Archive for November, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving, from All of Us at Search Engine Watch
We will not be publishing on Thursday, November 27, or Friday, November 28, in observation of Thanksgiving Day. I hope those of you that are celebrating the holiday can stay off the Internet and spend some time with those you love.
For those of you that aren’t celebrating Thanksgiving, or have had enough quality time with your family, here are a few things you might find interesting:
* If you haven’t checked it out lately, I suggest looking over the articles in our Search 101 section. It’s been updated with articles covering the basics of search engine optimization, search advertising, and several other topics. Keep an eye on that section, as it will continue to be updated on a regular basis.
* We’ve been collecting quite the archive of Search Engine Marketing Webcasts. We’ve got one-hour presentations with Q&A available on demand on topics from Holiday PPC campaigns to search trends, to Profitable PPC fundamentals. You can also sign up for upcoming webcasts, including one next week on Advanced Keyword Research.
* Catch up with other Thanksgiving refugees on the Search Engine Watch Forums, or browse the archives to find the best advice on a range of search marketing topics.
* Head on over to Facebook to join the SearchEngineWatch Facebook Group or the Search Engine Strategies Facebook Group. Or check out our LinkedIn Groups for Search Engine Watch, SearchEngineWatch.com Forums, or Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo.
We’ll be back on Monday with plenty of new Experts columns, blog posts, and more. Have a happy Thanksgiving!
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Baidu’s Search Ad Revenue Drops 10-15% After Paid Ad Scandal
Chinese internet giant sacks staff over paid for search listings from the Guardian reports Baidu has dropped the ads of four clients after finding out their medical licenses were false. According to the Guardian, this has resulted in Baidu’s ad revenue dropping ten to fifteen percent, plus…
The Biggest Web Site Usability Mistakes You Can Make
When you built your first web site, didn’t you just want to promote it everywhere with big bold letters saying, “HEY EVERYONE! COME HERE AND LOOK AT MY WEBSITE! ISN’T IT GREAT?” Or, when you submit your web site to forums for web site reviews, what do you typically ask for? You [...]
Happy Thanksgiving & Programming Note
Happy Thanksgiving Search Engine Land readers! Today, in observance of the holiday, we hope to not write here today. So make sure to tune in tomorrow for today’s search news and tomorrows.
To give you something fun to look at, I’ll post what I did at the Search Engine Roundtable, a…
Interview: Yahoo’s Larry Cornett on Universal Search
by Manoj Jasra
One of the most interesting sessions at this upcoming Search Engine Strategies in Chicago is going to be Universal & Blended Search. Dr. Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search is one of the top experts in the world on this subject and is also a panelist at this session in SES Chicago. Last week I had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Cornett to get his insight on blended search and to get a better understanding of Yahoo’s future in this area.
[Manoj]: As with textual search, Universal search will continue to improve amongst the search engines. Are there specific things Yahoo wants to address in regards to the user experience with its search offering?
[Larry Cornett]: Yahoo! is committed to providing the best search experience to our users. We are constantly looking at new ways of incorporating different types of content into our search results. A great example is Yahoo! SearchMonkey, which lets any publisher enhance their search results. This technology can be implemented by multimedia publishers who wish to have specifically stylized search results, which showcase the Yahoo! Search engine results page.
In addition to SearchMonkey, Yahoo! Search has also introduced multimedia integration including video, audio and photos (see below) directly into the search results, allowing consumers to get their answer — whether it’s a Web link, photo, video or music clip — without leaving the page.
[Manoj]: Do users interact with one type of blended search element (i.e: images or video or text or news) better than others, if so why?
[Larry Cornett]: We have already seen good user interaction with our SearchMonkey enhanced listings. Our tests uncovered that users found this blending of structured data to be useful. In fact, in some cases, we saw a lift in click-through rate of as high as 15 percent. We believe that this enriched search experience helps users get directly to the answer they’re seeking.
[Manoj]: What did you think of Ask.com’s search interface before they changed it back to more of a common search results pages. We thought the uniqueness might help attract more searches.
