I have a friend who runs a website for a product that hasn’t been invented yet. Seriously. He’s a smart guy who’s half domainer and half lazy SEO (god blesss ‘im), and a while back he decided that digital wall calendars are a product that must, one day, be invented.

Being an SEO he also realized that even now people are searching for them, expecting them to exist – So he went out and bought digitalwallcalendars.com and electronicwallcalendars.com, and made them into really basic info sites, acknowledging that there is demand for this product, so someone please make it (Tungle you hear that? Call me, I’m in Montreal, this should be your business plan).

He runs Adsense. The ads, quite obviously, cannot have much of anything to do with digital wall calendars, because … THEY DON’T FREAKING EXIST, but he admits to me that he’s reluctant to add much of any more content to the site, because for whatever reason, incomprehensible to him, people are actually clicking the ads. Why change that?

The sad fact of the matter is that a lot of the ad networks and websites that display them pander to, and are utilized, by web morons - people who barely understand that they’re clicking on an advertisement when they do. These ad networks are embracing the lowest common denominator, and even taking advantage of them. Website owners profit, and have no incentive to change the woeful status quo.

A lot of the time these are older people who aren’t able to get their heads around the subtleties of Internet life and how people interact online, but sometimes they’re just culturally isolated from an understanding of those subtleties (redneck tech anyone?). Of course there are other web morons (every time I read Youtube comments, I die a little inside), from the next generation, not the last, and the only reason they might bite the dust is a heaven sent epidemic of the Darwin effect (an atheist makes a silent prayer, and he means it dammit).

The older generation’s Internet experience is ruined by their lack of understanding that they’re being taken advantage of or underserviced, while the younger generation’s Internet experience appears to exist solely to ruin MY internet experience.

The fact that young web morons are empowered to spout their valueless verbal diarrhea on the largest websites in the world is a by-product of the technology of web 2.0, and the mindset of freedom of speech being a free-for-all. With little to no editorial intervention, the free-for-all becomes a useless cesspool of non-information. The public internet degrades in value, passing reason and purpose to the privatization of the world’s evolving information technology, limiting access to high quality content, and so essentially, making knowledge an exclusive privilege.

Who’s at fault for all of this mediocrity? You, me and the powers that be. Ad networks are not the only online entities embracing the mundane, most of the world’s biggest websites do it too, and we the people feed the cycle by contributing to the melee with nothing noteworthy at all. Well, it’s almost 2010, and I don’t really care about flying cars, but seriously, people who make the world go round, people who surf the web, all of you listen to me, I’m sick of seeing the Internet pander to the (s)lowest common denominator, so fix it. One website at a time, here’s some advice:

Myspace Anthropomorphically

I hate you. If I’m ever lonely at night, having trouble falling asleep, all I have to do is think about the millions and millions and millions of other souls just like myself that also hate your guts, and I feel a little bit better about the world around me, and can slip into a peaceful slumber. You’re like the strip mall in the poor part of town that sells nothing but cheap plastic souvenirs begging to be taken home like so many flea ridden stray dogs.

Myspace Users:

Musicians - You needed a myspace page in 2005, and yes, even in 2010 you should have a presence there that lets people find your real website, but stop thinking of it as your home, or even a hub - your myspace address is not what you should be advertising, there are plenty of free ways to easily stream your music from your own domain and properly interact with your fans on your own site. A domain and hosting cost NEXT TO NOTHING, and there are specialists out there who will help you do what you need to do – if you’re concentrating on pimping your myspace page, stop, go write a chord progression, and move on. While it’s good for networking, and it may be for another couple of years yet, use it, but start thinking of it as a conduit to interaction, not an end. It’s not good enough.

Comedians: (a lot of people don’t know but comedians embraced myspace early on for the same reasons musicians did) - same deal boys and girls, you want to promote yourself online, use myspace for networking and exposure while it lasts, but hurry the hell up and get a slick website up, running, and established, like this Montreal based stand up – THAT’S how you sell yourself, use myspace as a business card to point people to a place where you can really get your message across. It’s 2010, there are no technical barriers anymore.

12 year old girls: grow up.

Anybody else feel they need to use myspace?

Myspace owners:

Rupert, your personal advice, same as for the 12 year olds.

Good news, it’s dying:

Craigslist, anthropomorphically

I love you, but you’re like the girl I dated in University ten years later. You never really grew up, never developed, you never did anything to improve yourself, and the years have not treated your looks so well. Simply put, you’re ugly, you’re useless outside the one thing I use you for (you know what that is, and if you think that’s enough for me to stick around should something better come along, think again), and I simply do not expect to be friends with you in the long run. Shave your legs.

Craigslist users:

There is nothing you can do. You don’t even know that you’re being fed ten year old usability and that the Internet has the potential to be sooooooooooo much better. You’re like a boy who has been raised in a cellar, never having seen natural sunlight, never having read anything but communist era propaganda schoolbooks. How could you know any better? Of course you couldn’t. It’s not your fault. Please don’t be angry with the world, though understand it is your right.

Craigslist owners:

Read that wired magazine article all the way through, steal the tens of thousands of dollars worth of free design advice and invest the one week it would take to make your website not suck so much. I know you don’t care that it sucks butts, perhaps you’re above suckery, I don’t quite know, but really, it’s no skin off your back, and if it would make the masses happy, can you explain to me why it is that you don’t care? You realize even your grandmother would despise your site. Why do you hate your own grandmother?

Let me guess. You don’t care to tell me.

Bad news, people don’t know what they want:

Google Adsense anthropomorphically:

You are the worst thing that has ever happened to the Internet in the history of the Internet. Why do you think its okay to make your advertisements look like content, blurring the line for all but a slim portion of web users who can differentiate? Does it make you feel superior to take advantage of all of the small IQs out there who are never quite sure if they’re clicking on a text ad, or a real piece of content? How do you sleep at night? Oh that’s right, comfortably on a billion dollar pillow.

Google Adsense users:

Hmm, this is pointless, the people who don’t know that they’re clicking an ad are not going to read this. Everybody else, just move on. Webmasters who use it, I can’t blame you, it’s the easiest buck, but trust an old-school affiliate, there is better money to be made with real programs, they’re just a lot more work to scale intelligently to your content. Elbow grease builds engines.

Google Adsense owners:

Okay, I’ve been an affiliate for about 12 years now, and I’ve never EVER come across an affiliate style program that treats their affiliates as HORRIFICALLY as you, dear Adsense owerns, abuse yours. You guys are more crooked than the casino and porn industries put together, in an awkward position. Why, when the account I’ve used for six years and absolutely pummelled with spam, from shallowmaker and beyond, have you never even missed a payment by a day, but plenty of others who have disgustingly clean accounts are cancelled, fund seized, emails ignored, and kicked to the curb.

If you were trying to compete with other affiliate programs you would have failed a long time ago because of your absolutely pathetic lack of customer service, you’re inane ‘I make the rules, screw anyone who gets in my way’ philosophy, and your tendency to steal from honest people, without even the courtesy of a personal ‘screw you’. Instead, you act like any other rich prick, and just do what you want at poor people’s expense.

Google Search anthropomorphically:

I guess I can’t blame you for pandering to the masses, except, that’s kind of the point of this post, so here, let me blame you. You’re killing the world. Please stop trying to convince people that all of their answers can be found behind your little white search box. The entire concept of universal search is going to dumb down the portion of the population of the planet that haven’t learned how to learn yet. People need to develop the skill of critical thinking, and develop the ability to qualify knowledge, but the masses are letting your ranking algorithm do that for them. I’m not sure how to fix that… but you know, at least be friendly with black Google. Racism isn’t cool.

Google Search users:

Stop it. Stop taking your life, your library, your homework, your whole freaking developing mind, and outsourcing it to Google. It’s not worth it. Your brain will atrophy. You’ll grow up without any skills and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. You will simply become another Paris Hilton, and our culture will die.

Google Search owners:

Hey, geniuses, ‘universally accessible’ means EVERYBODY regardless of creed, colour, religion, socioeconomic status, or LOCATION. Stop pandering to oppressive governments who trample human rights just so you can profit – all you’re doing is propagating abuse and human suffering. Pandering to the highest common denominator is no better than the lowest, if the high end is all about keeping the proletariat down.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

My preferred tool, and what essentially enables this, is Google Analytics. I value ease of access to interesting and useful data, and how quickly novices can become familiar and productive with the tool.

Google Analytics can be the lazy webmaster’s best friend (and I like to be lazy in bulk, it keeps me busy) without any tinkering, but can also be an extremely of an insightful tool for people who decide to go beyond looking at numbers, towards an interpretation of them, with a wee bit of config (and there is craziness beyond the basics, but let’s not go bonkers just yet).

A lot of what is presented in Google Analytics (okay lets get lazy and call it GA) is not quite as it seems, and without some work to dig into the data and interpret it, some default views might actually end up misleading your efforts.

Getting the basics of Google Analytics down isn’t all that complex, but if you’re just starting out I do recommend getting a walk-through from someone who has used it from a marketing perspective in the past. If you’ve got e-commerce tracked there’s another aspect to consider, and even if you’re only concerned with a specific segment such as paid search, gaining some understanding of other sources of traffic is likely to help your paid efforts.

I’m going to present a handful of ways to gain a little clarity, which is by no means a comprehensive overview of how to interpret your data (whole books are written, my friends, volumes), but it might help lessen some common misinterpretations.

1 - Clean Out the Brand & Expand

You need to mine your analytics software for keywords that can expand and contract your PPC account. The best source of lateral ideas for keywords to bid on, especially if you have a lot of content on your site, is from the organic traffic you already get from the search engines.

In order to see the terms coming from search engines in GA, click Traffic Sources > Keywords. If you select ‘non-paid’ you’ll see data over time for your organic traffic, and a short-list of your top referring keywords. You can choose another metric like source to see where they’re coming from, and look at goal or monetary information for them also. In order to clear this list up you have to apply an ‘exclude’ filter on the list of keywords. This option is available at the bottom of the list of words, just pull down where it says ‘Filter Keyword’ and select Exclude.

In the exclude field type your brand words, or parts of words, separated by the pipe symbol, ‘|’. This symbol just means ‘or’. Once you apply the filter, the data over time graph at the top will reflect the filtered keywords, which incidentally is a great way to monitor your overall organic SEO efforts, as will the list of keywords presented. Simply set the number of rows in the bottom right to something large like ‘500’, and explore the list for juicy new keyword ideas.

So what happens if you don’t have organic traffic to mine keywords from? Mine your existing adwords traffic, which is tip 2.

2 – Exacting Adwords

If you’re running a PPC campaign, you need to understand your match types, and while I believe they should only be used very strategically, chances are you’re bidding on some broad-matched terms.

The second technique I want to present for gaining clearer insight into your PPC campaign via Google Analytics is something I actually consider completely mandatory for any advertiser who utilizes ‘broad match’ in their Adwords campaigns. It’s just a set of two filters that you apply in your GA account, which reveal to you the actual phrases that people searched at Google which triggered your ad. If you’re a PC computer shop and bid on broad-match for ‘laptops’, it might be nice to know if you wasted ten bucks today for people searching ‘apple laptops’.

Revealing the long-tail of the phrases you’re bidding on lets you both expand and contract your account, intelligently. If you see phrases where the searcher-intent doesn’t match your website’s offering, look for patterns, and you might find a new ‘negative keyword’ to prevent your ad from being shown where it’s not relevant. On top of contracting with negative matches, you should constantly mine this set of ‘long tail’ phrases to find more phrases to bid on specifically. If you bid specifically on a phrase instead of on a part of it via broad-match, chances are you’ll be saving money, be up against less competition, and you’ll have a chance to tailor your ad and landing page with more relevance.

That funky string in filter 1 for you to copy/paste, so long as wordpress doesn’t muck it up: (\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*)

3 – Compare Data in Context

Google Analytics lets you look at data over time very easily, enabling you to spot trends, but if you don’t put the time-frames you’re looking at or comparing into context, it loses meaning. Sometimes a necessary aspect to consider in order not to lose context is seasonality. I recommend, in most cases, comparing time frames to their equivalent from the previous year – it rarely makes sense to compare Q1 data to Q4 data without taking seasonal trends into account, and if you don’t have a sophistimacated formula for doing so, just compare it to the same time last year.

