been covering local search for more than six years. He is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on online consumer and advertiser behavior and the relationship between the Internet and traditional media, with an emphasis on the local search marketplace. He also co-chairs Search Marketing Expo - SMX Local + Mobile.

The 3X Local Search momentum

noreply@blogger.com (Arnaud Fischer) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:11:00 +0000

The local search marketplace continues to grow rapidly, at a faster pace than general search. Local Search - more than 1.5 billion queries per month, second most popular activity after email - is at the cross road of several trends in hyper growth mode.

A larger portion of local SMB offline spending is shifting online.
Local search still represents less than 10% of search advertising and could double over the next 5 years with spending projected to grow from $8 billion in ‘07 to nearly $20 billion in ’11.
Lead generation spending is expected to reach $3.6 billion in ‘11

Web search queries have also continuously grown in length and precision, increasingly including geo-modifiers, driving more conversions.

To this point, Greg Sterling’s “Consumer Purchase Funnel” describes pretty well the consumer purchasing cycle from general research in Web search to transactional intent at a local search level.

And bloggers have definitely picked up the trend, with about 27 posts a day trending upward.

"Obama" versus "Clinton" blogosphere share of voice

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:49:00 +0000

Just for fun ...the spikes are amazing. Both IceRocket and Blogpulse are reporting 1%+ share of voice for each of "Obama" and "Clinton". Go figure where it's going to be at by November. The Web's transparency and fluidity is democratizing ... democracy.

English posts that contain Obama per day for the last 30 days.

Posts that contain Clinton per day for the last 30 days.

No wonder kids are engaging into politics more than a generation ago.

Sentiment analysis and consumer generated content

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:20:00 +0000

Sentiment Analysis draws on computational linguistic, information retrieval, data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, statistics and predictive analysis to transform unstructured online dialog into marketing insights about companies, products and issues. Web 2.0 was about collective intelligence; Web 3.0 is about connecting knowledge, making the proliferation of user generated content one of the main drivers behind the emergence of the Sentiment Analysis discipline. Sentiment analysis is on the verge to making eCommerce and Online Advertising a whole lot more efficient.

44% of Internet users are content creators according to PEW. Who are they? Angry customers, consumer activists, competitors and more, contributing thoughts and media to the online world. 12% of Internet users have posted comments on blogs. A Zoomerang survey reports that 78% recently voted and rated compared with 47% two years ago. 44% have recently commented on a forum or blog compared to 23% two years ago. 28% have recently written a review versus 15% two years ago.

What are the drivers behind the CGM growth? There is clearly a democratization of revenue share models underway, although being compensated is not a primary driver according to Peter Turner. So, why are users generating content online? Authoring content online has become a basic consumer need of expression, leveraging media fragmentation and device proliferation. Some Internet users just love the attention, educating and influencing, feeling part of a community and creating a dialog. The emergence of social networks' architecture of participation describing systems designed for user contribution, vertical communities, Q&A platforms have accelerated this trend in a significant way. Summize already aggregates over 22 million reviews by over 3 million reviewers. Wikipedia passed 2 million English language articles in September. The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months. YouTube gets about 8 hours of video upload every minute. With increasingly easy to use publishing tools like blogs and RSS feeds, everyone can be an author. Information consumers are becoming producers, driving a significant marketing shift. Marketing is not anymore about "convincing" but about "influence". Recommendations from consumers are trusted by 78% of respondents according to Nielsen.

Traditional advertising is broken. If folks talked to you like TV commercials do, you would punch them in the face! Traditional information sources are facing trust erosion and message dilution challenges. 80% of consumers prefer asking friends or relatives to report on products rather than relying on the brands themselves (PQ Media). 98% of respondents found online reviews credible and 82% have bought at least one product as a result of them (Deloitte). In contrast, 4% highly trust content and opinions from vendors or advertisers. Word-of-mouth is a very powerful selling tool and is generally positive toward brands. PQ Media reports about 3.5 billion brand conversations online each day, making WOM marketing the fastest-growing alternative media segment. Advertising spending will reach $20 billion this year and eCommerce is on track for a $200 billions year. More than 70% of users rely on online reviews. 82% of consumers who read product reviews online, say purchase decisions have been directly influenced by the reviews. 69% of consumers who read reviews, share them, amplifying the impact (Deloitte).

