everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: search

  • The Fine Art of Search Engine Marketing

    I dropped by the recent OMMA (Online Media, Marketing and Advertising) conference here in San Francisco and got a healthy education on some of the finer points of search engine marketing. What was most startling to me was the finding by one of the panel members (it might have been Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer, he was throwing a lot of stats around) that the ROI for most search engine campaigns is now up to $1.50 for each dollar invested. The significance of this was not lost on the audience. Search Engine advertising is no longer a marketing expense but a sales channel.

    I may be stating the obvious to some of you but this struck me as significant. When a traditional marketing activity moves from the expense column of a balance sheet to the revenue side, it completely changes how management views this activity.

    I had the good fortune to catch up with Joshua Stylman of Reprise Media and he explained to me some of the things that Reprise is doing to optimize marketing for their clients. Reprise also runs the Movable Type-powered blog, SearchViews so they’re drinking their own sherry (it tastes better than dogfood)

    For The New York Times, they analyze the top stories from the RSS feeds to make selective keyword purchases to drive readers to the nytimes.com site.

    For a Lord of the Rings merchandiser, they spider their client’s site to extract product names and use them in combination with general phrases related to Lord of the Rings to bid on "tail terms" which are extremely specific and thus low cost but highly effective and relevant. The case study (registration required) goes on to quote attaining a 1:6 ratio of ad dollars spent to every dollar generated!

    I don’t know about you but if I had a campaign that returned $6 for every dollar spent, I don’t think there would be any doubt in my not looking to maximize resources spent on that channel.

    I found the tenor of this conference refreshing. Unlike other conferences which had the feel of a shrill carnival, this one was more in tune to the art of good advertising; the importance of creating something that is of value to not only the advertiser but, equally important, the consumer. I appreciate that there are companies out there that are taking the time to work out phrases that will find me exactly those things out on the tail that I might want. Spend your money to optimize the tail, relevance will trump brute force "Punch the Monkey" schemes every time. Anyone remember the x10 camera?

  • Grokker & Data Visualizaiton

    I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a sucker for whiz bang tools that change the way we look at things. When it comes to search, I’m always on the lookout for a better way to scan a text listing of search results. While there have been many attempts at this (remember some of the early data viz attempts by Alta Vista?) I always ended up going back to relevance ranked text search results. Nothing can really beat the speed with which the mind can process text on a page.

    Grokker.com is the latest attempt to make searching more efficient through the use of data visualization. They’ve been around for a while with a client side version of their graphical user interface and they’ve been showing off their front end to Yahoo Search since early May. After being reminded of Grokker by a post from Steve Goldstein, I thought I’d give it another whirl.

    Conclusion? After 10 minutes of playing around and trying out different searches I’m not convinced that this is going to bring any extra value for me. I think that a generic search does not lend itself well to this type of presentation. The clumping of similar results into a sphere that you can explore may be helpful if you’re searching on a really broad concept (i.e. "polish") and do not know where to begin but as soon as you have a set of results focused enough to scan through them, the visual representation breaks down and is less efficient than plain text. Grokker tries to overcome this with the text preview box but the slight time delay makes it more frustrating than effective.

    I am usually pretty tuned in to how I want to search on something and how to construct that search. Call me an old command line guy but I know better than to search on a single, ambiguous word and expect results that will be relevant. It’s much better for me to try out a couple of examples with liberal use of the browser’s back button than to wait for an AI program to "grok" my result set for me.

    This is not to say that data visualization is all fluff – it can be very powerful  when applied in specific situations. I’m a big fan of Edward Tufte and all the great work being done around the Google Maps API in combination with other data overlays (real estate listings, crime in Chicago) is clearly preferable to a text representation of the same data. Likewise, Blogpulse is trying to represent blog posts over time which is a great initial step towards representing  search results over time. In each of these cases, the application of data visualization is effective because the data is already focused enough so that the graphical representation of that data is effective. In general search, there are too many questions about the base data that undermine the impact of the graphical presentation to make such an interface an effective way to navigate search results.

  • Technorati Amplifies the Conversation at Salon

    Technorati has integrated itself into Salon.com with a new feature which lists the most blogged stories of the site. In addition, they list links at the bottom of each story so that you can follow the conversation out of Salon and trace the thread into other blogs that have linked to the Salon piece. Richard Ault has a nice write up illustrating the integration with screenshots and Niall Kennedy describes this as the first of what Technorati hopes to be many such integrations.

