23 Musings

It seems the mobile web is beginning to come of age at last. Could it be down to the iPhone? The greater occurrence of phones with wireless built in? Better mobile web apps? Increasing addiction to the internet so you just have to get at it everywhere you are? Well, personally I think it's down to our increasing need for data, connections with our networks and need to access email on the go. Definitely the iPhone has made a big difference but I believe it's social networks which will really kick start the mobile phenomenon. Just look at Japan and the iMode surge a few years ago, the majority of apps used were related to social uses and email.

Anyway, ZDNet are reporting that Google have seen a 20% increase in mobile search usage.

According to SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) it does.

Apparently money is shifting into search and away from print and classified at an increasing rate. The reason for this I'd surmise is that search is being seen as a way to follow consumers rather than just trying to put an ad in front of them. It's now widely accepted that most markets have a need to be active in search so it's natural for spend to shift towards it.

Key findings from the SEMPO study are:

• The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007.
• North American SEM spending is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast a year ago.
• Marketers are finding more search dollars by poaching budget from print magazine spending, website development, direct mail and other marketing programs
• Paid placement captures 87.4 percent of 2007 spending; organic SEO, 10.5 percent; paid inclusion, 0.07 percent, and technology investment, 1.4 percent.
• Google AdWords remains the most popular search advertising program, but both Google and Yahoo sponsored search spending has decreased from a year ago

Here's how the spend is shifting:

Shifting to search is great for all the SEO agencies out there but is also going to make their jobs a lot harder as they have to work for their money to get clients to the top of the listings. As competition grows, so it becomes more difficult to get dramatic improvements in position, some SEO agencies have had an easy ride in recent years and that's going to get harder.

Other developments will also affect SEO such as the introduction of semantic search technology (as announced by Yahoo recently). Developments such as this could change the rankings entirely and again will mean the agencies have to stay ahead of the game and work hard (not a bad thing).

So says Tim Berners-Lee in this article on the future of the web, search and semantic technologies over on the Times website.

I tend to agree with him unless Google move into the semantic search space pretty quickly. With Yahoo announcing support for semantic mark-up within their search index Google will surely not want to be left behind.

I'd like to think the future of Google will embrace semantic technologies and make it a real 'discovery engine', surfacing links of high relevance to searchers through much stronger understanding of the content within.

As an aside; one thing I've been thinking would be a nice app would be a semantic web robot which you could set off to scour the web for content and with the added semantic features (rather than the more usual boolean profile based robot) it could learn as it went by allowing you to score results for relevance to you. The first really intelligent agent?

So Yahoo recently announced their Open Search platform. Now more details are emerging and Yahoo have announced they will be supporting semantic mark-up and making use of the structured, meaningful data that can be applied to web pages to help them index better and serve up more relevant results.

This is a big step forwards and if released into the main Yahoo Search will surely help them in their fight for users with Google and Microsoft.

Relevance is king in the search engine world, being able to interpret results by more than just standard search algorithms of content density and link equity has the potential to deliver a much more relevant results set to every search. As semantic mark-up and web standards increase in usage this could give Yahoo and edge they badly need.


There hasn't been a major move to optimise relevance in search results for years, this could give SEO's something to keep them busy. Rather than following the usual tactics of copy optimisation and ensuring pages are well formed, developers will now need to ensure they use the relevant semantic tags to add meaning to their pages.

The one thing that will bring the users flooding in is if an engine finds a way to deliver highly relevant results. Returning three truly relevant links is far more useful than delivering one thousand arbitrarily ordered links. I for one would immediately switch to using an engine who gets semantic search right.

I hope to see this implemented asap if Yahoo have any chance of capitalising on this move. Google will be hot on their heels otherwise...

A report (here via Marketing Charts) shows that ROI on search marketing has improved in the past year.

What is really interesting is the figures showing ROI improvements by search engine. Google has improved ROI by 7.5% (and it's taken a whopping 76% of the total spend). Yahoo showed a 39% improvement in ROI returned to advertisers since the launch of Panama which is great news for them although coming at a difficult time. MSN interestingly shows the highest clickthrough rate and ROI, it's ROI was 27% greater than the average across other engines.

Just shows why the money is still all in search at the moment. While returns like this are to be had it's going to be tough for anyone to convince me that it's worth moving money out of search into other areas.

