Microsoft looking to improve search by buying FAST!
January 8, 2008
So, yesterday Bill Gates hinted in his keynote at CES that Microsoft would improve search. It’s an area where they haven’t really shown any improvement in recent years. I thought to myself at the time, maybe they’ve finally realised that it’s all about the algorithm and the quality of results you deliver to users, not in the interface and fancy AJAX tools.
So I watched, and waited, and lo and behold they announce an offer to buy FAST Search and Transfer!
The offer comes to approx $1.2B which is a fair valuation. Rumours are that the shareholders have already approved this and it’s all a formality and will go ahead pretty quickly.
Top move Bill! FAST is a great piece of search technology with many applications. It has it’s heart rooted in providing good algorithms and tailorable search tools which is exactly where Microsoft should be pushing it’s Live Search offering.
Now you just have to integrate this with Adcentre and deliver a Google beating search engine, no small task, that should make the next year very interesting!
Google sends even more traffic to the travel sector
December 11, 2007
Hitwise have released a new report on the market share of the major search engines today (based on U.S. data). Unsurprisingly, the report shows that Googles dominance continues to grow rapidly. Google is said to now account for 65.1% of the search traffic delivered online, up 5% from this time last year. Yahoo, MSN and Ask are said to be at 21%, 7% and 4%, all down slightly year on year.
Interestingly for those of us in the travel market 33% of travel traffic is said to be from search engines, thats 15% up year on year. That’s a big jump, perhaps we’re all finally nailing our SEO and PPC strategies.
Google shows its dominance in the online travel sector by donating 21% of travels traffic all by itself which really shows where the focus needs to be for search engine marketers in the travel industry. That’s a 26% increase in the amount of travel traffic that Google contributes to since last year, again a huge leap.
All this bodes very well for the forthcoming January peak booking period!
Aim for the top in natural and paid search!
December 11, 2007
Eye tracking company Enquiro Research has produced a report (sponsored by Google no less) which shows the importance for brands to be well represented at the top of both natural and paid search listings.
They say ‘There is significant correlation between brands’ appearing in the top organic search and sponsored placements and consumer brand affinity, recall and purchase intent‘. Well that’s pretty obvious, but it’s always nice to have these concepts validated by eye tracking (something that I place great value in as an insight and usability tool).
The most interesting findings are:
This shows that there is definite brand affinity and recall to be gained by being well positioned and using the brand name in your listings. Good advice for travel companies with January coming, I see so many travel listings that are just a destination name and no brand mention at all.
The full report can be found here.
Innovation in PPC
December 3, 2007
We all know how notoriously difficult paid search is to get right in a highly competitive marketplace. Take car rental, loads of players, very high bid prices and some really proficient PPC campaigns. Need a what to stand out from the crowd? Take the lead from Sixt of Germany then, they’ve done something very clever with ascii art to make their adverts stand out from the crowd.
This is genius, and they experienced a 40% plus increase in clicks on the campaign! Something that could be applied to many industries!
This campaign has just won an award, more details here.
Progression in search interfaces
November 6, 2007
Less is more it would seem when it comes to search interfaces. Just look at Google to see the less-is-more approach at it’s best. Their minimal approach to the search homepage works really well, although I do think a big reason for that is that their algorithm is much better at returning relevant results with minimal input from the user.
Prof. John Maeda of MIT Media Lab had put together an interesting image showing the development of both Google and Yahoo’s homepage over time. It’s really interesting to see how Yahoo lost their way and Google stayed true to the minimal approach. Click the image below to see a full size version:
Dogpile better than Google???
October 18, 2007
In customer satisfaction it would seem.
JD Power has completed a survey of internet users looking at their satisfaction with various online services. In use of search, Dogpile has come top for the second year running with Google coming in second.
The study, now in its fourth year, examines consumer behavior, experiences and satisfaction of Internet service subscribers with the most frequently used online services. These include search engine/functions, web portal, instant messaging, social networking, music downloading services and online console gaming systems.
The search rankings are below:
Dogpile is a meta-search engine which scrapes all the major search providers and presents the results back to the user. This provides a one-stop search experience for it’s users. Another factor that helps it is the companies limit they place on advertising next to the results. Paid search adverts are integrated into the results listings and mentioned as sponsored, this isn’t particularly obvious so perhaps users just miss the fact that they click on ads.
I think a lot of this is down to misconception by users. I believe they probably think they are getting a better service as Dogpile promises to search all the best engines in one go. What the users probably don’t notice is that the relevance suffers as a result of this. There can be pages and pages of similar results, many links to the same websites and definitely more advanced searchers won’t get the same valuable results they would from Google. Could this be a case of lower numbers of users and less sophisticated users?