[Larry Cornett]: I don’t want to comment specifically on what our competitors are doing, but what I will say is that we are entering a period of massive change to enable search engines to handle more complex content on the Web as content continues to grow, change, diversify and fragment. At the same time, users are performing increasingly sophisticated and open-ended tasks online, connecting broadly to content and services across the Web. Given these changes, all search engines are becoming more sophisticated and the simple search result page of ten blue text links is evolving to help address these complex tasks. At Yahoo! our aim is to define the intent of the consumer when they are in search.
From a SERP interface perspective we are doing this through Yahoo! SearchMonkey, as I described earlier, which lets publishers creates more useful and visually appealing Yahoo! Search results which will drive more relevant traffic to their sites. For a user’s perspective instead of just seeing a Wikipedia link and a snippet, you could call back to Wikipedia and show a photo, get more context about the article, maybe even present some of the external links or the edit history, whatever the publisher wants to do to enhance the result. A Yahoo! Local business listing could put structured information about itself as part of the result, like a photo of the store front and its main line number. Yahoo! SearchMonkey empowers publishers to customize the search experience to help user find what they want easily and the increased relevance of the result can drive traffic to publishers sites.
In addition Yahoo! is differentiating our search experience by providing a safe search experience for our users with SearchScan. The SearchScan feature from Yahoo! Search provides a seamless way for users to search the web with confidence by reducing the risk of visiting dangerous sites on the Web with no download or fee required. It works by filtering out or alerts users to sites with possible spyware downloads, hacking risks, or sites that generate email spam.
[Manoj]: According to comScore, Google has continued to get stronger in search market share in the last year. What do the other engines have to do in order to maintain and grow their own markets?
[Larry Cornett]: Yahoo! is committed to providing an open, relevant search experience that understands the users’ intent. That said, we have recently launched a service called Yahoo! Search BOSS – an open Web services platform that offers developers and companies the chance to create and launch Web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure, technology and index that powers Yahoo! Search. BOSS fosters search innovation by enabling developers and companies to disrupt the search landscape by building their own world-class search experiences.
Yahoo! is looking to fragment the search market, create an equal opportunity for all players, and expand the Y! Search advertising network through unprecedented access to our search infrastructure. By creating this new ecosystem for search, we may see changes in our market share, but largely at our competitors’ expense.
With BOSS, you can build your own search engine – one that recognizes the difference between blogs, user reviews, news and shopping sites, and clusters results accordingly. Developers and companies can use BOSS to create a more social search engine, in which rankings are determined by a users’ social graph and combined with newsfeed results, or conduct a visual search to present thumbnails of the Web pages instead of links, making it more user-friendly for non-savvy searchers. Essentially, BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences for companies big and small.
[Manoj]: How is the search experience at Yahoo different than Google?
[Larry Cornett]: Yahoo! has spent a lot of time and research creating a new search experience for our users. One of the things we know from our research is that our users struggle when they are searching on an unfamiliar topic. They often don’t even know how to start their search. So in October 2007, we launched a significant new feature roll-out, which includes Yahoo! Search Assist and enhanced Yahoo! Shortcuts.
Search Assist (see below) essentially helps users overcome one of their key pain points, which is how to craft an effective query. As they begin to type their query or their keyword into the box, it suggests other keywords that might be related to what they’re typing. It also provides them the correct spelling of those keywords. And after they’ve conducted their initial search, Search Assist actually suggests related concepts based on their query to help them follow the right path to get the job done.
We know from our research that another pain point for users is that search engines often don’t provide the ultimate answer. They only help them down the path of finding the answer. And what we want to do at Yahoo! is actually start to begin to deliver what they really need within the search experience. So we’re not just focused on the process of searching but really on the act of finding. And to that end, we have also introduced enhanced Yahoo! Shortcuts (see below) that actually deliver the most relevant information that our users are seeking for particular types of searches.
So for example, if you type in the name of a movie at the very top of the search results page you get a link to a video trailer. You get local show times in your area, a link to a deeper description of that movie as well as reviews from critics and other Yahoo! users, right there at the top of the search results page. We’re trying to deliver the most relevant information to our users immediately following their search to help make their job easier.