Local news...

In an absolutely bonkers move a lecturer from Brighton Uni in Sussex UK has banned her students from using Google and Wikipedia to research their topics for assignments.

The lecturer says that students have got too used to just regurgitating the first things they find after a Google search which can often lead to inaccuracies.

I say it's a bonkers move as the issue here is not that students are using the web to research. The web was invented by universities for research purposes, it's the best source of information available to students today. Yes there is some inaccurate data and wholly fictitious information but it's down to the research processes used.

Rather than ban all the students from using these sources, which is totally ridiculous anyway as most will carry on regardless, the Uni would be better off putting some effort into training the students how to research correctly, use Google effectively and effectively evaluate information and data sources.

The lecturer Professor Tara Brabazon will be speaking on the subject this Wednesday at the Sallis Benney Theatre in Grand Parade, Brighton. Her talk will be titled 'Google Is White Bread For The Mind'. I think I may attend!

Hitwise have released some new figures (found via Marketing Charts) which show that Google managed to account for 66% of all U.S. searches during the four weeks up to the 29th December.

It seems we're set for another year of Google domination in the search engine market. I can't see anyone making a dent in their market share for quite a while (although the Microsoft/FAST deal may make things interesting eventually).

Another interesting stat from the report is that the travel sector has received 22% more traffic from Google from December '06 to December '07 and a 12% increase in traffic from search engines in general.

This shows that for those of us in online travel the search engine is still going to be the major source of qualified traffic. Time to shift that banner spend into something more lucrative like paid search!

So, yesterday Bill Gates hinted in his keynote at CES that Microsoft would improve search. It's an area where they haven't really shown any improvement in recent years. I thought to myself at the time, maybe they've finally realised that it's all about the algorithm and the quality of results you deliver to users, not in the interface and fancy AJAX tools.

So I watched, and waited, and lo and behold they announce an offer to buy FAST Search and Transfer!

The offer comes to approx $1.2B which is a fair valuation. Rumours are that the shareholders have already approved this and it's all a formality and will go ahead pretty quickly.

Top move Bill! FAST is a great piece of search technology with many applications. It has it's heart rooted in providing good algorithms and tailorable search tools which is exactly where Microsoft should be pushing it's Live Search offering.

Now you just have to integrate this with Adcentre and deliver a Google beating search engine, no small task, that should make the next year very interesting!

Hitwise have released a new report on the market share of the major search engines today (based on U.S. data). Unsurprisingly, the report shows that Googles dominance continues to grow rapidly. Google is said to now account for 65.1% of the search traffic delivered online, up 5% from this time last year. Yahoo, MSN and Ask are said to be at 21%, 7% and 4%, all down slightly year on year.

Interestingly for those of us in the travel market 33% of travel traffic is said to be from search engines, thats 15% up year on year. That's a big jump, perhaps we're all finally nailing our SEO and PPC strategies.

Google shows its dominance in the online travel sector by donating 21% of travels traffic all by itself which really shows where the focus needs to be for search engine marketers in the travel industry. That's a 26% increase in the amount of travel traffic that Google contributes to since last year, again a huge leap.

All this bodes very well for the forthcoming January peak booking period!

Eye tracking company Enquiro Research has produced a report (sponsored by Google no less) which shows the importance for brands to be well represented at the top of both natural and paid search listings.

They say 'There is significant correlation between brands’ appearing in the top organic search and sponsored placements and consumer brand affinity, recall and purchase intent'. Well that's pretty obvious, but it's always nice to have these concepts validated by eye tracking (something that I place great value in as an insight and usability tool).

The most interesting findings are:

This shows that there is definite brand affinity and recall to be gained by being well positioned and using the brand name in your listings. Good advice for travel companies with January coming, I see so many travel listings that are just a destination name and no brand mention at all.

The full report can be found here.

We all know how notoriously difficult paid search is to get right in a highly competitive marketplace. Take car rental, loads of players, very high bid prices and some really proficient PPC campaigns. Need a what to stand out from the crowd? Take the lead from Sixt of Germany then, they've done something very clever with ascii art to make their adverts stand out from the crowd.

This is genius, and they experienced a 40% plus increase in clicks on the campaign! Something that could be applied to many industries!