People influence each other’s behavior in many ways, voting, crowd dynamics, following fashions and joining fads. Social influence is particularly relevant to consumer behavior because people aspire to what other people have and rely on other's knowledge and experience. Driving, wearing, reading, listening to the same things builds social identity and promotes cultural cohesion. So, what is the impact of social influence? One in ten Americans tells the other nine what to wear, where to eat and what to buy, according to Keller Fay. Few important trends reach the mainstream without passing through the Influentials in the early stages, and the Influentials can make or break a brand. Brand managers and advertisers already took notice, moving from testing word-of-mouth marketing to including it as a growing component of fully-integrated campaigns.Spending on social media and “conversational marketing” will surpass traditional marketing spending by the end of 2012 according to a TWI Surveys. WOM is expected to reach more than $1 billion in '07 and will show compound growth rates of about 30% through 2011 to reach $3.7 billion.

Now, no human being can read through this content and make sense of it fast enough. SentiMetrix has developed an innovative scientific and technology framework to measure sentiments or opinions expressed in electronic media, combining data gathering with sophisticated entity extraction and real time text analytics to track opinions. Sentiment Analysis is emerging as the definitive brand monitoring platform. Andiamo Systems already provides tools that help identify, measure, understand and act on consumer attitudes toward brands. BuzzLogic surfaces leading online conversations, unlocking precision semantic targeting leading to between 2X and 4X traditional online advertising conversion rates. Advertisers and marketers agree that "Engagement" is the right metric for this new social media paradigm, although nobody agrees on a definition nor how to measure. Sentiment Analysis and Tone polarity scoring will emerge as the "Engagement" metric that advertisers and marketers can quantify.

Sentiment analysis and consumer generated media slides

Facebook catching up on MySpace

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:08:00 +0000

Facebook is on a trend to closing some of the gap with Myspace's traffic. MySpace made the open and distributed widget economy flourish but Facebook has managed to successfully position itself as a platform; both inviting the community to add apps incremental value. If Search is the Internet OS, Facebook is the middleware!

Even though MySpace has over twice as many visitors as Facebook (Compete, QuantCast ), Facebook is growing a lot faster. With 1 in 8 users worldwide visiting MySpace.com in any given month, the social network remains an incredible success story of adoption in an industry in its infancy. This said, MySpace could have reached critical mass and now most of its growth potential, getting closer to saturation with its current value proposition? Already 55% of online teens have profiles online according to PEW. Adding incremental unique visitors beyond a certain point becomes expensive for a traffic harder to convert and of poorer quality to advertisers. Engagement metrics look about the same although still in favor of MySpace. Compete shows more pages per visit for Myspace at 55 versus 44 for FaceBook but the gap is closing.

Traffic and Buzz converge. Nielsen BuzzMetrics Blogpulse shows blog references to "myspace" still outnumbers "facebook" although the gap is closing. IceRocket also confirms the trend with 2,007 posts including the term "facebook" over the past 3 months versus 6,413 for "myspace".

Queries can be split many ways of which isolating i) navigation vs informational vs transactional queries and ii) convenience-based vs preference are only two behavioral dimensions. Enough navigational queries take place in search boxes to also extract some directional insights from Google Trends. Google's search volume confirms Facebook closing the gap on MySpace as well.

Now, not all user generated opinion is good. Playing around with OpinMind, MySpace still has a much more positive "Sentimeter" than Facebook. This said, I would not conclude that fast that MySpace drives more satisfaction, engagement for that much. Different demographics makes them apples and oranges. The Sentimeter displays the relative number of positive and negative opinions identified by Opinmind's automated search processes ... just another data point. It would be interesting to see OpinMind's trend.

And now for more fun, I passed both through the sucks-rocks grounder to put FaceBook on top again.

Web 2.0 People Search Engines

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 08:51:00 +0000

If Web 1.0 was about linking information then Web 2.0 is really about linking people as pointed out by Mills Davis from Project10. The social network phenomenon is creating an unprecedented and growing amount of buzz and is already channeling significant amounts of traffic around. IceRocket Blog Trends reports about 400 posts a day referring to the phrase "social network". Nielsen BuzzMetrics Blogpulse shows an increase of 200% in 6 months from 0.015% blog share of voice in March 2007 to over 0.045% in September 2007.

After years of stagnating online white pages, a myriad of people search engines have emerged and Facebook joined the party last week by allowing its profile pages to be found. Never before was personal information so readily available. Looking for an ex, a long time friend or classmate? Checking out a potential hire? Planning a family reunion? Anyone owe you money? People search engines let you find information about other people from crawling, indexing, aggregating, consolidating and normalizing content from Web sites, social network affiliations, photos, blogs, news, public records and other user generated footprints. People search engines are also surfacing privacy issues, encouraging some to manage their online reputation like consumer brands should.

