Posts Tagged ‘Search Engines’

There’s rarely a day that goes by where Microsoft and Google don’t challenge each other. They battle to control every aspect of our digital world, including email (hotmail vs. gmail), the browser (IE vs. Chrome), the desktop (Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs) and of course search (Microsoft Bing vs. Google Search). While Google has continued to gain ground on Microsoft, Yahoo and others, a new search competitor called Twitter has emerged.

Why Twitter? Well, besides serving as a social networking tool for celebrities, Twitter also provides a stream of breaking news and real time events. For example, if I am looking to learn about the latest developments in SharePoint, I avoid the search engines because the news that I’ll read there will be at least 24 hours old. Instead, I search for tweets with SharePoint as a word or hashtag in Twitter. The search results present me with a list of links on the latest SharePoint developments.

I’ve got to imagine that both Microsoft and Google recognize that they lack this capability. And Micrsoft Bing has jumped in with both feet with the recent announcement that tweets from Twitter will now be indexed and served up alongside Bing results (source). While details are still murky, it seems that Microsoft is trying to impart on us that Bing is the leader in search engine technology. Search behavior is being influenced by Google’s dominance of the market place so Microsoft has to challenge Google. This is not the first time that the Bing team has been innovative: they’ve released advancements in both image search capabilities, where you see an endless set of results, and video search capabilities, where you can play a video without having to leave the results. But with Twitter integration, they now have a leg up on real-time search results. By regaining ground, Microsoft puts the hurt back on Google because 97% of Google’s revenue is dependent on search.

The upcoming advancements also has ramifications beyond the worlds of Google and Microsoft. For example:

• Search engine marketers could use their web analytics package to determine if Bing or Twitter drove users to your site.  But once tweets are served alongside search results, it is going to be tough to give credit where credit is due. In other words, was it Twitter that brought me to the website or was it a search term in Bing?
• Search agencies have previously ignored tweets because the “nofollow” directive has no influence on rankings. They could leverage other techniques, such as Google Universal Search to improve site rankings. But with the upcoming change, they have to game Twitter to get their clients to the top of the page. NOTE: This Bing-Twitter deal may turn Twitter into a SPAM wasteland. Yikes!
• Developers have been able to leverage the Twitter API to create interesting mashups. Twitter hired Pivotal Labs last year to help fix their infrastructure last year (source). With Microsoft now in the game, the Twitter platform will be put to the test and hopefully it can withstand the additional strain. NOTE: Microsoft may also use this relationship to influence Twitter to use their server technologies and that would hurt the open-source movement.

The additional challenge that Google faces is that they have lots of irons in the fire, including the Android mobile platform and the Wave Collaboration platform. These are areas that Google needs to succeed in if they wish to loosen their revenue dependency on search. Since Google is in a dominant position, they can either sit back and let it all shake out or respond by following Microsoft’s lead. Based on the above, it seems that they better swiftly react.

NOTE: You can now search the latest tweets using the new Bing Twitter engine (source).

I recently came across a search engine marketing report from predictive marketing firm [x + 1]. The report shows that the majority of SEM professionals gave a low rank to the performance of SEM (a ranking of 1 – 3):

While the report doesn’t clearly explain why SEM practitioners are dissatisfied, I can guess as well as the next person that it is due to the growing efforts required to run an SEM campaign. Eric Schmidt actually highlighted this fact during Google’s recent quarterly earnings Q&A session (for Q2 2009):

“Starting roughly [at] Christmas, people were spending more time searching and when they purchased products, they were purchasing products of less value. Furthermore, when they did so, the whole process just took more time.”

Since it takes longer for a visitor to complete a purchase, SEM professionals are pouring over more data in order to attribute a sale to an SEM campaign. Unfortunately, only 10.3% said they consistently saw lift rates above 20% so they’re not seeing the results that they desire. Clearly, there are plenty of professionals that are “testing the SEM waters” without much success but their continued dissatisfaction may lead to abandonment of the practice. Additionally, the report goes on to explain that companies continue to invest in SEM: almost half 48.6% said the economy had no impact on their SEM budget. For now, companies are investing because there are success stories where SEM grew the top line. But as with SEM practitioners, companies may become dissatisfied and cut SEM budgets if they don’t reach their ROI goal at some point in time.

And one final point. Before you decide to put your entire weight behind this report, you should note that:

• The number of respondents was not revealed. While the report states that “half of respondents … have decision-making authority on spending and allocation of search,” the report said how many people actually participated so there’s no way for one to determine if the findings truly represent the attitudes and concerns of most SEM professionals.
• There’s no context to the findings. While the report provided a snapshot for March 2009, there was no mention of prior findings so there was no easy way to determine if attitudes have changed over the past six months to a year.

While the findings are interesting, I am looking forward to seeing more valuable data from [x+1] in the future.

Google recently announced the official release of SearchWiki, a set of personalization features for your Google search results. The personalization features enable a user to perform various tasks including:

• Reshuffling or resorting (and removal of) results
• Attaching notes or comments to your results
• Suggesting a website to be included in the results

Additionally, these features allow users to share their SearchWiki results of others in Web 2.0 fashion.

While the ability to personally change search results and add comments/content to websites has led to some significant discussions regarding SEO and privacy of user data, respectively, the bigger question that we’ve been asking ourselves is whether this feature has legs. While Google has let the genie out of the bottle, we’ve all seen how Google can kill an idea. — Google recently announced the shutdown of Lively, a 3D Virtual Worlds set to complete with SecondLife, only 6 months after launching it.

Here are several reason why SearchWiki is here to stay:

Reason #1: Most of the features in SearchWiki are not really new.
Google has allowed users to attach notes to their search results since March 2007 when they took Google Notebook out of beta. Also, users have been able to submit a website to Google for inclusion since the very beginnings. And while users could not reshuffle their search results, they’ve also been able to report website that were using unscrupulous SEO techniques to have them removed from the results (BMW got in trouble for this recently). The biggest change is that SearchWiki brings these features together onto one page — the Google Search Results page.

Reason #2: Users expect these kind of features. Going hand-in-hand with the reason above, users are already accustomed to these features. For starters, there are other, lesser-known search engines, such as Collarity, that offer personalization. Secondly, the idea of democratically promoting stories to the forefront has been gaining steam with the popularization of Digg, which has also shown phenomenal growth in the number of registered Digg users. Lastly, most blogs (including ours) enable users to add comments/notes to posts. In fact, Google also enables commenting in Google Reader (see image below).

Notes/Commenting in Google Reader

Reason #3: Google has put this release through the ringer. For the past six months, Google has been testing the interaction of beta testers/users with SearchWiki. This is typical of Google as they commonly release products first into beta (or even a limited beta) before making it publicly available.

Reason #4: SearchWiki fixes the problem with Google Search Results. While Google has been an increadibly successful company, it is definitely not perfect. And one of the biggest issues with Google searches is the results index is refreshed on a monthly basis — this is referred to as the Google Dance. So the site that you found interesting may not appear in the top results when you return to Google.  That means that you’ve got to bookmark your site if you think that you may want to look at it in the future.

Thinking about the future, it seems that the adoption of SearchWiki will do two things for Google:

• Improve the amount of time that a user spends on the Google, which will hopefully improve ad revenue.
• Futher modify user behavior to a point that may lead to the death of bookmarketing services, such as Delicious.

If you’re a Google shareholder, SearchWiki is not such a bad thing after all.