This campaign has just won an award, more details here.

Less is more it would seem when it comes to search interfaces. Just look at Google to see the less-is-more approach at it's best. Their minimal approach to the search homepage works really well, although I do think a big reason for that is that their algorithm is much better at returning relevant results with minimal input from the user.

Prof. John Maeda of MIT Media Lab had put together an interesting image showing the development of both Google and Yahoo's homepage over time. It's really interesting to see how Yahoo lost their way and Google stayed true to the minimal approach. Click the image below to see a full size version:

In customer satisfaction it would seem.

JD Power has completed a survey of internet users looking at their satisfaction with various online services. In use of search, Dogpile has come top for the second year running with Google coming in second.

The study, now in its fourth year, examines consumer behavior, experiences and satisfaction of Internet service subscribers with the most frequently used online services. These include search engine/functions, web portal, instant messaging, social networking, music downloading services and online console gaming systems.

The search rankings are below:
Dogpile is a meta-search engine which scrapes all the major search providers and presents the results back to the user. This provides a one-stop search experience for it's users. Another factor that helps it is the companies limit they place on advertising next to the results. Paid search adverts are integrated into the results listings and mentioned as sponsored, this isn't particularly obvious so perhaps users just miss the fact that they click on ads.

I think a lot of this is down to misconception by users. I believe they probably think they are getting a better service as Dogpile promises to search all the best engines in one go. What the users probably don't notice is that the relevance suffers as a result of this. There can be pages and pages of similar results, many links to the same websites and definitely more advanced searchers won't get the same valuable results they would from Google. Could this be a case of lower numbers of users and less sophisticated users?

Dogpile beat Google on satisfaction, functionality, ease of use and results quality in the survey. I am going to trial Dogpile for a while to see if it could ever replace Google for me, I reckon it won't but am always willing to give something different a try.

I posted the other day surmising whether Yahoo is catching up in search based on some new metrics from Compete. The general feel from that post was that they weren't really and the numbers were questionable in value.

So, what should I see this morning? New, useful features in Yahoo's main search interface, the kind of features that make search a whole lot less painful for users and add a lot of value, helping users to target searches more effectively.

The first thing I noticed was that they have integrated images from Flickr and also playable videos, kind of like Google's universal search idea and equally as useful to the user. So if you search for a music artist (eg. Unkle) you should get images and video in the results along with useful additions such as links to albums, lyrics, photos and more videos. Next I did a search for a hotel (eg. 'hudson hotel new york') in New York (being the online travel buff that I am) and the top result in this case was a Yahoo Local listing for the hotel complete with map links, again extremely useful (although possibly doing themselves out of a small amount of ad revenue here). Another cool feature is the inclusion of custom results for searches such as health related (eg. 'lyme disease'), quick easy access to relevant info is the killer in search and here Yahoo have it spot on.

And then there's the biggest and most useful addition, and it's an addition that Google haven't yet implemented... It's an AJAX based search assistant panel that appears if it senses you hesitate while typing a search query. It works as an auto-complete assistant and also a guided search tool as it will both try to guess what you were typing and give you suggestions as well. This is extremely powerful and really makes search easier for the user. It also adds a lot of value to advertisers as it should mean more qualified clicks on paid search results as the searches are better informed.

I'm actually really surprised this has come out of Yahoo first, I've been waiting for Google to implement something like this for a while now but for once Yahoo have the upper hand. Now all they need to do is sort out the problems with their paid search results (relevancy, gaming etc), fix their algorithms for natural search and improve the interface and they could become my search engine of choice!

Okay, so Google are still miles ahead on market share in the search world. Below is the latest graph from Compete.com showing just how commanding a lead they have.
However, Compete have some interesting insight into quality rather than reach. Quality in search is rarely discussed and whenever it has been Google has always been assumed to be in the lead there as well due to their massive research and development capabilities.

That may be the wrong assumption though!

Compete have looked at a metric they call search fulfillment. They came up with this because even though there are many searches taking place on the major engines, not all result in a click on a result and a referral. In fact, according to their data out of approx 7.5 billion monthly searches only 5 billion result in a referral.

So, if Google looks like the leader from a search volume point of view, how about from a fulfillment point of view. The graph below shows an interesting picture...
So Google is not getting the referrals the volume suggests it should.

