Search results matching tag 'Search'

Bing: It's still here!

1713999 — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:59:00 GMT

Just a few days ago we were having a discussion in the office about Bing and its seemingly terminal beta status... Following a bit of a debate regarding the rationale for leaving something in beta in one market whilst you launch in another (in summary: it enables a test-and-rollout approach for both the technology and the marketing and also enables two rounds of PR, one for the beta and one for full launch) we decided that it couldn't be long until Bing got a full roll-out. In fact the only reason we figured it hadn't already happened, given that the functionality now appears to almost exactly mirror the US 'full Bing experience', was due to Microsoft not wanting to detract from the recent Windows 7 launch.

Well now we're left wishing we'd all started a lottery syndicate, or at least that I had posted our prediction here first, because Bing just went and launched properly in the UK.

As I approached the usual slot I set aside for writing this blog it seemed like the most important thing for me to comment on this week but now I'm actually putting hands to keyboard I'm questioning the importance of the move. After all the product is no different today than it was yesterday and 'beta' as a notion seems increasingly irrelevant - Google leave products in beta for years, as evidenced by the 'feature' that re-introduces the Beta badge in Gmail just in case you got somewhat attached to its presence during the five years that service remained in beta.

What I thought would be more interesting then would be if I revisited my original thoughts on the subject - back when Bing launched I went through five reasons why Bing still has a long way to go. So, how far have they gone?

1. It was ugly. It still is ugly. Sorry, I still can't stomach that logo and still think the start images should be full screen.

2. The launch timing was all fumbled. The first few months of less-than-full functionality mean that many people will have tried a less-than-perfect product. It's not ideal. Now the product is the full version it is important it gets a real marketing push.

3. Google were already catching up. I argued that Google were rapidly catching up with the areas where Bing was supposedly pushing the envelope. Google Options does, to a certain extent, add extra functionality but I'm not sure how many searchers even know of its existence and Squared is very interesting but relatively unknown (and still... you guessed it, in beta).

4. Bing isn't social. Bing still fails to utilize passport data in any way that benefits users although, to be fair, no-one else seems to be doing much in this area either.

5. They just don't get the audience. Interestingly all the signs point towards the fact that Bing is no longer targeting the 'power searcher'. Integration with Ciao and Bing Cashback don't exactly scream 'savvy searcher' but at least Bing seem to be going after a more realistic audience now. Perhaps the audience talk was never any more than PR spin.

The latest (and much more significant) news is that Bing (along with Google) will use Twitter to introduce real-time search to their results and that they will be partnering with the computational engine Wolfram Alpha to provide answers to actual questions. More than anything this at least proves Microsoft's commitment to continuing to push Bing forward - important because almost every other search engine launch feels remarkably static in comparison to Google. It will be interesting to see if Google are working on something of their own to compete with Wolfram...

Effects of social media on search

1919324 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:10:00 GMT

The relationship between search and social media is the subject I get asked the most about by advertisers and agencies at the moment. It’s a hugely complex area because both search and social media mean so many different things and work together in so many different ways.

To make matters worse, the last 18 months have seen radical developments in both. However, the two have an undeniably positive effect on each other and I believe that the secret to the most effective, integrated online campaigns lies at the heart of this relationship.

The IAB will be looking into this in far more detail in the future, but right now I wanted to share my own experience below and to gather some of yours. If you feel I’ve missed something, please email me or leave a comment below so that I can adapt it.

What is search and social media?

For the purpose of this article I have made three key assumptions:

Search = a website where the primary function is to search content including video, image, blog articles etc (e.g. Bing, Google, Yahoo!)
Social media = a website or tool that allows for user interaction and content creation, whether that's a blog, forum, picture upload site, social network etc (e.g. blogs, forums, review sites, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube)
Social search = the search function on a social media website, e.g. Twitter search, Facebook search, Digg search.
(NB: Digg, Technorati etc can be classified as search engines, but because their content is primarily user generated or user rated, for the purpose of this article, they are classified as social media)

Table showing the effects of social media on search

This probably makes things seem a lot more complicated and perhaps a little too general, but I wanted to document everything in one place.

