Bing and Google Team up with Twitter

Last week both Bing and Google announced deals with Twitter that will have the popular micro-blogging service share real-time Twitter data, or tweets, with each major search engine. While Microsoft has already created a co-branded Twitter trends and search product (bing.com/twitter), it is widely speculated that each engine will start indexing and serving tweets within search results pages. Although few details were released, it’s clear that two long-debated topics have officially gained some semblance of clarity: “How will Twitter monetize its valuable trove of user chatter?” and “How will search engines tackle the real-time social search space?”
From a search standpoint, the implications are vast. A major criticism of algorithmic search has forever centered on the inability of search engine crawlers to index and serve real-time information quickly enough to respond to consumer demand for breaking stories or popular trends. Though Google has come a long way by integrating semi-fresh news into search results pages via Universal Search, any regular search engine user has at least once attempted to search for information on a breaking news story only to be forced to navigate directly to news sites because the latest stories had yet to be indexed. The value that Twitter brings is that not only are users picking up on stories as they happen – often times from the scene of the story – but they are directing other users to content around the web in real time, as it is updated.

The flip side is that anyone who has searched for breaking news on Twitter’s vastly underdeveloped search engine (twitter.com/search) is often inundated with irrelevant information, worthless or sometimes inflammatory comments, or even spam. Where the search engines provide value – and why this marriage is so promising – is the integration of the algorithm and the human. Should Google or Bing find a way to apply a filter or relevancy funnel to tweets, they would be able to offer searchers real-time, human-generated information in a way that’s useful and informative. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where some breaking news happens and Google is able to filter Twitter results that only show the original source of the story, re-tweets by only the most respected or influential Twitter users, and the most respected news sites or blogs. Call it a TweetRank, if you will.

The second potentially valuable outcome of this deal is the fruition of something the search engine industry has been clamoring over for years: social search. While Google has made the Internet vastly more manageable and useful (not to mention a boat load of money: #GOOG) with algorithmic-based search, nobody has to this point been able to find a way to give users and consumers a centralized way to access the opinions, thoughts, and sentiments of web users. Ranking and serving websites based on a formula of content relevancy, link popularity, and accessibility has proved useful, but it has had little to do with what the collective voice of the Internet population may think. It’s the content creators, not the content consumers, who matter.

Although you can get opinions about a new restaurant from places like Yelp, or learn about what Kanye did at the VMAs on your favorite pop blog or through your Facebook feed, you’re not going to actually find out what the Internet thinks unless you can harness all of the conversations and serve them up in a relevant way. This is where 140 characters of tweets come into play. Not only does Twitter offer millions of succinct thoughts in real time, but it offers links to millions of different areas of opinion and content that have nothing to do with how many inbound links a site has, or what the anchor texts of those links say. The promise of social search is a way to couple algorithmic relevancy factors with the conversations, not just the content.

There will always be a large percentage of searches that will require nothing more than rank of relevancy or thoroughness. What search engines are missing are the searches that require a voice and an opinion, or that are happening as the Internet is searching. Twitter has played its hand and has given away its treasure trove. If recent history is any guide, it will be up to Google and Bing to come up with the most relevant and user-friendly way to serve it to you, with the winner taking the gold (and the money).

Article by Justin Scarborough

The Year (Almost) Of Mobile Search

This article was previously published in SearchInsider October 9th

Each year at Razorfish we release our Digital Outlook Report in which we make predictions about the trends, developments and opportunities that will dominate the next calendar year.  Fortunately no one’s keeping score.  For the last four years running we’ve said the coming year would be the breakout year for mobile.  So far that hasn’t happened.  Since we’ve been wrong so many times before, I will take a more cautious approach here and simply say that 2010 is the year in which marketers need to make a serious investment in their mobile strategy.

To be honest, I had written off mobile and mobile search.  Despite years of hype, we’ve seen only pockets of relevant opportunities for our clients, and even there the opportunities were very, very small.  To put it in perspective, our mobile search campaigns pull in less than 1/100th the volume of our traditional desktop-based campaigns.

At that level of scale, the channel has been easy to ignore.  The other week, however, I had a conversation that piqued my interest.  In speaking with the heads of mobile at Google and MSN, respectively, I learned their data independently verified that smart phone users (those on the iPhone, Palm and Google Android platforms — BlackBerry is not quite there yet) exhibit mobile search behavior almost identical to that of desktop-based searchers.

This is a profound and deeply important insight: smart phone users are treating their handsets like a portable desktop; they are browsing, searching and transacting on their phones.  Since smart phone growth is one of the fastest-growing segments of the mobile market, it is certain that over the next several years more and more searchers will be adopting this behavior and using their phone like a portable PC.   There are several important implications of this trend.