To do this just click the down arrow to the right of the date range box, and select ‘compare to past’. Then just change the secondary date range to read from a year earlier and click apply:

You’ll be rewarded with some contextual comparison data, and if you’ve gone to the trouble of filtering this chart down to relevant metrics ahead of time (such as non-branded organic traffic for SEO, or specific campaigns or keywords for PPC), you’ll have a nice distilled meaningful graph. Remember that seasonality is not the only way to gain context, always ask yourself if you’re comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges when you’re doing comparison work.

There you have it folks, three simple but essential ways to gain a clearer view of your traffic and trends, to make more intelligent and informed decisions for your organic and PPC search campaigns. Now, just to mess with your heads a little bit, have a look at what kind of information GA can really put at your fingertips:

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

Naoise’s Note: This is a guest post by Cathy Camper, a librarian for the Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR. Cathy’s work has appeared in places such as Wired, Cricket, Cicada, Primavera, Women’s Review of Books, Lambda Book Reports, Utne Reader and Giant Robot. Full bio at the end of the post, or visit www.cathycamper.com - Thanks for the amazing contribution to the Acquisio Blog Cathy! (p.s. - I take full responsibility if wordpress has prevented me from displaying your article in as nicely presented formatting as it was provided to me, my apologies, but I can’t access the css to indent your paragraphs).

Forward and Backward; Musings on Librarianship and the Future of Search

By Cathy Camper

This article is written in response to Naoise Osborne’s engaging post “Nine Ways the Internet Could Change that Would Make Search as We Know it Obsolete” (August 26, 2009). As I read it, I had an eerie feeling that for me, a librarian, the future he described is my now. I posted a response, and Naoise invited me to write about search from a librarian’s viewpoint. So here I am.

Disclaimers first: like Naoise, I’m not a futurist, and unlike some of my colleagues, my job is to help people find what they want, not to work on the technical side of search, search engine optimization or search innovation.

Still, as a public librarian, search, as well as its more obsessive cousin, organization, is at the core of what I do. The future of finding information is the future of my job. When I first discovered online marketing articles addressing search, I was thrilled. But my eyes soon glazed over reading discussions of stickiness, click-through and bounce rates. My goal as a librarian is simply to ensure patrons find what they want. It doesn’t matter if they stare at one page all day or flip through hundreds if they leave satisfied. Libraries aren’t selling anything. Like the U.S. Post Office, public libraries often are left to do what no commercial enterprise would take on, for example, provide free Internet service, and instruction, to everyone.

In some ways, Google trumped librarians good when it fulfilled the publics’ need for a magic box that would find whatever the public typed in. Author, title, keyword, call numbers – the public never understood or cared what library metadata was anyways, and it turned out even accuracy mattered less than getting a slew of answers to requests in the blink of an eye.

On a larger scale, the Internet rearranged librarians’ approach to knowledge overnight. The one right answer no longer sat for years in a volume on the reference shelf; now there were many right answers, which would also always be changeable. The right answer might exist anywhere, not just on shelves or in catalog order, or provided by people of a particular profession, class, training or status. Actually this has always been true about knowledge. But now the speed and breadth of electronic information meant it could no longer be ignored, or protected by knowledge gatekeepers.

Librarians today are kind of like early mammals in dinosaur days, scurrying between the claws of commercial search giants like Google and Amazon, grabbing crumbs of information either straight from the behemoth’s clutches, or plucking information the bigger reptiles miss, to feed the needs of those that ask. We supplement search using books, databases, library resources and other means to fill in what the dinosaurs can’t provide.

One of the main contentions I have with futurist scenarios about information and search (for example, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous) is that they are often built on an unstated platform of optimistic, forward movement, assuming a democratization of information access by making it free. Google replaces the lockdown of organizational systems with the infinite flex of individual search. Tagging does away with the Dewey Decimal system and the card catalog. Social networking disperses authority and expertise to everyone; Wikipedia cumulates it. MP3’s make CDs obsolete. Internet trumps library; the e-book trumps paper. Even the name and number of Web 2.0 implies a movement beyond, away from, whatever was the web point zero.

But the reality librarians deal with is that knowledge also moves backwards, authority and expertise still exist, and matter, and “free” may have costs.

Some examples. You’re restoring a 1930’s car. You need to see color samples to do a historically accurate restoration. Repair manuals, car books and extensive online searching turns up no color pictures. A library with magazine back issues may answer your needs; by searching backwards, you find a color ad for the car that shows not only the hues but also how they were applied.

Or say your research demands primary sources. Pretty much anything before 1982 may still be on paper, unless there’s been demand, (and funds) to digitize it. OK, so maybe it’s not on paper, it’s on a floppy disc. Or microform.

Which leads to another wrinkle. We have to not only search backward, we have to retain a method of doing it, technologically, if that information is to be of use. In the next twenty years, imagine the computers we inherit of baby boomers who’ve kicked the bucket. If and when the grandkids figure out the passwords, will they have any desire to look at Grandpa’s 10,000 unlabeled digital photos? If he’s uploaded and tagged some to Flickr, they might survive, but for the family archives, it might be the shoebox of labeled paper photos that gets passed on down the line. What about those unmarked floppy discs for a Commodore 64? Even if the family has the desire, can they find the machine to read them?

As to authority and expertise, it still exists right there in the double o’ed logo of Google’s branding. The hidden change is that it’s been corporatized. These search giants are commercial; their best right answer, in essence, is a product to buy. Google is free only in that it makes enough on advertising to stay solvent. Google works well if you want to buy something. It works less well if you’re researching expertise in knowledge, say in the forefront of cancer research, where a medical database or a cancer institution’s holdings may be more to the point.

Another problem with corporatized information is that it’s not always in the users interest, though it often looks to be. An example might be when your financial institution pushes you towards electronic banking by telling you “conserving paper conserves trees.” They’re also not telling you the cost of electronic banking, or that should you need a paper statement, the bank will now charge you for that. Similarly, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook strive to maintain an image of magnanimity, offering “free “products, while at the same time extracting payment from users via privacy invasion, and maintaining an ultimate authority over what gets shown and who gets space. These social networks aren’t public square forums where anyone can say their piece. Read through their user agreements to see who has ultimate say.

Speaking of users, patrons, customers, they also can direct search skills backwards as well as forwards. Public libraries have been hugely influenced this way by the recent recession. No longer can a ditch digger find a new job through newspaper want ads. Now, he has to look online, on Craig’s list. But to do so, a 50-year-old ditch digger has to learn to type. He has to know how to write a resume, and use software to do that. Then he has to learn to use the Internet, e-mail protocol, and letter writing skills. He has to have an e-mail address. And he has to have Internet access. If he can’t afford it, his only free access is one hour a day at the public library.

Libraries go backwards to bring these users forwards. True, it’s momentary, and in some rosy future, all people will be Internet savvy or will have died off. But what may not change is that the Internet will be freer for some than for others. One hour a day, shared access, will give you different results and opportunities than owning your own computer with 24-7 availability. The Internet may be the land of milk and honey, but the bottleneck to get there, for many, is long and narrow.

So this is the state of my job now, to move backwards and forwards, to find the best answer to match the individual needs of each patron. In a way, my job is to be a Web 2.0 search engine, to search what David Weinberger calls the “mess of information” out there, to fetch and present the best answers to each individual, in a way that best meets their needs.

So what of the future of search? Personalize online searching will wreak havoc with library assistance. At best, I could look over your shoulder, throwing out suggestions, or we’d each search, then contrast and compare.

Some futurists predict that search will disappear, and that in the near future, artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. While I don’t doubt this will happen, we rarely jump into the future all in one leap. Look around you at our 2009 neighborhoods – while some houses could be inhabited by the Jetsons, many more date to the 1950s or even Victorian times. A good model of the future needs to incorporate lots of old baggage.

A realistic model of information storage and retrieval needs to consider worst as well as best case scenarios. Not adding up the cost of electronic bank statements may save paper but not the environment. There are lots of dystopian futures out there that could seriously interrupt our Internet idylls. Global warming, the demise of petroleum stocks, epidemic - none of it bodes well for electronic access as we know it. All it takes is for the plug to get pulled – no more electricity – and we go from the Jetsons back to the Flintstones. Recent movements such as growing food locally, self-sustainability, and alternative energy and transportation sources are important for librarians to know about, on and off the Internet, into the future. And again, much of the information for these movements is found researching past knowledge, searching backwards, to go forwards.

Now let’s get dystopian dark, let’s look at the monopoly Google is amassing. No longer is the hoard gold or land holdings. It’s information. That includes information about you, which you might consider private. One of the reasons librarians are challenging Google is because it’s dangerous when information is privatized because its use no longer falls under public laws regarding privacy, accessibility or dispersal. But it’s also dangerous when one entity becomes king of the heap. If I were an evil hacker-terrorist-despot, why bother getting the bomb? Go for the fountain of knowledge instead; invade and conquer Google. There are lots of variants to this Google nightmare. What if Google simply disappeared, just wasn’t there tomorrow? What if Google becomes a monopoly of all recorded information? What if Google decided they were tired of being nice and free, now they were going to be tight, mean, and expensive?

Early in this article I used an analogy comparing librarians to early mammals. I did so not because I believe (though I hope) future librarians will grow big and dominate like the mammoths and smilodons of yore, but because things can change, best evidence in history all says they will, and that change can be unpredictable. We’ve been graced by a bubble of time, here in the U.S., free of war, strife and invasion. But civilization is fragile. Rosy futurist scenarios that forget to look at history are arguing the wrong points. The best chance of information survival is not publicity, authority, power, electronic storage or even paper recordings. Our oldest surviving stories were written on clay tablets and buried it in the desert, dependant as much on fluke as human planning for their survival.

I sometimes daydream a potential sci-fi novel, a futurist nightmare scenario, one based on human fallibility. Futurists describe an Internet with limitless choices, brimming with good information. But imagine as years go by, an Internet that accrues some good along with all the bad ads, the false information, the self-aggrandizing websites, the unsigned come-ons, plus information reiterated again and again with no accreditation or date stamp. For a window on what I’m talking about, try searching “acid reflux” on Google. You’ll get some good hits, and hours and hours of pseudo-science. Multiply that times twenty or fifty years.
Let’s also imagine a future where we can’t look back. Libraries are unfunded; the doors locked, the books piled in dusty heaps. Microfiche, floppy discs, CDs abound, but machines to read them no longer exist. 16mm films sit cracked in their canisters. Bureaucrats cut funding for institutional and private databases, directing all pleas for education to the Internet. Why not, it’s free?

Let’s add to that a public that even now, at the height of information availability, is no less susceptible to rumor, is no more insistent on fact than in the past, and is just as likely to believe that because something’s in print, it must be true. The recent debates about healthcare in the U.S. points this out, all ideologies aside. Much of what is being argued and debated is not based on fact.

Add to that the big free library that Google Books promises to become. Only this library is only accessible using Google’s sloppy metadata, as Geoffrey Nunberg makes clear in his article “Google’s Book Search; A Disaster for Scholars.” Misdating, cataloging errors, classification errors abound. Nunberg finds a 46-70 percent error rate on misdating alone, but as he says, “… even if the proportion of misdatings is only 5 percent, the corpus is riddled with hundreds of thousands of erroneous publication dates.”

Voila! A dark ages in the Age of Information, where the litter of useless knowledge impedes search, where falsehoods become truths because they’ve lasted the longest, they’re the top of a hit list, or because a celebrity twittered it. More information will be collected, but equally will it be jettisoned, because of ignorance or expediency. History predicts what gets saved will be things that are most organized, most accessible, and most obviously valuable. And like medieval times, who can access, use, understand and protect information may narrow.

This is truly a worst case scenario. In reality, the future’s more hopeful. If like Nunberg suggests, Google books were to connect with the Library of Congress or OCLC’s metadata on books, we could create a library unrivaled in any other human civilization. Steps to self-monitor or organize information, for example changes in Wikipedia to promote accuracy, may tame the wild frontier we now search. These actions are the duties of future librarians. These organizers probably won’t hold library degrees, or be called librarians – they may not even be people, as artificial intelligence and Web 3.0 mature - but this wrangling of information is the forefront where innovation will occur.

Hopefully we’ll always exist in a place somewhere between information dystopia and utopia, a place that allows enough happy accidents, that there will always be a need for search. The buried doubloons. The lost and refound manuscript. The private collection. Though I’ve defined the future librarian mainly as an organizer, the passion is equally the hunt. And even more than the hunt is the importance of what we serendipitously find along the way. The Internet is great for this. But so is fossil hunting. Forward and backward. We need both.

