A Week of Announcements

• Apr. 13, 2006

It's the last shift before four days of golf, gluttony, and passive aggressive arguments - everything that is a family oriented holiday - and here I sit, virtually mired waist deep in articles about everything from the media market gone crazy to the latest Google purchases. And it seems to me that this week, more so than last week, is the week of online announcements. So here I am, with the somewhat daunting task of producing an article that pulls the most interesting and pertinent nuggets from this paper wasteland that is my desk, (I sometimes wonder if I would be better served just to throw them all up into the air and pick whatever lands face up.), summarize them, form an opinion, and give a brief explanation of the potential effects to those of us in the industry...allow me to peer into my crystal ball...

Innovation

In my opinion, the most interesting online innovation this past week was from somebody least expected. ABC, in a seemingly final effort to step on the toes of CBS (they put the Final Four games online) and put the final nail into the coffin that once was NBC, has decided to put complete episodes of its hit shows onto its website for streaming broadcast. The best part, it's going to be free. Why? The market penetration of DVRs and online television (YouTube and ClickStar [Morgan Freeman's million dollar baby]) has scared marketers, advertisers, and networks alike, just as the VCR did in the early eighties - and capturing that younger demographic makes or breaks all the players. The catch? All the video feeds will be embedded with ads that a user cannot skip. In fact, this quiet revolution is so promising that big business bought all the ad space available in three minutes.

Sign of the Times

If ABC gets a prize for innovation of the week, a few French researchers get the grand prize show home for being the impetus to all of this past months search engine activity. A comparative study by researchers at the University of Provence has suggested that the relevancy of today's search engines is not that good. In fact, neither MSN, Yahoo!, or Google received a passing grade. As a result, the major players have taken notice and started to make some big strides in the effort to increase relevancy.

Google has started experimenting with expandable and collapsible search results - the very same thing that is being leveraged in every ASK.com re-branding commercial on your television. (I'm not altogether sure whether or not this is equivalent to an opposable thumb, but the monkey evolution gimmick seems to be working for ASK.com.) So why has Google caught the train, same reason they bought the "shrouded in mystery" algorithm of the Australian grad student that is supposed to work wonders at pulling out real content from websites - to give more relevant search results. What does it mean to you.... well, you know all those SEO tactics that we have been expounding for years and years - time to start paying attention.

Big Daddy has finished running its route, and with a new algorithm on the horizon and expandable search results on the SERP, you'd better start paying attention to usability concerns, having real and relevant content, and understanding your target market.

In the wake of increased relevancy, Yahoo! has also mentioned that it has a new algorithm in the works, one that is going to assess ranking for sponsored ads, aka. the Google way of doing things. No longer will the highest bidder be assured the top sponsored position. This change is scheduled to take place at the end of the year, but its ominous presence is definitely looming. Come 2007, landing pages, content, and CTR will be factored into bid price for sponsored positioning. Is this the right decision? I'm not sure. It does seem strangely contradictory when I factor in the results of our soon to be released follow up to our Google Eye Tracking Report; this one investigating Yahoo! and MSN. Our results seemed to go so far as to say that the perceived relevance of Yahoo! sponsored ads was actually quite good relative to the other engines. In fact, it would appear that the free market strategy that is currently in play actually works quite well in establishing perceived relevance and significant click thru.

What does this all mean? Well, hopefully it means that the search engines are moving towards establishing a marketplace that actually rewards above board SEO tactics like fixing content instead of just plugging keywords into the page, like you would hurriedly pack a suitcase after realizing you might miss your flight. Whether the Yahoo! position to strike down a free market economy is the right decision is questionable; I'm all for increasing relevancy but not at the expense of usability for the online marketer. I don't think Yahoo! is that game either.

In Other News

A few weeks ago, Google started to experiment with showing results from its Google Base database in its .com search engine results page - in effect, pushing down the organic listings and giving precedence to what is currently a free marketing tool. The catch? Right now, Google is only displaying those results linked to a physical product, like a make of car or apartment for rent. In essence, Google is only showing those results that you would see in your local paper's classified listings, but that doesn't mean that it will not expand out to include services as well. But who does this benefit? If you have a localized service or product, why not use Google Base; after all, it's free, its geo-targeted, and its free (think I already said that). The problem is your listing expires after 30 days, we're really not too sure how Google is assessing rank and relevance, and if Google Base actually starts driving significant traffic - it will not be free anymore. That said, we have to question how effective Google Base is, but so long as it is free and Google is giving it the prime SERP real estate, you would be foolish not to take advantage.

Last, but not least, MSN Search went down for a day and a half over the weekend. You may have noticed. The effects weren't really resounding; barely a blip on the radar, but the explanation caught my eye. Microsoft, who is transitioning to supplying their own sponsored ads and actually extending those ads to other properties like Office Online, admitted fault for the servers crashing, but rather than explaining the error, chalked it up to being "new to the search game." Scary. They're new? Maybe that is why they missed out on the opportunity that Google is taking advantage of in their latest partnership. Google is going to supply dynamic ads for MLB 2K6 (Major League Baseball 2006) on all gaming platforms, including X-box. This means that those virtual billboards in the game will actually be real billboards for real products, maybe yours. And in case you were wondering, two years ago the gaming industry overtook film and television in revenue generation.

Those are the highlights, in addition to the growing debate about search engines and their roles within Communist China, and whether or not online publishing will soon eclipse traditional print (but who wants to talk about that now that it's on the front page of Forbes?). The important nugget? In my opinion... relevancy is taking its rightful place at center stage again. As the medium that is the Internet expands into new forms, (cell phones, automobiles, even refrigerators) users are coming to the forefront to demand one thing from all their searches - exactly what they were looking for. Search engines have no choice in the competitive marketplace, but to actually give their audience what they are demanding and neither do you.

 

Rick Tobin
Search Marketing Strategist
Search Engine Positioning by Searchengineposition
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