How and why search queries will die

Search engines do not stop changing, from how they process and understand information to the end user’s experience. The evolution of search is driven as much by new technology, changing user expectations as it is by optimisation activity from the content creators.

It is the ubiquity of smart devices and mobile computing that will generate some of the more interesting innovation in this space. There is no good reason to confine search to the browser, and every reason for it to become a service, an invisible layer between the user and the rest of the world, a part of the devices and other software tools we use, and not a destination.

Typing is so last century. Formulating a query to suit an algorithm to get a relevant result is a relic from last decade, and clicking on links to actually get what you wanted is a failure in user experience. Web based search engines are a result of the constraints of technology, their user experience model a relic of static HTML directories and a less responsive internet. However a lot has changed in the last few years, and both the queries and their results have changed.

Read more of How and Why Search Queries Will Die on Search Engine People.

Brands in the Cesspool

Since 2008 if you talk about brands and search anyone familiar with search marketing immediately remembers Eric Schmidt’s speech to an audience of visiting magazine executives. The then CEO of Google stated that:

Brands are the solution, not the problem, brands are how you sort out the cesspool.

Since the Vince / Brand update and Eric Schmidt’s infamous ‘cesspool’ remark, a lot has been written about how Google treats brands in search. Sites directly linked to brands appear to have an easier time ranking, can occupy more space on the results page and can have an edge over aggregators competing for long tail queries including brand terms.

The crowded Search Engine Results Page

Constricted space in the first pageview of the search results page and the range of content being displayed, including places, headlines, video, products and information, place a premium on the top two spots. The range of content a brand generates can help to increase the area on the results page it occupies across some searches:

• User Generated Content
• Press Releases
• News Items
• Advertising and Marketing Content

Brands benefit from more than just the way Google handles and displays data. As significant as the Vince update and Google’s changes to their search engine results pages are, there is more to marketing brands in search than the mechanics involved.

Own Your Keywords

Your Brand Name is Your Castle

It takes time, money and consistent performance over time to build a brand. Being an Apple or a Coke isn’t cheap, and maintaining a market-defining identity is hard, as the Yahoo!s and Nokias of the world have demonstrated. The ability to lay claim to a collection of words, like iPod or Googling, is a very powerful marketing tool, and has a real impact on search.

Being able to dominate a search term or query space naturally tied to the name of the company is very powerful, especially if the company dominates its industry. Search is as much a navigational tool as one used for information discovery. Training a market to search for your products with terms that you create or control (now with additional help from Google) ensures it is harder to lose share of search.

Building a query space where the incumbent has a natural advantage over any invasion is very much a castle and moat strategy. Challenging the brand that ‘owns’ the query space can be costly, and challenging on the brand name itself prohibitively so.

Nothing is Really this Simple

Not all searches including a brand term are treated the same way, and not all brands are used alike. In most cases the name itself will return the brand’s main site at the top of search, but without an optimisation strategy, long tail queries with brand terms are still open to competition.

The brand’s custodians still need to consider optimising for phrases where a brand term is entered with other qualifying words. Long tail queries like these are still open to direct competition, especially in markets where the brand is used to describe a product or activity, or is used as a proper noun. It is the difference between a search for ‘Nokia’ and a search for ‘Nokia N9 prices Australia’. The latter is easier to optimise for, and there is more of a financial motive to do so. Even with no money to be made, fans will build out the brand’s query space and generate content that will populate the search results, as many companies demonstrate, such as Apple.

Not every brand is directly selling something. Some provide information or opinion, aggregate or organise information from other sources, represent an interest, a group or a franchise. Broadly speaking, most brands fall into one of the following loose groups:

• Representative (governments, interest groups, lobby groups)
• Product (Apple, Nike)
• Franchise (McDonald’s, Oporto)
• Informational (newspapers, TV stations)
• Portal/Search engines (Facebook, Google, Yahoo!)

How a brand manages competition within its query space and optimises both its main and micro sites depends on its business model. A brand that sells product through partners or retailers may not need to optimise for location or transactional searches. Brands whose business model depends on an ad model need as much traffic that is relevant to the advertisers as they can get. An entertainment brand with a specific product offering, such as a TV station or sports team, might benefit from a more focused approach, targeting product specific phrases and usage terms.

Most of the options available to these business models apply almost equally for non-branded participants in the market as much as for brands; the difference is in execution. Due to their very nature, brands can affect the search behaviour of the market through other advertising and public relations channels. By announcing new products or creating content and interest around new terms, they can drive search behaviour to terms that they have optimised for, with their primary touchpoints or with campaign-specific content.