The social search space is growing broader, including submission and bookmark sharing, implicit and explicit voting, tagging and cloud navigation, commenting, and now an emerging "people search" category. Social search has become social networks' underlying glue. Search is the Internet OS!

The people search space is getting crowded in a world where technology categories have often historically had just enough room for 2 leaders and a rotating third player. Mashable reviews about 40 social search engines and AltSearchReviews now maintains a Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list on a monthly basis.

Buzz monitoring picks up on noise long before Comscore's panels can register statistically significant traffic levels. Online buzz is an interesting directional proxy for online sentiment and future success even though some started earlier and are better at generating buzz.

Spock claims to be the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people with over 100 million people already indexed. In addition to scouring social networks, Spock does a nice job at differentiating its feature set by letting users vote. And the Spock Power score determines how much influence you have each time you vote or add a tag, image, link, or relationship. Complimentary tour below.

Wink Technologies is a People Search Engine that makes it easier to find people across the Web. Wink claims the largest index by providing search of over 200 Million profiles across social networks and on-line communities. Wink lets you add friends, monitor Web presence activity and includes a messaging platform taking it closer to some social networks. Wink recently expanded the sites it queries to include some people search sources, such as The Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia.

Ziki is a next generation search engine focused on people, powered by people. Ziki has developed its own algorithm to collect and organize information relative to a person. The platform also includes several community features such as networks, recent activity updates, similar profiles and views reporting.

PeekYou has been in stealth mode since October 2006 and officially launched in beta this past July. PeekYou's differentiation claims revolve around i) de-duping numerous identities into one consolidated snapshot profile and ii) platform openness.

ZoomInfo contains profiles on more than 36 million people, including biography, employment history, Web references and other Web links such as blogs. Founded in 2001, ZoomInfo is a "relative" industry veteran, more focused on the business world, closer to LinkedIn-type content. The company also gives access to executive profiles requiring a paid subscription.

pipl positions itself as The most comprehensive people search on the web. pipl aggregates more than social networks, also including public record information from PeopleData such as addresses, birthdays, passenger records from ellisislandrecord and more. Unlike a typical search-engine, Pipl is designed to retrieve information from the deep, sometimes referred to as "invisible" Web, estimated at 500 times that of the surface Web.

Ex.plode.us is an easy way to find friends and those with common interests, no matter what social network or service they use. You can search for names or interests. Not unlike other engines, the company's vision is to build an application that acts like the glue between social networks, breaking down silos and opening up the web using open standards. In addition to crawling and aggregating social networks, ex.plode.us lets you add friends and comments on friends' profiles.

Rapleaf, founded in 2006, is positioning itself a bit differently. Use Rapleaf to build, promote, and manage your online reputation. Rapleaf's application is a twist on eBay's seller ratings and emerging B2B brand monitoring plays like Andiamo Systems, Converseon and BuzzLogics. The Rapleaf score is calculated using data from ratings given about a person and other online information such as social networks. Members can also export their reputation score widget to blogs and other networks. As pointed out by Stefanie Olsen from Cnet, Rapleaf has no visible link to TrustFuse, but TrustFuse's privacy policy mentions that the company is a wholly owned subsidiary of TrustFuse. And TrustFuse sells data to marketers so they can better target customers.

Naymz, not unlike Rapleaf, is positioning itself as the place to maximize your business and job opportunities by promoting your good name and reputation. A little like LinkedIN, Naymz has developed a confidence level index. This reputation index is calculated from a number of variables, including profile completeness. Naymz goes one step further and lets users subscribe to someone else's recent Web activity such as blog posts and profile updates.

WikiYou, "A Wikipedia for people" according to TechCrunch, is the unauthorized biography of every person on earth. WikiYou also aggregates friends and let's you discuss, comment on someones profile and add videos.

As for traffic, the space is in its infancy and the jury still out. ZoomInfo is way ahead with about 1.3 million unique visitors a month. Most everybody else remains below 100K visitors according to Compete and QuantCast. This said, all are significantly increasing usage traction and visitors are giving them a trial, generating around 5 pages per visit.

Below is a video presenting ZabaSearch that I did not review.

