The Pre-Commerce Blog

The Beatles are Not Bigger Than Jesus, But Something Is

The new Google Trends product is getting lots of talk, but it took Google themselves to put it to the important use of proving that:

• More people want sex than jesus
• More people want jesus than Mel Gibson
• Paris Hilton was bigger than jesus, briefly
• The Beatles are not bigger than jesus, at least in 2006 (if only they had data from 1963...)

Search Engine RoundTable gives a good overview of how this tool can be used by online marketers.

Bonus: Don't miss the related research from Andrew Sullivan

Only You Can Save The Search Engines

The fact that the search engine emperors have no clothes is one that nobody seems to like to talk about. What I mean is, search engine results suck. How often do you search for something even remotely complicated and get truely great results at the top of the list?

Watching the world of tagging emerge, the idea of enabling users to contribute to solving this problem has been occuring to me lately - not that user input or feedback is a new idea - but it was brilliantly brought up today in a post by Bubblegeneration who took it a step further and suggested that users get paid for helping.

Search deperately needs to catch up with the hype and dollars. It needs lots of improved vertical search solutions. It needs the invisible tabs to get visible. It needs a lot more 'spam pages' to be filtered out. The algo's and the engines that own them can't do it alone. I hope they let us help.

Search Optimization Eye Tracking Study Results

Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa summarizes several recent eye-tracking studies over at Chief Marketer, in terms of what they say about Search engine optimization. She draws a few conclusions which should come as no surprise: * Users have short attention spans. * The copy in your listings really matters. * Paid search isn't a replacement for good organic results. The last of course is where most people need to focus. Paid search is great, can produce good to great ROI, and generate a lot of business. Nothing wrong with that. But it's consistently reported that 8 of 10 clicks on search engines happen on the organic results side - yet budgets and focus generally isn't there. It's easy to see why. Paid search is relatively straightforward and produces near-instant results. Organic optimization is black magic at best, and takes months to even begin to produce results in many cases. But as these new research results demonstrate, if paid search is most or all of your search engine marketing program, you're effectively invisible to most searchers. (Marketing Sherpa also sells a report with more detailed results. We provide this link for your convenience, and don't get any compensation if you choose to buy it.)

If You Can't Google It, It Really Shouldn't Exist

Another step in the Googlization of the world is announced:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.

As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

Local Search Gets Better

The race is really on in this area - with Yahoo pulling ahead with another update of local.yahoo.com. As usual, Battelle has the info and insights.

Said another way, as a user I get the sense that the more I put into Yahoo Local (or any number of other well considered sites), the more I get out. I'm motivated to use it not simply because I get some information, find a phone number, get driving directions, but also because I sense I am contributing, through my clickstream, to the creation of a smarter service which will serve be better in the future. Also, I am participating in a community that I am part of. That, in the end, is what will drive loyalty and usage in a Web 2 world.

To SEM or Not To SEM

Polarizing debates sell papers. Even if there are no papers. As I watch extremists from both the left and right trade insane and untrue allegations about Cindy Sheehan, my RSS aggregator leads me to a somewhat similar debate on SEM. In this corner, we have Jennifer August of Search Engine Guide, taking great exception to an article by Jack Humphrey on WebProNews. Jack says search marketing is snake oil. And Jack knows snake oil (more about that in a moment). My two favorite quotes from Mr. Humphrey: * The vast majority of small business startups will never have the resources, time, or know-how to turn an idea into a profitable online business focusing only on search engines. * In a well balanced marketing campaign that focuses on many ways to bring in targeted traffic, search engine marketing has its place. You do what you can, and you move on to all the other ways there are to promote your business. "You do what you can, and then you move on." Never has the manifesto of the loser been stated more clearly. Don’t bother finding out if what you’re doing is right. Just do something, and then move on. Don’t bother learning if there is something missing in your efforts. Do as much as you feel like, then move on. Don’t even consider that some things take time – and some things take a lot of time. Spend a little time, and then move on. Don’t assume that your efforts will need to be tuned and calibrated over time based on initial results. Give it a shot, and then move on. Of course, not everything Jack says is preposterous. He describes the hype in the SEO business and the ‘hammering of misinformation (that) never lets up.’ That’s true enough - as is the fact that nearly every paragraph in his essay is just more whacks of that very hammer. Lest I just sputter generalities like young Jack, let’s take on a few of his ‘points’: * You are led to believe that your business will die a terrible death without the search engines.

Search engines drive billions of visitors to web sites, and once most web sites attain position within the search results, that traffic represents the vast majority of their visitors. Saying that a site will die without search traffic is hyperbole, but saying that search engine traffic is potentially the best traffic source for most web sites is not.

* It is not long before a new business finds itself wrapped up in a game where the only winners are the geeks and deep pockets. If you do not fall into either of those categories, your business is doomed from the start if you hop right off the porch to play with those big dogs.

So geeks win all the organic search results, and deep pockets win all the paid search results, and you (assuming that you and Jack were separated at birth) are doomed. Except that unless your ‘new business’ sells Viagra, propecia, texas hold-em, or Paris Hilton DVDs a simple google search will clearly demonstrate that geeks aren’t winning all the search results. And I know ‘a dozen top quality companies off the top of my head’ (to quote Jennifer) that are making 4x to 10x return on paid search with far from ‘deep pockets’ from which they pay their Adsense bills.

