everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: search

  • The Wall Comes Down

    Everyone wondered if the New York Times would be able to pull off their Times Select premium news experiment. Despite projections of up to $10 Million in annual subscription revenues as of Wednesday morning most areas of nytimes.com will be free of charge. This is excellent news for bloggers who will now be able to point to articles on the site and know their readers will be able to follow their references with our having to pay a subscription fee.

    Back when Times Select launched almost two years ago there was talk of driving subscriptions via an affiliate program. I guess that never really took off and now Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of nytimes.com admits that, “What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google and Yahoo,”

    It’s widely known that more traffic comes into the site via search engine links and blog referrals than via the front door and if you’re not converting successfully via these entry points then you’re better off monetizing the traffic via advertising.

    It’ll be interesting to see if this puts pressure on wsj.com to open up as Rupert Murdoch, their new owner, has hinted.

    I still think that the optimal combination of free vs. premium is the one that I outlined two years ago when Times Select launched.

    Restricting access during the period when these pieces are the most valuable will drive subscriptions to TimesSelect. It makes less sense to keep these pieces under lock and key throughout the time when people are mildly curious to see what all the fuss is about and have the time to sample a frequently referenced article without having to commit to an annual subscription. I would prefer to see the program re-jigged so that TimesSelect members get first dibs on grokking the perspective of the day but after 48 hours the doors are open for any and all up until the 3 month mark when they drop back to a view which restricts non-subscribers to only the first few paragraphs.

    Open access to popular pieces for a three month period would help move low cost advertising inventory and allow for the fence-sitters to properly experience the quality of the Times’ news stream should they later decide they want to get access to this stuff prior the 48 hour embargo for non-subscribers.

    Call it Kennedy’s Rolling Window of news & perspective. The cheap seats only let you see what’s directly in front of the window while subscribers get to see not only what’s coming down the pike but also dig back and review what’s gone by.

  • Climbing back up the rankings

    Climbing back up the rankings

    One of the most frustrating things about moving your blog to a new domain is watching your various rankings drop off a cliff and the associated loss in all the things that come with it. Despite all the attention to detail (301 redirects, revisions on all your various social networking profiles, re-writing URLs) you basically cease to exist as far as the search engines are concerned and here we are, now a month later and I’m still crawling my way back to relevance.

    Reputation and influence is not portable.

    SEO is just a passing hobby of mine. Feeling inspired after the last Webmaster World conference in Las Vegas, I experimented a bit on my old domain and tried to see if I could get myself ranked for “social media advertising” and was pleasantly surprised when it only took me a few weeks to reach the #1 spot for the phrase on all four major search engines. I later realized that the term was not as popular as “social media marketing” so I shifted to focus on that term. I soon ranked highly for that term as well. That was back in January.

    I later lost interest and didn’t really think of it until I moved everything over to this new blog on this new domain on August 5th. Right before I pulled the plug on the old blog, I took a snapshot of my rankings on various services and have been tracking my comeback and it’s been pretty slow going.

    Here’s a summary of the highest point I had reached on cavitate.net and where I am now on everwas.com:

    Rankings for “social media advertising”

    • cavitate.net – either 1 or 2 for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. #6 for Ask
    • everwas.com – not even in the first 50 results

    Rankings for “social media marketing”

    • cavitate.net – in the top 30 for Google, Yahoo and MSN, #5 for Ask
    • everwas.com – #31 for Google, nowhere on Yahoo, MSN. Ask still has my old domain listed at #17

    Technorati Authority. Stowe Boyd had a series of posts where he tracked his rise back up the rankings after he moved his blog which is interesting for comparison except that that was back before Technorati calculated an authority value.

    • cavitate.net – 56
    • everwas.com – 12

    Google Pagerank

    • cavitate.net – 4
    • everwas.com – not even rated yet, must still be in the “sandbox”

    Yahoo! Site Explorer Inlinks – I didn’t measure the inlinks on cavitate.net but I’ve been watching the inlinks climb up and am now at 866.

