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Search Engines & Entertaining New Ideas

June 27, 2010 in Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | No comments

Search as a Portal

Bing has announced some new features in search this week. Explained in the Bing Gets a Fresh Look post, content themed on Auto, Finance and Entertainment information was used to demonstrate “great new decision-making tools in [these] areas”. Similar to the enhanced Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) served by Google and Bing, these new tools take search closer to portals in their content consumption model.

In many ways SERPs are becoming more like portal content pages. Search goes beyond an ordered directory of URLs and descriptions. Content including maps, scanned books, images, video, news, blogs, product listings, and social media material is indexed and increasingly being presented in the main SERP as a part of an enhanced search result.

Indexing Entertainment Media

The Internet is an important source of entertainment, either supporting content available through other channels or material native to the web. As said by Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi in his “A New Entertainment Experience For Bing” post:

“In the field of entertainment, 76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go.”

Entertainment information, from song lyrics to game trailers to film reviews, matters to the user, and can take many different forms. The challenge is in organising it in a human friendly way, similar to what has already started to happen with geographic information and maps. The search engine can programmatically add more content in locations under their control in a theoretically infinitely scalable fashion.

Search in the Music Business

Google is also in the entertainment business. Beyond their search properties and YouTube, Google’s acquisition of Simplifymedia during May hints strongly at Google directly entering the music business. It is likely that Google would add their product to the search experience in the same way as Google Commerce feeds (formerly Google Base) are added to the index or through applications in Chrome or Android.

Lady Gaga on Bing

Lady Gaga on Bing

Lady Gaga on Yahoo! Music

Lady Gaga on Yahoo! Music

Search is starting to provide a portal-like experience. As the search experience becomes richer, more personalised and more aware of the location of the user, it gets closer to providing the experience sites like Yahoo! do, but with finer levels of customisation through queries. Pages like Yahoo! Music may soon be eclipsed by pages like Bing Entertainment or the current Bing Lady Gaga SERP. In the end it will be how the consumer prefers to consume and seek out content that will determine this. It is passive consumption versus searching with intent.

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Can Yahoo! just be a Portal?

February 20, 2010 in Online, Search, Search Engines, Social by Anthony | 2 comments

The big news of the week was that Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search agreement was approved by both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Yahoo! is now closer to replacing their search, and search advertising product with Bing’s.

From what has been said, up to Yahoo!’s latest post on the matter, Yahoo! is going to stop being a search engine and simply focus on providing enriched data. In their words:

1) Providing you with rich results that display the most relevant information from Yahoo!’s rich content properties, as well as other great product, local, entertainment, reference, social and tech sites.

2) Showing specific results from vertical search products, like Yahoo! News.

3) Providing handy tools on the left-side of the page, such as our Search Pad and Search Scan apps, site filters that help you refine and explore the search results more easily, and related search term suggestions to help you refine your search further if the results aren’t quite what you were looking for.

Yahoo! seems to see itself as a portal, and is operating as if a portal can be distinct from a search engine. However, Google and Bing have taken a different approach, and have demonstrated that a search engine can become a portal. The inclusion of many Google properties, such as Maps, Base and so on, onto their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) has been discussed at length for years now. Bing has also chosen to follow a similar path, and have developed a suite of additional products of their own. Both Google and Microsoft also have email products that include social functionality in Google Buzz and Windows Live. It is interesting that while a portal site is moving away from search, search is moving towards becoming portals.

Yahoo! SERP for Vancouver

Yahoo! SERP for Vancouver

Google SERP for Vancouver

Google SERP for Vancouver

Bing SERP for Vancouver

Bing SERP for Vancouver

A lot of what Yahoo! has discussed that they can bring to the Internet as a part of their portal business is already provided as a part of the Google and Bing search experience, or as a part of their additional properties. Where we are with search in terms of the richness of data that can be sorted and surfaced in search, each SERP is essentially a portal site. Depending on the term, photos, news, blogs, social commentary and maps can all be presented on the SERP as an algorithmically generated themed portal page. In getting out of search Yahoo! is limiting itself to competing with Bing and Google purely on content that they have the rights to, their existing user-base and presentation of information.