* As people spam the search engines, they must adjust how they rank sites in order to compensate. This means a lot of good sites take a hit when Google changes the way it ranks sites.

Yes algorithms change. And undoubtedly some ‘good sites’ see their rankings change from time to time. But the overwhelming-vast-near-total-majority of sites that plunge into the abyss after an algo-update were gaming the system and got busted. Large content-rich sites with lots of natural inbound links don’t drop out – in fact they stay strong update after update.

And here we get to the best part. The little link below Jack’s bio says he is: “managing partner of Content Desk where publishers use cutting-edge site building software and tactics to turn content into cash”. Following the link provides the payoff – Jack sells ‘content’ (or more accurately it appears to be a content-stealing-via-rss system) to people who want to rank well in the search engines in order to get free traffic so they can earn money via contextually relevant paid-search ads (relevant to their store-bought content that is.). This is irony so thick you can taste it. Mr. ‘don’t depend on search engines for your business’ runs a business where he helps other people with no apparent skill or creativity to harvest the written work of others, feed it to the search engines, and then make money off of traffic the search engines provide via ads that the search engines sold. Just don’t waste your time on search marketing!

How Not To Use Google

To prove once again that evil is in the eyes of the beholder, Google last week decided to put CNET into a 'PR Sandbox' for one full year, because they dared publish otherwise public info about CEO Eric E. Schmidt. (more here and here and here)

ZDNET.UK, another CNET publication, fires back with this wry apology.

Acting under the mistaken impression that Google's search engine was intended to help research public data, we have in the past enthusiastically abused the system to conduct exactly the kind of journalism that Google finds so objectionable.

Yahoo Updates Search Results: Film At Eleven

Search engines update their algorithms all the time - listings move up, listings move down, listings appear and disappear. For years, only a small handful of people have known or cared. But now that tens of millions of dollars in parts of the economy that get attention are impacted, algo updates are news.

Today, it's only news.com. They tell of the update and all the ensuing screaming and chearing. Of course the webmaster and seo forums are full of opinions too.

But this is going to get a lot bigger. We're going to see Algo reports the way we see Box Office Weekend Opening Receipts reported in the not too distant future. And with it, all the problems with the SERPs which the engines right now don't really have to answer to anyone on, will suddenly be of interest to Katie Curic and Chris Matthews. It won't be long before we'll be hearing exchanges like this:

(Matthews): "But why sir, do I not find 'Pep Boys' when I search for 'brake fluid', but instead find 'brake-fluid-discounts.com' a clearly inferior website?"

(GoogleFlak): "You see Chris, our algorithm takes into account hundreds of factors which impartially..."

(Matthews): "But one site is clearly better than the other - Can't I trust you guys to figure that out? Am I getting railroaded here because of payola or cheating of some kind... Your engine is driving the American Economy! Don't you have a responsibility to get it right?"

(GoogleFlak): "Sure Chris, and millions of satisified searchers come back every day because they're pleased with the quality of their results."

(Matthews): "Do those people know the games that are going on behind the scenes? The kind of manipulations we just heard about in that report from David Schuster. When I had John McCain on this show yesteray he was mentioning Congressional Hearings. Is that what it's gonna take to get accountability and for you to get this stuff right?"

I've said for a long time that Google and the other engines are having their cake and eating it too. They make their money off the appropriation of the content of others, their algo encourages millions upon millions of otherwise useless web pages to be created, they avoid real questions about optimization with the vapid advice to 'do things for the users, don't think about us', and most importantly their results are amazingly full of junk and highly ranked irrelevance. We're just past July 4th, but the fireworks are still to come.

Directory Listings - Another One Bites The Dust

Another cheap, pointless, yet effective SEO technique may be biting the dust. Directories are loosing their impact in SEO, or so says an 'algo chaser' over at SearchEngineWatch forums, as reported by SEO Roundtable.

Nobody thinks directories serve any purpose other than providing links that the search engines can count anyway - have you every seen any of these bazillion directories in your referrer logs? So their death, if accurate, should be welcomed.

We'll miss the 'good old days' when SEO was just one long series of tricks and little-known-facts, but we're eager to move onto something far more productive: helping clients build web pages and sites that really are the most relevant in the world of their targeted keywords.

Update: More at SEO-Book

Search Results Go To The Dogs

An article on Metasearch has some interesting stats on the differences between page one results on the top search engines.

...a study conducted by Dogpile in collaboration with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University, "Missing Pieces: A Study of First Page Web Search Engine Results Overlap." compiled a random sampling of 10,316 keyword searches across Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves, returning a total of 336,232 unique search results on page one.

Only 3% of returned results (totaling 10,712 links) achieved first-page rankings across all three search engines, 12% of first-page results (39,959 links) were shared by two of the three engines, and 85% of results (285,561 links) appeared on just one of the engines' first pages.

(you can) try this yourself. Go to missingpieces.dogpile.com to test the Missing Pieces tool, and see how results overlap.

This is interesting both because it shows how hard it is to rank well across the top search engines at the same time, and it highlights the fact that none of these search engines are really very good at finding 'the best' results. They just each have their own algorithmic biases and we're all too lazy to turn to page two or (usually) to go try another search engine. I think 24 months from now the major search engines won't look anything like they do today (in terms of results or user-interfaces) and we'll look back at this first 'heyday of search' and wonder how we all got along with such terrible results.