Explanation of the effects

Direct improvement on own website search rank (via links)
Major social bookmarking sites and networks include ‘nofollow’ script which currently reduces the effect a link has to different degrees across each search engine. However, search engines still follow and record these links and of course there are many other benefits of receiving links from the sites, e.g. gaining traffic and raising visibility of an article to help bloggers pick it up. That said, blog articles tend not to have 'nofollow', so receiving a link within an actual blog article is currently the most effective direct use of social media for improving your own website's rank. The reason a blog, forum or review section on your own site can help is because of a technique known as 'pagerank sculpting' that allows you to raise the importance of your own pages - but this is an advanced and perhaps changing technique so I won't elaborate here! :)
Significantly improves reach in search
While you can optimise your search campaign to target lots of relevant key terms, it’s not always possible to cover the thousands of key terms that attract smaller - but once combined equally important - amounts of traffic. This is known as the ‘long tail’ and where the power of Forums and Reviews created by users come into their own. Users can create thousands of new articles, allowing you to reach the thousands of search terms that may only attract one or two people each but that you'd otherwise have missed.
Improves brand visibility in search
Pages of content that you run in social networks like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube are all part of your own web presence, they also tend to rank highly in search engines. Use this to your advantage to help control the top 10 search results for your key terms.
Includes visuals or special placement to help visibility in search
Search engines now show more than just links and text results, they also show images, videos, stars for review scores and even author details. Some social media can help you make the most of these, e.g. it’s easier to include a video in Google’s results if it’s on a well optimised YouTube page, and once integrated, Twitter results may be separated out in a special part of the page in the same way that News and Blog articles are.
Improves control of brand reputation in search
Linked to 2., by extending your web presence in search and social media using social media tools, it also means you have more control over your own reputation. This doesn’t mean you can control what people say about you online, it means you can attract comments to your own properties rather than on some random ‘hate’ forum, then you can learn from it and do something about it!
Drives significant traffic to your site without search
It’s not all about search of course, social media can drive traffic to your website directly via links.
Extends brand presence into ‘social search’
By conducting the specified social media activities highlighted with green in the table above, you can ensure your brand will appear in various social network searches, e.g. Twitter, Facebook etc.
Indirectly increase searches for brand or brand phrases
You don’t always need a link, sometimes an interesting article or advert can spark a consumer to search for your brand, product or service in a search engine.This however is harder to track and measure in social media.

Conclusions… for now

This article is a whistle-stop tour of search and social media, trying to squeeze a very big subject into very few words. I’ve left a lot out here but I hope this has helped you think about the relationship between these two important marketing channels.

For me, the major breakthrough for advertisers will be the continued realisation that your web presence no longer means just your website. In fact, it’s interesting that actually, only links from other people’s blog articles will offer a significant direct improvement to your own website’s search ranking when talking about social media, while everything else is indirect word of mouth and branding.

However – and it’s a big ‘HOWEVER’ - by using social media in its many different forms, you can significantly increase the overall search ranking and visibility of your brand’s web presence in search engines in ways that no other media can.

Follow the IAB on Twitter

Google: Even Better Than The Real (Time) Thing?

1713999 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:01:00 GMT

As we all know, Facebook were the top dog in social networking until Twitter came along and started to steal some of its thunder with the introduction of real time search. So in August, Facebook upped their game with the $50 million purchase of Friend Feed. Many commentators at the time said that the ability of Facebook to improve its real time search offering using Friend Feed's technology, whilst not the fabled ‘Google killer' many are waiting for, was something that would really affect the way users look at search and at least would make the boffins in Mountain View do some serious thinking. Do users want ‘algorithm search' based on how people link to each other like the current model of Google (and, though not executed as well, Bing which also now provides the organic results for Yahoo as well) or a ‘social graph' based on people's relationships and conducted in real time like Twitter and Facebook/Friend Feed?

Google know that real time could be the future and the fact that they hadn't managed to get on top of that was a real concern. Google did launch "Search options" in May, allowing users to filter their search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), as well as seeing related searches, a "wonder wheel" view, or a timeline view. But that's not "real time search", is it?

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that month, "Google has done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per second basis... We will do a good job of things now we have these examples."

And, true to their word, on October 21^st there were some big announcements.