Marketing a brand in search is different to optimising for general traffic and has its own advantages. Google seems to favour what it defines as an ‘entity’ and creating searches on a word or phrase of your own creation through brand identity and other promotional activity is a real edge. Brands take time and resources to create, but there is value in the result that goes beyond an algorithm update.

Schema.org and Google's +1 Strawman Deathmatch

Button versus Standards for Blogger Attention

On launch, the +1 button got the larger share of attention, while the Schema.org project kicked off in relative obscurity. Which is a shame, because it isn’t often that the two major search engines (and Yahoo!) agree on something, sitemaps being the last time. That they have all agreed on a standard for organising information that they will all follow is significant in itself. It is also interesting that their markup has been promoted ahead of WC3′s microdata standards.

Historically each search engine has developed their own markups to create a more semantic search experience, such as Yahoo!’s now defunct Searchmonkey and Google’s microformats. Other services like Google Base and their Maps product also produced the same user experience, by making it easier to organise information in a meaningful way in the results page.

Richer Content in the Search Results

Google is now:

…able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.

Google Flights

And Bing is talking about how:

Consumers benefit from this effort by experiencing much richer search experiences (see example below) across a much broader set of publishers.

Bing Film Times

The Search Engine as a Portal

As well as making the content on a site easier to categorise, microformat projects like Schema.org will probably also continue the trend towards a more portal-like search experience. With publishers providing more content to be displayed within the search results themselves and search engines facilitating this trend through supporting it in both organic and paid listings, mobile and otherwise, the Search Engine Results Page is as much a destination as content discovery aid.

Music in the cloud, and buying Skype

A Distributed Microsoft Social Network

Microsoft has a successful email service, a popular gaming platform with an online social network and a messaging client with a large install base. Also at the end of last year, Microsoft released a Facebook app for Live Messenger and began to incorporate social feeds into their own mobile and desktop chat clients. Microsoft already has a network covering multiple platforms and devices. Skype is an expansion of this network, and with Qik, it certainly shows some potential for mobile.

A more social Live

Reaching the Multi-Screen, Multi-Device, Multi-Platform User

There is more than one way to reach a new destination on the Internet. There is also more than one kind of software to use, device to operate and method to find new things. An Internet where banners and search advertising displayed in a browser are the only means of advertising no longer exists.

Mobile, gaming and social platforms are as important for building awareness as online advertising targeting desktop computer usage. The Microsoft Advertising blog has published a lot of content on reaching the multiscreen consumers, and advertising across multiple devices.

Buying An Audience

A number of interesting stats on Skype users were shared after the announcement. The most impressive was Skype’s current 170 million users and 40% year over year growth.

Buying Skype (with Qik in tow) gives Microsoft more users, much in the same way that their deal with Nokia will increase their Windows Phone 7 install base from 1.4% in Q4 2010. Even if Nokia loses an expected market of 50 million smartphones in 2011, the market share left by the time a Windows Phone 7 handset arrives will still be more than Microsoft has now.

Attention is all online

With information as easy to create and publish as it is now, it is curation that matters. Curation is more than a directory and a search engine now. Microsoft’s range of services, software and devices position them for a post-PC world, with its fragmented user experience. Microsoft’s own published reports say that we now:

…start our sessions in what I would call our intimate zones seeking personal information and contact through email, social networks, blogs etc.

Microsoft is building a distributed social network, covering computers, gaming, mobiles and tablets. They are creating a platform that can include Hotmail users, Xbox Live users, Facebook users, Windows Live users and now, Skype and Qik users. It reaches consoles, computers and mobiles and is accessible from different devices and platforms. It just isn’t limited to a single domain.

The types of content don’t really change from one device to the next, but how I experience, find or explore content, which software, applications, platforms I use, and where and how I connect do. The people I am connected to, how and where I search, the connection stability and speed and the specifics of the device I use all affect how and what I consume online.

There is more than one way to find or do things online. Publication is easier than ever and the Internet has an almost unlimited capacity for content. TV and radio only ever had 24 hours per day to fill, newspapers have a set number of pages, and the market could only sustain a limited number of these entities. Online, these limitations don’t exist; there is always space to publish just about anything. If the content created is good enough for the user, it is attention that matters, not the platform.

Some of the best business models online involve providing a platform (Facebook, Apple App Store), a search engine (Google, YouTube) or some form of aggregator (Flipbook, Netflix). Companies like DemandMedia are the exceptions that prove the rule. Their content production model works, both before and after Google’s Panda Update (an algorithm change targeting ‘low quality’ content, which may or may not be ‘content farms’), because it is integral to their attention and audience building strategy.