Truly my greatest fear is a universe where everything is known, the end of search. A GPS connected to RFID tags, so there’s no possibility of hidden treasure, no wondering what happened to Atlantis, or what’s at the center of the Universe. It scares me that that may be the end goal of artificial intelligence, to cut us loose from the weight of the unknown, to free our time from pondering. But for what? So we can play electronic games, plotting, scheming, dreaming– pantomiming search?

the end

Cathy Camper is a librarian for Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR, where she works in School Corps doing outreach to schools, grades K-12. She has edited recipes for Amy Sedaris’ book I Like You, and published a children’s science book Bugs Before Time; Prehistoric Insects and Their Relatives with Simon and Schuster (2002). Her work has appeared in places such as Wired, Cricket, Cicada, Primavera, Women’s Review of Books, Lambda Book Reports, Utne Reader and Giant Robot. She co-edits a small zine about candy called Sugar Needle. More at www.cathycamper.com

She thanks librarians Gregory Leazer at UCLA, and Wendy Hitchcock, at Lewis and Clark Law School, for their insights and suggestions on this topic.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

Most politicians are old; it’s basically a job requirement. It makes sense. The accruement of knowledge takes time and learning what to do with it takes practice.

Not many politicians would be classed as outright ‘ignorant’, but I’m afraid that if you can’t tell me, generally, the difference between Facebook and Google, you’ve got some modern learnin’ to do. And let’s face it, we can’t learn ourselves any younger, so it’s all politicians really have. The fact is the Internet, search engines, keywords, and link graphs are all areas of knowledge that politicians, or at least their right-hand-peeps, need to get their over-educated heads around, right about now.

To their credit, our would-be leaders are beginning to understand (at least the power of) social media, but are failing to comprehend how social media really intersects with search engines, keywords, the link graph, and the simple fact that searchers are actively seeking information. That’s a lot to learn, but a first step towards a functional understanding of our strange little online world might be achieved via our easy to comprehend friend, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing. It’s a quick and simple way to get your political paws on real-life search traffic, so you can see the power of turning the tables – of appealing to people looking for information about issues, instead of just broadcasting information about issues out to as many people as possible, in any direction they might be looking. Who do you think is more likely to vote?

So why am I talking about electioneering at a time when nobody’s doing it? Last year, towards the latter end of dual American and Canadian federal election races, I wrote a post about the state of PPC advertising use by the candidates on both sides of the border – I didn’t have a method of data collection or anything statistically significant, I just tried searching for terms at Google (via the ‘view your ads in different places’ geo-targeting feature in Google Adwords), and I had a lot of trouble finding relevant political ads for relevant key-phrases.

This year I’d like to be a little more proactive – Canada (yes, it’s a weird place) might have another federal election as early as the next few months (sigh), and setting up online campaigns is something you want to start early in the election cycle and evolve, not start late. So I’d like to outline the basics of what someone running for an elected position in North American (or, you know, anywhere) should consider in terms of online campaign marketing. I don’t mean from the community building, online campaigning, get people talking perspective, but from the search perspective – where search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC advertising allow you to get your (in this case political) message in front of people who might actually be interested in it, because they’re searching for it.

Understanding this difference is essential: Search is the only medium where you’re answering questions posed by people who are actively seeking an answer, whereas grassroots marketing is simply asking people who already know you to spam people they know with your message, and broadcast marketing is just plain old traditional spam, pushing messages towards people who didn’t request them. Who is more likely to be a fence sitter in decision mode?

The complexities of setting up a full political Social+SEO campaign are beyond the scope of this lill’ole article (if you happen to be someone who actually is interested in those complexities, ahem, shameless plug, my first name at g-mail pls), instead let’s look at the essential paid search campaign. PPC is the fastest (legitimate) way to send genuine search traffic to pages which present your message in exactly the way you want it presented – viral social-media messages, which history has now proven should be part of your campaign also, do not allow you to control the content being presented nearly as comprehensively, because they require an element of sensationalism (or some other obfuscation, angle or opinion) in order to get passed around.

PPC is still horrifically underutilized as a medium for political advertising. According to Rimm-Kaufman less than half (only 44%!) of the 2008 US presidential contenders used paid search at all. They also found that the methodologies used in political PPC campaigns are simply not as sophisticated as in private enterprise. Ad copy, landing page testing and conversion tracking were not common.

In a meager attempt to begin a slow remedy of this situation, I offer some very general steps towards setting up a not-ridiculously-pathetic political PPC campaign. I’m not here to teach you Adwords or the other PPC systems, but just to give some basic “here’s what you have to do or get done” information.

Step 1) Map Your Issues

Get a list of every single issue, positive and negative, that may be a factor in the election race. Put it down on paper. I know you still like paper, you’re old. Give this list to someone who is good at keyword mining (get an SEO to train a marketing-savvy campaign staffer) – a decent common-denominator search keyword research tool is Google’s own Adwords tool. Keep in mind though that this tool is build to work within the world of Adwords, which requires some understanding in order to interpret the numbers presented for all phrase, exact, and broad-match options.

If there are some issues that have strong geographical associations, make a note of the places and the association so that you can build a different advertising message for different regions.

Do this even if that association simply means one area tends to have one opinion, and a second, another - one fish two fish, red fish blue fish.

Step Umm) Not Really a Step At All

This is just a little aside about what I like to call “searcher intent”. For each of the phrases that will be returned to you by your keyword searching slave, umm, volunteer, you have to make an intelligent inference about what that searcher might be looking for, and what you might want to present them. This, in many cases, will be intuitively obvious, but doing the work of examining the searcher intent of your phrases, and ensuring you appeal to that intent in your ad-copy (for better ad click through rate) and on your ad’s landing page (for better ‘conversion potential’), is something that I simply haven’t seen done yet for a political campaign. This is the element of craftsmanship that separates a good, effective paid search campaign from a useless one.

Step 2) Group Your Keywords

If you’re the keyword researcher, at first just worry about producing as exhaustive a set of lists for as many of the phrases as you can (lots of worksheets in an excel workbook). After this you can then worry about doing some logical (or keyword based) groupings of phrases for your ad-groups. It might be wise to group your keywords based on searcher-intent where it applies, this way you can likely appeal to a large portion of the keywords in that group with specific effective landing page copy – in general just build as many small tightly-focused ad-groups as is technically possible.

Do not forget to comprehensively cover your own name and people within your party. Online reputation management in a political campaign necessitates proactive self-referential ads. Even if the keyword research tool doesn’t show people searching for specific issues yet, but you predict them to, bid now, and bid on issues in conjunction with your name and party name. People want to know where you and your party stand on specific issues – don’t let someone else tell them. Also consider building a strategy for bidding on opponent names, as McCain did in the last race.

You’ll want to get some specific advice on match-type choices, all I can say in general is, if you do a lot of indiscriminate broad-matching you’ll lose some of the value that comes from the specificity of being able to infer searcher intent. Don’t ignore broad match, just use it strategically.

Now go back to your original list that contains information about opinions in different places, and where appropriate, make a note of which groups are going to require ads and landing pages to be geo-targeted. Geo-targeting your campaign means people searching from one area can be shown one ad, while those searching from another can be shown a different ad (reading that sentence should have made any politician smile).

Step 3) Write Your Ads

So ad-groups are just our logical groupings of keywords mentioned above. When those keywords are searched for at Google, an ad has to show, and it has to point somewhere. This is what campaign staff are for – get your minions to write hundreds of those juicy little character-limited ads (give them the character limits for Adwords and whichever other platform you’ll be advertising on, as the requirements might be slightly different, and breaking up the ads words appropriately is most certainly minion work).

Hey, ad writers, you’re going for high click-through-rates for your ads based on the keywords that will trigger them – this is a political campaign, don’t be afraid to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Adwords is a democratic system, ads that make Google more money (get clicked more) will be shown more. Just make sure there are a few variations for Google to choose from in each ad-group. This is your first line of offence in appealing to searcher intent, so be sure that the ad-copy-writer is writing based on the keywords that will be triggering the ad, and that they understand the essential concepts.

If you’ve incorporated geo-targeting into your campaign, be sure that the writer understands where the ads are going to be triggered from, and what you want to say to that specific region.

Step 4) Write Your Landing Pages

This is where you have carte blanche to completely screw up your efforts if you wish. One major technical caveat, your landing pages have to match up very well with the keywords in the search that got the visitor there. If you fail to match keywords to content, you’ll likely be penalized by Google or other PPC providers for not being relevant enough, and you’ll be charged more money for the same service. Read up on ‘Quality Score’ to learn more. This doesn’t mean stuff every single keyword variation into your landing page, but be sure to include your core keywords from the ad-group. The implication of this caveat is that you need to be relevant in order to be in a position to influence the person who clicked on your ad.

Once you’ve worked out a process of creating landing pages for each ad-group that cover the core keywords in their copy, you have the opportunity to tailor that copy so that it appeals to the searcher intent, and your ad-copy. Notice I didn’t say tailor the copy so that it displays the same message as your print and television advertising, tailor it to the searcher intent of the search phrase, and any modification of that intent that your ad might provide. If you’ve bid on too many phrases and can’t create content for each keyword, back up and try to extrapolate the dominant searcher intent in that ad-group.

Again take geo-targeting into account.

Step 5) Launch & Pay Attention

Paid search in conjunction with a good web analytics program like Google Analytics allow for a lot of insight into the effectiveness of your campaign. There may be no traditional ‘conversion’ metric to focus on or judge your visitors on (if you have a contact form, for instance, and it is not the ultimate goal for all visitors, it should not be used as a measure of success), and so you should be focussing on engagement metrics.

Engagement metrics involve things like time on site, and bounce rate (a complex one if you present a lot of information and no call to change pages on your landing page).

You should also be sure to enable some advanced functionality in Google Analytics so that you can see the full search term entered by people arriving via a broad-match in your PPC campaign. Once you have full search term access you can evaluate for searcher-intent, and you can also segment by variables like location of the searcher, gaining valuable insight into things like which issues matter most to specific constituent regions. The practical use of web analytics cannot be overemphasized (even if its power extends a bit outside of the original scope of this post), and at a minimum should be used to refine and guide your PPC efforts over the course of your campaign.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

*Update - NY Judge has delayed hearings in the Google Book Deal - read all about it*

Much of humanity’s knowledge is in the process of being digitized, and a new set of rules are currently in draft-mode concerning how this wealth of knowledge may (or may not) be made available to the public.
If you’ve ever read a book, or wanted to, if you’ve ever searched Google, or dreamed of it, you might want to catch up on the latest developments in our civilization’s fight for access to information. More recently, as physical copies of literature have become less relevant to the public, being able to effectively access their digital counterparts becomes increasingly important. This is an opinion piece, and all of ‘em are mine, the author, so don’t go blaming anybody else if your sensibilities are touched. With that disclaimer made, on with it!

Walking down the street the other day a friend of mine turns to me and asks: Hey, so you work with Google or whatever, what the hell is the big deal? Why am I constantly hearing about this ridiculous company with a childish logo, I mean, it’s just a freaking search box isn’t it?

My response was to pause for a moment in order to consider how I could express to this pre-Internet generation chum what the hell the big deal was. Eventually I responded: Well, I think that search box will come to represent, in a very real way, either human freedom, or a lack thereof.

My friend looked at me, head tilted to one side, incredulity spurting out of the corners of his squinted eyes, and said: never mind. In a manner that clearly portrayed the underlying sentiment: Naoise, you’re an idiot who never learned to answer simple questions with anything but pedantic, complex answers. And while that may be so, in my defense let me just say: c’mooooon, strue! Freedom of search really is related to the larger concept of the freedom of civilization.

There is a real technological divide that meters how freedom of search is doled out to the world’s citizens, and we, as a generation, may be leaving the future of this freedom in the hands of a small group of private, for-profit companies: Google, Microsoft, and quite possibly, Facebook.

Google’s search box, simply because Google themselves seem to be the only ones taking up the reigns and ‘organizing the world’s information’, is quickly becoming our gateway to information and new knowledge. Microsoft wants to compete on the same grounds with a universal search engine, and Facebook wants to redefine how search is perceived, utilizing personal social graph information in order to make that happen.

The Digital Divide, Search & Creating

The most basic staple of modernity, electricity, is an infrastructure issue where the poor are the last to receive access. One of the most basic staples of freedom, access to information, is fast becoming a technology issue, where once again your class dictates both your physical ability to access the information, and often the quality of that access. What it doesn’t limit, for a large portion of what we consider the ‘free world’, is the pool of information which you are allowed to access, that slushy digital sea of knowledge that sits behind the protective, omnipotent, yet wholly opaque search box.

