The Rise of the Social Nervous System? (kind of already here)

The Rise of the Social Nervous System by Joshua-Michele Ross is an interesting piece that ties together some concepts about records of our online lives, online privacy, and the social effect Web search engines, including the use of communication applications like Twitter to make us smarter.

Bottom line: Our lives are online, get used to. Transparency is in.

Researchers predict click-through behavior in Web searches

Here is a press release concerning predicting click-through behavior in Web searches and here is the full paper that used neural networks to predict click through rates during Web searching.

I’ve been focused for some time on moving Web searching research from descriptive models (i.e., counting things) to inference models (i.e., predicting or influencing actions).

The research reported in this article is one step in developing these models.

Along with neural networks, also looking at using time series analysis to predict user actions on Web search engines.

Academic Research on Ad Click Thru Rates

Here is recent press release on research on ad click through rates. Here is the full paper on ad click through rate research.

The results were interesting. Using real world data, the click through rates for sponsored ads was about 15% overall, which seems high to many folks (who never click on an ad) but is much lower than reported by the search engine companies.

Could be good or bad news depending. Plenty of room for growth though in the keyword advertising market.

Microsoft's New Platform Search: Kumo

Kumo, Microsoft’s latest attempt at breaking into the Web searching top tier, was reported in a story in The Wall Street Journal that focused on Microsoft’s efforts to re-tool their search platform.

From the pictures of the Kumo results page, it looks a lot like Clusty or Ask.

I wish Microsoft well in their efforts, but I don’t know if this is going to shake things up enough.

The email from Satya Nadelle that appeared in the Wall Street Journal story stuck me as odd, especially this quote:

In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40% of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes. These and many other learnings suggest that customers often don’t find what they need from search today.

These are all behavior statistics that, by themselves, could be either strengths or weaknesses. 40% of queries go unanswered (I believe he is talking about 40% of all queries don’t get a click) may mean that the search engine results page had the answer and there was no need to click a link.

50% of queries are on repeat tasks could mean that folks do similar tasks over time.

46% of search sessions durations are longer than 20 minutes – good or bad depending on the topic. (Note: This is way higher than published work in the area of session duration. See this report on page visitations and this on session durations.)

This is behavioral data that needs combined with attitudinal data to get real meaning.

Microsoft has an uphill climb, regardless. Google has a great search platform, the easiest to use keyword advertising service around, and wonderful market share. Yahoo! is hanging on to sizeable market share, has a good keyword advertising platform, and an excellent brand name. Ask has some great technology and a willingness to quickly try new things. Tough competition, even with the Microsoft bank account.

What will do it for Microsoft? One of two things.

(1) Some disruptive technology that users just cannot ignore. Hard to do in the competitive search engine market.

(2) Some change in customer behavior not related to technology (i.e., get customers to change for some reason other than better search results). Again, hard to unless one of the competitors screw up.