People search engines face a number of challenges from directing comprehensive crawls, to de-duping content, extracting meaningful entities and even more fundamentally differentiating value propositions and building rational business models. What's next? Are people search engines viable as standalone destinations or will they be rolled up as a feature by better integrated social networks. And general purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo! will eventually better integrate people results leveraging their respective "OneBox" and other vertical intercepts. Critical success factors are actually very much in line with traditional algorithmic search: relevance, comprehensiveness, speed, ease of use and trust. The people search engine industry is still in its infancy and if Web 2.0 is about linking people, Web 3.0 could very well be about connecting and making semantic sense of people's knowledge.

[PS: published from Google Docs, well done Google!]

The more money ... the more buzz - Nielsen

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:52:00 +0000

Nielsen BuzzMetrics just released the results of a new study establishing some strong correlation between online buzz and media spending. $20 million is the price tag for rising above the noise.

On average, the top 10% of products with the most buzz, spent nearly $20 million on paid media for the launch.
Companies that generated the next 40% of blog buzz spent an average of $15 million

I was surprised by the coverage head ratio, few brands generate most of the content. I would have expected the explosion of consumer generated content to actually surface the tail and put some light on smaller brands

10% of brands accounted for 85% of total CPG buzz in the study.

The study sounds pretty encouraging for emerging semantic technology applications such as online buzz monitoring, tone polarity extraction and sentiment analysis. The more brand advertising dollars shifting online, the more requirements for evaluating impact on social media buzz.

Searchles = Search + Circles

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:30:00 +0000

Social discovery engine Searchles announced enhanced video search functionality and a creative Ajax-based search button surfacing social refinement options. The Searchles platform includes many of the basic "social search" features such as tagging, sharing, comments, voting and social ranking, groups, messaging and clearly considers video content as just another media users can submit, tag, share submit. Thinking about it, Searchles is not unlike Digg, maybe just more personal and not yet as popular. Searchles positions itself as a a highly scaleable "social search" platform that showcases expertise, enables collaboration with peers and instantly captures it in searchable knowledge indexes. The platform is a hybrid, combining aspects of "social bookmarking" and "social networking" technology with analytical "social search" capability.

* New search box [...] designed to be more compatible with the enhanced search options of a social search[...]. This innovative new feature combines the user-friendly display of a traditional search box with the range of network oriented social search options on Searchles – such as searching through your friends’ or groups’ posts – made visible as one scrolls over the search button.

* Many video sites only offer users the capability to search within said site, while Searchles enables users to do only one search to access a pool of videos that spans all of your favorite video sites as well as Searchles TV Channels users have created.

Reaching critical mass to fuel the social network effect is probably one of the top social search challenges along with combating Spam. The more users, the more interactions value top surface and the more content submitted.

Searchles gets somewhat lost in the sea of PR noise generated by FaceBook and others, while still managing to sustain the interest of some in the blogophere with a couple posts a day in average as reported by Nielsen's BlogPulse and IceRocket.

Digital influencers will grow to 34.4 million in 2011 - eMarketer

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:16:00 +0000

Many Computational Linguistic departments across the country are busy developing a broad range of Semantic-based algorithms these days. Browsers came from the academic world, so did a lot of search technology, why not sentiment extraction.

Advertisers traditionally follow consumers. eMarketer just released a study mentioning that already 66 million adults regularly share advice about products and services with others, and 27 million are exerting that influence online. As more people become comfortable with voicing their opinions on the Internet, the number of digital influencers will grow to 34.4 million in 2011. There is a shift underway from few-to-many to many-to-many publishing models resulting in an explosion of consumer-generated media. 44% of Internet users are content creators (PEW), and an increasing ratio of search engine's top results are now user-authored content. Brand owners are losing share of voice and control over their message. Internet sentiment analysis, buzz monitoring and online reputation management could very well emerge as the next significant search marketing era after SEO and SEM.

SentiMetrix is one of these emerging startups I have been keeping in touch with over the past months. SentiMetrix is offering innovative technology framework to measure sentiments or opinions expressed in the electronic media, worldwide. It combines data gathering with named entity extraction and text analytics, to track opinions expressed about the topics requested by SentiMetrix clients. SentiMetrix platform is based on the award-winning Oasys technology (http://oasys.umiacs.umd.edu/oasys/) developed at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies by Dr. V.S. Subrahmanian and his team. By combining statistical methods with natural language processing techniques, the software closely mimics the way humans perceive opinions expressed in electronic texts, be it news articles, blog posts or customer reviews.

Why I left AOL Search

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:39:00 +0000

I started at AOL Search almost 3 years ago, hoping to be part of the turn around story, taking AOL to the Web and integrating search consequently. ... I was also thinking no one would single-handedly hold responsible if AOL missed a step.