We know that this is resonating with users, as Yahoo! was voted No. 1 in Search Assistance & Suggestions, according to a Dec. 2007 Keynote Systems study, “Keynote Customer Experience Rankings: Search”.
Check out our small business news site.
Assembling Your Landing Page Optimization Dream Team, Part 2
The success of your testing program relies heavily on the cooperation of many people in your organization. We continue our look at some key roles needed for a successful landing page optimization program. …
Happy Thanksgiving, from All of Us at Search Engine Watch
We will not be publishing on Thursday, November 27, or Friday, November 28, in observation of Thanksgiving Day. I hope those of you that are celebrating the holiday can stay off the Internet and spend some time with those you love.
For those of you that aren’t celebrating Thanksgiving, or have had enough quality time with your family, here are a few things you might find interesting:
* If you haven’t checked it out lately, I suggest looking over the articles in our Search 101 section. It’s been updated with articles covering the basics of search engine optimization, search advertising, and several other topics. Keep an eye on that section, as it will continue to be updated on a regular basis.
* We’ve been collecting quite the archive of Search Engine Marketing Webcasts. We’ve got one-hour presentations with Q&A available on demand on topics from Holiday PPC campaigns to search trends, to Profitable PPC fundamentals. You can also sign up for upcoming webcasts, including one next week on Advanced Keyword Research.
* Catch up with other Thanksgiving refugees on the Search Engine Watch Forums, or browse the archives to find the best advice on a range of search marketing topics.
* Head on over to Facebook to join the SearchEngineWatch Facebook Group or the Search Engine Strategies Facebook Group. Or check out our LinkedIn Groups for Search Engine Watch, SearchEngineWatch.com Forums, or Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo.
We’ll be back on Monday with plenty of new Experts columns, blog posts, and more. Have a happy Thanksgiving!
Google’s Gains Continue in comScore’s October 2008 Rankings
The year-over-year gains for Google that we saw in Nielsen Online’s October 2008 search engine rankings were mirrored in comScore’s rankings for the same month.
Google enjoyed a nice 63.1% share, up from 58.5% during the same time last year. Yahoo was at 20.5% down from 22.9%> Microsoft was at 8.5%, down from 9.7%.
There was one major difference between Nielsen and comScore. Nielsen said the number of searches declined, while comparing comScore’s October 2008 data to its 2007 data shows that the number of searches increased to 12.6 million billion up from 10.5 million billion.
Check out the rest of the data here:
Preparing for the Worst: Bad Online Economic Data Just in Time for Black Friday
It’s the day before Thanksgiving, where you show up at the office, but you’re really thinking about tomorrow’s good meal. You’ve worked hard to set up those search marketing campaigns to run strong on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
So, I really hate to bring you the bad news, but keeping it from you would be a disservice.
Let’s just rip off the bandaid.
First up, eMarketer has lowered its projections for online advertising spending for 2009. The new growth number is 8.9%, down from 14.5% projected in August. They’re also expecting a long recovery, projecting 2010 growth to be just 10.9%. In five years, things will still be slower on the uptake (than in recent years). Projections for 2013 growth are at 13.5%. Silver lining: some of the tapering off is likely due to market saturation and not just the economy.
Next, eBay’s traffic is declining. In January of 2007, eBay saw 62 million unique visitors. Last month, they saw just 49 million. Sure, not all of that was due to the economy, but dipping below 50 million can’t be good for eBay.
I saved the worst for last. comScore has released data showing that online consumer spending for the first 23 days of November was down 4% from last year. That’s not a slow down in growth people, that’s flat out shrinkage.
But I’m not a total Scrooge. Unemployment numbers were better than expected this week. And at least one Slate columnist explains why fears of another Great Depression could be overblown (let’s hope he’s right!).
As we overdose on turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, let us not forget the ultimate strategy for marketing, business and life in general: Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Related Reading:
Selling SEO During an Economic Downturn
E-commerce Growth Slows to Just 1% in October 2008
Online Advertising Networks Struggle As Industry Growth Slows