First, if searchers are treating their phone like a desktop, marketers need to offer desktop-quality experiences on mobile devices.  Developing a site experience that renders well on a 2″x3″ screen will no longer be a cutting-edge novelty.  Marketers will need to invest in creating effective, small-format site experiences.  Apps may play a part in this ecosystem, but apps alone will not suffice.  If searchers are indeed using their phones like mobile PCs, they will demand Web-based content and functionality independent of the on-deck environment.  Marketers should take the time now to experiment with mobile site design while the stakes are still relatively small.

Additionally, search marketers need to start experimenting aggressively in mobile search.  This is advice we are giving to our clients today.  The tactics and techniques that make desktop-based paid search campaigns effective do not translate perfectly to the mobile environment.  Ad copy, for example, is much more effective in mobile search campaigns when specifically tailored for that channel.  While the stakes are still low, and the cost of experimentation light, search marketers and search agencies should take time to test, learn and prepare for a world where the mobile search opportunity drives meaningful business results.

Moving away from marketers’ imperatives, searcher behavior on smart phones has serious implications for the major search engines as well.  Is search behavior on smart phones fully incremental to desktop search?  I can’t believe it is.  That means mobile search will cannibalize desktop search activity, at least to some extent.  That’s not good news for search engines, especially Google.  There simply isn’t enough real estate on the mobile device to monetize search results as well as Google has done on the desktop format.  Could mobile search do to Google what the Web has done to print media, turning, to borrow a phrase, desktop dollars into mobile nickels?  I doubt the threat to Google is as grave as that facing the print industry today, but I’ll be closely watching the dynamic between these two channels
It’s easy to make predictions when no one checks your track record, but in 2010 we will put our predictions into action.  We’ll work with clients to design compelling small screen site experiences, we’ll test our way through the budding mobile search marketplace, and we’ll short Google’s stock as mobile eats away at its browser-centric revenue stream (that’s a joke.  Honest.  I have no sound investment advice to offer, whatsoever).   It may be several years still before mobile search drives meaningful business results, but those who plan to take an early lead in this space will do so now.  Are you ready?

Article by Matt Greitzer

Yahoo Ends Search Submit Pro; Bing to Gain Search Share

On December 31, 2009 when Yahoo’s paid inclusion program, Search Submit Pro, fades to black, it will be the first time in over five years that sites competing for top placement in Yahoo’s organic search results will be doing so on a level playing field. Since the time Search Submit Pro was introduced, sites participating in this program gained traction, and an advantage, in the organic search results. Today, searches on core terms in almost any industry (travel, finance, insurance, retail, etc) yield search results that are dominated by paid inclusion listings. But on January 1, 2010, we will awaken to a new decade and undoubtedly a very different future for organic search results.

Yahoo, as part of their pending search deal with Microsoft, will be exiting the algorithmic (organic) search space and relying on Bing to power their organic search results. However, unlike the imminent discontinuation of paid inclusion, we do not anticipate this happening until later in 2010. So we will be starting the year focusing on rankings across Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But once Bing begins publishing their organic listings on Yahoo, they will command approximately 30% of all US searches, narrowing the focus to primarily Google and Bing alone.

We fully expect businesses that relied heavily on paid inclusion and paid search while making minimal investments in SEO will now change course to devote extensive resources to bolstering their rankings organically. Currently, of the top 10 organic search results appearing in Yahoo for the term “car insurance,” only five have a first page listing on Bing. These companies won’t want to risk missing out on 30% of the search share, and as these businesses continue to optimize their sites and focus on SEO, others will need to do the same in order to just maintain current positioning.

Unlike other New Year’s resolutions – losing the holiday weight, saving a bit more money, giving up smoking, and so on, the resolution to bolster your SEO in anticipation of the upcoming changes shouldn’t wait until the calendar flips! Fortunately, if you have been diligently optimizing your website for that other engine, Google, you should have a very good foundation for success.

Article by Rob Aronson

A House is Not a Home and a Video is Not a Homepage

The homepage of a website is the most important page on your site. It receives the most visits, most incoming links, most directory listings, and the most direct hits. The homepage has to look great, be engaging, and pull visitors deeper into your site. This can sometime lure web creators and managers into making the homepage extra flashy (both literally and figuratively), with tons of images, videos, and buzzwords. These graphical elements cannot be crawled by search engines and mostly blank areas to them, while the buzzwords may not be the words that are most likely to lead a user organically to your site.

While in SEO we try to strike a happy medium for all pages between an engaging, technology-heavy user experience, and what search engines want, it is by far the most difficult and important to find that medium within the homepage. Again, the home page is where most of your incoming traffic tends to land.

