Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Social bookmarking web service Del.icio.us has just launched their much anticipated version 2.0 and has officially rebranded themselves as Delicious (sans dots). The relaunch of the best social bookmarking site out there brings a slicker user-interface, enhanced performance and upgraded search capabilities.

The team over at Delicious describes the changes as…”just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.” Sounds like a decent upgrade to me.

Here is a little more detail on the 3 major changes with the new Delicious.com.

• Speed: New site infrastructure focuses on loading pages faster now and as the website continues to grow past its 5 million current users.
• Search: Delicious site search is completely overhauled with a focus on speed and relevancy. As any Del.icio.us user can attest to, doing a internal search was a tedious process that usually took awhile to load results. Not any more - search is now instantaneous and more relevant.  The new site search expands into other areas when returning results, including not just a users tags but also other bookmarks and outside social networks.
• Design: Obviously this is the first thing you notice when you hit Delicious.com. The new design focuses on improved usability and enhancement of the new features.  Here are just a few of the changes that went live: new navigational organization, auto complete and sorting functionality, new bookmark layout, top 10 tags and new bundles.

So bottom line…what do I think? I like it. The new UI is solid and they didn’t go overboard with changes. For me, nothing is worse then when a highly used service goes through a complete redesign that confuses users. When it comes to the new enhancements I haven’t spent to much time going through them all, but from what I see (especially with search) the new features are great. Job well done, to bad it took you so long to get it live.

When you go to Microsoft’s Live.com search engine starting today you will see something different. Live Search is now showing a full background image behind their minimalistic search interface with what they are calling “hotspots”. These hotspots (see images below) are interactive regions on the background image that, when rolled over with the users mouse, show image related search results. The Live Search teams calls this new feature “both engaging and a great place to start a search.” This new “feature” is an extension of the “simple and clean” home page release Live Search made last spring.  Live makes it clear that the focus is on the search box and loads that first, then the background image with hotspots.

“Our goal for the home page is to find the best way to enhance users’ sense of discovery, surprise, and delight while balancing engineering realities for a great user experience.” The Live Search team goes on to say. “We think the new design is a great start, but there’s more to come, with lots of interesting directions that we’ll be exploring in our next releases of the home page.”

Ok, sure these hotspots caught my attention the first time I saw them. However, since they aren’t targeted to the user or their search results they become random and irrelevant to the majority of people heading to Live.com.  Don’t get me wrong, the few people who do actually rely on Live.com for their primary search activities might interact with the hotspots here and there. But, in the end how is this adding anything to the search experience? Feels almost like Google’s “I Feel Lucky”.

Now, you know what would be cool? What about changing the image daily based on a logged-in users profile / search patterns? For example, I am into sports and have listed the New York Rangers as my favorite sports team. The background one day can be an image of various Rangers with hotspots leading to the first 3 results for term “New York Rangers”. For me, that would be cooler and actually make me want to visit Live.com to see what my image is for the day.

For a few months I have been hearing the rumblings of a new search engine called Cuil (pronounced cool) that was being started by former Google employees. Well, last night Cuil officially launched to a great deal of buzz and press. The buzz revolves around two key components, first it was started by 3 former senior level Googlers, including Anna Patterson who worked as a senior search architect for Google. The other piece of buzz revolves around the fact that Cuil claims they are the “world’s biggest search engine” - which is a pretty lofty claim no matter how you look at it.  On Cuil.com they are currently showing the number of searchable web pages at 121,617,892,992. Impressive…but how real?

Cuil, of course, is not giving away any of its secrets in terms of how it ranks and indexes. However, Cuil did release some insight into their ranking algorithm.

“Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.”

So, what does that mean? Basically, Cuil is focusing on the fact that their relevancy goes much deeper when compared to other search algorithms. But, I am a bit confused when they talk about “superficial popularity metrics”. To me what they describe is what we know about Google’s algorithm.  How is what they describe any different than a standard search engine algorithm that builds relevancy through various components like inbound links, on-page attributes, etc?  Almost seems like they are talking about a social search site like Digg.

Putting everything else aside, how is Cuil as a search engine? First, lets take a look at examples of  the number of indexed pages for both Google and Cuil.

As you can see from the 3 examples above, Google out indexes Cuil on every search. In fact, the above examples are just the 3 I decided to show, there was not a single example of where Cuil returned more results. So where are all of those 120+ Billion web pages? In fact, for the search “homes for sale” Cuil couldn’t come up with a single result while Google had close to 100 million. No search results for a relatively common search term is completely unacceptable.

However, even though common sense says that to have the best search results you need the most indexed pages, the real test comes down to relevance. This is where things becomes subjective. Let’s put aside the indexing numbers for now since a search engine should really be judged by the relevancy of the SERPs - quality over quantity. Unfortunately, Cuil doesn’t beat Google at this either. Whether I searched a broad or specific term Cuil usually displayed some relevant results, but they also had the habit of showing some random and irrelevant results. For example, I keep seeing New Zealand TLDs here and there. Sorry, when looking for “Homes” I am not interested in anything outside of the US. Don’t get me wrong, Cuil’s SERPs are good, however are they better than Googles? No, not from what I see.