Yahoo Mindset - The Power of Choice

A new search option from Yahoo Research, Mindset brings a very simpley yet very useful addition to search - a slider that allows you tell the engine if you're shopping or doing research. As you move the slider, the results change in real time. Very cool and very handy. And a big change for the world of organic search optimization.

Andrew at Traffik as already posted a good analysis of the long term implications for SEO practitioners. The one point I'd add is that if 'gaming the engines' gets harder, then it's even more important to actually be useful and relevant to people who are searching - whether they're doing research, price comparison, looking for reviews, etc. I've believed for some time that we've crossed the line where it's now easier to just win honestly than it is to play all the SEO games. Developments like Mindset make this even more true for the reasons Andrew points out.

InsideGoogle has a chart comparing the different results as you slide. (Why's that at InsideGoogle?)

Greg Linden (via SearchBlog) points out both the Google and MSN similar research projects. But he thinks the 'fail the grandma test':

I'm surprised to see this focus on sliders. They aren't particularly useful. They fail the grandma test. Most novice users will not use or understand the slider; they just want the top result to be useful. It's not even that useful to power users since sliders fail to provide the level of granularity they need.

I disagree, but more importantly think that with everyone in the world (almost literally) searching these days, we can't have search engines only aimed at Grandma. I like the simplicity of the Yahoo approach even though I myself might like (and use) 3-5 different sliders (grandma I ain't). But I think their decision to just have one, and have it offer such clearly different choices is a good one that most users will understand and come to appreciate.

More Reason To Rank Highly In Google

A new feature of Google, when used in FireFox, gives an even bigger advantage (and extracts a bit of a toll) from top ranking pages.

Google now pre-fetches 'top results' (they don't say how many) so that these pages load faster when users click them. This means users are going to have another incentive to click top results instead of venturing further down the list. It also means a lot of bandwidth is going to be sucked up (and paid for) because of Google caching.

I wonder how analytics programs reflect these cache hits? Will we think we got visitors, or a bot visit, or what? Anybody know?

Search Engine Usage Stats - January 2005

Via Internet Retailer

The majority of Internet searchers use multiple search engines, according to a study by Nielsen//NetRatings. The finding shows the volatility of the search market as the major players intensify their competition for user loyalty. The study found that 58 percent of Google searchers also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, Yahoo! and MSN Search. The use of multiple search engines also applies to Yahoo! and MSN searchers. Approximately 71 percent of Yahoo! searchers also visited one of the other top two engines, and 70 percent of MSN searchers also used one or both of the other two. Top Search Engines by Search Share, January 2005, U.S., Home & Work * Google Search - 1,923,153 searches = 47% * Yahoo! Search - 868,174 searches = 21% * MSN Search - 523,188 searches = 13% * Total - 4,085,880 = 81% NetRatings also released the latest rankings of the leading search engines, measured in terms of search query volume for February 2005. * Google took first place with a 47 percent of total searches, with 1.92 billion queries. * Yahoo! came in second with 21 percent market share, based on roughly 870 million queries. * MSN, meanwhile, came in third place with 13 percent market share, based on approximately 520 million search queries.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 2:17 PM

Google AutoLink : No Respect

You'd think Google would have more respect for links. This is the 'don't be evil' company. This is the company that got famous (and rich) because links used to be a recommendation one person made to a lot of others. Of course, their success has led to an internet full of bogus and manufactured links (and pages), but that's a problem I've already discussed.

But now we have Google Toolbar 3.0beta. Here's what Google says about it:

AutoLink: Whenever users see a U.S. address on a web page, one click on AutoLink automatically links the address to an online map. For example, if users are reading a review of a new restaurant, clicking on AutoLink will turn its address into a link to a map, complete with directions. AutoLink also links package tracking numbers to pages displaying that package's delivery status and other useful information, such as Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) and Publication ISBN numbers.

So Google has gone from counting links to adding them to web pages automatically. As Bob Dylan said, 'Sometimes the devil comes as a man of peace'.

The 'net is abuzz with comments and complaints, some thoughts and diatribes, as well as arguments and discussions (plus a thoughtful condemnation).

My view is that users do have the right to modify pages as seen in their browsers (remove ads, ad links, turn the background purple, whatever). But users should have to intentionally and specifically desire/install the feature that makes these changes. Bundling such a feature into an otherwise useful application is how the rest of the scum-lords poisoned our computers. So this isn't the method Google should use.

Make it a stand alone feature with a very clear description of the functionality, add more user control over which links go where, and I think everything would be fine. Bundle it so most people don't even mean to get it, turn it on by default, put some potential links in and leave others out, don't provide ways for users to add new link targets, and don't clearly articulate what you'll be autolinking in the future and what you will not, and we all have ample reason to worry.

For now, if you have a web site and don't want Google putting links on your page that you didn't want there, some fine folks have created scripts to stop Google AutoLink.

Google Share

A new study estimates the split of searches amoung the major search engines:

Google is the world's most-used search engine, increasing its share from 56.4 percent to 57.2 percent in the past eight months, a new study found. OneStat.com, a Web analytics firm in Amsterdam, also reported yesterday that Yahoo's global usage share is holding steady at 21.3 percent. Google and Yahoo are the largest search engines, followed distantly by MSN Search with 8.6 percent usage and AOL Search with 3.5 percent.