I spent most of the past decade planning and building search experiences from developing the first SafeSearch application in 1994 with InterGO to crawling and parsing applications with Microsoft in 1996, then Altavista, Infospace and AOL.

I was realistic. After IAC acquired Ask, I knew there was no room for AOL Search to rank among the top 3 players in the traditional search category. Personal technology categories, from desktop operating systems to browsers and productivity apps have traditionally had enough room for two leaders and a third rotating player. I also knew the search ecosystem was heading for fragmentation. Crawling, indexing, computational linguistic and managing consumer media experiences definitely don’t require the same core competencies. Given the rise of social networking, broadband penetration, the explosion of consumer generated content and the emergence of awesome technologies re-inventing user interaction models. I also knew that AOL on the Web still had a unique opportunity to reclaim its historical online community fame and core competency.

I thought AOL had a unique opportunity to repositions itself as a Discovery Engine, taking the lead on becoming the leader of an emerging new social search category. FullView was the base for exactly that. Social search is This is just what my team focused on after integrating Search capabilities and optimizing revenue across the Network including the AOL portals, Email apps, MapQuest, Netscape and more to reach about 110 million UVs.

In May, the new AOL management team - probably rightfully when considering corporate strategic goals - decided to copy and paste the Google experience to gain some level of business parity. I always knew that was a possibility while evangelizing social search as a differentiation factor and stuck around to the end. Let Semantic Search technology, Social Searc h, and Sentiment analysis strive.

Google in 3 years

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Sun, 06 May 2007 16:48:00 +0000

Steve Newcomb - Powerset - posted an interesting question on LinkedIn's Q&A service:

What are your predictions for Google over the next 3 years. How will people perceive Google? How will their search engine look? Where will Google's stock be in 3 years? what are your top 10 predictions.

The answers are pretty interesting ...

Top brand, advertising co., and personalized media portal.
Stock over $800;used by more than 10 million small businesses.
Shares will go up but not by a lot. Growth steady, not enormous, continue to have legal problems.
Sued for anti-trust. Acquisitions subject to FTC scrutiny. >90% market share int the US search market.
Amazing at finding new avenues for generating revenue via ad placement, continue to be 'so-so' at building new products and technology.
Become the world's leading source of News, Information and Social Commentary.
Will continue turning into corporate culture shop; become somewhat regulated; taking market share from *sloppy* competitors; into the telco business
Into DVR software, buying TiVo and offering the OS free of charge; "push" individualized video ads into TV programs
Into the billboard business
Will buy Neilsen/NetRatings
More projects with Apple
Monetize more of their services
Collaborate more than compete with other search engines
Merging blogging, office suites, and advertising using google earth/sketchup.

In spite of how successful a consumer brand and advertising play, there are days I still believe Google would be into grid computing if a sustainable business model emerged. Below is a note I sent to colleagues over 2 years ago, after IAC acquired Ask. Since then, Google acquired a whole lot of black fiber around the country, launched Google Apps, and Amazon deployed their S3 architecture, Mechanical Turk and Elastic Compute Cloud.

-----------------------------

2008 [maybe more like 2010], SEARCH is the Internet OS … what if …

It’s 2005; we are competing against Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, IAC, Amazon’s A9, right? We compete for eye-balls, that’s how we all make money today. This said, personal technology categories, from desktop operating systems to browsers and productivity apps have traditionally had enough room for two leaders and a third rotating player.

In 2008, Search is the OS enabling content applications to deliver media and information-related consumer experiences; think of the search ecosystem as a 3-layer value chain:

1. Media: everything content related, wherever it is.

2. Content applications: Web browsers, media players, communication applications, ...

3. Search as the information OS: crawling, indexing, computational linguistic, device access management...

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! think of Search as the Internet OS platform, focused on developing, surfacing, and documenting APIs, inviting developers to contribute value-add services legitimizing and extending their reach.

Google and Microsoft own the Search OS layer

Today [2005], Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, IAC/Ask Jeeves, A9 are stretching to cover the broad Search spectrum from exposing APIs to delivering the content experience. That might not prevail in the future. I don't subscribe so much with some analysts' belief that Google will remain a Media company. Google’s capital expenditures to develop the biggest data center on earth puts them on a collision course with Microsoft, not with Yahoo! Google’s top management layer is made up of technologists, not media folks as is the case at Yahoo! I am not making this up, read it from smarter people who know how to count. The Search Appliance (read potential Network OS) is still a priority at Google.