What shapes the user's experience of the Internet

Many of the things that influence a user’s online experience, how they search and explore, and the information they consume fit into one of these broad categories:

• Infrastructure
• Connection Speeds and Stability
• ISP
• Application & Address Layer
• Devices
• Software
• Navigation & Discovery

A user’s experience of the Internet is shaped as much by these as by many other factors: how they find new content, the software they use, the device used, how it connects to the internet, the ISP. There are also many other services running in the background, just out of sight, such as the DNS provider, application layer and physical hardware, which also affect the end user experience. Their impact can be as dramatic as an Armenian woman cutting two optic-fibre cables or as subtle as connection speed and stability.

Sites and Portals, Clients and Servers

There is a brillant image on Doc Searls Weblog, from the post A sense of bewronging. It is a photo of a cow and a suckling calf. Doc Searls used it in a slide deck to illustrate the relationship between users and sites on the commercial web:

It’s a calf-cow model. As calves, we request pages and other files from servers, usually getting cookie ingredients mixed in, so the cow can remember where we were the last time we suckled, and also give us better services.

Online search, commercial websites and social and advertising networks now track user behaviour and information better than ever and adjust their content to suit. This trend is neither new nor limited to Google and Bing’s forays into personalised search.

Arguably this is not in the best interest of the users, especially in search. Social signals might be handy for finding a restaurant, but their value declines as the information falls further and further outside of the social network’s aggregated sphere of competence. For example, the sites a creationist might like would be utterly pointless for a query on evolutionary biology, even if the text includes the same terms.

These one-sided relationships are not just limited to the commercial web, but extend to hardware, software, the ISPs we use and ultimately to the digital and physical infrastructure of the Internet. Individual users are being moved away from an objective Internet. Tools like Google, Bing, Twitter, News.me, Facebook, and any other platform or service that serves content person by person are creating a siloed, Narrowcast Internet.

The Why and How

Search is credited with being THE way people find information online. Algorithmically generated lists of links, paid or otherwise, account for a significant amount of traffic on the Internet. Despite indexes full of optimised commercial content and with declining search literacy (Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content), arguably no motive for the search engines to provide more than An Adequate Search Result, search is still seen as the best way to find new information.

Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) are not the only place people spend their time or discover new stuff. Hitwise’s ‘Top 20 Sites & Engines’ report for the US datacentre indicates a more nuanced picture of online behaviour. The top five most visited sites for the week ending 23rd April 2010 were:

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Youtube
4. Yahoo! Mail
5. Yahoo!

The top five for Hitwise’s ‘Top 20 Sites & Engines’ (week ending 23rd April 2010) report from their Australia datacentre was not all that different:

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Youtube
4. Windows Live Mail
5. ninemsn

Portals, social media and email sites matter as well as search, either web or video. Other discovery modes such as link sharing via social media, email and outbound links on articles are as important for generating attention and an audience as a listing on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The post, New Microsoft Advertising Study on “Living with the Internet”: What’s driving web behaviour? on the Microsoft Advertising Blog makes the point based on their research that users:

…start our sessions in what I would call our intimate zones seeking personal information and contact through email, social networks, blogs etc.

Curation matters, especially online, and curating requires choice. Linking, displaying, referring to content inadvertently prejudices the user against what they don’t see. The link a friend would tweet or email you to answer a question might not be the first one you would find on a Google results page. The product description you see in a company’s iPhone app can vary from the one on their Facebook page. Site content and ads can change depending on the device being used too. What a user finds to answer a question or complete a task does change depending on how they find it.

Search and curation

There are a number of different ways a user can navigate from one place to another online. Non-digital media directs users to new information, so do kinds of feeds delivered through single or multiple source applications like News.me, last.fm and The Australian’s app. Most navigation modes fall into one of the following groups:

• Search Algorithmic Link
• Search Paid Link
• Shared Link/Bookmark Link
• Non-Search Paid Link
• Unpaid Link
• Personally Bookmarked
• Direct Feed API
• User Entered Destination

Motives, Devices and Further Fragmentation

User intent plays a huge role in determining which tools they use and how. Microsoft’s ‘Living with the Internet’ report identified six different motives for the majority of online activity:

• Communication
• Information
• Entertainment
• Surfing
• Transaction
• Creation

The report explored the different motives behind Internet use by PC, laptop and netbook compared to smartphone and tablet devices. The smartphone and tablet users from the report focused on fewer motives per session than those using laptops and desktops. Mobile and tablet users were also less likely to cite entertainment and transaction motives for their time spent online.