When other sites link to a website, they often link to the homepage. Links are one of the most important factors when search engines choose which site to rank higher; however, if a site has tons of links but no corresponding searchable content, it can still be difficult to outrank a less popular, content-heavy site.

Keep in mind next time you are redesigning your site that the homepage will not only be your outlet to most users, is it is the web equivalent of your storefront, where a customer enters and hopefully does something (purchase, sign-up, etc). While it is important that the page look and function great, without the right SEO and the right crawlable content, and no matter how much time and effort you put into the appearance of your homepage, if search engines can’t find it, its visibility will suffer, and your investment will be wasted.

Article by Olga Mamontov

Wolfram Alpha Revisited

Since its launch in May, Wolfram Alpha has made strides to improve its search results and its reputation as a computational knowledge engine. With index and algorithm differences distinct from the big three search engines, Wolfram Alpha promotes its strength to educators, students, and researchers online, and capitalizes on creating new knowledge.

By soliciting user feedback in their community forum, Wolfram Alpha has learned of and responded to reports of bugs to make improvements to their query comprehension. It is reported that the database contains over 10 trillion pieces of data, more than 50,000 types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for over 1,000 domains, and is still growing. This is one of the reasons Microsoft saw Wolfram Alpha as an attractive partner for Bing.

Based on Bing’s proactive approach of optimizing each search vertical, and its corresponding algorithm, to provide the most relevant results for each category, it is speculated that they may integrate Wolfram Alpha data into a new science category or within a Q&A section. It is also possible that Microsoft could be looking at how to replicate Wolfram Alpha’s algorithms to provide a computed answer – not only webpage results – as another step to align to its goal of becoming a decision engine.

Wolfram Alpha has also used their community forum to respond to feedback claiming that their results are not as intuitive as search engine results. As a result, an emphasis has been placed on educating users, helping set expectations, and providing additional information to guide users to get more out of Wolfram Alpha. In an aggressive move, Wolfram Alpha announced the first annual Homework Day would be held on October 21, 2009.

On Homework Day, a live interactive webcast will be hosted by Stephen Wolfram. The goal is to bring together students and educators from kindergarten to college and beyond to explore how they can best utilize Wolfram Alpha for help with homework. The web event is scheduled to be a nationwide initiative, allow educators to upload lesson plans, and highlight classrooms that are using Wolfram Alpha. This aligns with Wolfram Alpha’s target audience of users within education and research.

It will be fascinating to see how Wolfram Alpha continues to increase its presence and reputation online.  With the types of partnerships that have been built since its launch (with Bing and with students and educators), it does not appear that Wolfram Alpha is looking to expand outside of a computation knowledge engine. Depending on how deals like licensing their content to Bing evolve, opportunities may arise for integrating Wolfram Alpha results on websites.

Article by John “Mac” Morgan and Jenny Du

The Accidental Monopoly

This article was previously published in Search Engine Watch on October 9th.

This past weekend, I introduced my oldest to her first official game of Monopoly. We’ve played other children’s versions before, but this was a full on, old school battle down Ventnor Avenue complete with Luxury Tax and Free Parking.

I took it a little easy on her, not buying every property in order to give her a fighting chance. At one point she asked me, “What’s a monopoly?” I explained to her the goal is to own the whole board, thus creating a monopoly where the other players have no choice but to pay you with every move they make.

I started to think more about a world with no choice, and it brought me back to the world of search.

Continue reading The Accidental Monopoly.

The Search Interview

In this edition of the Search Interview, we spoke with Joe Wildfire.  Joe is the eMarketing Strategy & Analytics Manager for Genentech.  Currently in the eMarketing Department at Genentech, Joe helps  to implement strategies and solutions across campaigns and brands. Previously, he was  on the agency side in New York as a planner, buyer, coordinator, trafficker, and account executive, but relocated to the Bay Area and am enjoying the new coast.

1. What do you like about search?
It’s becoming more and more local and is constantly refined. I like that results literally change every time one performs a search – it really gives some credence to the ‘smarter-than-human’ algorithm claim.

2. How do you search?
I’m a long-tail kind of guy and perform most of my searches from my browser toolbar. I like to dabble in searches across the big engines and enjoy seeing the differences from one to another.

3. What does search do for you that other tactics don’t?
Captures most of the audience at the very beginning of an interaction as opposed to somewhere along the way. It’s still a gateway for most folks on the internet thus it holds a certain prominence compared to other tactics.

4. How important is search in your marketing mix?
Very important – from both and SEO and SEM perspective. Recent industry restrictions have made SEM a bit more difficult, but it’s interesting to see what solutions have been developed across advertisers. Search is an integral and cost-effective part of all our campaigns, often surviving the dreaded budget cuts and campaign revisions when other tactics do not.