Don’t get me wrong, Cuil does have some positives and cool features. I like their layout (3 or 2 columns) and how you can break searches into categories. But, at the end of the day Cuil is no Google or even Yahoo. I see it is a good search engine but it will never compete with the big three. Granted, it is only a few hours old but to compete with Google you need to launch perfectly out of the gate. Cuil could get better over time, but by then who really cares?

Now, in terms of Google killers, I think it is time we start to focus more on “Semantic Search”.

On a regular basis I am asked what online sources I use to gather news & information related to what I do.  This is a loaded question considering my personal “blog roll” changes on an almost daily basis, in fact the only thing that does not change are the topics: Digital Marketing, SEO, Search, New Media, Rich Media, Tech, etc. Once I list out my favorite blogs and websites the next question usually revolves around how do I consume so much content. The answer is simple…it depends on the content, the topic, the website and my location. Some websites I visit everyday as part of a morning / train ride ritual, some I browse through on my RSS reader while at work, some I get via email and read on my Blackberry. Like I said, it all depends.

It is my goal to stay connected to what is happening throughout the digital world at all times and I believe I accomplish this very well by truly relying on the best sources for information. Below are the where, the how and the what when it comes to how I get my daily download of digital information (in no particular order):

John Battelle’s Searchblog (Website and email) - Search, New Media

ReelSEO (Website and email) - Video SEO, Video, Rich Media

Mashable (website and email) - Social Media, Social Networking, New Media

TechCrunch (website, email and RSS) - Digital, Technology, Web 2.0, New Media, etc.

GigaOM (email) - New Media, Technology, Digital

Silicon Alley Insider (website and RSS) - Technology, Digital

Sphinn (RSS) - SEO, Search

Bruceclay.com Blog (RSS) - SEO, Search, SEM

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog (RSS and website) - Search

Official Google Blog (RSS and website) - Search

Web Analytics Blog | Occam’s Razor (Website, RSS and email) - Web Analytics

Shoemoney (Website and email) - Digital, Affiliate, SEO

SEOmoz Blog (website and RSS) - SEO, Search

Yahoo! Search Blog (RSS and website) - Search

Matt Cutts (website and RSS) - Search, SEO

MediaBytes With Shelly Palmer (Website and email) - New Media, Digital, Technology

All Things Digital (Website) - Digital, New Media

Web Analytics Demystified (Website) - Web Analytics

CrunchGear (Website) - Technology, Gadgets

TechMeMe (Website and RSS) - Technology

NewTeeVee (Website) - New Media, Digital

Digital Media Wire (Website) - New Media, Digital, Technology

MediaPost’s Search Insider (Email) - Search

Online Media Daily (Email) - Digital Marketing

Wireless Factors (Email) - Wireless

Web2List (Email) - Web 2.0, New Media, Technology

On top of the websites I utilize for my digital information, I also subscribe to numerous daily email alerts…just in case I missed something. Email alerts are great for quickly scanning topics as well as doing your own personal brand reputation management. The following are the keywords I subscribe to through Google Alerts: Viacom, Digital Marketing, Rich Media, SEO, Online Marketing, mRSS, Video SEO, SEO, search engine optimization, Khawe, Kieran Hawe, Hawe, MTV Networks, Social Media, SMO, Social Networking, Affiliate Marketing, Digital Strategy, Flux, Webtribution, Twitter, Web 2.0.

There you have it, where I go and how I get the latest news and insights into what interests me online. Have a website or information source that rocks that I didnt list? Let me know.

BTW,  this is meant as insight into my personal preferences and not a specific endorsement. But, hey if I read them they must be good.

Regardless of what you search for, Wikipedia usually has a high ranking - that equals a ton of traffic to the non-profit collaborative web property. Google’s answer to the monster that is Wikipedia is Knol, which is basically Wikipedia with more ownership and monetization. Knol, at its core, is a collection of “authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.”

Like Wikipedia, Knol is based on users creating content on specific topics which become searchable pages within Knols database. Unlike Wikipedia, once you visit Knol it will become very clear that the focus is on the author. Pages are created by authors who then have complete control over what changes are made to their page. Basically Knol wants to do away with the anonymity of topic pages and highlight the names of the people who have contributed to it.

“The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.”

Another key differentiator is that Knol will allow multiple articles on a specific topic - unlike Wikipedia which usually has one all-inclusive subject page. Which article comes up first when you search on Knol (and maybe organic results) will be determined by various factors, including if the author is verified, comments and probably most importantly by how well the article is ranked and reviewed - basically the social concept of the crowd determines what rises to the top. How quickly before people figure out how to game this system? I give it 3 months.

To further separate Knol from Wikipedia each author has the ability to monetize their page through integratation of AdSense ads - this obvioulsy results in a incentive to create good, popular, content. The monetization of pages will draw immediate attention and content creation, but I question the purity of the content when making money comes into play. The beauty of Wikipedia is that the people that contribute do it for the greater good of sharing knowledge, not how much money they can make.

So what do I think about Knol? It is nothing original but things will get interesting once their is significant amounts of content being created. Of course anything done by Google has a chance at making it to the mainstream and must be watched closely. However, there are still many questions that need to be answered…how will Knols impact search rankings? How and where will Knols show up in organic results? What about the inevitable influx of spam? What will Google do about copyright issues? Google, and anyone involved in search, will really need to keep a close eye on this in the coming weeks and months to see how theese questions get answered.

Oh, and by the way, Knol will allow one New Yorker magazine cartoon per page…take that Wikipedia!