Is this enough? Both Google and Bing are creating more and more properties. Both Google and Bing have been developing more inventory requiring very little ongoing maintenance and have been rolling them into their main SERPs. With the inclusion of more user generated content such as social media updates and personalised search from Google, and Flickr content in Bing Maps and an apparent focus on travel indicated in their PR, how much value can Yahoo! provide as just a portal?

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Text ads and Disruptive advertising

November 23, 2009 in Advertising, Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | 2 comments

Text ads on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) are a disruptive form of advertising. The intention is to distract the viewer whilst they are engaged with one mode of product search, to use an alternative means which produces revenue. In relation to search, the relevance of the ad served is calculated using a different method to that of organic search, and is heavily influenced by both click through rates and money bid per click. AdWords advertising is visible next to and on top of the organic results, on Google Maps, within the AdSense network, in the Search Suggestion box, and so on.

With the option of now adding additional links and other content to an AdWords listing, the look of some AdWords ads is closer to that of organic search. If I were to have a tinfoil hat moment, I might go so far as to say this could potentially lead to the effective monetarisation of organic SERPs returned for branded terms.

NIB Search Engine Result Page

NIB Search Engine Result Page

There is one thing that has driven this renaissance of the text ad by Google, and that is the fact that disruptive advertising can work. AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft’s adCenter have worked because with all the tracking available the advertiser can prove that the money spent has a return, without falling back on nebulous metrics such as branding. With SEM, disruptive advertising does work, provided it is relevant enough.

One product of effective performance measurement is the emphasis on terms that denote an information search close to the point of purchase. The most competitive terms are those that indicate a pre-purchase search. With the exception of a few groups of generic terms, this mindset has left the research and discovery keywords in most markets ignored and possibly undervalued.

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The Yahoo! Microsoft deal

August 4, 2009 in Advertising, Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | No comments

This week saw a significant change in the search market place. A deal was announced that would see Yahoo! search being powered by Bing, and Yahoo! Search Maketing switch to Microsoft’s Adcenter . Soon, this will also mean that what I wrote in “Obvious Paid Search Tips” will be out of date, and the answer to “Hands up everyone who cares about what Yahoo does” is more or less no-one. In terms of something that matters, this will increase interest in ranking well in Bing and, at least outside of Australia, there will be more competition within Adcenter.

Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing

The merging of two Pay Per Click market places will increase internal competition. With more participants in the market and a reduction in available inventory, the cost of traffic will increase. Account management will be more efficient with this consolidation, and the volume of available traffic will increase too.

However, we won’t see this locally, as bidding for Australian traffic through Bing and Yahoo! is done via Yahoo! Search Marketing (Formally Overture, formally Goto, etc). What we will get instead, based on information to date, is an eventual change in the platform we use.

Why People will care more about rank in Bing

With Microsoft powering Yahoo!’s search results a good rank in Bing will mean even more traffic. Most decisions on how to allocate SEO resources are influenced by reported search queries and Google’s domminance within this metric. As a result, a lot of SEO activity online is focused on building for Google. It is seen as the only engine worth building for, as it will return the most for the investment of resources. With a ranking in Bing about to appear for more queries, and the deal generating more awareness, this may drive more interest and activity.

Still more to come

There has been a lot written, and some very in-depth, on this deal over the last week. There are going to be even more blog posts and press releases to follow. The fate of Yahoo!’s other search products has not been revealed yet, and there are other areas that still need to be clarified. One thing that can be taken for granted now is that a lot of people are going to be auditing the size of their brand and industry’s query space, and the rankings of their sites in Bing.

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Obvious Paid Search Tips

July 14, 2009 in Advertising, Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | 1 comment

Thousands of businesses are addicted to Search Engine Marketing (SEM). It is like the gateway drug of internet advertising. You just bid on a term then pay that amount each time someone clicks on it. There is even a choice between two main providers, Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords. Google is the most popular, because everyone one wants to be in the first spot for some generic single word search term. With all that in mind, I have collected the basic information and obvious suggestions for running a Pay Per Click campaign in this post.

Where the clicks come from

Yahoo Search marketing and Google Adwords both offer a number of sources of traffic:

Search: Placement on their own (Yahoo/Google) Search Result Page (Yahoo ads will display on Bing.com.au as well within Australia)
Search Network: Placement on SERPs generated from their directory by external sites (Google)
Content Network: Sites serving ads as determined by keywords the page content matches
Placements: Only in Google – selecting specific sites to place ads on.