Differences in the device’s interface, screen size and the user’s concurrent activities all probably contributed to this pattern, at least in the population studied. Ease of managing multiple browser tabs and applications probably plays a role in differentiating behaviour from one device to another. Keyboard versus touch or phone keypad input is another factor.

Mobile Matters

A post called ‘Some Milestones We Will See This Year in Mobile Statistics’ on the Communities Dominate Brands blog bought up some interesting figures on the 4.6 billion actual mobile phone handsets in use last year, along with a few interesting predictions for the coming year.

Last year, of the 4.6 billion mobile phones in use:

• 96% of all phones in use worldwide have at least a basic browser
• 71% of all phones in use had a ‘real’ web browser that was HTML compatible
• 59% can do basic apps via Java or Brew

Mobile devices are becoming an even more significant part of the user’s experience of the Internet. If all you have to use the internet with is a phone, you can’t play EVE online, WOW or run Steam. If you only use a desktop, you don’t get to use augmented reality. Use a dumb phone, and chances are you are restricted to WAP or a seriously impaired experience on non-mobile optimised sites. However, if you are using a smart or feature phone, you can access a different application ecosystem, and use location and augmented reality tools.

Cows all the way down

Our virtual world is a network of inter-dependent nodes hostage to Armenian women cutting cords, governments building walls or flicking switches, unreliable networks, hosting companies cutting cords, domain names taken down, and so much more.

A user’s experience and the information they find is the result of a large number of factors. Online services are diversifying and use more signals and cues for sorting and curating information, creating billions of different user experiences. Each of these experiences is a result of the many layers of dependencies and gatekeepers between the user and the rest of the Internet, from the hardware they use to how the information is placed in front of them.

To borrow that mental image from Doc Searls, it’s cows all the way down.

But do not mention the content farms

This February has been a month of drama for the search industry. It started with Google accusing Bing of cheating at a search panel at the start of the month. Google followed up the lively panel discussion by publishing a lot of screenshots explaining why they are convinced that Bing was using their search results as a ranking factor.

The write-up on how they did this is pretty comprehensive, but just briefly: they planted artificial queries and set sites to rank for them within their own live directory. They then used the queries and clicked on the links they planted there with computers running Windows, Internet Explorer and with the Bing toolbar installed. It was published on Google’s official blog after the talk, and found its way into the USA’s mainstream media, in a severely abridged form. Bing responded shortly after as well, and put their case forward on their own blog.

In the discussion that developed around this very public fight, kilobytes of text were used to list which search engine came up with what. Google’s copying of Bing’s left column and infinite image search scroll were mentioned, as was Google’s universal search. Issues like whose content Google was incorporating into their own product, sometimes against the owner’s wishes, emerged too. Google’s original statements regarding their own manual control over a site’s position in search emerged, and their original statement “we do not have the capability to manually change it” was brought up.

In all the excitement however everyone seemed to forget what the search panel was expected to be about: content farms, and poor quality content funded by AdSense. The discussion about search quality that permeated the search and Internet marketing community seemed to be forgotten. Even the long running debate over whether or not Google was favouring their own products, such as YouTube and Google Places, was forgotten for a little while.

Adapted from BrisbaneOnlineMarketingMeetup.com – Purported SocMed / Digital Marketing Gurus

In Australia, we expect to transition Yahoo!7′s organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the page) to Microsoft during January 2011.

The change in their paid listings is coming later in the year:

The transition of your paid search account to Microsoft technology is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2011.

For months now both Yahoo! and Microsoft’s blogs have been discussing the change and how to switch over for the USA and Canada. In those markets, the deadline for transitioning from Yahoo! to Microsoft Adcenter was today.

Here in Australia, we should be able to expect the same level of information during the transition period, as outlined in today’s email:

Approximately three months prior to the transition of your paid search account, we will begin sharing more detailed information with you, to help you prepare for the changes to come. Until then, please continue to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account as usual.

There will be one important difference between the switch in the states and here in Australia; Microsoft Adcenter is not active locally. To date Bing’s paid listings have been driven by Yahoo! Search Marketing. Personally I expect to see Microsoft Adcenter introduced into Australia well before the changeover date, to allow Yahoo!’s current Search Engine Marketing customers to migrate their campaigns across.

Other than a change of interface, there will not be any real change in how the SEM marketplace operates in Australia. Unlike in other markets, where they have gone from three to two SEM products, Australia has only had Yahoo! Search Marketing and Adwords. This deal does mean the final end to the SEM product that Overture (Previously Goto) spawned, and that, at least, is significant.