13 Searches Lead Down

Frederick Marckini writes about some interesting stats published by comScore regarding the number and type of searches people conduct before making an online purchase. Some of the more interesting quotes:

* Searchers who ultimately purchased a product online conducted some 13 searches before ever making the purchase. This means that for every single converting search term, there were 12 prior nonconverting searches -- searches that today, most PPC search advertisers would never consider bidding on due to poor post-click conversion performance. The implication is nonconverting terms have a greater value than search marketers currently ascribe to them. * The majority of searchers in the study who ultimately purchased began by searching broader terms. Yet most search advertisers still believe they should primarily buy product-specific terms to reach buyers. * The study indicates we may also need to rethink our paid search time horizon. A significant increase in conversion rate was witnessed after a searcher had been investigating a product for over four weeks. According to Rinaldo, "It's a long buying cycle. If companies abandon a broad keyword prior to four weeks, they lose a quarter of their audience."

Certainly there is a lot to learn about search patterns and bidding strategies from these numbers. There should also be something to learn about web site design and the content / conversion rate abilities of these sites. People don't do 13 searches just because they're still doing research or can't make up their minds. They do 13 searches because the results they get don't satisfy them.

Houston, We Have A Problem

P.J. Fusco is a reasonable and patient woman. I am not.

Writing on ClickZ, she describes the SEO process as it exists in a mid-sized company, where after figuring out what needs to get done to optimize a web site, the politics begins - and the web site optimization stands still while the process plays itself out.

I wonder how these marketing executives, IT managers, brand managers, and legal folks would react if the problem at hand were more concrete - what if instead of keywords not indexed, the issue was a front door that wouldn't open - literally keeping the customers out? Would they work to 'strike a compromise' and 'get the input of all the stakeholders' before the found a solution 'in a reasonable timeframe'?

Or would they - or at least one of them - grab a hammer or a forklift or whatever it took and get the damn door open so the customers could come in, and then clean up the politics and mess later.

I know what I would do.

The Good and The Bad

Somebody over at Threadwatch posted a tongue-in-cheek comment the other day that gives voice to a thought I've had often: Google is doing at least as much damage to the net as good.

I was just sitting here drinking my coffee and I had a thought. Far from making sense of the web as they purport to do, Google is single handedly turning it into a bloated disaster zone.

First they spouted the content mantra. Webmasters diligenlty pumed out millions of pages to satisfy the hungry cralwers.

Then they started the anchor text numbers game. People then went out and built millions of sites especially to promote their other pages.

Now we have adsense. Pages are now being made from crap especially to make as many adsense impressions as possible.

Add to that buying pagerank, blog and guestbook spamming (all due to Google's algorythms) and the rest and I wonder if it's a master plan to take down the net :)

I really don't think it's too funny. There are literally millions of web pages and links and spam of all sorts that wouldn't exist if Google didn't measure and value the things that they measure and value. Worse still is the fact that Google doesn't acknowledge the mess that's being made in their name. I blame them not because they should have had the foresight to expect all this, but because since it has happened all they've done (as far as I can tell) is stick their heads into the sand.

It's a tough problem, but they're smart folks.

SEM for B2B

Is search marketing an important aspect of online marketing for a company that is B2B? Of course it is. But in my experience more than a few B2B marketers don't think so.

They believe that high-ticket, long-cycle sales are the exclusive territory of their outbound sales staff. Apparently this was well proven at a recent NYC event for B2B Marketers. As MediaPost points out the panelists treated their audience to numerous myths and misperceptions, including this one:

MYTH: "People don't do searches for big ticket B2B products and services."

REALITY: Let's go to Overture's Keyword Selector Tool. Below are tallies of searches conducted in Overture in September 2004:

*Enterprise asset management - 1,341 *Supply chain management software - 1,692 *Telecommunication infrastructure - 1,052 *Security management - 5,290 *Product life cycle management - 6,294 *Wireless solution - 3,409 *Document management services - 1,644

Okay, so these don't match the volume of searches for Ashlee Simpson. They do, however, represent qualified leads. Note that this is just for one search engine too.

The truth is that when people need to buy something - or learn about something (which they often do before they try to buy it) - they turn to search very early in the process. This is just as true for a Sarbanes Oxley compliance software as it is for a new digital camera.

Google Cheat Sheet

An excellent link for any Google user to keep handy.