Yahoo seems to do really well from this which I find strange as the relevancy of results in Yahoo never seems as good to me as Google. Of course there are many other possible reasons for this, a couple being that the figures may exclude clicks on paid links and that Google returns much more useful snippets in the results than any other engine often negating the need to click through.

Of course Google's figures could be vastly inflated by all the agency types, SEO's and webmasters out there who perform daily searches to check their sites rankings without ever clicking on anything. It would be really interesting to understand those volumes!

Creating a visual search engine that can find video (or images) of people is a bit like the holy grail (highly desirable but tricky to get your hands on). Now along comes a company called Viewdle, who are one of the start-ups at the Techcrunch 40 event at the moment. Viewdle quote themselves as a 'facial recognition powered digital media platform for easily indexing, searching & monetizing video assets'. Quite a powerful thing if they get it working right. Perhaps YouTube should buy them (seeing as Google have yet to make real use of Neven Vision technology).

Viewdle comes out of Reuters Labs and there's a demo up and running which looks pretty cool. It shows how many times someone appears in clips and how long they feature (demo link here for Angelina Jolie). I'm hoping that as it comes from Reuters it should stack up commercially as I'm sure they'll have used this on their own archives.

Japanese authorities have finally recognised the fact that their dominance in all things device and hardware is slipping and that they have missed a trick by not moving into the service side of things such as search.

The Financial Times carries a story about a new initiative to move into researching search and ways to personalise devices such as in-car navigation using search as the building block.

I'd love to think that a state funded program could compete with Google (GOOG), but I fear it will take all of the Japanese inventiveness to come up with anything that comes close. I'd say they'd be better off investing the money into research in new network protocols and ways to usher in a new era of web connectivity. That is after all something the Japanese have always been very very good at.

In the news today Google has come out to say that usage of it's mobile services have soared during the summer months. Usually the summer months can see a dip in web usage and perhaps this is evidence that users are getting more comfortable with the small screen so continuing to use it when on the move.

Visits to Google's maps, Gmail and mobile searches on mobile phones and wireless handheld devices rose 35 percent between May and June. Thats a reverse of last years pattern which saw a decline at that time of year.

They attribute a jump in use of 40 percent to the launch of the iPhone. However I know that it's widely used in the UK too and we don't have the iPhone yet.

This is definitely all about better handsets being available, more people having decent handsets and the public at large getting more savvy with ways of accessing the web. I'd expect it to keep rising rapidly. For the UK, we've had such a poor summer weather wise that I'm surprised that usage hasn't shifted back to PC's, the test will be when we have a decent summer (we can pray that may be next year...).

...search, advertising and everything else in between!

During a keynote speech at the Search Engine Strategies conference in California this week, Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google talked about personalisation as key to Googles future strategy for search and most other avenues. She said that within 10-15 years time search sites will understand much more about their users such as location and personal preferences.

She also said it's important that the ads are personalised too. Now that could have an impact for Adwords advertisers in the future, some advertisers won't want to limit their coverage by being restricted by individual searchers histories and preferences. Although other advertisers will be getting excited by the prospects of better targeting.

Interestingly she mentioned that Google is looking at changing the presentation of its universal search page "to guide users' eyes" so they can see the results and the advertisements, her philosophy being that the ads and the search results should match.

She also said that the way Facebook aggregates data about relationships between people, including when they met and how they know each other is interesting. She said "The type of information they're building about the social graph between people is something that is intelligent and will be particularly useful in the future". It certainly looks like Facebook have noticed this...

For the second consecutive year, Google has slipped in the rankings of a US consumer satisfaction survey. This year they've slipped so far they actually come below Yahoo!

According to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Yahoo's customer satisfaction score rose by 4% to 79, while Google fell by 3.7% to 78. Other search engines measured in the rankings were Ask.com, which posted the biggest increase to score 75, making it equal with MSN.com. AOL dropped by 9% to record a satisfaction score of 67, making it the biggest loser in the survey.

Foresee Results who run the survey said that it is an indicator of the financial success of a business in the wider marketplace and reckon that the next year could show a turnaround for Yahoo. Music to Jerry Yang's ears I'm sure, they could do with some new found success!