Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Ask.com, a distant 4th in the search engine race, launched some anticipated changes to their core search engine. The “new” Ask.com focuses not just on web results but also “structured” data within various categories. The changes are meant to deliver faster and more relevant search engine results, as well as integration of Q&A sites like WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers for those search queries posted as a question. Interestingly, the new Ask.com also removes the 3 paneled SERP and goes to the standard 2 panel display.

From the ASK.com Blog:

Our goal is to deliver the best answer to you, the first time, every time. We know that is a difficult goal and no search engine can always deliver with that precision 100% of the time, but we think we’re getting closer and closer to the ‘bullseye’. We also believe you will agree once you’ve tried out our new version.

Presenting direct answers to your searches, front and center, has always been at the heart of the Ask.com experience, and we push further down that path today with the introduction of three new answer technologies:  DADS, DAFS, and AnswerFarm. These technologies take both structured and unstructured data, and - instead of delivering a title and description for each document - they deliver answers.

Here is an example from the new Ask.com for the search query “What is a good credit score?”

So will this give Ask.com new momentum in the search engine war? Nope. Ask.com is good, like the results, but in the end they will always be behind better / bigger search engines Google, Yahoo and Live.

David Provost, noted entrepreneur and expert on the Semantic Web (Web 3.0), recently published a report titled “On The Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry“. The report profiles 17 industry participants and analysis that focuses on:

• The Semantic Web as a commercially competitive technology.
• Linked data will be extremely valuable - when it’s better understood.
• Natural Language Processing is an important step in deriving value from”World Wild Content”.

The semantic web or Web 3.0 is where most experts see the current web evolving into. Provost’s report takes on the task of bringing clarity and meaning to “Web 3.0″, as well as taking on the task of providing future vision of where the internet is heading. The report is a must read for anyone involved in the online environment.

Of course there is some argument as to what the exact definition of the Semantic Web is, personally I go with Tim Berners-Lee: “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

Microsoft just launched their latest gimmick to try and increase their search engine usage market share. SearchPerks, which went live this morning, rewards users for searching using Live Search on Live.com, MSN.com, Hotmail or Windows Live Messenger. Basically, once you sign up and download their “Perk Counter”, you get 1 ticket for every search you do (up to 25 per day), you can then exchange those tickets for prizes like concert tickets, games, airplane miles, etc.

From the offical SearchPerks website, which by the way can ONLY BE VIEWED IN IE 6.0 or higher:

Here is how it works:

• Get 500 tickets just by signing up and downloading the Perk Counter

• Start searching using Live Search at Live.com and MSN.com, or on Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger

• For every search (up to 25 per day), you’ll earn a ticket towards great prizes

• Stay tuned for additional ways to earn tickets once you join the promotion

• Redeem your tickets for prizes once the promotion ends on April 15, 2009

Is it me or does this sound like something from 1998? Does Microsoft really think this is going to work? Here is what will happen, a bunch of web users will do their searches on Live.com until April 15, 2009 - cash in their tickets and then 99% of them will never come back. Microsoft will see their search share go up a few percentage points during this gimmick but will drop back down to their original level when all is said and done.

Seriously Microsoft? Why don’t you focus your efforts on 2 things 1) making your search better , which includes integration of the Powerset semantic search and 2) buy Yahoo search.

The “Official Google Blog” put up a post yesterday titled “Search evaluation at Google” that gives some really interesting insight into how Google goes about improving search result quality and user-experience. Below are some points I found to be interesting, but I highly recommend reading the entire post.

Google’s evaluation methods:

• “Human evaluators. Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or “side by side” with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions.”
  
• “Live traffic experiments. We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of queries are shown results from alternative search approaches. Ben Gomes talked about how we make use of these experiments for testing search UI elements in his previous post. With these experiments, we are able to see real users’ reactions (clicks, etc.) to alternative results.”

Anyone remotely involved in SEO or digital marketing should always take advantage of any information / insight Google opens to the public.

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”.

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!

When you are fighting for your life you need to do anything you can to save it. Yahoo executives, who are fighting for their jobs, are using their most valuable asset - the Yahoo.com Homepage - in their fight against Carl Icahn.