Musical Algorithms

What if there were no Google algorithm to game? Or more precisely, what if there were several different algorithms all being used at the same time - so that no specific tactics or tricks would consistently place your pages 'at the top'? A discussion going on over at the SEO Chat Forums says this is just what might be happening over in the datacenters of the almighty and now almighty-cash-rich Google. Of course, as with all things Google, nobody is sure exactly what is going on, how long it will last, or why. But skipping by that lunacy for a moment, I want to weigh in with the opinion that the 'spinning-wheel-of-algorithms' is a pretty good solution to the SEO problem that Google themselves have created. Certainly a better solution than any other I've thought of or heard discussed. The 'SEO problem' of which I speak (in case you don't obsess about Google for a living), is that ranking highly in Google is worth thousands to hundreds-of-thousands of dollars per search term, and so webmasters and their paid advisors everywhere are constantly, actively, and relentlessly trying to game the system to get their pages up top. The result is that Google's results have been seriously altered (in many cases for the worse) and many web pages are being designed with Google in mind at least as much, if not more, than the humans who will actually use those pages. Millions of words in SEO forums have debated the ramifications of all this, with opinions ranging from 'business is war' to 'just be nice'. Google themselves have mostly stayed silent (excepting the usually cryptic quips of the Google Guy) in an apparent attempt to avoid flaming the fires of an unwinable debate with a predominantly unreasonable crowd. Here's why I like the russian roulette solution so much: # The fact is there is no right algorithm. By mixing them up Google will give searchers a broader range of results and over time I'd suspect that leads to a better online experience. # What gets measured gets done. This is why we have comment spam and cloaking and all kinds of SEO techniques that are currently effective but ultimately silly. If certain types of links start to count less often, there is that much less incentive to be aggressive in getting links. If bold tags count a little less, there is less incentive to use them when a design otherwise wouldn't call for them. # A broader set of measurements further incents genuine goodness. I've never believed the 'black hat' vs 'white hat' SEO arguments - so I'm not referring here to 'kinder and gentler' SEO techniques. I've also never taken much stock in the 'just make a good site for your readers' crowd, because that is really quite nieve. But I do believe the algorithms are constructed to generally reward efforts that make sites better for users. The problem has been that this general effort assumes that nobody is intentionally gaming the system, and that of course is an even more nieve assumption. But if sites are measured on lots of different metrics all mixed into a bunch of different algorithms, then over time perhaps the gaming of the system will be limited simply because effort/reward ratio will increase substantially. And that is ultimately why I have such a positive reaction to the random-algorithm-generator. It ends the game by smashing it into a million pieces. More competition from Yahoo and even MSN and the other search engines could also do this - but those are going to take a lot of time before we see major percentages of the search population shift. By Google itself becoming multi-algorithmic we could see a huge change in the SEO game overnight. Surely there would be challenges and ramifications for both site owners and marketers, and probably plenty for everyone to both like and dislike. But I think it would essentially end the arms race and that alone makes it worth doing. {Via Search Engine Roundtable}

A Seven Word Phrase For New Surfboard

Onestat.com reported on the average number of words people type into search engines, confirming that search phrases are getting longer.

Of all the search phrases world wide, 30.09 percent of the people use 2 word phrases, 26.83 percent use 3 word phrases and 16.60 percent use 1 word phrase. More and more people use now 3, 4 and 5 keywords since the last measurement. The global usage of 2 word phrases has decreased with 2.49 percent from 32.58 percent to 30.09 percent since February 2004.

This means you have longer and more complicated phrases to target, but also means you can get your listing in front of more people if you take the time to figure these out and optimize for them. (via SearchEngineJounal)

Number of words in search engine searches - July 2004
1. Two word phrases 30.09%
2. Three word phrase 26.83%
3. One word phrases 16.60%
4. Four word phrases 14.83%
5. Five word phrases 6.76%
6. Six word phrases 2.81%
7. Seven word phrases 1.13%

All numbers are an average of the last 2 months.

Mis-Spelling Your Way To Fame and Fortune

As if she doesn't have enough problems, now people are mis-spelling her name - 598 different ways.

While funny, it makes clear the important point that there's a lot of opportunity in optimizing your pages for folks who aren't good spellarz. One example: Some digital camera sites I was working with increased traffic by over 20% by adding pages that used the spelling 'Cannon'.

(via Search Engine RoundTable)

Seth Says No To SEO

Certified marketing guru Seth Godin, who gets oodles of respect from this reporter, has taken a swing as the practice of SEO. While it's only fair to note that he's already put his comments in context, it's still worth knowing what he said, and the opposing viewpoint (offered by Aaron Wall).

Seth basically says that SEO is a 'black art' (which is very true) and concludes that PPC is a more fair and rational system. Perfectly logical. Except that only approximately 20% of all clicks go to PPC ads. So if you ignore organic search you're missing 80% of the potential for any given keyword.

(BTW: I can't site a linkable documentation of that stat right now, but I've heard numbers surrounding 20% quoted directly out of the mouths of numerous search engine mucky-mucks. How's that for attribution. Anyone care to link some real proof?)

I Love You Until Someone Better Comes Along

Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services reported on last Monday that while 83% of search engine users rate themselves as 'extremely pleased' with their current search engine, a full 63% would switch search engines if a better service came along.

This apparent contradiction isn't surprising. In fact, I think these numbers are about what any good online business can expect from here on out. Even if you get most of your customers to love you, they'll still leave you very quickly when someone better comes along.

And online it's much easier to find out that someone better has come along. This is true because of search engines, and the 'Back' button, and perhaps most importantly because of the ubiquity of opinions.

Once upon a time (meaning pre-1996 or so) a business could piss off just about as many customers as they wanted, and unless Mike Wallace came after them the odds were that mass advertising was going to overwhelm grumbling customers and keep the doors open. Today, anyone with a little time and energy can seek out pretty complete opinions on products and companies via all kinds of web sites and in enthusiast forums all over the web. And one day soon opinions are going get organized. They're going to be one mouse click away from any web page, product number, or company name. And the raters will be dutifully rated, so the irrational flamers and paid-supports can be easily weeded out. In other words your reputation is going to be like a tatoo on the forehead of your business.

Get Ready. The challenge is clear: businesses online are going to have to win their customers repeatedly. It's true for Google, and it's true for you.

