The Latest Search Engine Research that Every Marketer Needs to Know

Hey!

I did a radio show with RSS Ray, The Latest Search Engine Research that Every Marketer Needs to Know. The podcast is about 30 minutes, available on iTunes also.

However, here are four questions that I was asked and some more coherent responses.

1. How has the way we search the Internet changed in the past few years?

Looking at the general purpose search engines, like Google, Bing, and Ask! From a technology point, there hasn’t been much change. The last major technology innovations to Web Search was Page Rank and sponsored search. The interfaces are nearly identical to those of 10 years ago. Google in 1999 would feel very similar to Google 2009. The crawling algorithms are the pretty much the same. Now, ranking has improved with some innovative uses of anchor text and other factors. Topic identification and query suggestions has improved. And, there is some interesting work going on in video and multimedia. Mobile search may eventually take off. But, generally, from a technical stand point, there hasn’t been much innovation but a lot of improvement in effectiveness and efficiency.

How searchers interact with search engines has also held pretty constant also. Users enter typically submit short queries, a two or three terms, and sessions are short, two or three queries. The trend has slowly been increasing on both fronts, but generally the same.

What has changed is the context, the scale, and the variety.

In terms of context, the direct availability of content accessible on the Web is nearly ubiquitous. Web search engines provide access to textual and multimedia content in a wide variety of settings including both home and work, as well as in mobile situations.

Second, there is the number of searchers attempting to access this content via Web search engines. The scale of topics submitted by these users is surely unparalleled in pre-Web end user searching.

Third, the variety of content, users, and systems is certainly unique. This combined diversity on the Web in both content and users is extreme.

In addition to satisfying information problems, modern Web search engines are navigational tools to take users to specific uniform resource locators (URLs) or to aid in browsing.

People use search engines as applications to conduct ecommerce transactions, such as with sponsored search or Google’s payment system. The increase in main line ecommerce use of the Web is certainly a major change, not only from the user side but with professional search engine marketing firms, search engine optimization firms, and the affiliate networks. These have really changed the game in how commercial content is found, accessed, and presented to Web users.

Search engines provide access to content collections of images, songs, and videos rather than directly addressing an information need with a specific object.

Search engines provide access to transactional services such as maps, online auctions, driving directions, or even other search engines.

Search engines perform social networking functions, as with Yahoo! Answers. Web search engines are spell checkers, thesauruses, and dictionaries.

They are games, such as Google Whacking or vanity searching.

Modern Web search engines are adding an increasing diverse range of features. Providers are placing more and highly varied content and services on the Web. In response, people are employing search engines in new, novel, and increasing diverse ways.


2. What are the big search engines currently doing to improve the search experience?

Well, in the US, when you talk ‘big’, you are only taking two now, Google (65% share) and Bing (with about a 30% share). Maybe three if we include Ask, which is typically around 4 %. All the rest split the remaining 1 %. … and, honestly, spoken persons from these companies could probably answer it better.

From my analysis though, some of the most exciting work is the behavioral targeting. By behavioral targeting, I mean the collection of techniques that leverage past and current user experience to enhance future (both near and far) searching experience. There is a lot of beneficial work going online advertising targeting, query reformulation, topic identification, and user behavior prediction.

I have been doing work on predicting click through using n-grams, neural network and time series analysis. We are trying now to develop a formula for an individual user given a search history. We are see some success. I would expect the search engine companies are pursuing similar studies. They have better data than I have and more of it. So, we should see some good progress from them.

Another area that the search engine companies are doing some good work, is in the area of spam prevention and detection, both on the organic side and on the sponsored side. This stuff is not exciting but it is something that probably has the most direct and beneficial lift to the

3. Google has been seeing some major competition from Bing recently, do you think Google has anything to be worried about?

Well, major competition might be a stretch. Bing is floating around 8%, up a little from pre-Bing days.

Some of the early reports on numbers are coming into okay, the slight uptick in traffic, the reports of the Bing converts on the sponsored search side are coming in positive, the advertising budget has been reported at $100M, so that has to have some impact. The Yahoo! deal bought them an additional 20% marketshare. My daughter likes their font and the cool pictures they have as background. So, some okay number and reactions.

However, my daughter, although she likes the interface, doesn’t use it. She uses Google. I have tried it a couple of times, just to play again. It’s okay. Probably in the ballpark with Google. But, it doesn’t seem like a game changer to me, and I’m a person that kept using Yahoo! , along with Google, right up to the end.

The Google brand is just too strong. The habit is just too engrained. Bing or some other competitor is going to have to bring a totally disruptive technology to the Web search that users just can’t ignore, 10% better results at lease. This is going to be hard to do, ‘cause Google has a great culture of technology innovation. Alternatively, Google could do something to cause searchers to loss trust and confidence.

I’m not thinking that the Bing advertising campaign, the first decision engine is work either. A lot of search is not a decision process. When I’ve put search as problem solving and decision making to the test, it doesn’t correlate. It appears to me that searching is better viewed as a learning process. I believe this fits with Bing name anyway. Bing! Search, learn!

The bottom line though, should Google be worried about Bing? Yes! The landscape is littered with companies that did not take a threat from Microsoft seriously.

4. How do you think personalized search results will change the way business optimize their websites?

Yes, it will. Personalized search reorders search results based on your history of past searches, giving more weight to topics that interest you. Personalized search results has been around for awhile Google experimented with these at least 5 years. However, with Google accounts and desktop search bars more common, the past data is there now.

It will make SEO efforts more difficult for sure and getting brand awareness will be a bigger challenge.

However, people change. Current habits are not locked in concrete.

It actually may a be bonus in that unlikely customers will be coming to their websites. This will allow attentive and efforts to be focused on those visits that are truly potential customers.

5. Given current trends, what is the best way for search marketers to improve their overall performance?

Nothing has changed here from basis advertising. Get the right message in front of the right person at the right time.