Search is the best source

Depending on how much transparency you want, there are a number of different keyword match options available from both Yahoo and Google. With Google, keywords can be set up for exact, phrase (keywords used in a phrase, in order) and broad match (whatever Google feels like). With Yahoo there is standard (the terms and minor variants) and advanced (whatever Yahoo feels like, including phrase and broad like matches).

Selecting Keywords, the summary of the summary

This part can be fun, as the entire process hinges on your or your team’s ability to think of the product or service in the same way as the market. There are a number of different ways to approach this process. At this point it is a return to basic marketing theory, or as I like to think of it, actually getting some use out of my degree.

The concept of the Sales Funnel is actually rather important to structuring your campaign and selecting the keywords. In this insanely simplified version, first the customer identifies the problem. This part of the process is most often expressed in general research and specific query terms relating to the general subject. The structure of the queries themselves will vary depending on how familiar with search and the Internet in general the user is. Next they research potential solutions. Research, location and cost terms broadly match this phase. In the final pre-purchase phase, specific terms are often used such as brand terms and product descriptions.Depending on the type of product and the company, an SEM campaign can target any one, combination or all of these phases.

Keyword Quality Score

The Quality Score in Google and the Quality Index in Yahoo determine how much you pay for position. Quality Score is applied by keyword, and Quality Index is applied by ad. Otherwise both operate in a broadly similar fashion. These scores are determined by a combination of ad and keyword relevance and click through rate (CTR). If your ad matches the keywords and you have a good CTR you will get a better position for the price you pay per click. This is fairly easy to game. Separate good match keywords from general ones by adgroups, write relevant copy and watch the score go up and cost per thousand (CPM) come down.

Building landing pages

Make sure you build a landing page. If you can, build a couple. Seriously, go nuts. Try as many different ideas as you can afford within the time available. Match the pages to the keywords and the specific group targeted by the campaign and adgroup.

Reported Average Position

Average Position is a metric presented in both Google and Yahoo that deserves a special mention. It is mostly useless. It is a measure of the number of impressions the ads received per position displayed in. When you consider the number of variations of distribution of position that a decent campaign can generate you can see that there is not much that can be taken away from it. Its only use is as a loose indication of increased competition when observed in conjunction with shifts in cost, impressions and assuming a consistent Quality Score. A much better run down can be found on The Search Agents blog.

In Brief

There is a lot more to be said about SEM, but this is only a very quick overview. My intent was to quickly cover Yahoo and Google on setting up keywords, building landing pages and writing relevant ads, and monitoring levels of competition.

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Hands up everyone who cares about what Yahoo does

June 29, 2009 in Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | 1 comment

I did not think that there would be too many of you.

But I often find myself suprised at how often people completely disregard Yahoo as a source for traffic these days. While Google does indeed dominate right now, I do not see how relying on it to provide up to 90% of all traffic is a great idea. Yahoo may not perform as many searches as Google, but it should account for more than a single digit percentage of inbound traffic. It is just good business not to trust a single source for the bulk of your revenue.

Google does have a huge pile of traffic, and getting pages into Google does not take as long as it does with Yahoo. However Yahoo does make it easy to pick content to be displayed as a part of an enhanced search listing.

http://www.ysearchblog.com/2009/03/12/embed-videos-games-and-docs-with-searchmonkey/

Yahoo Google’s Base

More recently, and interestingly Yahoo has also started to support Event, Product, Review, Job, and Personals Google Base feeds.

http://www.ysearchblog.com/2009/06/18/searchmonkey-updates-new-enhanced-results-and-support-of-google-base-formatting/

The takeaway right now

I have nothing say right now on the impact this will have on sites being listed, the size of the query space it will occupy or if this can change the volume of traffic sites will recieve through Yahoo. There are a few points to consider here though.

Google is the biggest, but it is not the only search engine around.

It is still worth keeping up with the number two and three in the market, and do not accept abysmal visibility in them just because they are not Google. There is still traffic there, and if your industry uniformly adopts a Google-centric view of the universe, there is opportunity too.

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