The socioeconomic access-to-information differences don’t only manifest in the extremes – one finds it easy to imagine the poor of India having trouble accessing the Internet – but also in modern western splits. In Canada, 91% of people earning more than $90k per year access the Internet regularly, while only 47% of people earning less than $24k per year (a little above the Canadian poverty line) do the same (source: Statistics Canada). That’s a significant difference in a fully modern first world country. Even in the US, low-income American’s broadband connections decreased 3% from 2007 to 2008, which is hardly a sign of convergence in the digital divide.

A survey taken in May 2008 (warning: PDF file) revealed that 49% of Internet users use a search engine ‘on a typical day’. This is an increase of 69% from January 2002, when the data was first collected. By contrast, the percentage of people who use e-mail ‘on a typical day’ grew only 15%, from 52% to 60% over the same time-frame. Search is used on a daily basis almost as commonly as e-mail, and is growing at a much, much faster rate. We’re addicted to search, and that addiction has yet to even approach maturity.

These increases reflect greater general access to search, greater awareness of search in demographics that already had access, and a habituation of searching amongst those who already have access and awareness. In all cases, search is working its way deeper and deeper into people’s lives, but again, not in an equitable way.

Almost 50% of the American population’s Internet users search on ‘a typical day’, but that number is 66% for college graduates, and only 32% for those who never attended college. The number is 62% for people who earn more than 75K per year, but only 36% for those who earn less than 30K. Part of this is the quality and immediacy of access, which shows people with broadband at home to be significantly more likely to have ever tried using search engines at all, when compared with dial-up users.

The younger generation, of course, is also more habituated to integrate searching online into their daily lives, with 55% of those 18-29 years old searching on a typical day, but only 27% of those 65 or older doing the same. The children are our future, and our future looks pretty saturated in search queries.

So where does this leave us? The concept of search in 2009 is different from our old concepts of information retrieval, and I fear we are moving dangerously close to a common acceptance of the search box as being not only the primary, but the best method to discover knowledge.

I believe it is inevitable that a larger and larger portion of the population will not only integrate search engine use into their daily lives, but invest in search mentally, as a means to knowledge discovery of all types. Knowledge discovery, via access to information, is of course the basis upon which new knowledge is created, and fundamental to the advancement of a civilization. The personal freedom to create is in my opinion (which, hey! I created) an essential aspect of freedom, and is fundamental to the freedom of civilization as a whole to progress in anything that could be considered a natural way.

Within this quest for knowledge lies the almost inconceivable potential of the Internet as we know it, to provide. But it is far from guaranteed that the information the populace at large is given access to will be a full index, free of an intermediary opinion based layer of adulteration (and I do not mean in a ranking sense, but in an inclusion in the index sense). If the index is maintained by a for-profit company, is it unrealistically cynical to think that they will consider their index their property, and appropriate it according to their will, now or in the future? If you managed to come to the conclusion that no, it is not unrealistic, ask yourself this: is it naive to trust the future will of any for-profit company on the basis of their current ideology?

How to Save a Civilization: The Public Library, Unabridged

The idea of harboring or safeguarding the canon of a civilization’s knowledge being essential to the maintenance and cohesion of that civilization is certainly nothing new, and what naturally follows is the necessary freedom to access that information being granted to the populace. Governments have, for many generations, taken responsibility for their citizen’s access to information, if only to guarantee an educated and productive public. For the same reasons inverted, knowledge has long been suppressed by governments, ruling groups and private groups alike in an effort, beyond the obvious economic gains available to those who control production methods, to keep the public passive and unquestioning.

In modern western culture circulating libraries receive public funds to catalogue and make accessible as much common and accepted knowledge as is possible. When new entries to the greater canon of human knowledge grew beyond books and evolved to the point where the ideas only ever knew a digital life, libraries adopted and helped to evolve the early Internet. One of my first real jobs, back in 1997, was for a government program designed to teach people how to use the Internet and how to use search engines effectively, via free access at the public library.

If the world evolves to the point where physical access may eventually fade in importance as ubiquitous access to the Internet becomes the standard, the issue then becomes the nature of the body of information that we do have access to. While it may remain difficult to control access to websites if one knows the URL, it needs to be understood that, essentially, the only form of online information discovery outside of visiting sites you already know (which then link directly to new knowledge), is via search engines.

And what happens when the all-powerful little search box becomes the gateway to more than just the Internet as we currently understand it? When the true canon of human knowledge migrates to ‘The Cloud’, and books are no longer printed and sent to the public library for anyone to access, that little search box takes on a whole new level of importance.

Concentration and Ownership of Knowledge

Google has a stated goal to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, which taken optimistically, seems almost noble – an image Google has always tried to create for themselves (do no evil = be noble). What is at issue is whether or not “universally accessible” means equitable and identical access without regard for any characteristics of the searcher, be it nationality, location or socioeconomic status. Nobility may be a relative thing.

It is quite obvious that Google does not, in fact, mean this, as they have already capitulated to the Chinese government and censored their search results for Chinese citizens. There is no hope that Google has any intention of being noble in achieving its mission; they have already failed in the name of profit. In a much larger sense, if their mission is to make the world’s information accessible, in suppressing it, they have failed civilization.

While the suppression of human freedom for profit is a tough one to justify, Google has produced rhetoric to do just that. Regardless of their optimism in this being a short-term solution with a goal of greater good in the long run, the suppression of information concerning human suffering only helps to extend and proliferate that suffering, now, in the present – if things change in the future Google will at least have profited in the Interim.

Google are not alone in their transgressions, and in fact are much more up-front about their opinion on the matter, and much more transparent to users about changes to their index that affect search results than their major rivals. Microsoft has also come under fire for similar issues, but in typical Microsoft fashion, they’re just too big and monolithic to really care about the world around them. Recently (june of 2009), Microsoft altered search results clear across the one billion person country of India, to exclude by default sexually explicit content. This is not the same as not displaying sexually explicit content to those who do not request it, but actively blocking it from those who have in fact requested it.

This is the modern world’s version of book burnings and bannings – it takes the form of incomplete, abridged, or adulterated indexes of data behind a corporate search box.

A Brave New Digital World: The Google Books Debacle

Earlier I speculated as to what may happen if the true canon of human knowledge - at the moment more confined to paper and ink than bits and bytes - were to migrate to ‘The Cloud’. If the current store of humanity’s books does go digital it may simply become another catalogue of bytes, which will almost inevitably be controlled by an entity, if not outright owned by it. That human civilization’s knowledge would then also become subject to annihilation by something as ridiculous as the EMP effect of some future solar storm is disconcerting enough. Even if that may be a little far-fetched, it’s certainly not far-fetched to ask the question: if the country’s electricity grid fails, or if brown-outs and blackouts significantly affect our lives, do we want our history, along with news and the ability to search our current world to become something we have technical problems accessing? Or to become something we need to appropriate access to physically, once again with all of the classic problems it presents for equitability?

Beyond the big picture problems of appropriating access-to-(way more)-information to a private company, the Google book deal is riddled with problems. A couple of years ago Google started to develop the concept of digitizing books which have fallen out of copyright protection. This, once again, taken optimistically seems quite noble. But the truth of the matter is that Google has tried to jump the gun. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers both sued Google back in 2005, claiming copyright infringement for their initial digitization and book search efforts. In disentangling itself from these issues Google actually converted the former adversaries to allies, and announced a deal. A new deal. A stunner.

Not only will Google digitize out of copyright books, but also out of print books that are still under copyright – even when those holding the rights to those books don’t specifically agree to Google’s plan. Keep in mind that lots of books go ‘out of print’ just a few years after they’re first published. The reason Google has carte blanche to sell these books is because the Authors guild filed a class-action lawsuit, which would require you as an author to actively opt-out of the settlement if you didn’t like it. By default, if you do nothing, Google can sell your books. Entire sovereign nations have complained, with Germany and France claiming broad copyright issues. So what happens? Google will likely be forced to hide these books from European searchers, once again closing the canon of human knowledge selectively, based on who you are.

An organization called the Open Book Alliance (OBA), along with numerous other entities such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have taken up the fight against Google. Here’s what the OBA had to say about Google’s attempts:

“The members of the Open Book Alliance recognize the tremendous value that the mass digitization of books can bring to consumers, libraries, scholars and students. Making books searchable, readable and downloadable promises to unlock huge amounts of our collective cultural knowledge for a broader audience than was ever possible.

But, as we’ve noted, this settlement is the wrong way to go about making this promise a reality. The current settlement proposal would stifle innovation and competition in favor of a monopoly over the access, distribution, and pricing of the largest collection of digital books in the world, and would reinforce an already dominant position in search…”

Google has paid more than lip service to the concept of accessibility, in that they plan to provide terminals to all public and university libraries in order to access the Google Book repository free of charge, but as The New Yorker points out:

“The out-of-print books Google has digitized come from nonprofit institutions that built their collections as a public good. In return for pocket change—Google will contribute $125 million to create a nonprofit rights registry—these public treasures will now be monetized for the benefit of a private corporation.

True, Google will give every public and university library one terminal where readers can access its entire collection. But these machines won’t be able to download or print texts—and you can imagine the lines. Libraries that want full access to all the books in Google will have to pay for the privilege, as well as for every download.”

While there is plenty to think about in terms of access to information for the public at large, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is also concerned about your rights as a consumer - in this case, a reader. In the initially proposed Google Book deal, there were absolutely no guarantees that your personal privacy regarding what you read and purchase would be in any way secured. Here’s a quote from a group led by the EFF:

“Google Book Search and other digital book projects will redefine the way people read and research,” said Lethem, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. “Now is the moment to make sure that Google Book Search is as private as the world of physical books. If future readers know that they are leaving a digital trail for others to follow, they may shy away from important intellectual journeys.”

While for you and me, today, this may not be so much of a concern, put yourself in the position of an oppressed Chinese or poor Indian person who may very well shy away from searching and reading specific things for fear of being personally identified in the act, and persecuted for their thoughts and beliefs. This already happens, but it’s only going to get worse if what people are denied access to includes all of the books in the world, not just all of the blogs.

There is no point in ignoring the fact that humans will eventually, inevitably, digitize all past and current knowledge. The problem is it’s happening too fast, while the technology is still misunderstood by our governments, the very entities who should be helping ensure equitable access to information, while the resources to digitize are only truly in the hands of the private corporations of the world, and while the laws of copyright have not yet caught up to the digital age, allowing those corporations to take advantage of, potentially control, potentially privatize, and most certainly profit from, something so sacred as the canon of knowledge of human civilization.

It’s a big deal.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

We, as a species, kinda stumbled into this Internet thing. It’s all an inconceivably vast, unregulated, unhindered, unorganized cornucopia of digitized crap, and in order to deal with the fact that humans defecate in digital, we’ve had to invent stuff like Google to help us sift through all the … you get the point.

The way that we’ve evolved in our mode of seeking information has always been a function of the medium that holds what we’re looking for. Books added indexes, articles added abstracts, and libraries added compilations of indexed abstracts. Categorizable volumes fell prey to the formidable Dewey decimal, the granularity of taxonomy thought un-improvable. But Von Neuman screwd’em, and abstract data types, bubble sorts, relational DBs, non-relational DBs and relevancy algorithms took over the world (rich white men are so passé).

At this point in history we search by guessing at words that might be in the document that we are hoping also contains the actual piece of information we’re trying to determine. When you think outside the search-box a little, this methodology doesn’t necessarily strike you as the ultimate form of human-understandable information retrieval, and in a certain light, it might even seem a bit archaic (okay, with nothing more modern to compare it to, I guess that would be faux-archaic).

Now I’m no futurist (though it seems a cushy job, so if any of my half-assed predictions come true, I’ll be charging $200USD/H from this point forward for any futuristic thinking you may need done), but I know things can’t stay this way forever; if the medium changes, the search will change, and the entire paradigm of what it means to ‘look something up’ could evolve. As Bill Hicks would say, we’re not growing any more thumbs people, it’s time to evolve our ideas.

So, with that rather weighty introduction, which in retrospect seems not so ado, and with no further ado that I can do, here are some futurist (read, made-up) ideas of ways the Internet could change that would make ‘search’ as we know it, obsolete.