Here is the “if ...”

Google could very well only be in consumer traffic and advertising businesses because of short term necessities until a viable grid computing business model emerges. Now, if Google pulls back to focus on Search as the OS and grid computing services to become the “Intel Inside” brand not actually directly facing consumers nor advertisers, you can bet Microsoft will be tempted to do the same. Remember the browser race? Once the Netscape threat was put out, Microsoft pretty much stopped innovating with IE. It’s 2008, Google and Microsoft are leveraging large investments in research & development and own Search as an OS and touch on content applications mostly to feed the underlying infrastructure. AOL, Yahoo!, IAC, and Amazon are consumer facing media and services companies, involved to some extent at the content application layer level, along with a sea of smaller third party developers.

Still 2008, the search ecosystem is much more fragmented. Crawling, indexing, computational linguistic and managing consumer media businesses definitely don’t require the same core competencies. Differentiating the content experience, adding value around algorithmic results still means we have to apply technology to make sense of user intent, content, and presentation. Search technology can help, but it’s not such a binary world where you either do or don’t own it all.

And of course, anything can and will happen; that’s a safe bet.

Video search education about social search and sentiment analysis

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 13:51:00 +0000

Internet time is eating up on TV time. While the Internet video space remains at an infancy stage, content is getting more amazing, broader, deeper, better tagged and more easily searchable. Getting an education in Social Search and Sentiment Analysis is at reach and has become fairly painless using AOL Video and Uncut, Blinkx, Google YouTube, Live video search beta and Yahoo! Video. I am sure I am missing important ones, just ping me and I won't next time.

The amazing "The Machine is Us/ing Us" about Web 2.0 - while circulating for a while before -was also presented at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. Worth your time. On the lighter and still fun side, you can check out daweedrex's "Web 2.0 song, are you blogging this"

On the more ... academic side, if you care about the social Web and you have a few minutes, Ed H. Chi - scientist at Palo Alto Research Center - present a riveting talk about the emergence of the Social Web, summarizing initial results from PARC's Augmented Social Cognition research project and characterizing the evolution of both Wikipedia and del.icio.us.

There is also a whole lot of search marketing folks - good and bad - clearly understanding the value of social media reach and optimization, very much like the early SEO (1998 ...) and SEM (2000 ....) adopters. Given the shift in brand advertising dollars from the TV to the web, online buzz monitoring, Internet sentiment extraction and reputation management are emerging as critical in online marketing mixes. More and more product demos like AfterVote and insider interviews like this Technorati segment have also made their way there.

Point me to your videos!

TrailFire social search buzz, user engagement and network effect.

noreply@blogger.com (arnaud fischer) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 20:40:00 +0000

Social search engines are working hard at developing a dialog with their user-base requesting feedback and encouraging engagement. Most are building search on the premise that people can add a whole lot more incremental value on top of traditional keyword matching algorithmic engines. Adoption and ramping up usage is one of social search engines’ critical success factors to build scale, reach critical mass and generate that network effect to effectively surface that “people & community” value layer, although not everybody needs to be tagging, commenting, sharing, bookmarking for social search to be effective. TrailFire’s approach is pretty good. Discover what you are looking for on the Web using like-minded people’s trails. Trails can be private or public, shared via email, by posting them on any website or by publishing them on Trailfire.com. Following is TrailFire’s latest announcement from CEO John O’Halloran.
“I am pleased to announce that we have just released a new version […. […] allows you to form a private or public interest groups so you can more easily share your discoveries […]. For example, two or more people can now work together to organize a trip or shop collaboratively on the web. Teachers can guide their students to associated class material anywhere on the web. A fan club could guide their friends to hot web sites about their favorite celebrities”.

All this should sound familiar if you have read the blogosphere coverage of Google capturing Web history beyond saving search history. To make a long and sophisticated story short and simple, it’s like transposing PageRank’s content link authority to people’s Web connectivity. Then take that social Web map and personalize it down to a community or user level. In a different way, it’s also not unlike StumbleUpon’s discovery engine, getting some interesting coverage of its own as well.

Now, is TrailFire generating buzz? Following at BlogPulse's and other charts monitoring noise and chatting in the blogosphere.

Before cleaning up the logs from spam and seeded content, IceRocket's BlogTrend Tool is reporting a little bit over 2 posts per day.

Technorati is reporting consistent coverage, between 0 and 5 citations a day. Posts that contain Trailfire per day for the last 30 days.

Go TrailFire