    Google Webmaster Tools Inlinks – I also never got this on the old site but just saw it jump from just a handful to 4, 593 on 9/4

    MyBlogLog

    • cavitate.net – 126 members in its heyday
    • everwas.com – only 5 members have discovered this new site

    It’ll be interesting to see if these numbers change much over time. If you feel like giving me a little boost, feel free to link to everwas.com using the phrase “social media marketing” or “social media advertising” and see if that will change things.

    Photo by Todd Sampson

  • Sitemaps.org

    Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google now all support the same sitemap protocol. If you are concerned about the way the search engines crawl and index your site, create a sitemap and make it available. More information at sitemaps.org.

    Also be sure to check out Yahoo! Site Explorer for more tools on how to manage your site including when Yahoo last crawled your site.

     

  • Blog Search Shootin’ Match

    Bit of a blog search shooting match going on between old standby Technorati and new kid on the block, Sphere.

    Technorati’s signed on ap.org and will work with Edleman on international expansion. Meanwhile, Sphere has embedded their bookmarklet into Time.com.

    Technorati looks at link structure while Sphere casts the net a bit wider looking at the text on the page to get more contextually matched pages that may not be linked via an explicit url. 

    I’ve have both Sphere It! and Technorati This! (sheeesh, that was hard to find that link) bookmarklets side-by-side and find the two actually compliment each other. I use "S" when I am looking for conversation around a very broad topic and am looking for the fuzzy cloud of buzz around it and I use "T" when it’s a specific topic (or flash/video site with little or no textual info such as the new nikeplus.com site) and I want to hone in on just the people linking-to-that-very-URL.

    Two things I like about Sphere are the narrow time windows (last hour!) and the cool flash-based measuremap slider thingy that comes up when you select custom date range. By the way, this widget is available under a Creative Commons license from the kind folks over at Adaptive Path who worked on both Measure Map and Sphere.

    sphere slider widget

  • Creating a fake invite for a fictitious event

    After a mocked up invite to a "secret" Apple press event was found out to be false, the brilliant minds over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog dreamed up a contest with their readers to submit the best design concepts as comments to their blog. Apple fans are diehard rumor mongers who also have the best graphic design software at their fingertips so the quality of submissions are quite good.

    Added bonus is that with all the linking (69 as of now) and trackbacks this post has created, I’m sure that this post will eventually bubble up the rankings for TUAW over their competition the next time anyone searches on "apple rumor."

    Here’s a test – today a search on Yahoo shows the following:

    1. Appleinsider.com
    2. Rumor Has It (an apple.com trailer)
    3. crazyapplerumors.com
    4. appleturns.com
    5. thinksecret.com

    Google’s basically got the same list (minus the apple.com trailer) but same story, TUAW isn’t on the first page of results.

    Check back in a few weeks and let’s see if anything changes.

  • Kill the Paperboy

    Sometimes and idea gets floated that is so out of whack with current trends that you wonder if the author is just trolling for pageviews. Predicting the death of Google seems to be the latest parlor game and BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine has the latest with his post, Putting the Screws to Google.

    What if 2006 is the year big media players take aim at Google’s kneecaps? No, not with more lawsuits; the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers — on behalf, in part, of BusinessWeek’s parent company, The McGraw-Hill Companies — and Agence France-Presse have already sued the search behemoth. Rather, picture this: Walt Disney, News Corp., NBC Universal, and The New York Times, in an odd tableau of unity, join together and say: “We are the founding members of the Content Consortium. Next month we launch our free, searchable Web site, which no outside search engines can access.” (A simple bit of code is all it takes to bar all or some major search engines from accessing a site.) “From now on we’ll make our stuff available and sell ads around it and the searches for it, but only on our terms. Who else wants to join us? Membership’s free.”

    This is just nuts. Of course media companies are jealous of Google’s $450 share price. I’m sure many a publisher thinks that the site was built on the back of their content and feel they should get some of the advertising revenues sold next to the search results. But to try and build your own search engine and ask your readers to come seek you out just seems as shortsighted as previous efforts to wall off information in pursuit of higher margins.