At the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, the President of Microsoft's Online Services Group, Qi Lu announced the integration of real time Tweets into Bing. Later, the same day Google's Marissa Mayer announced the same thing for the market leaders as well as a new Google Labs product called "Social Search". This is a new feature that allows the user to see results for queries from people in their social network. According to Tech Crunch, it is likely that these updates will only be included if the data is open, which would seem to exclude Facebook but not Twitter (as long as the Twitterer doesn't lock their Tweets). This could be huge for Twitter in terms of taking their offering to the next level and who knows, this deal may mean that they may actually make some money now, though CEO Evan Williams told the New York Times that "revenue was not the focus of the deals." Of course, Bing and Google have slightly different algorithms so observing the difference in how they filter useful Tweets for the user will be interesting but it does seem a natural next stage for the search giants to include these updates in their results, just as they currently do for news stories, much to the intransigent chagrin of, for example, Rupert Murdoch or Sly Bailey.

So is this going to drive more people to use Twitter or has their uptake peaked making this just a new way of cluttering up increasingly option heavy search results on Google's once famously clean pages? Are these Tweets, unfairly dismissed as inane chatter by some, going to improve searchers' experience or should Google just be concentrating on improving their ever changing algorithm which is the best we have but by no means perfect? Only time will tell but the outcome may dictate the way search evolves in the foreseeable future.

How to cut your nose off to spite your face(book)

1721792 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:13:00 GMT

As agencies we're all trying to find ways to get our client's brands on to the elusive 7 or 8 sites they habitually visit. Some commentators have insisted that the 'destination' web is over and we'll never produce another microsite. The standard response to most briefs is that we can do 'everything on facebook', create a branded page, add some sort of application and take advantage of the inherently viral nature of the platform.

Couple of problems with that. First, you have very limited control over your new site - facebook can randomly update it's layout, users can start using the page as a customer service channel and disgruntled punters can use it as an opportunity to attack your client.

Secondly and more importantly, no-one will ever find it anyway because facebook have barred Google's crawlers. Brands are increasingly using the call to action "Search for..." at the end of their ads and in their outdoor work and that means ensuring that they come up top. A facebook page would be lucky to make the top ten.

So right now, that means we're back to creating ownable, searchable microsites and facebook is missing out.

Online is now number one in the UK

980161 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:47:00 GMT

Online commands respect : Another IAB Ad Spend report, another milestone for online – this time the big one

We released the IAB Ad Spend results today, with the record breaking news that not only has Ad Spend grown again – as it has every half year since we launched the survey in 1998 – but we have finally done what media pundits have been guessing and betting on for years. That is we are now the largest medium in the UK, with 23.5% share of all media spend now being spent on online display, classifieds and search. We are larger than TV not by a fraction, but by £113.6 million. We are also now larger than press display by £369 million.

We know that this is happening in a strange market however, with rumours that TV prices are back to 1980s levels (so it’s not just fashion that’s harking back to the good old days of Dynasty-style shoulder pads and studs, but TV prices too) and constant press stories decrying the fall of print circulations, all too often ignoring some of the success stories bucking the trend in both of these media. But the important thing for us here at the IAB, and the reason why we are very proud of our industry, is the proof that when the going gets tough, online can more than hold its own against other media. Budgets are being cut and prices are falling, but online is maintaining and growing its importance in the media budget.

Just to put the sceptics point of view across, we do present the data splitting press display and classified, so press combined is still the largest media. And we do include search in our figures, which some commentators are quick to point out is maybe not fair when comparing this to display media in particular. But the rise of search agencies with large blue chip clients spending their large blue chip client marketing budgets shows that this is not just an online directory service, it is a core part of the total media and brand marketing mix, not just the online bit. And even though online display did fall a bit on this time last year, though only by 5.2%, it remains the most successful display media in growth terms, with all other display media falling dramatically in this recession, with only cinema at 7.8% decline also getting away with single figures declining growth rates.

At £317 million for the half year to June 2009, online display is showing its strength and we expect it to ride out the rest of the recession well against other display formats. This is an exciting time to be selling online display, as new methods of targeting, behavioural advertising and reach measurements are becoming mainstream and the introduction of UKOM, the online industry’s answer to calls for one source of planning data, is being launched to build further confidence and growth in online display.

Classifieds are growing but are having a mixed time of it, with recruitment classifieds falling from this time last year, but growing from the last six months of 2008. All other classifieds are performing very well online showing growth from the same period last year, and in total classifieds makes up 22% of the online marketing mix, showing the effectiveness of and belief in this medium.