The Yahoo homepage, which is the most visited single page on the internet, is being used to let shareholders know the “truth” about Carl Icahn and convince the voters that his plans are wrong for the future of Yahoo. As you can see from the image at the bottom of this post, Yahoo didn’t just give the Icahn / Microsoft fight some meaningless real estate, we are talking big graphical call-outs on the right side and footer…space that is probably worth a very high CPM and garners millions of daily eyeballs. When you click on one of the two locations it takes you to a “Yahoo Stockholder Information” page that calls out Icahn and focuses on two big points: “The Icahn Slate Is Not the Right Answer for Yahoo!” and “Yahoo!’s Experienced Board and Executive Leadership Are Positioning Yahoo! for Future Success”. Basically, Yahoo points out the many flaws in Icahn’s plans and tries to discredit his business experience by calling out his not so good recent involvements with public companies.

So what exactly is Yahoo looking to get out of this? First they are trying to get every single Yahoo voting shareholder to side with the current executive team, there is even a convenient “vote now” button. Secondly, I am sure that Yahoo, who has been hammered recently in the press, could use any positive sway in public opinion. However, I would assume that any shareholder that cares to vote are well versed in what is been going on since every major media outlet online and offline has covered this Yahoo / Microsoft / Icahn battle in great detail from the beginning.

To me this reeks a bit of desperation, however it is understandable desperation. The fact that Yahoo has leveraged its homepage for their proxy fight shows that this battle very close - probably even more close than anyone expected.

In what was no shock to anyone, Twitter officially announced their purchase of search engine Summize for roughly a few million in cash and Twitter stock (hearing different numbers from different sources). Rumors of the purchase have been floating around the internet for over a week now and most people were just waiting for the official announcement. Today we saw what was once Summize.com now direct you to Twitter Search (Search.Twitter.com),which is the same Summize user-interface but with Twitter branding.

Summize was always the best Twitter search application around, I regularly used it to not only monitor specific keywords but my own name. Summize gained a great deal of traction and traffic when Twitter was having their technical issues the past couple of months. Twitter users flocked to Summize and other search services to make sure they caught all of their @replies and friends messages. I, like many others, never stopped using it once Twitter (sort of) got their act together.

On the surface the purchase of Summize drastically improves the internal search functionality of Twitter. But, as I have discussed in previous Twitter Monetization posts, this acquisition is another step in bringing in actual revenue. How? First, they can sell ads on the Twitter Search results pages. This is the easiest and most logical immediate step as everyone would be up in arms over any sort of advertisements within the main Twitter interface and Tweets. Secondly, Twitter can license out the Summize API to other micro-blogging / Web 2.0 services to power their own internal site-search, in this scenario they can either get paid for the use or have a rev-share deal in place.

The great thing about this deal is that it is a win-win for Twitter. They have improved the user-experience, brought in some top engineers and maybe created a much needed revenue model.

Now if only they can get rid of the “Fail Whale”…

Last night Yahoo announced the launch of another piece in their “open” puzzle by releasing Yahoo Search BOSS. BOSS, which stands for Build your Own Search Service, allows anyone to build and launch a custom search platform that is powered by Yahoo! search’s proprietary technology and infrastructure.

I played around with BOSS today and it is pretty cool, however it really isn’t that innovative considering both Microsoft and Google already offer their own custom search solutions. The difference with BOSS is that Yahoo really does give more control over the key part of any search engine - the rankings and results. Basically, Yahoo allows the user to manipulate the rankings however they see fit, this will really come in handy for more advanced users that are looking for their own unique search engine but do not have the resources to build it themselves.

Here is a list of features that are currently available with BOSS (Yahoo plans on rolling out more features over the next few months).

• Ability to re-rank and blend results.
• Presentation flexibility: no Yahoo display / branding requirements.
• BOSS Mashup Framework: allows developers to mashup search results with other public data sources.
• Access to web, news and image search.
• No rate limits on daily queries.

So why is Yahoo! launching BOSS? Two main reasons: 1) to grow their share of the search market and 2) create new revenue streams. I am not exactly sure how successful they will be with both but here is what Yahoo had to say about it…

“First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success — opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS — will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, we see a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo! Search experience and as a result, improve the quality of results our BOSS partners and their users get. Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, we’ll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.”

Since I have used Google’s Custom Search Engine on numerous properties for some time now, the question becomes would I switch to BOSS? Not right away, but once Yahoo releases some other features and I see BOSS in action more, it is definitely something I will consider.