    The overwhelming trend and momentum of the information economy is towards universal access. Powerful tools such as the search engines which indexes the information and social networks such as blogs and RSS feeds which act as filters to point to and annotate the good stuff only get better with greater access and distribution. With greater access everyone gets a piece of the growing pie. The more content from a site that gets indexed and added to the ecosystem the greater the share of the attention and traffic that clicks through to read the referred to articles and the greater the chance for the publisher to engage the reader and draw them in with more related material. The more good stuff is out there, the more folks will use the ecosystem as a source of information making the pie even larger.

    The newspaper sites should be focused on how to convert a casual reader that might come across their site by way of search engine hit or blog post refer to an engaged reader that will click through to more information and benefit from highly relevant advertising related to what they’re reading. Trying to choke off a search engines access to their information and force readers to come to their own search engine is like laying off all your paperboys because you can make better margins by asking your readers to drive to your downtown offices and pick up the paper themselves. “Come on by, your copy will be waiting for you!” Not likely.

    The other aspect of the Content Consortium that I just don’t see working is the bickering over shared costs of the infrastructure, how to effectively cooperate on ad sales, sharing profits, coming to agreement on technology, and index update times.

    Would you base profit-sharing based on the number of articles you upload into the index? That would really tick off the news weeklies that have far fewer stories than the daily papers. Would the wire services get credit for one liner “flash” headlines?

    Yahoo spends lots of time continually thinking how to improve our search engine. We have an entire research team dedicated to thinking about this. I don’t think a search engine is a commodity. Who’s technology will they use? How will they agree upon relevance? I can see the publishers debating this one for decades.

    I could riff on and on about this but at it’s core, pulling all the news off the search engine goes against what everyone wants, except the publishers. Putting up walls or creating scarcity by killing distribution of your product is the wrong way to build a buisness but a great way to kill one.

  • Privacy Wall

    I wrote the following post on Friday and was going to mull it over for a bit but then this article came out in today’s Washington Post that made the issues raised here all the more timely.

    An interesting topic was brought up that was glossed over in coverage of Friday’s Search SIG. John Battelle warned that the search engine industry is eventually going to hit a privacy wall. In pursuit of the perfect search result (which we all know is relative) it’s implicit that a search engine needs to know a bit about the person running the search. The more a search engine knows about you, the more relevant the results. If you identify yourself as a car fanatic and type in “jaguar,” an informed search engine can skew the Jaguar car information over the stuff on big black cats.

    As search engines pull in increasing amounts of information to gain context, there is going to be a point where the search engine companies begin to tread into a grey area where the rules and practices of how to handle private information have not been worked out. Every site has it’s privacy policy but who takes the time to read through these anymore? It would  be helpful to have a debate about this now. Who owns your information? What are best practices on how it’s stored? How can your data be used in aggregate? What are the opt-out procedures? Can there a simple way to indicate the level of privacy control, through the use of icons, much in the same way that Creative Commons indicates copyright control?

    We are ever more connected to the data cloud called the internet and mobile devices will prompt more and more of us to upload our information such as calendars & contacts into this cloud so we can access it anytime and anywhere we want. How many of you have clicked that little “sync” button in Plaxo and later realized that every contact you’ve every met now joyfully reminds you every year of their birthday? It’s so easy to forget what pieces of information you’re throwing around and how that data is used and shared.

    Battelle calls for search engine companies to kick off a debate on guidelines & best practices around privacy before something terrible happens that forces the government to step in with heavy-handed regulations that would bog down development of the social web. I would argue that this debate over privacy is already happening with the cases of Choicepoint and Westlaw earlier this year. Joi Ito has also posted at length about the privacy debate as it related to a program to roll out a National ID database in Japan.

    Clearly the elephant in the room as we all dance down the road to one big inter-connected nirvana. Being absolutely clear to the public about the trade off between sharing personal information and greater utility is an important point that should not be glossed over in the name of progress.

    UPDATE: John Battelle has an op-ed piece in the Sunday San Jose Mercury News on the topic. Related to privacy, I also point you to Barton Gellman who has written at length about “national security letters” in The Washington Post. These letters, which are authorized under the USA Patriot Act, give US agents broad powers to ask for and receive personal information in the pursuit of national security and obligates the provider of the information to keep the disclosure secret. Over 30,000 of these letters have been served and including the case of an orange alert in Las Vegas at the end of 2003. In order to try and locate a potential terrorist threat, the hotel records of an estimated 1 million guests at Las Vegas hotels were sent to the FBI for a data mining exercise.