Don't believe it. Consider this - when Google took over from Yahoo as 'the search engine' there were no blogs, about a zillion less news and opinion oriented web sites that people visited regularly, and a relatively small percentage of the population was actively online or interested in the concept of search. Imaging that a really great and far superior to Google search engine came online tomorrow. I mean something with much more relevant results, a fast yet more information rich layout, absolutely no search spam, and three really cool features that neither you nor I have thought of yet.

Would it take hours or minutes before news raced around the blogosphere and soon thereafter the news sites? Would it take one day or three before it got 60 seconds on the evening news? If it held up - people who used it liked it - would it take two weeks or three to make Time, Business Week, and even Teen People? Would it take a month before your parents or grandparents had heard of it? If everyone went and tried it, and it was really really better, would anyone go back to Google for 'old times sake'?

It could happen. To them and to you.

And About That Disembodied, Disinterested, Third-person Voice

An excellent article on writing marketing copy from MarketingProfs. (Written by Gwyneth Dwyer)

Hey Google! Can You Help Me Find A Web Site?

I love the Alexa toolbar because of the 'suggested sites' that it displays as you browse. I nearly always keep this visible, and have found hundreds of great sites I would have never known about because of it. I also display the Google Toolbar, which leads me to this request: Please add 'other sites you might like' to the Google Toolbar.

Doesn't this make all the sense in the world? Isn't Google supposed to help people find websites? Well there are a lot more ways of finding sites than just search, and recommendation is a huge one. Some recommendations come from friends, some from links between sites, but there are lots of algorithmic ways to determine 'other sites like this one' and Google should devote some PHD brainpower to this endeavor.

I think this would not only help web surfers, those poor folks that Google claims to place high above all others, but I think it would ultimately help them with their SEO manipulation problem. How? By exposing people to new web sites, these sites can earn the kind of 'good' links that Google lives - ones bestowed based on love and merit alone (as opposed to those evil links that traded or purchased or otherwise created to influence PageRank).

I'm assuming Google will take the same alorithm they use to determine context for Adwords, and apply the results against their organic results list rather than the paid results list. The 'new site exposure' will occur because the algo will (hopefully) find new and insightful keyword combinations to search based on, therefore showing people sites different from those that they usually see when they type in their typical search queries.

It's also interesting to note that Amazon, which ownes Alexa, chose not to include site recommendations in the A9 toolbar. So this plea goes out to them as well.

A Lawyer On Your PR Team?

The strange little distortions and perversions caused by PageRank-lust just keep coming. Now we have the humorous-yet-probably-true theory (via MarketingVox) that filing a lawsuit is good for your site traffic.

The idea is that a lawsuit, especially one against a highly visible company like Google, will get reported and linked on a lot of sites, thereby propelling your site up the SERPS for your targetted keywords. So the web becomes just like Hollywood - it doesn't matter what they're saying as long as they're talking about you!

Think Locally, Act Globally

It appears the boys at Google have some grand ambitions for local search. While they've been getting lots of press and making tons of money for conquering the world, they've quietly been placing some effort on helping you find a pizza or where to get your shirt starched.

Check out this report on their progress photographing every commercial street in the US at resolution sufficient to see the store hours hanging in the front window of every store. This effort is interesting but certainly not central to success in local search. But is shows, like the recent beta launch of local.google.com, that these guys are taking local search seriously. Another smart move.

When someone produces a local search engine that can provide both comprehensive and relevant results, hundreds of billions of searches and tens of billions of advertising dollars will follow. Consider this - Google and Overture have only 150,000 clients each - and they're earning billions of dollars in revenue. (These clients numbers were quoted by company representatives at a recent conference I attended). Imaging how much they'll earn when millions of businesses are 'paying per click.' Of course, they're already giving them the chance via recent changes to Adwords.

Local search is hard because there is less data available and the demands are actually higher than in 'cyberspace' searches. Local businesses tend to be in the Yellow Pages, but a huge percentage don't have web sites. While Google can buy the name/address/phone lists, they're going to find it nearly impossible to figure out all the different search terms that should apply to the business when their only clues are the company name and the Yellow Pages categorization. When the business gets a web site and gains context via its link network, there are a lot more clues for the search engines to use.

The stakes are higher because if I search for 'screen capture utility' and later find out that Google didn't include the best one in my results, I may be a little upset but will probably blame myself for not looking harder. But if I ask it for a place to have my tires changed, and later come to learn that I drove an extra 20 minutes because they didn't know about the Goodyear shop in the next town, I'm going to really be suspicious the next time I ask local.google.com for anything. Local search seams easier and sources like the yellow pages have set fairly high expectations for completeness - plus the physical world cost of leaving out a relevant result seems higher than the cyberspace equivalent.

Of course, this will all work itself out in the next few years. Success stories from local adwords will begin appearing in the next few months. Later this year there's bound to be a major update to local.google.com (maybe Barry Diller and Citysearch will get bought up with some of the Google IPO billions). Sparked by all this interest in 'local search' a renewed effort to sell millions of local businesses better web sites will heat up again (a lot of effort was spent on that in the late '90s). Those color LCDs are appearing in more and more of our cars, slipping in for navigation systems and the occasional DVD, but soon there will be wireless connections and a Google Search button on your dashboard. There will be one on your cell phone too.

Local search will be huge on the desktop, but it will really shine in the mobile world. And this doesn't even consider what happens when, in this same time frame, social networks sort themselves out and open-source ratings/opinions services become commonplace. Suddenly you can find out not only that there is a thai restaurant around the corner but that 82% of your friends rate it 3 stars or higher.