Search is by no means the be all and end all of online, though it has been a medium worth over £1 billion every six months for the last year. And it shows no signs of declining from this. As new offerings such as Bing bring innovation and choice to the market, and new product launches from Google such as FastFlip means this medium keeps being relevant and effective for advertisers.

We at the IAB are very excited for the next six months to see where ad spend will end up for the whole of 2009, even if sadly I won’t be here to announce it as I am leaving to start my own business. However I am very happy that my last week at the IAB sees the announcement of the big news that, perhaps earlier than most of us expected, online is now number 1 in the UK. And I was there at the heart of the industry when it happened.

Follow the IAB on Twitter

Affiliates Reap the Rewards as Voucher Code Usage Surges

778656 — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:52:00 GMT

An interesting week for the world of voucher codes it seems. Fresh from reading a piece in the Sunday Times about Mark Pearson over the weekend, a 28 year old who has built a £30m Fortune from Affiliate Marketing. I read with interest some fascinating facts and figures about voucher code usage from Hitwise.

This surge in voucher code usage is something that Internet Retailing is calling the emergence of the ‘maximising consumer’, I quite like this term as it demonstrates that consumers are not just looking for the cheapest price from often biased shopping comparison search engines but taking longer to look for value added offers and deals.

This trend will certainly have implications on Affiliate Marketing and Search channels as more cookies are dropped along a shoppers journey to the basket and adds to the debate on both de-duplication and allocation of commission to affiliates over other channels in the mix.

It also rightly does point out that the voucher code market is still a little murky, due to some historical and present spammy and volatile methods used by some sites to acquire traffic over user experience - something I think Google will take action on at some stage.

Despite the mass of voucher codes sites in existence and I’m talking over 200 - I can see a core handful of companies taking this channel by the horns followed by a number syndicated and white label offerings and thankfully a total clean up of this internal channel.

Also good news for our wee project Restaurant Vouchers though, as the report states that searches for the term have increased by 226.3% over the last 12 months!

More stories on this over at Google News.

Is Google search evolving fast enough?

902609 — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:13:00 GMT

The latest iteration of Google search, http://www2.sandbox.google.com/, is now available for general testing. The speed with which suggested search terms are returned is genuinely impressive, but are google now being held back by their approach to treating all information equally? I would find the results so much more useful if they were categorised in some way, identifying those results which were created by individuals in social spaces for example, as in many instances, that is what I am now looking for. It would be great to see the results grouped around social content, as they do for images for example, and then able to filter by type, for example reviews, microblogs, or bookmarks.

I often find myelf adapting the search terms I am using to try and identify user generated content (add "review" or "blog" to search term for example). So Google, it would be greate if you could help me out here, and use this amazing technology you are now demonstrating to bring back more than just suggested search terms, but content types and maybe indications of influence as well.

Thanks,

Ross

Facebook search is great, but will Google care?

2371004 — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:21:00 GMT

It's a big day for Facebook, and hats off to them, with the acquisition of FriendFeed and the launch of its real-time search engine, Mark Zuckerberg and Co. deservedly so, have a formidable product to bury Twitter, and even put a little scare into Google.

First, Facebook search. It's going to hit Twitter where it hurts, hard.

In true Facebook form (and that of any other successful internet company), the social network has cleverly borrowed some innovation, from Twitter once more, with a real-time search platform, launched today.

The improved Facebook search, two months in the making, is a direct strike at Twitter's own lucrative and much-hyped system.

Users can now search Facebook to find breaking news, bringing in results from friends' status updates, conversations, photos, links and video - all powered by Microsoft's Bing.

Previously, users were only able to search through profiles and groups in a clumsy, off-putting interface.

If the media was excited about Twitter's search functions, see the uprising in Iran as a previous example, Facebook search will deliver as well.

Facebook has 250m users, and about a fifth of them update their status every single day, which dwarfs Twitter's user base.

The company's acquisition of FriendFeed will soon make itself known as a brilliant business move on Zuckerberg's part.

In the beginning, Facebook wanted Twitter, but they weren't willing to sell. So instead, they get the second choice, FriendFeed, at a fraction of the price with a few goodies thrown in to sweeten the deal.