    Salon is the first of what we at Technorati hope will be many integration deals with media partners. I want to continue to get the quality content produced by bloggers marketed to as big of as big of an audience as possible. Journalists are often asked how their job security has changed with the popularity of weblogs. I think both serve a purpose and complement each other, and the Salon partnership takes a big step in that direction with a pioneering Internet content company.

  • Statistically Improbable Phrases

    Via Paul Bausch is news of a feature in Amazon.com that runs analysis on books scanned into Amazon’s Search Inside index. From Amazon’s site:

    Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

    Yet another tool to hook you back to the Amazon mothership. Here’s a list of books that list the improbable phrase, thumb tribes.

  • Reading vs. Scanning, Browsing vs. Searching

    A common objection to blogs is that because the medium is so easy to update and the cost so low, too much unedited drivel makes it online to make the material useful as a source of business information. I have to say I don’t mind people speaking their mind in an unedited stream. I describe it as viewing the raw feed from a network news show, the satellite uplink where you get to see the anchorman get his nose powdered during the commercial break.

    To me, the rough edges, where you see the process behind the production is an important part of the context. To those that view these edges as irrelevant and something that should be edited out of sight, I say that any skillfully-crafted search statement should be able to cut right by these distractions.

    The internet is messy. It’s not about finished pieces – it’s about works in progress. When Usenet was my the source of information, my kill file was my friend, it helped me filter out irrelevance. Navigating through a site map or other navigational aid is becoming a paradigm of the past. Now it’s all about using search engines used as scalpels to get right to the point. This is why search engine marketing has become such a hot business.

    I read magazines, I browse newspapers. I search the internet, I scan the results. I really don’t browse the internet anymore. If there’s a lengthy piece I want to read, I print it.

    Which leads me to my last point. I saw the piece about blogging on ABC Nightline last night and the one good point they made is that as links are propagated to the second and third degree, they drift further from the original point and the linking process twists original context much like a phrase gets misinterpreted in a game of telephone.

    How do we keep necessary context while also allowing people to drill down past it?

  • Yahoo Search API

    Just in time for it’s 10 year anniversary, Yahoo opened up API access to its search platform.  Allowing programmatic access to search services via URLs is a trail that Google has already blazed but in what maybe another arms race as we saw with hosted email storage, Yahoo allows five times the number of queries; 5,000 over a 24 hour period.

    There’s already an O’Reilly Hacks book in the queue (what’s with the cowboy boots on the cover anyway?), a growing list of applications that’s hosted on a wiki, and, a developer’s weblog running on our favorite blog platform, Movable Type.
    Jeremy Zawodny     has done a great job of bringing together all the right tools to get this ecosystem off the ground and is clearly the booster that made it happen. Great work!

    Opening up access this way ties in nicely with Yahoo’s media hub strategy which distributes their services in order to drive people back to Yahoo properties, boosting page views for advertising and brand awareness. The question on everyone’s mind is if the Search API set is a trial balloon for a broader rollout of other services. Yahoo IM? Finance? Music? Maps? Horoscope API anyone?

  • Ask Jeeves launches blog on TypePad

    Ask Jeeves moved to a shiny new office tower in Oakland and launched a shiny new blog to boot!

    UPDATE: and buys online RSS reader, Bloglines.

  • A9 Yellow Pages, teaching an old dog new tricks

    I would be remiss if I didn’t pile on to the hubub about Amazon’s new Yellow Pages search over on the A9 site. John Battelle’s got the scoop on how it was put together.

    In short, Manber and co. (urged on by Jeff Bezos, who Manber says was "very involved") strapped GPS-enabled digital video camera-cum-terabyte server rigs to the top of a bunch of SUVs, then drove them around the commercial areas of major US metropolitan areas, recording what then became composite still pictures of entire cities, one address at a time. A9 took more than 20 million images of 14 million+ businesses across ten cities (more are coming soon), then created a local search application they call Block View.

    Of course I see other benefits as well for my friends and family overseas. Wondering what Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley looks like these days? Take a stroll starting at Amoeba Records and click on the image to scroll either up towards the University or down towards Ashby. Notice Amazon still need to get photos of the other side of the street so you can’t see Moe’s yet but the listing tells you it’s still there.

    Then there the new game in finding unsuspecting people caught in internet eternity in front of questionable enterprises. How would you like to be known as the guy on the cellphone in front of Peepworld?

  • Higher Relevance = Lower Ad Sales

    Kind of obvious when you think about it but if the industry were to continue down the path of developing the perfect search engine that could find you exactly what you were looking for, would you even bother clicking on a context sensitive advertisement?