Google makes a few cents, the restaurant gets a new customers, and you get a nice meal. Better living through Google.

Microsoft Search

It's nice for an immature niche market like search to have an experienced and dedicated journalist providing 'professional grade' services while the rest of us amateurs hack away. Today John Battelle reports on a trip to Microsoft and shares his thoughts on the future of their search and MSN work. It's worth a read for anyone interested in how this market is going to mature via long term changes rather than minor issues like algorithm tweaks.

I haven't tracked MSN well enough to know how many versions they've had thus far - wasn't it once part of the big Microsoft HOME division - but philosophically at least it appears they're gearing up for the traditional 3.0 version where they shake off the stupidity that drips from their 1.0 and 2.0 offerings and lay out a deep and solid product or service.

Usually 3.0 isn't the sexiest product in the target market, but is so well centered that it leaves others with no advantages except those sexy frills. My drawers are filled with t-shirts from no-longer-with-us software companies who produced better software than Microsoft. I don't have a Google shirt, but I think I'll try and get one in the next year or two, just in case.

A9, and Counting

Amazon’s A9 search engine got a lot of blogging attention last week (Following John Battelle's break of the news). Here are some of my thoughts on it: First, it’s a very smart move by Amazon for a number of reasons. There aren’t many companies who could leverage their way into search at this point, but Amazon can. If they decide they like this and really promote it to the 40+ million regular users of their shopping site, it’s an instant factor. More importantly, the shopping engines – including Yahoo Shopping, Froogle, and Shopping.com – are direct competitors for Amazon. Sure they are listed in all of those, either organically or with paid positions, but those sites send lots of shoppers to places that aren’t Amazon. By adding a vast network of other retailers within Amazon – including 3rd parties who compete directly with the Amazon on price right on the Amazon.com site – they’ve proven that they just want a cut of the transaction and don’t really care who ships the goods. But people are getting used to the idea of a shopping search engine, and they don’t think of Amazon that way. But they will be able to when the hard-core shopping stuff gets added to A9. (Don’t worry, serious shopping search tools just gotta be coming.) Amazon does not want you to think 'Froogle' first when you sit down to shop online. It's one of the few things that could really hurt them. It’s also a great use for the somewhat under-utilized Alexa. I love the Alexa toolbar, but the site itself – which always did provide search features and used Google results just like A9 does – felt like a half-hearted effort. A lot of Alexa could use touch ups and minor improvements, but I’m not sure they ever had that much reason to do it. I bet it gets folded into A9 and gets the attention it deserves. On this subject, it sounds like the excellent ‘other sites like this one’ feature of the Alexa toolbar isn’t in the A9 toolbar. Why? (I’m basing this on what I’ve read as I haven’t installed the A9 bar myself yet.) It’s also nice to see someone pushing search forward with something other than algorithm tweaks. (That’s not really fair to lots of 2nd or 3rd tier search engines, I know.) My guess is these guys got unlimited rights to use the Google core when Google wanted in bed with Amazon and onto the Amazon.com site, and now they get the benefit of letting Google do the hard part and they get to spend their dollars innovating. Smart. For all their faults Google results seem to be ‘good enough’ for most people based on user trends. That said, I hope what we’re seeing is just the very beginning of how they intend to add value. Remembering searches is nice, and obvious. How the hell did Google skip that one all this time? Now start remembering which sites I went to when I did the search. If I go back to an old search, it’s probably because I want to go back to a site and found and forgot to bookmark. Why make me visually scan the darn list again? Taking this further, please build both local and online bookmark management in, and hot new features like OnFolio has. In other words, manage what I’m looking for and what I’ve found and decided to keep. People use Google a million times a day because lots of people don’t bookmark, and bookmarking sucks in too many ways to mention. You want to lock me in – fix and own my bookmarks and I’ll never stray. That’s an investment. I’d also like MORE data on the results page. Why books but not music or other products. I don’t mean the ‘search inside the book’ When I search ‘Elvis Costello’ I get book links right onto pages on Amazon.com. Why not Music or DVDs or whatever fits the query. Certainly that is only a matter of time. I also WANT the paid Adwords. Bill Gross was right – the person willing to pay the most to get seen is relevant. To me these Google results feel incomplete without the Adword ads. All the talk of collaborative filtering being discussed is certainly attractive too. Many of the best Amazon features are the ‘other people who bought this liked’ and ‘here’s what people recommend instead / in addition to’ and reviews. All of these can apply well to web sites, and Alexa already most of this anyway. My comment on all the ‘privacy’ concerns is this: give it up. Nearly everything interesting that happens online from now on is going to involve: * Remembering what you do * Connecting what you do to what others do (both those you asked to be connected to or those connected to you via some pattern matching) * Adding contextual advertising based on what you’re looking at or who you are If you don’t want the benefits that come from these things, fine. Don’t get a Gmail account. Don’t sign in at A9. Etcetera. But please don’t complain and call your congressmen, and generally whine so that I can’t enjoy these benefits. Companies should have to tell you what they’re doing. You should be able to not participate. But saying that no company should be able to offer features just because you don’t want to use them, is as asinine as saying people should't be able to talk about things on radio stations you can choose not to listen to. Oh, wait a minute… I hope we see lots of constant innovation from A9, just like we’ve seen from Amazon.com. I don’t think the search engine wars are going to be won by the most ‘relevant’ results, they’re going to be won by the best search environment and the most ‘sticky’ features. As a result, despite their late start, I give A9 a shot at the crown. Update: Interesting look at A9 from a usability viewpoint here at whitespace.