5. Let’s do some word association
Organic Search – Low-hanging fruit
Google – The Boss
Yahoo! – Runner-up
Bing – Interesting…
Ask – I miss Jeeves
Google killer – Not Wolfram Alpha
Social media – Disorganized; Not new anymore
Video optimization – Not done well

Bing To Test New Paid Search Format

News broke last week about Bing launching a pilot to test a new paid search ad format. The new format will include logos and favicons embedded in the regular search listings, which sounds similar to the format Yahoo is currently running for a limited number of brands. This new format is another attempt by Bing to help win search share and encourage advertisers to boost their budgets within the engine. Both Google and Yahoo have executed this same type of program, so this is not a new concept to the paid search space.

Microsoft has reported a rise in searches and click-through rates, and this new format may help drive consumers’ interest in Bing even further. The implementation of this new format should help boost brand awareness for advertisers that have opted in to the program, though it is still unclear how successful this format has been in the past for both Yahoo and Google.

According to a Bing sales representative, the news about this pilot was released prematurely to the press. Currently the program is not even in the beta stage, and is only in a “technical test” for a closed 30-day period. There are only a few advertisers in the test and less than 5% of traffic will be featuring the new format. There is no set date for when the full beta version is expected to be released, although if successful we expect that Razorfish clients will be invited to participate in the beta.

Article by Courtney Kriebel

Google Health OneBox

As part of Google’s effort to provide online searchers with answers as quickly and directly as possible, OneBox results have been added and continually updated for popular searches. OneBox results are included for searches on movie information and showtimes, stock information, weather, etc.  Health information is the latest addition to OneBox – an expansion of the Google Health initiative.  While Health OneBox include links to pages on WebMD, Medline Plus, Mayo Clinic, and Wikipedia, definitions and links to Google.com/health have raised additional concerns about Google favoritism of select websites and what are Google’s long term goals.

Google Health (still in beta after 20 months) was launched in February 2008 and spurred a lot of controversy since the tool allowed users to store and upload health and medication information. Google reassured integrity in security of confidential information and in maintaining privacy, which were some of the user concerns. As an added value, users were able to access health information and tools that were licensed from A.D.A.M.

In August 2009, Google started integrating OneBox into health search results. Google’s algorithm appear to align Health OneBox results to specific conditions available within the Google health Topic Index, longtail terms such as “cancer treatment” are not yet included. The definition and image (where available) are snippets from Google.com/health with links to WebMD, Medline Plus, Mayo Clinic, and Wikipedia – spurring additional controversy.

While A.D.A.M. is licensed by many other online health sites, there is question of whether Google is crossing over to content development not just organizing and delivering online content. There is also question of whether select sites are being favored over sites that may provide more relevant content.

In organic results, it does not appear that Google is adjusting the rankings to align with the Health OneBox sites so site optimization strategies are maintaining relevancy.  Additionally, keywords within Health OneBox are not targeted.  They have high search volume and may seem appealing when determining target keywords and content, but ranking for these keywords do not hold as much value.  Traffic driven from these broad keywords may increase, but in most cases user intent is not determined effectively. Targeting more specific keywords drives more qualified traffic which may decrease bounce rates and increase site interaction which is more important than driving traffic.  If marketers continue to strategically plan websites with search engine friendly design and relevant content, there is no current threat from the addition of Google’s Health OneBox.

Article by Jenny Du and Rafael Ferrer

Google Search Results and the Keywords Meta Tag

Google recently released more information on how it incorporates the “keywords” Meta tag into its algorithm, and if this tag has any effect on organic search rankings. For many years now it has been accepted in the search industry that the “keywords” Meta tag does not play a role in how Google interprets and ranks a site. As Google’s rankings and the websites that are competing for these rankings grow, more importance and time is being placed on how sites can effectively compete. During the early stages of the search industry, competing websites would use the keywords Meta tag to mirror competitor keywords or add irrelevant keywords that would drive traffic to a site, and in this manner they would gain a competitive edge.

This week Google officially confirmed that the keywords Meta tag does not play a role in the search results it serves, and this policy will continue for years to come. This is important for webmasters and site owners, as they should be focusing their efforts on more important “off page” and “on page” factors that are more important to Google specifically, such as link popularity. In the past there has been some speculation that if a competitor matches the keywords that another competitor is using it could affect how each site is ranking, and this announcement proves that this assumption is not true.

Webmasters or site owners are advised to not totally discontinue use of the keywords Meta tag, as some of the other major search engines still use this Meta tag in their algorithm even though it may not be a major factor like it had been in the past.

Article by Rafael Ferrer