Microsoft has been involved with and developing social tools for a while and the number of accounts on Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail and Xbox Live has always been impressive.

According to the Windows Live blog post:

We’re still early in the release, but to date, over 10 million people have connected their Facebook accounts with Windows Live.

The engagement figures are impressive as well:

…there have already been over 250 million chat conversations between Messenger and Facebook customers, and these conversations have lasted more than 1.5 billion minutes.

The most interesting trend is cross-device software and platforms, including TV, via Xbox Live, mobile, computer and almost certainly tablets. The Microsoft Advertising blog hinted at where this may go with their post, Multi-Screen Consumer Research and Your Media Multiplier Effect. Creating a cohesive experience from desktop to mobile and to loungeroom is going to create changes in media consumption and user behaviour. Already behaviours are less restricted by software, platforms and devices. Microsoft Live Messenger and Facebook are connected and even console systems such as the Xbox360 are used as de facto social network devices:

…4 million personal messages are sent between Xbox LIVE members every day.

From online social interactions on both mobile and console systems, to product search initiated on mobile, and ending with a purchase via PC, integrating multiple media formats into the one chimeric experience will be disruptive. Especially as the media they consume becomes less dependent on the device and its location, and expectations for data portability change.

Ultimately it is the task a user seeks to complete that matters. Their objectives are more important than the device, platform or software used. What has begun to happen with the Windows Phone 7, Xbox 360 and the Windows OS is a hint on where technology is going. Making social, search and basic everyday computing functionality available no matter where the user is or what they have in front of them is the killer app. The device and platform do not matter: the user only cares if they can complete their task.

1. Artificially inflating the value of traffic and impressions from brand-focused campaigns by
   • removing direct response metrics from campaign management or
   • believing it is something it is not
2. A word I made up

In the late 1990s the Internet was going through its first real bubble thanks to a combination of optimistic venture capital and a high perceived value of impressions. At the time, companies like Yahoo! benefited from this immensely as advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads. Even at an inflated price, banner impressions were still cheap compared to TV or other broadcast media and no distinction was made in the mind of the advertisers.

Over ten years later large portal sites no longer dominate the web. Search and social media have taken their place (though Portal sites and Search Engines are not all that different), but advertising for branding online is still a factor.

Advertising for branding is different to direct response campaigns. The metrics for measuring return on investment (ROI) are different for each type of campaign. Competition between direct response and branding ads in the same query space will favour the campaign with larger margins and cheaper goals. Direct response campaigns for low margin sales based on hard ROI targets don’t usually have these.

There are a number of ways that a branding campaign will differ to a direct response campaign in a way that can raise the cost of traffic, and these include (but are not limited to):

• CPM campaigns versus CPC
• Conversion value not limited to a single sale
• Pricing based on costs of broadcast media
• Completed goal action is simpler than a sale

Like most media, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and online display advertising benefit by providing products to maximise return on advertising inventory.

Networks like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have made changes and acquisitions to cater for brand advertising. These include, though are not limited to, YouTube display advertising, display networks like Adsense and advertising tools such as the option to advertise above the fold on sites using Adsense.

Winning at PVP in EVE Online

Wining at Spreadsheets in Space

PVP in EVE Online is not fair. In fact the challenge in PVP in EVE Online is in setting up these unfair encounters. In most MMORPGs, the actual act of combat consists of a few mouse clicks and some waiting. EVE Online is no different. It is the risk of losing stuff that makes players focus on everything before the actual combat a lot more. It is taking the right mix of ships, avoiding being out-numbered and cornered by a superior foe and acting before the opponent even knows they are in a fight where player skill starts to make a real difference.

Why SEM is like EVE Online PVP

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in very similar to PVP. It is a zero-sum environment where operators compete for a resource through actions governed by a set of rules and environmental factors generated through user behaviour. There are a few principles that carry over from EVE Online PVP to SEM.

• Situational awareness is king
  • Know how the advertising network works
  • Understand competitive activity
  • Understand how the market behaves
• Observe, act and assess
  • Analysis without an accompanying action is useless
  • Assess the effectiveness of activity & reassess decision making model
  • And repeat…
• Know where you can compete and where you can’t
  • Don’t waste time & resources competing directly with advertisers intent on outspending you
  • Find alternative ways of reaching potential customers.

Information is the key. Understanding how the query space works, having good situational awareness, and knowing where in the sales funnel certain terms are is valuable. It won’t save you from the SEM equivalent of a gate camp (high margin and ‘branding’ campaigns with large budgets), but it is essential for remaining competitive without burning through your budget.