1) Personalized Intelligent Information Agents

Do you remember that creepy scene in Minority Report where Mr. Katie Holmes was bombarded with personalized advertisements? Memory treadmill:

The idea of information flowing the other way, from the net to the individual without a search request is certainly nothing new – in its most basic form I think I’d call that a newspaper. A slightly more abstract version of the concept would be the vertical ‘portal’ (if you ever took the word ‘vortal’ seriously, you’ve played this game) – and more recently the personalized home-page version of a portal.

These individualized portals like iGoogle deliver information automatically via user-chosen widgets, topics of interest, subscribed RSS feeds etc, without the user having to perform a traditional ‘search’ for the info. This concept can be extended into what are known as ‘smart agents’, or ‘intelligent information agents’, a fledgling sub-field of Artificial Intelligence, where the equivalent of personalized search robots scour the web, retrieving information based on a fairly sophisticated schema of … you, Mr. Katie Holmes.

Search may change in a couple of different ways if proactive AI retrieval becomes commonplace. Search may simply become something we only consider for a smaller subset of information retrieval quests, because so many every-day things are answered automatically. Or, search may become something we apply to specific data sub-sets of the information that is already being retrieved for us, as opposed to searching ‘the whole f@*%ing Internet’ every time we need to find something.

2) The Valid Person & The Real Recommendation

The current state of the Internet is a precarious balance between anonymity and identification. Anonymity is required for any pureness of freedom, for the realization of a borderless, egalitarian digital world where every IP address and every byte is created equal. Identification adds value, some would argue, because any piece of content published under someone’s own name, to put it bluntly, is infinitely more likely to be a valid contribution to the canon of human knowledge.

There is a perfectly reasonable case to be made for both forms of information offering value: the former searcher wanting to know the low down on what’s happening in Tehran, the latter wanting to know the low down on what sucks about the latest Apple gadget.

In the beginning, there was darkness: a wholly anonymous Internet, full of un-credited, unaccredited information. Then there was light: in the most disgusting form you can imagine, Facebook. If the world widely accepts the idea of personally identifying themselves online, the world wide web will change, and along with it, our perceptions of search. A nameless faceless website is no longer adequate for the task of answering my questions, and Google has as much of a clue as a shoe at knowing how legitimate the nature of the information I’m reading is. When this mental shift happens, we’ll revert to searching for answers from trusted, verifiable sources, once again shrinking our world of influence to manageable levels, where we don’t find ourselves ‘learning things’ from anonymous websites that only exist to profit.

3) Specialized Databases & Expert Systems

The Internet is big, in a completely non-literal sense. I often question whether or not I really want to be searching, I’ll say it again, the whole fu**ing Internet, every time I have a query. I also have a brain. I know what *kind* of information I’m looking for, and if given the option, I may even choose a search methodology that takes my previous knowledge into account. This, since Google took over, has only ever manifested in people attempting to change their search methodology by fiddling with their query. However, if options materialize, your brain might actually come back with the suggestion that you try searching a different source of data, maybe one that’s smaller or more specialized.

Youtube, for all intents and purposes, is simply a specialized search engine for videos. It revolves more around its search box than any other feature. Google understands this, and before we were given a chance to think of Youtube as an independent search-spot, Google both bought the company, and began integrating Youtube results right into their current search engine. The universal search concept is, as much as anything, an attempt by Google et al. to try and reform our concept of what search is, keeping us going back to the one-search-box and one-universal-index mentality. I think it’s a move motivated by self-preservation.

Other proprietary, specialized databases exist, such as Lexis Nexis, the subscription based (mostly) legal search engine and data archive. Other, private, super-high-bandwidth globe-spanning networks exist, like Internet2. Perhaps more important are the private, proprietary expert systems (such as those used by large hospitals) using semantic AI. These databases, due to the constrained and relational nature of the data set, are light years ahead in terms of functionality compared to where Google could realistically be (any time soon) when looking at the public Internet as a whole.

Even if Google can try and protect what we think of as ‘search’ by integrating multimedia file-types into its regular old search engine, it can’t monopolize how we think of different information-types. File types are easy. Information types, and semantics, are not.

How much will high quality, privately maintained specialty search engines and expert systems take over our mindset of what it means to find something accurate, quickly? My guess is, as the general level of quality of information published on the net continues to become more and more diluted day by day, the value of maintained or exclusive indexes will grow in accordance.

4) Personalization Gone Mad

Google and the other big boys of search have been pushing the concept of ‘personalization’ of search results for more than a couple of years now, and while we have yet to see (or notice) much of any significant change in the way search engines treat us, the future may not be so friendly.

The issue here is that a great deal of the time, when someone searches they’re not looking for results that are in any way related to their life, hobbies, other websites they visit, or other searches they’ve made. They’re looking for *new* information. If personalization becomes a ‘standard’ feature of our search experience, as opposed to an option available for each query, then it is going to naturally decrease the variety of websites returned in my search results. This, taken to the extreme, is going to change our search experience away from something that can be thought of and acted upon as a shared experience. The notion of telling a friend about something via a search engine query, Googling it, could become antiquated. Right now, this is a pretty valid thing to say to a friend:

Hey I read a great article on n.n. last night, can’t remember the site but just search Google for ‘net neutrality in India’, you’ll find it.

But in a personalized search world, I may have only stumbled across that article because I’d been researching outsourcing companies in Bangalor recently, and Google promoted the same sites I’d visited last week when I included ‘India’ in my net neutrality search this week. Google thinks itself clever, but if I had only been at that site last week for an unrelated reason, then all Google has done in showing it to me again is falsely promote it. In addition to this, I have lost the ability to use Google as the share-point for my information, and telling my friend to search Google may end up in a frustrating wild-goose-chase for them. You might think this a subtle shift, but once we give up search as a shared experience, the nature of if changes. “Google it”, could become meaningless as a command to verify a fact if the results that fill your first page contradict the results that fill mine.

In addition to this, be it fallacy or not, people draw some faith in the validity of a site from rankings - shaking that (false) validity association by serving different results to different people is likely to affect the way the general public thinks about search. Because the concept of associating rankings with validity or trustworthiness is a naive one, this shift may very well be for the best (though I can’t see a loss of association between ‘validity’ and its brand name being a good thing for Google, which may be enough of an impetus for them to not alter results from person to person too much, too quickly).

5) Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is a topic far too expansive to be explained in a simple bullet point of a blog post, but in its essence it revolves around the concept of whether the information currently freely available on the Internet will be provided without regard for who is requesting it or from where.

This means things like bandwidth may or may not be allocated differently for different people in different places, transfer limits, open ports, data-types being transferred. A neutral network would not discriminate with respect to what sites are accessible, what type of equipment is used to access it, etc etc etc.

Yeah, huge topic, and absolutely vital to the future nature of the Internet (hint, people with lots of money don’t want the same Internet we have now. Oh no…no they don’t). The ways that a non-neutral Internet could affect search are varied, and would depend on how neutrality was affected. If content or sites were restricted, as they are in China, then the mentality of the populace of people who are ‘searching’, has to take this into account (if they’re aware of it), and they must realize that they data-set they are scouring is intentionally incomplete, or obfuscated, and hence change they way they search.

6) Ubiquitous Access Provision

The world of Internet service providers has been shrinking since broadband access became commonplace. Cable television companies currently hold a near monopoly because of the fact that they own the best ‘last mile’ cable from grid to house (just as phone companies had previously). This, again, is a paradigm that could shift with technology.

If technology providing broadband Internet access loses the leash, and either WIFI, cell networks or another medium take over, the way we access the Internet may change – and may even boil down to something much more concentrated than Comcast: a single Internet provider present in every major city. If this was the case, the current model of paying for monthly access and/or data transfer rates and quantities may become obsolete.

A single point of access for getting online would not, in-and-of-itself, change the way we search, except, perhaps, if the entity providing that access were (buu buu BUUUM!) a search engine.

There have been reports for years of Google buying up dark fiber across North America (fiber optic cables laid city to city, but never the ‘last-mile’ to each house, as that last-mile infrastructure is the most expensive). Given some modern WIFI broadcast hardware, Google would be in the perfect position to offer ad-coupled Internet access to people for free in these cities. When you’re the ISP you can do a lot to encourage people towards your search engine. If it took off (and admit it, you’d use free Google wireless) it could potentially choke out a large portion of the competition in local search, stifling innovation, and impeding search as a concept from evolving naturally. It would change search by not allowing it to ever change from Google’s vision of what search is supposed to be.

7) The Spammers Win – Destruction of the Databases

Newsflash: Google isn’t stupid. Every other major search technology has, over the course of a few years of consistent growth and expansion, collapsed in on itself in a pile of gelatinous SPAM. They were all public databases, and as an old school SEO I can tell you from personal experience, those who ran the previous competitors to Google did not know on which side their bread was buttered. Google took care of its index, the others did not, and the others failed.

But is Google infallible? It is just a database after all. Up until now it has only had to deal with marketers who want a slice of the pie, and are willing to exploit the search engine’s weaknesses in order to get it. This is child’s play. Has there been a concerted effort yet by an anti-Google group (we’ll leave potential motivations aside for now) to dilute the Google database? The only intention behind it now is black-hat attempts to get traffic from Google – but what happens when the right group of smart kids rebel, realizing that Google has been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and decide to destabilize the nature of the index on a larger scale.

Sound like unrealistic conspiracy theorizing? I’ve had this conversation – and trust me, the people who have cause to discuss this don’t do so in jest, or with any hint of the casual, though the idea always seems to spiral so wide (Google is particularly skilled at the upgrade game) as to be walked away from without resolve. But is it so far fetched to think I may not be the most resolute person in the world? (Hey, no laughing just because you happen to know me personally!)

What would happen if we were thrown back to 1999 style search result quality, where everything seems to be spam? We can’t just start over, delving randomly into petabytes of hedonistic data, looking for strings of characters via the distorted prism of a modern, near-meaningless, corrupt link graph… can we?

8) Semantics Start Making Some Sense

Semantics, the study of meaning in language, is the holy grail of search engine relevance. That is, to be able to understand something more of a search query than which words it contains, and to understand more of the documents in your index than simply the sum of its characters.

If you’ve ever queried a relational database with a structured query language (SQL), you have some understanding of how humans have traditionally, proactively created meaningful associations between sets of data. Once these connections are in place and recognized, you can use structured queries to retrieve very specific results or sets of data.

Google’s database is not relational, but vague attempts at drawing some semantic associations between the otherwise free swirling data it contains have been made. Google ‘Squared’ allows you to build sets of information that have meaningful relationships. Try playing with it to get a sense of its limitations and proneness to error.

More constrained data sets such as the information in Wikipedia are being organized and systematized, then placed into a database for structured query options. DBpedia takes the Wikipedia resource description framework dump, and allows for access via a structured query language named SPARQL. I really consider this to be fake semantics however, as it is half-forced structuring of previously existing facts. Semantic interpretation of language is soooo much more than that, and potentially could reign in more meaningful answers to more subtle questions from a global data-set like Google’s.

There are two ways in which the world has to change in order to make the semantic web a reality, each attacking what is missing, from opposite ends:

• Natural language processing and semantic interpretation has to advance for general web content – who knows where the limits may lie. Google squared and Wolfram Alpha are not accessible enough, but a clever way to use relational information to enhance current results could be possible
• Publishers need to start standardizing any information they present which can be standardized (HTML 5 structured markup and equivalents)

The second point speaks to publishers, many of which are simply commercial entities who have products that lend themselves to structured data (such as price, height, weight, color, etc).

I believe searchers would be willing to adopt, and may even appreciate, the option of being able to include some semantic style directives in their search. It would be an evolved query to see something like this being asked of Google’s index of the entire world’s data:

How many average sized Florida Oranges could fit into the flatbed of a Ford F150?

This is the type of query that could be answered accurately (though perhaps not with a high degree of confidence) if semantic associations were to be better identified and indexed. The general searching public may very well shift the way they compose their queries as a result of comprehending that they can request relationship data.

9) The Internet Becomes Self-Aware, Awakens, and Devours Us All.

Resistance is futile.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

So it is with a hint of a nostalgic grimace that I wade into the search results of the enemy camp’s engine – charmingly, disarmingly named, Bing. You have to admit it’s a cute domain. Ringing with a clear lack of monolithicism… if that’s a word. It’s also pretty universally meaningless, non-culture-specific, difficult if not impossible to misspell, and four, sweet, golden letters long. This blank-canvas, mega-carrot-gem of the domain world was undoubtedly chosen to be so perfectly open to interpretation, one imagines, in order to give the Bing marketing team more time to try and figure out what the hell to do with it.

