The Pre-Commerce Blog

Try Something New

I've been forcing myself to try search engines other than Google, and the process makes it clear that getting all your search results from one place is no smarter than getting all your news from one source.

The recent outbreak of search competition, and lots of talk and activity concerning vertical search engines (shopping, business, etc.) suggests that lots of people would benefit from more diversity in their search diets - but kicking the Google habit can be tough. After all, the names Teoma, Kartoo, or Dogpile don't spring to mind very quickly do they? How are average netizens ever going to sample all the new flavors?

Perhaps SEO's, Bloggers, and other would-be influencials can use these cool little buttons (and the button-maker) to spare a few pixels in their gutters to recommend some new search options that they particularly like to their loyal followings. Beyond the community service, this can give the new and lessor-known engines more of a chance, and an even slightly spreading of market share will help nearly everyone. (So you have to do it without a PPC fee.)

When I see the same name in lots of blogrolls I give it a try. Maybe it will work for search engines too.

PS: The above are just a few samples. Someone with more skill might want to pick better colors, or design ready-to-use buttons for more engines.

Google Gets Personal

Beyond the visual changes exposed at Google is a new lab experiment - Google Personalized.

Pretty crude right now - you define some subtopics within large topics (like jazz within music) and then use this nice slider to constrain your searches to your areas of interest - but over time this will probably be more significant than the loss of the little fake tab graphics. Which one will get more blog talk today?

Froogle Gets Promoted

Am I the first, or last, to notice that Froogle is now on the Google home page and part of the tab bar on every results page? They've also added adwords to the side-bar (maybe that's been there a while, I thought it wasn't originally). I wonder if this is because it's 'ready' (it still says beta) or because of the moves of Shopping.com and Yahoo!?

Shopping search is going to go nuts over the next few months, and as I've pointed out recently I think it all ends with more and more integration of the selling into the searching, until it gets very hard to tell the difference. Amazon started the other way - selling stuff and then letting others sell on their pages and then adding paid ad links directly to competitors. The searchers will go the other way, first doing organic listings, then blending in paid (shopping.com is essentially 100% paid), then selling things through third party relationships that are like affiliate marketing (% of sale) deals, and finally selling things direct.

The big mix is probably great for consumers, but I hope the engines label the parts as well as Amazon does. I doubt they will. I also hope the competition ups the quality of pre-purchase 'how-to-buy' and 'what-to-buy' information. Froogle and the others right now are far from perfect in helping you decide what to buy, they only help find out who has something if you already know it exists, and mostly what the different pricing options are. Adding opinions and reseller ratings is critical, as the dedicated shopping engines have found. But it needs to go much further, integrating thoughtful editorial with pro reviews and human-edited lists of external resources. CNET has many of the best attributes of this type right now.

Update: Surprise - I wasn't first. Seth has it and says he got it from Alex. Unofficial Google's got it too. SearchEngineLowDown even tracks down the Google News Release with a list of the changes to Google and Froogle.

Follow That Car

In yesterday’s post suggesting that Yahoo! buy Shopping.com, I mentioned that the new Yahoo Autos looks like an indication of things to come. John Battelle makes a similar point today when he says “If you want to track the commercialization of search, watch Yahoo.”

Just as in years gone by, the search engines (it used to be the portals) will find more and more ways to monetize their traffic, which generally means keeping people on the site longer and sending them off the site less. Sure the world is a better place in that now they get paid when people leave the site – at least part of the time – but still they know that there’s lots of margin left in those users. So one by one they’ll figure out ways to take the most profitable market segments and keep them in-house longer and longer.

Reminds me of a friend who’s in the shopping mall business – after years of seeing which businesses lasted, had the best margins, and were the least difficult operationally, he buys up those businesses. Own the building, get nice safe rent from the tough or money loosing businesses and keep all the high-profit low-risk ones for yourself. Nice way to make a living.

Expect the same from your favorite search engines. They’ll sell you a click for $0.50 if it’s only worth a few bucks, but if they see that you’re paying $0.50 (or even $5.00) for clicks that nets $50, it isn’t going to take long for someone in the organization to start writing white papers about getting a bigger piece of that action.

There are lots of complications that will come out of this, both for the engines, internet users, and independent businesses and web sites. Hang on – the ride’s going to get bumpy!

Checkbook Please

Shopping.com has filed for their IPO. They earned $6.9 million on revenue of $67.2 million this past year. Yahoo should buy them fast before the price goes up after the IPO. Or they could do even better and buy BizRate which has broader services and appears to be a higher class operation. Better yet they could buy both, just to keep them both from Google.

These companies are the pure-shopping side of Overture. Every click is paid for, and there are LOTs of clicks. Plus they both have scads of user opinions, the once and next driving force of commerce. And it's a great fit with Yahoo Stores, where they earn from both store rent and as a percent of sales. This adds a revenue stream for the big boys who don't run YahooStores, and who already have to buy Overture ads to get into regular search listings. Top this off with moves like the new Yahoo! Autos and you start to see where this is all going.

Update: Two days after writing this entry, it was reported that Yahoo! purchased Kelkoo, the european equivalent of Epinions.

Update: A post at SearchBlog about Shopping.com and their Google relationship.

Microsoft Increases Competition, For A Change

When Microsoft and the word ‘competition’ come up in the same sentence, somebody usually has to call a regulatory agency. Not this time. With the official announcement that Microsoft will launch a new search engine later this year, it seems that we can all look to Redmond and give thanks.

Google has been WAY too powerful. They earned their dominance by building a better product and winning customers on the merits. And I’d say they’ve been pretty responsible with their power. Good thing for us they started make a lot of money at it. Because it was this money that has brought Yahoo and now Microsoft into the game, and soon instead of one provider controlling 80% of all internet search, we’ll have three major players each controlling around 30% of search. Let’s hope AOL somehow makes a break and the field spreads even wider.

This is good news for a lot of reasons. The first is that as we saw in November (via the ‘Florida’ update), it isn’t healthy for any company to have 80% of their revenue coming from one place that they don’t control. Now if one of the engines decides to change 10 of their top 10 results, people won’t have to starve or jump off of bridges.

Another is that as it becomes harder and less lucrative to ‘game’ the system, maybe less people will do it. I’m not sure about this one, because the available reward might still justify the means. Today lots of people ‘do what they gotta do’ to get top rankings for high value ‘money words’. I don’t believe in the whole ‘black hat/white hat’ school of SEO whining, so let’s just say some of these people are aggressive. When a top ranking on Google means about 50% less revenue than it did before, the incentive for aggressive behavior goes down. Or considered another way, when you’ve got to do 3X as much work to get the same result, some people will think it’s not worth the effort. Again, I may be way wrong about this one.

Balance on the organic side also brings more competition to the paid side, potentially lowering costs and creating tiers and discernable segments. The rise of vertical search engines and more diverse PPC distribution networks is helping this cause too.

Finally, as always this competition will improve the products. Google and the others have a lot of room to improve and weekly internal reviews of market-share charts will motivate them to get there. Who would have ever thought we’d have Microsoft to thank for something like that.

Have any other ideas about benefits of the emerging market competition? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.