Facebook has 'borrowed' a number of FriendFeed features, like the 'like' function, but now it can integrate it's powerful search architecture into it's own.

And why go to Twitter when you can log on to Facebook and (thanks to FriendFeed) and check-in on your Twitter stream from there.

Will the new Facebook kill Twitter? No chance. But a few months from now Twitter's trending topics function - already a cesspool for spam and other nonsensical content - will seem archaic and obtuse.

If Facebook can convince users the new search is worthwhile, and somehow get them to pry open their privacy settings - which it has had some success doing so far, the platform will really take off - enough to get Google sweating.

Then it's no surprise that Google made an announcement of its own today, in fact, the company unveiled a completely new search engine, coming right out of left field with 'Caffeine' - faster, more accurate and comprehensive, it said.

Google's search was already lightning fast, but Caffeine appears to give search results even faster, for those without a nanosecond to spare.

Though it has yet to be made publicly available (it can be tested here) Caffeine brings more results for any given query, sometimes hundreds of millions more.

It also gives marketers a slew of new SEO algorithms to play around with.

It's unclear at the moment how Google plans to integrate Caffeine into its workaday search engine, the product is still a work in progress - or for that matter if it's even a better platform, but it shows the company is constantly innovating, never one to be left behind.

The company said Caffeine has been in the works for many months, before Bing, before Twitter's rise to superstardom.

But Facebook's day is Facebook's day, and it has single-handedly roused interest in real-time search (again). Will Google care?

Google has also said it's interested in entering the real-time search market, but how? Is a Google/Twitter acquisition in the works?

Statsaholics Anonymous

1919324 — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:40:00 GMT

For years I’ve known about my addiction to site stats. Watching that trend line fluctuate, hoping for an upward curve. Now I’m willing to step forward and come clean. I’m not alone with this affliction; the world is covered with web statsaholics. Alisa Bowman, Jason Jaeger and Geoffrey Golden being some of the brave souls to admit their problem.

It made me think, is search the new crack cocaine? Could search’s success be largely thanks to the human race’s inherent need to see a graph with growing trend lines that continuously look better than they did the week before. Take the below week from one of my sites:

Check out the peaks on that! They’re growing and getting bigger. But wait, a week later and an influx of traffic from a social network caused a mega spike:

Suddenly those peaky peaks seem crappy and the mega peak is what I’m after in future. It’s a continual battle to up your own game. Don't even get me started on Ebay auctions.

Has anyone been able to go cold turkey?

Follow the IAB on Twitter

Badabing - it's on the up. #badabing

2306192 — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:14:00 GMT

So, it seems that BING is making an impression in the US – comScore reporting as much as a 3% increase in the two weeks since its launch.
It will be interesting to see if this growth is sustained, or rather whether the £100million investment rolls on and on to fuel the hype of the new ‘Decision Engine’. CEO Steve Balmer suggested that MS are prepared to offer up 5-10% of its operating incoming in search over the next 5 years (possibly a staggering £11billion!) and today at Microsoft’s European search summit MS has boldly vowed that they will be the best UK search engine – quite a statement eh!

I took 5 minutes to have a scout around BING; here are some of its nicest features that I’ve noticed.

• Search

Realted search, clear and logical – not too sales driven
Introduction of categories in the linear results - Apparently to combat the huge drop off of click through rates post position 5 that Google experiences, Bing seemingly offers a more enriched list.
Importantly – result quality seems good.

• Image search

Select by size, layout, colour, style and people – and from my test they all seem to work, makes Google’s colour selector look a bit naff!
Viewing options on how many images are on a page, nice smooth switch over of formats

• Related searches

They seem logical and unobtrusive
You can turn them off if they annoy you!

• Video

Roll over snippet functionality – gives you a small preview of the video in question (although this could reduce CTR on query based searches)
Again the plethora of search filters are welcoming and useful i.e best match or most recent

• Shopping

Bit of a fail – shoots you out to Ciao! Which just isn’t as nice? Still it’s a reputable partner, although the introduction of flashing banners, adsense and tags like ‘earn money for reviews’ removes some of BING’s simple allure.

• News

Limited, but hey it’s only in beta – expect more to come in this area

• Maps

Nice link through to Multi-map – still not Google maps is it!

Follow Microsoft’s search summit on twitter hash tag #badabing.