At Razorfish Search we’re wincing in anticipation of the day Larry Page snuffs out Exact Match, a beautiful bit of engineering that delivers EXACTLY what we paid for. If yesterday’s post on the Google Blog — announcing the new default option of including misspellings and plurals with exact match — is any indication, Google is going to slide into evil with a level of transparency and a sense of history that would make an oil company blush.

The post didn’t mention that Google’s new matching is exactly the same as Yahoo’s unlamented “Match Driver,” a factor in advertisers’ preference for Google back in the days when the two companies competed in search. The post also didn’t mention the likely impetus for this change: a surprising 8% year-over-year CPC decline that put a damper on GOOG’s Q4 earnings call. Seems a few too many Google customers found out you can get more conversions for less money with a smart keyword strategy of multiple-match-type buys of the same keywords. (Razorfish didn’t see the 2011 CPC decline – presumably because our clients have been enjoying these discounts for years.)

Rolling back the glorious precision of exact match is one way to “earn” more per click. If Google were our client, though, we’d point out angering your best customers and being less than straightforward about the decision is a tough way to win Likes and Friends. Oh, right — we mean +1s. Whatever.

A line millions of San Francisco Giants fan thought they would never get the chance to hear, read, write or shout at the top of their lungs: “The San Francisco Giants won the World Series.” For decades, the Giants perfected the art of the gut wrenching, knife twisting, want-to-jump-off-the-Golden Gate Bridge type loss. Red Sox and Cubs fans would be familiar with this plight. However, on Monday, November 1, 2010, the Giants finally achieved the impossible and brought San Francisco its first World Series and the first for the franchise since 1954.

The spontaneity of a World Series win is great, but some fans did not have the opportunity to celebrate on such short notice. Fortunately, the World Series celebration culminated in a city-wide parade held on Wednesday, November 3rd. Fans all across the country not too hungover to use a computer entered “giants parade” related queries in hopes of gaining more information. Yahoo! reported that on Wednesday, there were 4.82 times more searches for “SF Giants Parade” than “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

This is where the intrepid search marketer comes in. By bidding on “giants parade” related keywords, one is able to target a whole contingent of Giants fans. These aren’t your normal Giants fans: these are fans on an orange and black championship high, ready to purchase Giant World Series memorabilia. There are also fans from out of the area looking to join the celebration, who may search for San Francisco accommodations or other attractions in the area.

The good search marketer reacts to a trend; the excellent search marketer foresees a trend and prepares accordingly. So if you want to be a champion like the San Francisco Giants, keep an eye on the horizon for unexpected possibilities and react quickly so you too can hit performance goals out of the park!

Everyone at Razorfish Search is getting ready for the search Alliance between Yahoo and Bing. Since the traffic distribution officially started moving over on October 11, the numbers have taken a swing into the right direction. If you have been reviewing your Bing traffic numbers, both impressions and clicks should now be higher in Bing while your Yahoo traffic slowly diminishes. On average, results show that impressions and clicks have increased on Bing by 35% – 50%. Bing impressions will continue to increase throughout the month, as Yahoo distribution will reach 100% by October 31. Everything so far is looking promising across the board.  The big question is: how will your CPC’s and performance be impacted when the Alliance is completed? Only time will tell…

Our national search team is made up of 96 people, and together we have 380 years of experience in search marketing. That’s an average of 3.96 years of experience per team member. In QuickPoll, we make it easy to access our team’s knowledge.

ComScore just released their search market share data for February. The report shows that Bing’s share increased, although at a slowing pace, while Yahoo lost share.

ComScore is one of a variety of sources for query share data. There are limitations to reporting this type of data and often we find the reports contradictory. We decided to poll our team to find out if comScore’s reported share changes are visible in our campaigns. The majority of the team said they were not seeing these changes from January to February.

Tell us what you’re seeing by answering our QuickPoll

Have an idea for QuickPoll? Email us at razorfishsearch@razorfish.com

Yahoo hosted an event at their Sunnyvale, CA headquarters on February 10th, called SearchSpeak, to showcase some of its latest developments in the world of search. Very few new search projects were shown off, as most of the presentation was dedicated to highlighting search programs and applications that have been slowly added to Yahoo’s set of search services over the past year. The room lost power early in the presentation, foreshadowing the overall tone of the event, which was to remind the industry that search is still a priority for Yahoo and they are still very much a player– even though it appears that they are losing search power.

Despite new enhancements such as their redesign of Yahoo! Search in September, enhancements to Search Monkey, and the inclusion of Twitter in its search results, Yahoo is still struggling to keep and grow its search audience. January 2010 market share numbers for search engines released by both Hitwise and ComScore indicated independently that Yahoo continued to lose market share among the three major engines. Google still maintains its dominance among total searches while Bing, although representing a much smaller share, continues to grow steadily, eating away at Yahoo market share.

Yahoo’s most recent search enhancements are meant to satisfy searchers looking for “things” as opposed to “objects” or documents. This “web of things”, as they call it, more accurately defines what people are looking for; by offering results in this format, people are more likely to find exactly what they want. Yahoo asserts that simply offering a list of links, as with traditional search engine results page, does not provide enough information, especially when search queries are not semantically clear. Yahoo indicated that most of the search queries made via Yahoo  contain a noun in the search string. This tells them that people are looking for actual information on specific concepts and “things” as opposed to information related to what they may be looking for.

Additionally, Yahoo now suffers from an identity crisis as it prepares to hand over much of its search functionality to Microsoft for a share in ad revenue. Most of its user base is made up of those who come to the site to check email or read news. Fewer and fewer users come to Yahoo directly to conduct a search. It’s almost as if search has become a secondary feature for Yahoo, and they needed the SearchSpeak meeting to reiterate their search presence to users searching the web.

Article by Paul McDevitt