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.

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.

Googling For What They Don't Want You To Find

Interesting article from SecurityFocus, via TheRegister, on how you or others can use Google to find things that aren't meant to be found. Talks about use of some advanced Google search techniques, and how passwords, budgets, medical records and more can be found (and how they inadvertantly get into Google in the first place).

Adsense & PageRank

Fred Wilson is a very well known VC in NYC, and runs a nice blog called 'A VC'. In commenting on his Google Ranking for his name he said: "Well, now I am at the top again. Go to Google. Check it out. And I am sure the reason why is that I put AdSense on my blog."

Sorry Fred, it just ain't so. Believe me there are hundreds if not thousands of folks out there aggressively experimenting with every trick in the book to juice their PageRank, and Adsense doesn't do it. I also run adsense on sites whose positions are scrupulously tracked. There's no impact. You can't believe that the smart folks at Google would bust down the 'chinese wall' between editorial and advertising in such an obvious way, do you?

It is much more reasonable to assume that your blogging increased both your PageRank and your relevance to the term 'Fred Wilson' because so many people now link to pages on your site using your name as the link text. The increase in relevance is probably more responsible for your improved position than any PageRank increase.

This is just one of the many PageRank rumours that live long unproductive lives. There are lots of sites, forums, and blogs that report on what works (even when they're wrong). Perhaps this site can take up the cause of exposing Google Snake Oil.

AOL Leads Search

Well, obviously not. But in the 'Future of Search' session as SES I thought the most interesting ideas came from Gerry Campbell of AOL.

Specifically, he talked about search results that weren't just pointers to related data, but also included data extracted from those pages. So if you did a search for Elvis Costello, the results page would include a photo taken from one web site, a bio taken from another, some CDs and DVDs, recent news etc. The search companies have already shown they can identify images pretty well, and with product feeds flowing and lots of RSS news and info, they could do a lot of this without even scraping HTML.

While these kinds of results are clearly beneficial to users, they'll raise interesting questions for site operators - what is the financial impact of having unique content or valuable data is displayed on composite pages? If it's a taste that gets people to your site, that's great. But if they are satisfied with the composite, you might lose some valuable traffic. And if the engines slowly but surely get better and better at extracting just the valuable bits, and simultaneously improve the targetting, selling, and profit they make off the context they create from the work of others, when do the sites really start opting out (via robots.txt) in droves?

This problem seems like a long way off, but it probably is only a year or so. Already we're seeing weather, news, shopping, and other actual content displayed in standard search results. Add their existing image search results and a few more items and fewer and fewer search results will lead to pages off site, or at least to pages off site that haven't paid for the priviledge.

Gerry made another interesting point, but I can't recall it now. Anyone who can please add it to the comments.

GoogleFog

Google dominates the search industry. Millions of users have become enthralled and web publishers have become dependant on their traffic. The company is one of the most recognized brands on the planet. The company is the conduit between millions of consumers and thousands of businesses. An entire industry has developed to help businesses interact with Google for both their organic and paid listings services. These services and those clients help the company generate revenues widely believed to be approaching $1 billion per year (and growing).

Even better (for them), is the fact that they’ve been able to accomplish all this under an amazing cloak of secrecy. They create value by organizing the work of others, yet provide only superficial guidelines to help those supplying the content obtain the maximum potential benefits from their participation. They generate a substantial portion of their revenues via a distribution network, and but don’t even tell these partners how their commissions will be calculated.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people would like to ask the good folks at Google a few questions. A rare opportunity to do so appeared this past week in NYC at Search Engine Strategies. Unfortunately, the results were about as relevant as far too many Google searches – there were some keyword matches but the actual value was almost non-existent.

Google’s Director of Search, Craig Silverstein participated in a number of panel sessions. I saw him in four different ones – and learned that you should build web pages for users, not really worry about your Google rankings, and that in 300 years he thinks we’ll all have a dog named ‘fetch’. Craig sat quietly and listened while other panelists shared inaccurate facts and strategies with the attentive audience, but did take the time to point out that his silence shouldn’t be taken as agreement or endorsement with anything that was said. He didn’t point out why he lacked the ability or courtesy to helpfully join in the conversation. When asked direct questions during session segments brazenly identified as ‘Q&A’ Craig pointed to a clause in his speaking contract that allowed him to only answer questions of his choosing.

The worst of it came at a morning session called ‘The Future of Search.” Here Mr. Silverstein faced probably 500 people who took nearly a week out of their schedules, spent a grand or two, and did both largely because they’re trying to run their businesses better in terms of how they interact with Google. Faced with this opportunity to offer practical, insightful, and useful information about what the company would be doing, Silverstein instead spent his minutes entertaining the crowd with a fairy tale about what searching might be like in 2304 – when we’re all quite dead.

Craig Silverstein is clearly a very smart man. He's Director of Technology at Google, was their first employee, graduated from Harvard and much more. He came off as a very pleasant and nice guy too. He devoted a lot of his time to the conference, spoke well, and represented his company with humor and personality. I’m sure he’s a great guy. Too bad that in the search for answers about Google, he just wasn’t relevant.