What Bing is Vying for

Search engine share is usually thought of as a portion of a pie – the pie being all of the searches going on from any search engine by people in a geographic area, like America. But any Internet novice knows that ending up on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) can happen in more ways than one. You could realize you want to search for something, then:

• Choose to go to a search engine by typing in the search engine’s URL
• Choose to go to a search engine by clicking a Bookmark to get there
• Use the most obvious search box in your browser to perform the search, using the default selected engine
• Use the search feature of whichever application you’re running (if you’re not in a web browser) – and you may end up on a SERP
• Use a site-specific search if your query ought to be answered by the site you’re currently on – this can sometimes direct you to a proprietary search, and sometimes to a branded major search engine SERP (even if the SERP only includes entries from the search-box site)

Or sometimes you might click on a link that points at a SERP. Any other ways to get there… did I miss any? (no, people who search Yahoo for ‘google’ and Google for ‘yahoo’ don’t count, because I could not bear to live in a world where those people count for anything)

These range from brand-active (typing in the search engine URL) to brand-passive (clicking a link), and some in-between options. Other than actively choosing an engine, they are most commonly thrust upon you via default settings of the search-box in a browser, tool or toolbar (set by the developer/marketer/tool owner etc, or sometimes a power user).

All-in-all there are not a great variety of ways to get to a SERP. Other than fighting the software wars of default search engines in browsers – and while MS may have the muscle, once bitten twice antitrusting, so it’s hard to imagine them integrating Bing too heavily into Windows 7 – Microsoft’s real challenge is trying to gain traction on the other factors: what choices people make.

The Real Demographics

What it boils down to is that there are two demographics of decision makers here:

• Younger, computer literate influencers
• Older, computer-confidence-dependent, the influenceable

People my age (earlier thirties people, if you hurry up and read this) began using Google because we saw it emerge as legitimately better in a search world choking on spam. We still use it now because it has held up, and we’ve used it since the beginning.

People younger than me use Google simply because they’ve never known an alternative. People older than me use Google because people younger than them told them to. That’s the world you’re dealing with Microsoft.

How the Young Influence

The young influencers do everything from install Google toolbars for parents to send out Gmail invitations to friends and co-workers and help people find things online when they’re having trouble. They’re Google fans for all the reasons we’re so familiar with, the same reason everyone loves the epic non-brand brand. They don’t advertise for Google, in their minds, by recommending it, because Google isn’t a product that costs or demands anything. It is as close to a noncommercial entity in people’s minds as any hugely profitable multi-national corporation the world has ever seen, with the possible exception of Disney.

Winning the hearts and minds of the young influencers is hindered by Microsoft’s history, but it really only negatively affects Geeks, and Geeks have proven time and time again, if they’re loyal to anything it’s technological superiority – so if MS makes a better product, they will use it, and all of the old default influencing behaviour will come back. The problem is, if Google has anything to say about it, it will never come back the same way again…

When we all told our parents back in 2003 to try Google it was because they were calling us at college, frustrated, basically asking us to look something up for them online because they couldn’t find it themselves. We pushed them to Google, they ate it up, hungry for any advice from their mind-bogglingly-computer-competent children, and as hungry as anyone for a reasonably useful search engine. Do college kids still get those calls? Do people still get those frustrations, in general, or is Google doing the seemingly impossible, and evolving as fast as the Internet?

Just as important as any trickledown from young to old, the geekier the young influencers, the higher the chance they will fuel adaptation laterally – by telling their peers. Non-geeks have no cause to send a friend the URL of a ‘better’ search engine until the comparative, original search engine fails in a noteworthy way. Geeks on the other hand don’t need one technology to fail in order to adopt a new one, they have a much better sense for perceiving the inherent advantages of one tool over another. This is actually the heart of it – because if geeks can spread a technology laterally, then the trickledown will cover a lot more geography.

When a Search Fails

The last vestige of hope for the vestigial Microsoft lies in that little gap – that place in time and mental space – that is a failed search attempt. If there are people out there getting frustrated, not being able to find what they want, Microsoft has to have branded Bing well enough that instead of simply reforming their query to the almighty Google, they realize there might be an alternative. This is obviously an absolutely essential goal for Microsoft, regardless of demographic. Most advertising should be able to address this goal pretty directly.

Affecting the Influencable

Older people aren’t going to go to Bing for no reason - it’s not an episode of Corner Gas, they’re not promised a laugh, it’s not a destination at all, it’s a tool. As I’ve said already, I believe the only ways to gain market-share in the unsavvy demographic are:

• Become present enough in people’s lives that when a search attempt fails, Bing as an alternative comes to mind
• Converting the influencers so that when the influencable seek help, they might be recommended Bing

The first point is where the 100 million dollars needs to go, in an awareness and branding campaign. But if Microsoft’s past branding commercials are any indication, they are incapable of actually saying anything other than pure generalities.

How might Microsoft market to this demographic? Straightforward marketing messages that say things like ‘Try Bing – it’s a better search engine’, would be a good start. And in fact, it’s aaaaaalmost what Microsoft decided:

Except, some marketing genius decided that instead of presenting Bing as competitors to Google by calling it a new or better ‘search engine’, they decided to try and coin a term to differentiate Bing as a different type of product, a ‘decision engine’.

Bad Decision, Engine

This, simply put, was a massive, massive mistake. In one fell swoop Microsoft went from showing the world that there was an alternative to Google to making it look as though Bing was something different than Google.

Notice how subtly, yet fundamentally, those two points differ.

“When you need to make a decision, use Bing”, boils down to “But if you want to just, you know, look something up or search the Internet, keep using Google”.

Sigh. Don’t play the nomenclature game Microsoft, it’s dangerous and the truth of the matter is, you just wasted a crap-load of money, and if you continue to call Bing a ‘decision engine’, you may jeopardize all of your other efforts to gain SEARCH market share.

You built Bing to fill an existing need right? Now get it through your skull: the need your product fills is that of a search engine, not that of a decision engine, because there is no existing need for a ‘decision engine’. There is no such thing, as a decision engine. Hell Babbage’s difference engine is more real. Nobody needs one of those either.

Just throw up a nice, sensible commercial with an older Midwestern couple getting frustrated at their computer, then calling their son at college to ask for help because they can’t find anything on the internet anymore, it’s all spam. “ahhh Mom haven’t you tried Bing.com yet? It’s a better search engine.”

“It’s a better search engine.”

Why did you not choose that as your slogan? Tell me. Just give me a ring if you’re too embarrassed to write it in the comments, but I godda know. MS, don’t you get it? The golden opportunity of having a rival who is synonymous with search? You don’t have to say “It’s a better search engine than Google”, because there is no search engine other than Google, so effectively “It’s a better search engine” does the same thing! Do you just think that’s an insignificant opportunity? This is how you get into the brains of the public for that all important failed-search moment. Do you just not get it? Can you tell you’re kind of pissing me off?

Connect with your audience Microsoft – the older, need-internet-hand-holding generation is not going to embrace the idea of a ‘decision engine’, because they can’t relate to it conceptually. None of them have ever even taken the Internet seriously as a tool for contributing significantly to the decision making process, other than which airline tickets to choose. It’s a fact finding tool, I’ll make the decisions myself, once I’ve gathered the facts, thank you very much. Don’t try to be clever, don’t try to give people something they’ve never heard of, and barely understand, and then try to convince them they need it. Just give people a choice, and let them feel like they’re making it for reasons that make sense to them.

And maybe hire a creative firm that understands the real world of the Internet a little bit, hm?

Affecting the Influential

This is more difficult, and it’s hard to know just how much attention Microsoft even wants to pay to the issue. MS are undoubtedly aware of the trickle down effect of tech-user adoption, and while they may have traditionally attacked the pyramid from the other end, IMHO they’ll have to address both sides to give Bing a shot. The young influential crowd is anti-Microsoft, anti-corporate conglomerate, anti-most-everything commercial, and hence, damn difficult to market to… with, you know, commercials.

Google’s real genius lies in their nonchalant approach to communicating with their users (that is, everybody). They always manage to present things as a friendly peer-to-peer offering, asking their users to hey, just have a look at this real quick if you have a second sometime would ya? Kinda cool huh, unlimited free email? Ah go-on you can have one, and some exclusive invites too, but try to keep it on the downlow, we don’t want too many users at once k buddy? Thanks. Kinda nice yeah, that online document sharing? Uhhu, sfree. Kinda funky yeah, the whole Wave thing hm? Ohyeah you can have it. No woooories, you never have to actually buy anything from us Bra, we’re Google.

Case in point:

• MS launches a new search engine – 100 million dollar ad-campaign
• Google launches a new search engine – puts a post up on its ugly-assed blogspot blog, asking if anyone wants to try it out in beta

Google puts its new ‘Caffeine’ engine on a stupid ugly, not repeatable out-loud URL, www2.sandbox.google.com. How commercial does that look?

Which one would a geek be more likely to send laterally - to their friends, the fellow influencers? Google once again succeeds in presenting their products to geeks as something that don’t look or feel like products, but free tools that once again need to be passed along to friends, because they are once again as good as, or better than the current commercial alternative.

This never pay us but we’ll always give you everything for free and treat you like a peer attitude is something you can’t achieve as an established brand - nobody has ever really done it before.

At this point, I believe the relationship Google maintains with the public is well beyond Microsoft’s capabilities. The Bing brand is too young to engender anything resembling Google’s relationship with potential searchers, especially the most influential geeks.

So what can they do instead? How about a straightforward mass-market campaign advertising Bing as a ‘technologically-advanced’ engine? It just might go a long way towards the not-too-geeky younger crowd considering it as an option when faced with a need for a search engine beyond Google, or with an alternative to offer mom when she calls.

For the more hard-core geek crowd though, statistics speak. The type of campaign I would like to see to appeal to this specific and very important demographic should be something scientific, like some controlled double-blind tests of SERP quality. If Microsoft did enough testing on enough sub-demographics, they’ll eventually be able to come away with convincing, audience-specific stat-bytes like “75% of all Physics undergrads tested found better results quicker, with Bing in a blind test”.

This may help to create awareness of Bing as a technologically robust search engine, but geek influencers are not as immune to advertising as they might wish. In preparing to write this article I started an IM conversation with an old friend of mine who does not work in the search industry. He is the quintessential geek influencer – currently working on his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Waterloo, he represents the exact mindset that Microsoft wants to claw its way into. The conversation could stand as pretty solid market research for Bing to consider, and so I’ve posted it in its entirety here – if you’re interested in the evolution of search market share, but like me are too saturated by the industry to gather a clear perspective from outside, it may be worth the read just for the unadulterated non-search-marketer’s viewpoint.

Microsoft, Buy Hire This Man

In the end, my old friend and I agree, well beyond search and Bing, Microsoft only really has one hope:

Hire John Hodgeman – people love him. If you haven’t realized it yet Microsoft, everybody hates the cocky Mac guy, and everybody loves the adorable PC guy.

He’s a stereotype yeah (like you poorly make reference to with your John lookalike in the youtube vid above), but that stereotype is of a humble, intelligent, non-flashy, likely quite helpful if you’ve got a problem, everyday guy.

Make that what the PC is.

Embrace it.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

The Bing initiative needs the younger, tech-savvy crowd to accept Bing, embrace it, and most importantly, recommend it via word of mouth, if MS hopes to compete with Google in search. At the end of that post I reference the conversation with the target demographic rep, who we’ll call Non-SE-guy. He’s a PhD candidate in Chemistry at the University of Waterloo, quite web savvy, the kind of guy people go to when they need help using a computer, or finding something online, but has never worked in the search industry, and even though he knows me, has likely never considered it much of an industry at all.

This is that conversation - if you work for Bing you should read this as if your very job depended upon it. If you work anywhere else, what time is it? Stop reading this junk and go back to work! I just thought it was interesting to see some perspective on search related things without the smudge of the industry all over my lens.

(authors note: proper use of language, grammar and punctuation had, prior to this conversation, been sacrificed to the gods of speed, efficiency and apathy, proportionately in that order.)

Naoise says :

Other than choosing to go to a search engine and typing in the URL or clicking a bookmark, or searching from a built-in search box in your browser or toolbar, are there any other ways you ever find your self on a search engine search results page?