Dogpile beat Google on satisfaction, functionality, ease of use and results quality in the survey. I am going to trial Dogpile for a while to see if it could ever replace Google for me, I reckon it won’t but am always willing to give something different a try.
Yahoo search getting smarter
October 2, 2007
I posted the other day surmising whether Yahoo is catching up in search based on some new metrics from Compete. The general feel from that post was that they weren’t really and the numbers were questionable in value.
So, what should I see this morning? New, useful features in Yahoo’s main search interface, the kind of features that make search a whole lot less painful for users and add a lot of value, helping users to target searches more effectively.
The first thing I noticed was that they have integrated images from Flickr and also playable videos, kind of like Google’s universal search idea and equally as useful to the user. So if you search for a music artist (eg. Unkle) you should get images and video in the results along with useful additions such as links to albums, lyrics, photos and more videos. Next I did a search for a hotel (eg. ‘hudson hotel new york‘) in New York (being the online travel buff that I am) and the top result in this case was a Yahoo Local listing for the hotel complete with map links, again extremely useful (although possibly doing themselves out of a small amount of ad revenue here). Another cool feature is the inclusion of custom results for searches such as health related (eg. ‘lyme disease‘), quick easy access to relevant info is the killer in search and here Yahoo have it spot on.
And then there’s the biggest and most useful addition, and it’s an addition that Google haven’t yet implemented… It’s an AJAX based search assistant panel that appears if it senses you hesitate while typing a search query. It works as an auto-complete assistant and also a guided search tool as it will both try to guess what you were typing and give you suggestions as well. This is extremely powerful and really makes search easier for the user. It also adds a lot of value to advertisers as it should mean more qualified clicks on paid search results as the searches are better informed.
I’m actually really surprised this has come out of Yahoo first, I’ve been waiting for Google to implement something like this for a while now but for once Yahoo have the upper hand. Now all they need to do is sort out the problems with their paid search results (relevancy, gaming etc), fix their algorithms for natural search and improve the interface and they could become my search engine of choice!
Is Yahoo catching up in search?
September 28, 2007
Okay, so Google are still miles ahead on market share in the search world. Below is the latest graph from Compete.com showing just how commanding a lead they have.
However, Compete have some interesting insight into quality rather than reach. Quality in search is rarely discussed and whenever it has been Google has always been assumed to be in the lead there as well due to their massive research and development capabilities.
That may be the wrong assumption though!
Compete have looked at a metric they call search fulfillment. They came up with this because even though there are many searches taking place on the major engines, not all result in a click on a result and a referral. In fact, according to their data out of approx 7.5 billion monthly searches only 5 billion result in a referral.
So, if Google looks like the leader from a search volume point of view, how about from a fulfillment point of view. The graph below shows an interesting picture…
So Google is not getting the referrals the volume suggests it should.
Yahoo seems to do really well from this which I find strange as the relevancy of results in Yahoo never seems as good to me as Google. Of course there are many other possible reasons for this, a couple being that the figures may exclude clicks on paid links and that Google returns much more useful snippets in the results than any other engine often negating the need to click through.
Of course Google’s figures could be vastly inflated by all the agency types, SEO’s and webmasters out there who perform daily searches to check their sites rankings without ever clicking on anything. It would be really interesting to understand those volumes!
Viewdle, a visual search that works?
September 18, 2007
Creating a visual search engine that can find video (or images) of people is a bit like the holy grail (highly desirable but tricky to get your hands on). Now along comes a company called Viewdle, who are one of the start-ups at the Techcrunch 40 event at the moment. Viewdle quote themselves as a ‘facial recognition powered digital media platform for easily indexing, searching & monetizing video assets’. Quite a powerful thing if they get it working right. Perhaps YouTube should buy them (seeing as Google have yet to make real use of Neven Vision technology).
Viewdle comes out of Reuters Labs and there’s a demo up and running which looks pretty cool. It shows how many times someone appears in clips and how long they feature (demo link here for Angelina Jolie). I’m hoping that as it comes from Reuters it should stack up commercially as I’m sure they’ll have used this on their own archives.
Japan striving to be the next Google
September 4, 2007
Japanese authorities have finally recognised the fact that their dominance in all things device and hardware is slipping and that they have missed a trick by not moving into the service side of things such as search.
The Financial Times carries a story about a new initiative to move into researching search and ways to personalise devices such as in-car navigation using search as the building block.
I’d love to think that a state funded program could compete with Google (GOOG), but I fear it will take all of the Japanese inventiveness to come up with anything that comes close. I’d say they’d be better off investing the money into research in new network protocols and ways to usher in a new era of web connectivity. That is after all something the Japanese have always been very very good at.