    In this case, what happened in Vegas didn’t necessarily stay in Vegas.

  • Yahoo hoovers the dark web

    Big news. Yahoo has quietly launched a beta service which allows you to use the Yahoo engine to search content that normally sits disaggregated behind proprietary subscription walls. Some of you may recall the old Northern Light service which attempted to do the same but never was able to convince the larger aggregators to play. KeepMedia tried the same model and hoped to use the clout of the Borders Books brand to bring the magazine publishers directly to the table but has since faded from view. When I last talked to representatives from KeepMedia, they were more interested in the potential of their service as a place to sell targeted ad inventory.

    This time it seems that the attractiveness of Yahoo’s collective query traffic was just too good to resist and they currently offer a unified search box for the FT, WSJ Online, Forrester, and more. Yahoo Search Blog says that the big aggregators Factiva, Gale, and Lexis-Nexis are on the way in the coming weeks as well. The Factiva and Gale collections have been open to non-subscriber queries for some time now via the Microsoft Office 2003 Marketplace but because it was hidden away in a little Research Pane off of Office 2003, it never had a chance to test the Free Search > Become a Subscriber to Read the Article, model at scale. Yahoo will now test that model in spades.

    Don’t misunderstand me. Yahoo Subscriptions will never replace the power and benefit of the specialized search interfaces that aggregators such as Factiva have built for their core customers. But Yahoo will introduce a whole new class of customers to the value of searchable, archived publications that have, to date, been mostly limited to the Information Professional.

    Gary Price brings up a good point and asks what will happen when a unified search of premium content and free web content presents the stark economic contrast of the $2.95/article vs. free on the web side by side in the same search results. Look for intense downward pressure between all three main aggregators as they fight to offer the most compelling package to attract these new subscribers. The New York Times already fired the first shot with their TimesSelect plan. The one vendor that can offer both the NY Times and WSJ as well as the rest of their collection for the best price will lock in the lion’s share of the revenue from the Yahoo channel. This price war will be great for the consumer but rip shreds from the margins of the aggregators as they try and come up with the most attractive pricing.

    You can be sure that Google will follow in Yahoo’s footsteps soon enough (while huming "anything you can do, I can do better") and maybe even MSN and Ask will play the game once the model has been established. All this activity is going to expose the aggregators to the full force of the wild and fickle world of internet consumer business models in which they have little experience.

    Right now it’s a dead heat between Factiva, LexisNexis, or Gale to win the race to be the primary benefactor of Yahoo’s consumer search engine traffic. My guess is that the winner will be the vendor that can offer the most comprehensive collection of content (unfortunately, meta-data is irrelevant for the keyword searches coming from the typical Yahoo searcher) with a subscription model that is both economically attractive and easy to purchase.

    Some things that will quickly put one of these vendors in the lead are:

    – integration with all major credit cards and PayPal. Bonus if you can tap into Yahoo’s Small Business billing system.
    – persistent URLs that allow bloggers to point to specific articles deep within the database. 
    – a sense of community. Build in screens to entice subscribers login and see things such as the most popular (linked and viewed) articles and other exclusive features.
    – strong relationships with content providers that allow flexibility with pricing. It will take some time to settle on a model that works for the consumer and is sustainable for both the aggregator and publisher.

    The race is on. May the vendor with the longest tail win!

    Additional commentary by:
    John Battelle
    Paid Content
    Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra
    John Blossom

  • Technorati Beta

    It’s out folks, the latest and greatest version of Technorati is now available in a public beta. It’s smoothed out its corners and added a whole host of pre-loaded searches of top searches, news, books, movies right up front. If you login to your account on Technorati, you can also view your Watchlist searches right from the home page. In the words of Founder & CEO David Sifry, the goal is to make the site "accessible to more people and, specifically, people who new to blogging." Right on!