Non-SE-guy says :

Just the built in search bar in Firefox… I never actually load google.com to search for anything

Naoise says :

So the chances of you ever switching to Bing are affected by the fact that you never type in a search engine URL anymore?

Non-SE-guy says :

umm ya, the only way I’d switch to Bing is if I decided to install the search plugin in Firefox

Non-SE-guy says :

I mean, it’s kind of redundant to go to the URL box and type www.google.com when I can just type whatever in the browser search box and it’ll go to Google for me… saves a step ya know?

Naoise says :

of course, say you were on a strange computer and there were no search box

Non-SE-guy says :

I do end up typing scholar.google.com a lot to search journals

Non-SE-guy says :

If I was on a strange computer with no search box, I’ve been using Google since it first started, so it’s kinda ingrained in my brain

Naoise says :

How default is Google, and how malleable do you think your searching habits are - and, what kind of things might have to happen to get you to try another engine (assuming only finding good results would keep you there after trying)

Naoise says :

Okay pretty default

Non-SE-guy says :

Yeah real default, basically because everything else is shite

Naoise says :

(remember when it wasn’t and there were real options, from webcrawler to hotbot? it was a different industry)

Non-SE-guy says :

(I’d agree with that.. I forget what I used before Google)

Naoise says :

Have you tried Bing and written it off as shite - or does part of you write it off half-automatically because it’s MS?

Non-SE-guy says :

I know Bing exists, but I haven’t actually tried it… I did try the Wolfram one out for a bit… I didn’t like it… I haven’t tried Bing because I really haven’t thought about sitting down and comparing searches with Google

Naoise says :

Because you feel there is little incentive?

Non-SE-guy says :

Mind you, I’d say most of the time the first link in Google is Wikipedia entries anyway

Naoise says :

(how long have you noticed the strong Wikipedia presence?)

Non-SE-guy says :

(oh, maybe in the past year or so?)

Non-SE-guy says :

Yes, generally I can find what I want with Google so I don’t feel like there’s an incentive to use Bing

Naoise says :

When you said ‘haven’t tried Bing because haven’t thought about sitting down and comparing searches’ – I think that’s the essence of the issue MS has in marketing Bing, it’s not a ‘product’ in people’s minds, and so they don’t default to the behaviour of directly comparing for quality

Non-SE-guy says :

Yeah, like my reason for using a search engine is to find the answer I’m looking for, preferably within the first page of results.

Naoise says :

Right, so is it fair to say that the only time you’d use something other than Google is if you got frustrated right in the midst of the search process?

Non-SE-guy says :

Yes, I’d concur with that statement

Non-SE-guy says :

Mainly because I’m lazy and I’ve been using Google for 10 years

Naoise says :

I’m guessing you didn’t like Wolfram Alpha because it’s a different kind of search engine/process, not a general ‘find this string in the database’ type search, so if you were frustrated in a search process, would you go to WA, or Yahoo, or where would you go?

Or would you just keep refining search after search in Google, and simply not go to another engine?

Non-SE-guy says :

Umm generally I re-type the query in Google to refine the search - ooo Firefox has a Bing vs. Google comparative engine plugin!

Naoise says :

Yeah I’m sure those plug-ins are out there, I wouldn’t mind hearing your preference after a fair test, but at the moment I’m interested in what you’ve got to say because you’re the exact type of audience MS wants to affect with its marketing of Bing, and I’m trying to figure out if there is an intelligent way for them to go about reaching you.

Naoise says :

With their one hundred million dollar marketing budget….

Non-SE-guy says :

Well, as much as I say that advertising doesn’t affect me, advertising that appeals to my certain sense of humour does

Non-SE-guy says :

Like VW and Ikea commercials

Naoise says :

Do you think MS can detach the Bing brand enough to market it with humour?

Non-SE-guy says :

Those Vista commercials with Billy G and Seinfeld? a little tooooooo out there for me

Naoise says :

A lot of search-marketing people think MS shouldn’t try humour, because they’re not perceived that way to begin with, they’re serious

Non-SE-guy says :

See above… those Seinfeld commercials were meant to be funny..

Naoise says :

How about the Apple vs PC commercials?

Non-SE-guy says :

umm Apple vs. PC makes me like the PC more, since I think John Hodgman is hilarious and Justin Long should be shot

Naoise says :

I agree, my main recommendation for MS marketing Bing is to hire John Hodgman

Non-SE-guy says :

Penny Arcade did a cartoon about them.. the Seinfeld ones - http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/9/15/consensus/

Naoise says :

ahyeah? Ah… yeah, that about sums it up.

Naoise says :

So, your current guess as to Bing’s chances of taking a significant portion of Google’s search share in the next handful of years is?

Non-SE-guy says :

Well, I think they’d have to pull off a this-generation Nintendo

Naoise says :

How do you mean?

Non-SE-guy says :

Go for the soccer mom and retiree crowd and stay away from attempting to convert the computer nerds

Naoise says :

But there’s something to be said for that IT crowd (HA) affecting change by suggesting search engines to friends and family, and changing default search options for people

Naoise says :

That’s kind of how Google built up to dominance

Non-SE-guy says :

Yup

Naoise says :

Have you heard about Google caffeine?

Non-SE-guy says :

Umm vaguely.. I’ve heard of it but I don’t know what it does

Non-SE-guy says :

Is it one of their Google Labs things?

Non-SE-guy says :

or something more insidious?

Naoise says :

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

Non-SE-guy says :

hmm that might cause issues for Bing

Non-SE-guy says :

In the sense that it might be even better than what Bing currently is

Naoise says :

Well you can be sure that’s the impression they’re trying to make - they timed the ‘release’ pretty well in terms of Bing’s acquisition of Yahoo

Naoise says :

And yet, all Google has done is write that blog post on their official blog. No marketing. A URL like www2.sandbox.google.com is purely attempting to get geeks to pass it along to geeks, it’s so blatantly non-commercial - “web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences” appeals to geeks

Non-SE-guy says :

Yup, appealing to the followers - Nintendo has managed to market the Wii in such a way that people who had probably never bought a gaming console before, bought one

Naoise says :

That’s true, but MS isn’t trying to get people to search who don’t, so much as they’re trying to get people who already search to switch, yeah?

Non-SE-guy says :

Yes, so they need to figure out how people like my mom decide to search for things, and target that

Non-SE-guy says :

I think she uses Google because I told her to

Naoise says :

YES, as i mentioned earlier, the geeks are very influential, especially to the older generation (and sorry friend, but you at least used to be a geek, and you always will be to your mom)

Non-SE-guy says :

Now, would my mom care if I suddenly went, hey mom, you should really use Bing instead of Google.. it’s the best?

Naoise says :

Maybe not, but some commercials with frustrated mothers searching, then calling their sons at college, and the sons recommending Bing, cus, you know ‘its got more suggestions and stuff to help you find stuff – it’s easy mom you’ll figure it out, Bing.com’

Non-SE-guy says :

See that could work

Naoise says :

You have to get in on the tiny bit of time - that frustrated in the middle of an unproductive search time - and own the mind share for alternatives

Non-SE-guy says :

I’d think it would be hard to have two separate ad campaigns to target the geeks and the non-geeks alike. The ads that appeal to me appeal to my sense of humour.. I think geeks love in-jokes and self-referential humour that my mom wouldn’t get. Like LOLcats and what have you.. my parent’s would not understand keyboard cat

Naoise says :

You could legitimately argue to geeks that the results are better and that MS has put some serious engineering into Bing (it’s true, and it shows in the results, so they should be proud to say it) - which would only compliment the type of ad I suggested before, directed at mom. You couldn’t have the same campaign target both, but put some commercials on WTV and some on TECHTV and you’re just doing a normal demographic marketing job

Non-SE-guy says :

You’d almost need like a John Hodgman showing amusing slides in a deadpan manner that shows the technical aspects. ooo how about Harold and Kumar, where the one guy thinks they’re going to play ping pong, and the other guy shows up with a laptop and weed because he thought it was Bing Bong?and then it would degenerate into Harold saying with traces of an accent, I said PING PONG, and Kumar goes, right, Bing Bong. Hell I’d probably laugh if I saw that commercial, though it would have to be like a web only one

Naoise says :

Ha, i don’t know if they could pull it off… well actually, yeah they could – so long as nobody puts Bill Gates or Seinfeld in it.

Non-SE-guy dit :

maybe a spoof with Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October saying give me one Bing, instead of ping

Non-SE-guy dit :

ooo Office Space, like PC Load Letter? what the $!@% does that mean!?! oo I’ll check Bing… ahhhh - just pick out famous questions asked in well known movies in geek culture and tie in Bing - Press Any Key? Where the hell is the any key? oooh let’s ask Bing

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

Back in early 2007 there were so many boatloads full of buzz about Google integrating more ‘personalized’ results into the index, switching on a feature they called ‘Google Search History’ by default for many searchers. The Yoast screenshot shows some basic metric collection that would form the basis of a personal searcher profile.

A little later that year Google’s over-employed product-name-change committee slapped a new label on boring old ‘Google Search History’ and christened it ‘Google Web History’. Then they had the balls to say the name change was to illustrate that yes, they’re spying on us, but for all the right reasons, just to serve us better as individuals, commercially, and besides, if they just stand outside our open window and look in, is it really so bad… you know, if they own the windows?

All of this 2007 personalization speculation was pretty significant in the not-much-is-ever-all-that-significant world of SEO. Some feared the sky was falling, that personalized search would destroy SEO forever, others applauded what seemed like a logical move forward in the evolution of the greatest search engine the world had ever known (wow, so much drama in that sentence I’m on the edge of my laz-e-boy).

But here, in 2009, the impact of personalized search has been subtle, if noticeable at all. Just some barely perceptible differences in SERPs, mostly based on whether you’re logged into your Google account or not. And really, the SERPs kinda just seem like they’re the same but with sites you’ve been to before ranking better, or more often. As late as November 2008 however, industry heavyweight Bruce Clay predicted that personalized search results, search intent based SERPs, would only really start showing up in the wild over the first half of 2009. That’s just about nowish.

The November ’08 article is reminiscent of many, many early 2007 conversations:

“Ranking is dead… going forward you’re going to have to look at analytics, measure traffic, bounce rates, action, etc. SEOs will have to ask themselves questions like:

- Did I get the conversion I was after?
- Did I really deliver on the promise of SEO?” - Bruce Clay

Have the past two years been testing time? Are we about to see personalization hit the mainstream? More importantly, would that be a good thing for the surfing public? Or is that a baseless assumption someone made once and then just got championed through mindless marketing meeting after mindless marketing meeting?

I may not be the first to posit this theory, as personalized search was first launched by Google more than four long Internet years ago, but perhaps the reason they have been so slow to integrate it is simply because it fails to create a better experience for the searcher, or Google Incorporated for that matter.

The conspiracy theorist side of me thinks that in reality, personalized search may weaken Google’s brand as a whole, if it’s implemented too well.

When people go to a search engine it’s because they are looking for a piece of information, and they don’t know where to go to get it. Simple, yeah? The search engine directs them. Give people some credit, they know the search engine is not the keeper of the knowledge, that it’s just the key-holder, the gatekeeper, the stay-puft marshmallow man, and that the actual websites behind the Google curtain are the things that really teach you stuff and entertain you.

Personalized search has the idea built into it that if I’ve used a resource before, and I liked it, I might want to use it again. This is reasonable - but should it mean that that site deserves to show up more often or be given precedence in general when I do a search? If they show up, they are familiar, they are likely to be clicked - but does that mean they were the superior resource? The concept is a bit like how the brain works, with often used memory traces having the easiest to reach neuron activation levels, and so they self reinforce, but sometimes trigger just because they’re so commonly used, resulting in illusions.

In a fictional normal world (Oxymoronica!), if a searcher knows a specific resource is likely to house the information they seek, it is only in the rare and temporary instance that they can’t recall the name or URL of the target resource that they should choose to go to a search engine and use it to aid their memory. But Google has so permeated our minds, ingrained itself as the only solution for any type of searching online, that even if I know the target domain, but I don’t know the exact URI, I just search Google. On-site search engines usually suck anyway, right? That is the current power of Google’s monopoly on every thought that has to do with search – but it’s not impossible that things could change, that powerhouse sites like Facebook may train people to search at the website level itself, though it remains the exception.

If Google continues to adhere to the concept that search personalization is inextricably linked to reinforcement of previously discovered resources (which, of course, they may not, proven capable of changing their minds), then they will be effectively reinforcing the branding of other specific resource sites in their SERPS — some of us searchers have little itsy-bitsy highly influential brains (oh… hi), and repetition is the only thing that a brand needs in order to be remembered. It’s almost inevitable that this will contribute to a portion of users learning to go directly to the branded resource, instead of through a Google proxy each time. Intuitively the effect may appear to be small, but little things matter when you scale like Google.

It may even be safe to say (or completely unsafe) that searchers, the vast majority of the time, want to use search engines to find new resources, and that placing just the opposite in front of them more and more often is going to lead to dissatisfaction. The search engine just will not seem to be serving its most basic purpose. The more intelligent the personalization the better? Google will never know if I feel like a certain slant or opinion, which only humans can really associate with a domain, and so any automated attempts they make at going from a semantic interpretation of my query, to a certain website that has a complimentary style beyond matching text will always be, at best, a not-extremely-well-educated guess. Could they dream up practical and useful ways to use the personalization data? I’d be a fool to put anything past Google, but magic, I do not expect.

In ’07, Danny Sullivan theorized that Google wanted to get up close and cozy with user data in the long run, and search personalization was a part of this parcel, if not an end that the other personal data collection was a means to.

If things resurface in 2009, old controversies will become new again. Contrary to Google’s previous statements that the Google Toolbar would not be used to affect ranking results, they revealed that Toolbar data would be used to gather web history information, which would be used to directly affect personalized search results, and hence rankings. Genuine privacy issues were brought forth… but then Google stopped talking about it, the SERPs barely changed, and SEOs and the rest of the world got back to normal (ok the rest of the world never really noticed).

Beyond privacy issues, will a potentially blind push towards personalization on Google’s part actually harm the searcher experience? Will it reinforce surfer behavior of going directly to their favorite resources instead of Google first? Thanks Google, for reminding me that I like real websites more than you, and if my memory is functioning well, I don’t really need you half the time – but by the same token, shame on you Google, you’ve made my searching experience less diverse, not to mention you’ve become less of an egalitarian for my webmaster friends around the world. Boo.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

So everything else in this post is now moot… or… maybe waaay more important. You decide (I’m too tired).

Back to your original post:

Pluto is no longer considered a planet. Microsoft has released a new search engine. A year from now, will either of these facts affect your day to day life? The North American search market has had a pair of hands gripped firmly around its gullet ever since Google rose to prominence in the first half of the shiny new, hard to pronounce dates from, decade.

With its hundred million dollar marketing budget, one of the richest companies in the world backing it, and billions of dollars of revenue at stake, is Bing the start of an industry segmentation, of some actual diversity in the search landscape? Meh prolly not, but what do I know? Not much! That’s why I put together a horrifically flawed survey to get to the bottom of the truth barrel! But don’t worry, I’m here to enrich your life people. I asked some industry experts to take the survey and comment on the whole Bing Shebang (wow, there has to be a better way to spell shebang, a word I swear I’ve only ever encountered in spoken form).

So what did smart people have to say? Let’s go!

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEO site in the KNOW, SEOMoz said:

- “We consult for Bing…”

Which means basically, he can’t comment - which is cool, but sadly no juicy gossip from Rand - he did take the time to fill out the survey though, so the results listed are taking his (obscured by the cloud) opinions into account.

Marc Poirier, yup, that Acquisio PPC guy, said:

- “Bing has a shot and frankly they always did - MS is one of the only companies that can legitimately think about buying its way into people’s heads with a multi-billion dollar brainwashing campaign. IMHO $100M is just a good start. Picking up Yahoo’s search advertisers and search revenue won’t hurt either.”

Gab Goldenberg, of Montreal based SEO consulting services site SEOROI said:

- “Bing needs to get big celebrities who are regarded as smart to endorse them. Eg Oprah, 60 Minutes, 20/20″

So Gab feels there is a chance at market-share being established via popular media marketing. I’m not sure I agree, but then again, how much of an impact did Oprah have on twitter? Loads likely… but is Bing innovative like twitter? Or would it just come off as a shill?

Guillaume Bouchard, CEO of NVI Solutions, marketing and web design firm said:

- “I think Bing remains the same old traditional—errr— digital dream that Microsoft has, but with a blend of whatever is trendy right now. I think it’s about time they merge with Yahoo! and start thinking about how they can compete… for real… against Google.”

Dave Davis of Dublin SEO company Red Fly Marketing said:

- “I think if Microsoft buy Yahoo and integrate the bing algo, they have a shot at taking a significant portion of Google’s search pie…”

Sylvain Carle, CTO of Praized Media the local and social search engine folks said:

- “We are moving more towards discovery than search, or at least a complementary user model where “evergreen” results are mixed with “realtime” search, with an extra social-graph induced relevancy layer… more on this from the Praized perspective“.

ahhh.. I better go read that article.

Khalid Saleh Landing Page Optimization expert said:

- “Bing needs to do few things to gain market share:

• Focus on search and forget about all this other fluff portal stuff - (done!)
• Needs to do an okay job at search: I love Google and they set the standard in relevance but are they really that good? (done!)
• and it needs an amazing marketing campaign that will battle years of non-traditional Google marketing: it is not about throwing money around, it is about smart marketing. (hmm, we will see about this one)

At the end, I think Bing will capture 10% to 20% of the market in the next 10 years. “

Jim Hedger, of WebmasterRadio.FM Fame, said:

- “Me make moneyz from internetz! HUNGY HUNGY!”

Okay Jim didn’t say that, but I’m pretty sure it’s a legitimate quote from him from the last SES party (I keed I keed). If Jim gets back to me with a quote, I’ll come update the post. Yes Jim, I will go on the internet twice in one day to accommodate you.

Agustin Vazquez-Levi, Google Analytics consultant from AOD Marketing and NVI said:

- “<sarcasm>Bing? Its just a search engine. We all know those things are hard to monetize anyway. FAIL<.sarcasm>”

Rebecca Kelley, Social Media Marketing expert at 10e20 said:

- “What’s this ‘Bing’ nonsense? What the hell happened to Infoseek? Get off my lawn!”

There you have it folks, a lot of half to three-quarters baked ideas about the future of the Internet, or something. Curious what survey questions these fine people were asked to … survey, and how they answered them? Here they are, in no particular order, except that they are the same particular order every time:

1. How much longer will Google hold the title of North America’s dominant search engine?

a) 1 year
b) 2 years
c) 3-5 years
d) 5-10 years
e) The fundamental nature of the Internet will change before Google loses its stranglehold

Experts choice: 3 way tie between C, D & E

2. What are the chances of Microsoft buying, cheating or stealing their way to significant market share alongside Google in the next ten years?

a) <1%
b) <10%
c) <50%
d) >50%
e) >75%

Experts choice: D is the clear winner, with B and C tied for second

3. The world has never seen money build a prominent search engine brand, only the other way around (source, me). Advertising search has proven difficult and expensive, ask Ask. Jeeves knows it’s hard to make a search engine seem Cuil. Search engines can’t just collaborate with Timbaland. Bing has been blessed with a $100,000,000 advertising budget. What do you think it will take for Microsoft to properly deal with Google?

a) $100,000,000 should do it, if spent right. Like, give a million people a hundred dollars and ask them to use your search engine out of gratitude.
b) Give a hundred million dollars to starving Africans and ask the western world to use your search engine out of guilt.
c) Build a search engine that doesn’t have results full of spammy crap-content pages (haha, trick option! The only way to actually do this is to destroy the Google Adsense system!)
d) Create a new paradigm, a personal search and research portal customizable to the way you use the Internet, well thought out and designed, created from the ground up to exist in the cloud, open source, independent of desktops, call it Rush, or Tides, or Wav… oh shit.
e) Invest more than $100,000,000 – it’s going to take a lot more. Really.
f) Lose interest in this whole ‘search’ thing, it’s just a fad.

Experts choice: every answer on this question got some of the vote, with option B just squeaking out A and C, who tied for second

4. Yahoo has been around since before people who can now beat me in basketball were even born, but neither Microsoft nor Google have ever bothered to buy them. They have solid search technology that they’ve built over the past few years, and an old strong brand in the search market (yes, the only other old, strong brand in the search market). What should Microsoft do?

a) Nothing, keep building the Bing brand
b) Buy Yahoo’s technology but brand it as Bing or another name
c) Buy Yahoo’s name and put $100,000,000 marketing budget behind it
d) Let Google buy Yahoo instead and concede the only other concentration of market share that exists in the known universe (of North American search engine market share, that is)

Experts choices: B is the winner here, with C coming in second, and A getting a couple of votes.

5. Home is where the heart is, and where you’re likely to start your search from. What browser home-page style is going to win?

a) One search box to rule them all – current Google.com
b) Not too personal search/news portal – a la current Yahoo.com
c) Myspace style- left to my own devices to make a personal cesspool of a homepage
d) iGoogle style – left to some developers’ devices to create my personal Gadget and feed hell
e) A not necessarily search-centric communication style app-in-the-browser like Google Wave

Experts choice: We’ve got a two way tie between A and E.

6. Google has been all you’ve used for search since you were a child (c’mon, mentally you’ve come a long way since 2001), and even though they’ve never really actively pushed their brand on you, you’re a loyal Google searcher (obviously I know you better than you know yourself). How changeable do you think people’s search habits are when it comes to search brands?

a) Young people don’t have the same connection to Google that late-20’s early 30’s people do – they’ll switch as soon as Hanna Montanna gets her search spider crawling
b) Loyalty to search engines has never existed any more than in browsers. Any migrations in search engines will happen slowly as the result of better product alternatives, not as the result of marketing campaigns
c) A sexy marketing campaign directed at the right audience should be able to segment the market a little – if it works for everything else, why not for search? (yes, anything can be done wrong – Ask, the search engine for dumb married women)
d) The Google brand is synonymous with search and has captured a lot of every-day sticky eyeballs on its brand via products like Gmail and iGoogle, so it will be impossible to dethrone as the default mental search option in the foreseeable future

Experts choice: D is the winner here, no huge surprise, but C got a few votes, meaning some people think the nut is crackable via marketing (phhh, they must be marketers)… (oh wait, they’re all marketers).

7. Microsoft seems to have had a difficult time creating a brand to associate with search. A lot of effort has been put into the latest effort, Bing.com. What statement most closely resembles the branding advice you would like to give Billy G’s minions heading into 2010?

a) Keep marketing Bing as an independent branded entity, just pour money into it, it can’t go wrong, eventually people will change their homepage to it.
b) Stop marketing Bing as an independent branded entity, stop pissing money, nobody is changing their homepage. You already have a brand, use it. Make a Microsoft search engine and act like Microsoft: integrate it into every little bit of every piece of software and hardware you make, and force it upon the masses. It’s just a search box, not an app, no antitrust, learn from Google.
c) Just give up already and buy the domain search.com, market the hell out of it as the most advanced and accurate search engine in the world, winner of multiple made-up awards, and stop wasting money on absolutely horrific domain names like bing. Hello?!? Bing?!? Bingo.com would have been better. Actually bingo.com would have been a lot better.
d) Buy and market the domain Bingo.com as a sear… (okay I’ll admit I haven’t thought this one all the way through)
e) Now that you’ve finally caught up to Google in terms of search technology with the engineering behind Bing, you’re just five years behind whatever technology Google has been building for the last five years. Go and buy Wolfram Alpha this afternoon please. Then go and buy absolutely every other search company with a hint of innovative technology. Then hire away every top engineer Google has on staff by offering them millions of dollars in shiny steel briefcases, late at night, on moonlit beaches.

Experts choice: B is the winner here, with E coming in a close second. There’s people rooting for you here Microsoft. Real people, really rooting. Too much Google in your average search marketer’s life.

8. What do you expect North American Search Engine market share to look like in five years (the legendary sweaty summer of 2014)?

a) Goolge 98%, Yahoo 1%, Other 1%
b) Google 80%, Bing 15%, Yahoo 4%, Other 1%
c) Google 75%, Yahoo 20%, Bing 4%, Other 1%
d) Google 80%, Fancy New Player 15%, Other 5%
e) Google 30%, Bing 30%, Yahoo 30%, Other 10%
f) Google 30%, Bing 60%, Yahoo 5%, Other 5%
g) Google 20%, Yabingoo 70%, Wolfgoat Beta 10%

Experts choice: B is the stand-out winner here, with the vast majority of votes.

What do you think? Take the survey yourself and let us know.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog