Experian Marketing Services released some findings about search trends in the U.S. for the year. The firm finds that Facebook was the top search term for the fourth year, accounting for 4.13% of all searches (up 33% from 2011).
The data is based on the top 1,000 unfiltered search terms in the U.S. across over 60 search engines. It does not include mobile.
Four different variations of the term “facebook” were among the top 10, accounting for 5.62% of searches overall (up 27% from last year). The top two terms stayed the same from year to year. Behind Facebook was “youtube” again at number two.
Notice that “amazon” moved into the top ten for the first time.
Experian says that analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 6.03% of the top 50 searches, an increase of 44% compared to 2011.
Google terms, including “youtube,” accounted for 1.91%, a 20% increase from last year. New terms that entered the top 50 included: backpage, cool math games, fox news, pinterest and pof (an acronym for dating site Plenty of Fish).
“Navigational searches continue to dominate the top search results as users continue to visit their favorite sites via search engines instead of directly entering a web address into their browsers URL bar,” said Bill Tancer, GM of global research for Experian Marketing. “Single-word searches grew 16% in 2012 as a result of continued reliance on search engine’s suggested results. Other top 2012 searches reflected the ongoing infatuation with celebrities online.”
The terms “yahoo” and “ebay” have been in the top ten since the ranking was started back in 2006.
October has been a huge month for Microsoft, and it’s going to be interesting to see how the company’s new products and implementations inspire Bing use.
Is Bing poised to make a bigger dent in Google’s share of the search market? Do you intend to use Bing with Microsoft’s new products? Do you intend to use Microsoft’s new products at all? Let us know in the comments.
Last Friday, Microsoft launched Windows 8 into the wild. I won’t get into all the bells and whistles of that here. Read this, and determine if you think it’s worth the upgrade.
One thing is for certain though. There are still a lot of Windows users out there, and there are many will make the upgrade simply because it’s the latest version, and others will simply purchase devices that come with the operating system installed. This is a chance for Bing to thrust itself upon users in a flashy new way. Bing resides on the Windows 8 Start menu by default. Sure you can change it, but how many people are that passionate about the search engine they use, and how many simply won’t bother to use Google instead?
There is a standard Bing app for web search and image search, a Travel app, a Weather app, a News app, a Finance app and a Sports app. Some Facebook users (of which there are 1.01 billion), might be exposed to Bing’s social features for the first time, and find that appealing. They may like seeing their friends as they’re searching, and stick with BIng.
“Searching with the Bing app is fast and fluid, whether you use a touch device to tap and swipe or type and click with a keyboard and mouse,” says Brian MacDonald, Corporate Vice President, Online Service Division for Microsoft. “Finger-friendly results and images are front and center letting you quickly find what you’re looking for, so you can search less and do more. You can still rely on the same great Bing web experience in Internet Explorer 10, but we’ve optimized the Bing app to shine on Windows 8.”
“The Maps app makes it easy to find the places you’re looking for and helps you get there faster,” adds MacDonald. “Quickly pinpoint locations, get directions, see traffic conditions and more— all designed to be easily navigable with touch.”
The Weather app gives you a preview of the current weather and the hourly, daily, and 10-day forecasts. For the Finance, News, Travel and Sports apps (collectively referred to as the Bing media apps), Bing has partnered with brands like ABC, AP, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, Reuters and complete daily editions of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Microsoft refers to the experience as a built-in newsstand. The Sports app offers headlines, live scores, schedules, standings, stats, etc., and lets you personalize it based on the teams you care about.
It comes with a feature called “For You,” which offeres personalized recommendations for deals, restaurants, music, videos, etc. based on a person’s location, previous searches and recommendations from Facebook friends.
There’s also a feature called “Local Scout,” which provides recommendations for nearby restaurants, shopping and various activities in a Bing-powered guide.
“Whether you’re looking for the best brunch or live music in your area, it’s all a tap away,” the company explains. “Simply pick a result and you’ll see everything you need to know – where it’s located, how to get there, who to call, when it’s open, the website, and even ratings and reviews. Local Scout includes eat+drink, see+do, shop, local deals and the new for you experience.”
Bing Explore is a feature that lets you swipe the Bing home page across to see content that it has deemed relevant to you, including trending stories, local deals, etc.
The lock screen image on Windows Phone 8 automatically retrieves the image of the day from the BIng home page, so this will provide a constant reminder that you’re a Bing user.
Bing Music on Windows 8 has a larger catalogue, and Microsoft says it’s easier to find out what song is playing by letting your phone “listen” to music. The Shazam-like feature will show you the name, artist and album, as well as where to buy it or hear it.
Bing search results will return Windows Phone Store apps that are relevant to searching. “For example, when you search for movie times, Bing will show you several of the top movie apps,” Bing says. “Bing also powers search for both apps and games in the Store. This system has also been rolled out to Windows Phone 7.x devices.”
Finally, with Bing Vision, you can use your phone’s camera to look up product info by bringing the object into view. Bing recognizes text and presents the option to select words for a search and return product results if there is a bar code. It can also read UPC codes, QR codes and Microsoft Tag, and cover art for CDs, DVDs and video games. There is a also a translation feature which you can use to translate text you come across while traveling.
Then there’s Xbox, which could be one of the greatest assets Microsoft has in terms of having an edge over Google. Google does not have a competitor to Xbox. Xbox 360 sales recently surpassed 70 million units, and we’re just getting into the holiday season this year.
Bing first came to Xbox last year, but was missing the key web search feature. The new update means people can use Bing from the Xbox just like they can from the desktop. Sure Google has Google TV as a living room weapon, but come on. We’re talking about Xbox here. Microsoft said in its announcement:
“Not only have the overall voice recognition capabilities and accuracy of Bing on Xbox been improved, but we’ve also added the following features to help refine your searches even further. Search the Web from Your TV: With the addition of “Internet Explorer,” you can now search across the web, as well as the content on your Xbox, to find the most relevant results. Bing on Xbox also searches YouTube for web original video. So, if you’re searching for a film with Jason Statham, you not only get results for his movies from within Xbox, but you can also view related web content within the same search.”
Bing also provides the search for the new Xbox Music service, and Microsoft has added the ability to search movies by genre.
On top of all of that, they’ve expanded Bing on Xbox to more countries, including: Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain, Mexico, France, Canada (FR), Ireland, Japan, Austria and Switzerland (FR and German).
Now, I’m not saying all of this is going to come together and instantly put Micosoft ahead of Google in search. That’s just silly. However, I do believe the company is making some rather important moves that could lead to an uptick in its market share, and perhaps make Bing more relevant than it has been since it launched.
Microsoft has hardly toned down the marketing since it launched the search engine with a huge advertising budget. Now people know what Bing is, and Microsoft is putting it out there more than ever. Microsoft also has some major new products with its Windows 8 and WIndows Phone 8 operating systems, which will not hurt Bing’s chances of picking up some new users, even if Google is still a click (or a tap) away.
Of course people have to buy the devices (like the new Surface) for this Bing strategy to even try to come together, but that includes Windows PCs, and of course Xboxes. Let’s put it this way: none of this is likely to make Bing lose users.
Also, remember this: Bing doesn’t have to keep people from using Google all the time to get them using Bing more.
What do you think? Is Bing on the verge of taking a bigger piece of the search market? Let us know what you think.
When it comes to online advertising, Google is king. When it comes to search marketing in particular, Google has no peer. While nearly every major company in the U.S. has now invested advertising dollars into internet marketing, smaller businesses can easily run into roadblock if they don’t have the expertise or personel to implement a successful strategy in this brand new world of marketing.
This Wednesday, Bright Park, strategic partner development manager at Google, spoke to a crowd of small business owners at a sales conference in Lexington, KY. The conference was sponsored by local NBC TV station affiliate LEX 18, a Google strategic partner that offers digital marketing services to local businesses. WebProNews attended the event, and was able to speak with conference attendees about how they are incorporating digital marketing into their sales strategies.
The presentation comes just after Google CPC was shown to have fallen in the third quarter of 2013. In fact, current online advertisers may be diversifying their ad spending to social media or other search engines, such as Yahoo Bing. This makes the potential customers Park was addressing all the more important.
Park, whose work focuses on business development for Google’s Channel Sales Team, highlighted the growing importance of online marketing for small businesses, gave some tips on how to improve small business search marketing, and provided some insight into the opportunities and challenges Google faces with bringing small businesses online.
Park began by providing some statistics on just how quickly the online world is growing, such as the fact that 5 billion people are predicted to be online by 2020. “From the dawn of civilization to the year 2003, mankind had created a total of five exabytes of data,” said Park. “Now, in the year 2012, it’s estimated that five exabytes of data are created every two days.”
Pointing out that mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are now becoming ubiquitous, Park showed how search traffic often spikes when live events happen on television. “In short, if you’re advertising on television, you have to be discoverable online,” said Park.
He stated that this paradigm – the connection between TV and internet searches – is what Google calls the “zero moment of truth.”
Park pointed out that while past “zero moments” might be found in a storefront or television ad, people are now heavily researching their purchases online. “Four out of five consumers go online and research products before they go buy them,” said Park. In the course of such research, potential customers are going to use search, and Park encouraged small businesses to make sure they find the right message.
What Park didn’t mention is that the rising cost of pay-per-click advertising may be driving current online advertisers to seek out alternative methods. A New York Times article published last week shows that as more businesses take their advertising online, the price of keywords has risen significantly. The report shows that while small businesses with niche markets can still succeed with relatively low costs, new businesses unprepared for the competitiveness of the search advertising game could end up draining their ad budget for little return.
Park did, though, give a few tips for small business on how they can “win” that zero moment. The first tip was to put someone in charge of search marketing. Preferably, this is someone who knows the internet well, but Park admits that new world of digital advertising can be overwhelming. “Quite frankly, it can be complicated and time consuming to figure out a search engine marketing campaign,” said Park.
Though Park didn’t state it directly, this is undoubtedly where Google resell partners such as LEX 18 come in, offering simplified online marketing packages for small business owners.
Park’s next tip was for businesses to find their own zero moments. Park stated that a business can start this process by simply typing its name into Google’s search and observing what auto-complete suggestions pop up. These auto-complete results are based on data Google has about what people are searching for, and, Park stated, they can help businesses determine what potential customers are searching for.
Park’s third tip was for businesses to answer the questions people are asking about it online by tailoring its online content, based on the auto-complete suggestions and other research performed in the previous tip.
After his presentation, Park opened the floor for a question and answer session. A few of the questions dealt with Google AdWords, such as how businesses using Google’s main product can increase their AdWords quality score, become Google AdWords certified, or prevent click fraud. It quickly became apparent, however, that some conference attendees were only just beginning to understand search marketing. Many of the questions were about specific problems businesses are having with their organic search results or online reviews – not search advertising, which is Park’s speciality. Other questions, such as if Google has any services for word-of-mouth marketing seemed to completely miss the point of Park’s presentation.
Not all attendees were at the outset of their forays into internet marketing, though. WebProNews spoke with Ashley Smith, a 26-year-old volunteer promotions leader with Quest Community Church in Lexington, about what she thought of the conference. “We’re really excited to start using Google AdWords in a new way to really maximize the potential of reaching as many people as possible,” Smith said.
Smith stated that Quest already has a web presence, with online worship services, event schedules, and blogs, as well as a presence on Facebook and Twitter. It would appear that Smith and her colleagues already have a firm grasp of internet marketing. A quick search for “Lexington Church” shows that Quest is at the top of Google’s Places results for that search, with a number of positive reviews and an AdWords ad at the bottom of the results.
As major enterprise begins to standardize its search marketing strategies and move on to social media marketing, Google’s push to educate small businesses about the necessity of online advertising will certainly be a factor in the continued growth of AdWords revenue. Judging by today’s conference, the internet giant certainly has an abundance of potential customers, but will have to work hard to educate small businesses that haven’t embraced the internet.
The SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) Board of Directors has sent a letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz regarding search labeling transparency.
The theme of the letter is in line with the open letter written to the Commission by search industry vet Danny Sullivan earlier this year, in which he called for the FTC to scrutinize Google as well its competitors when it comes to labeling search results that have been paid for.
“Should the FTC undertake such a review, in addition to signifying the understanding that recent extreme antitrust claims against Google search practices lack merit, it would also be taken to mean that the FTC perceives the benefits of taking a broader, industry-wide approach to search labeling and transparency – a positive position,” SEMPO says.
SEMPO has spoken out against FTC regulation of Google in the past. See our interview with Chairman Chris Boggs here.
“As we have publicly stated previously, the search function is not a government-run utility, established by law and thus subject to bureaucratic oversight, but a service provided to consumers and businesses by private companies, which have set up their operations using their own principles, proprietary technologies and algorithms. We feel strongly, for a host of reasons, that regulating individual companies’ search algorithms is undesirable,” the letter continues.
“Nonetheless, we believe that a level playing field should be ensured for search as a whole – both for the protection of consumers and in furtherance of fair competition within the search industry,” it adds. “Consumers and search engines are both better off when consumers have full transparency about why they are seeing which results on search websites. If the present FTC guidelines on paid placements are being widely flouted, or if certain industry segments – such as vertical search sites – harbor particular practices that mislead consumers, result in fraud, or offer unfair competitive advantage to their commercial customers, the public and the business community deserve to know. And they also deserve to have steps taken to protect them in future.”
Google has come out in support of such an industry wide review by the FTC. In July, a Google spokesperson told WebProNews, “Consumers benefit from clear labeling in search results, and we have always clearly disclosed which links are paid advertisements. That said, not all search engines clearly disclose paid results, so we would support a fresh look by the FTC at search labeling and transparency practices.”
We also asked other companies like Microsoft, Orbitz and Expedia whether they would support such a review. None of them would comment at the time.
Google, of course, is facing another kind of scrutiny by the FTC. Recent reports indicate that the Commission will come to a final decision on whether or not to pursue a suit against Google by mid November or December, with a reported four out of five Commissioners supporting a suit. Meanwhile, at least one congressman has written to the FTC saying that even discussing antitrust when it comes to Google “defies all logic”.
To be clear, people are still turning mostly to search for seeking the answers to their questions. However, the gap between search and social networks is narrowing.
Are you getting more traffic from social media than you were a year ago? How’s it looking compared to search? Let us know in the comments.
There are plenty of sites out there that are getting more traffic from social media sites than they are from search engines. In fact, Google’s constantly changing algorithm almost demands that sites diversify their traffic sources and rely less on Google (the clearly dominant search engine) for the bulk of their traffic.
Doing great in Google now? There’s no guarantee that will last. You’re relying on an algorithm, and algorithms don’t care whether or not they have a substantial impact on your business.
Social media, on the other hand, is much more about people, and regardless of where they share it, people will always share good content, and are not necessarily influenced by over 200 mysterious signals when they share it with their own networks of friends and followers.
With that in mind, it might be good news that social media is apparently gaining ground against search in terms of the traffic it can drive to websites.
Paid Content’s Robert Andrews has a short, but interesting piece on the subject, citing UK Experian Hitwise data indicating that UK visits to major search engines dropped by 100 million through the month of August to 2.21 billion, and dropped by 40 million year-over-year. He shares the following comentary from Hitewise:
“The key thing here is the growing significance of social networks as a source of traffic to websites. Search is the still the number-one source of traffic, but social networks are growing as people increasingly navigate around the web via recommendations from Twitter, Facebook etc.”
“We’re basically doing 1 billion queries a day and we’re not even trying,” he’s quoted as saying, adding that “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. At some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on it,” and “Search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers, ‘I have a specific question, answer this question for me.’”
As Andrews notes, people are increasingly finding answers to their questions in social networks. This is why a Facebook search engine could be worth something to users. It’s why the search engines like Google and Bing have added more social content to search results, and it’s why Google is now failing in its mission to index the world’s information and make it universally accessible.
A recent survey from Greenlight Digital suggested that a Facebook search engine could instantly grab 22% of the market share.
According to recent research from Webmarketing123 (pdf), the number of marketers able to attribute leads and sales to particular social channels more than doubled (leads from 15 to 31%, sales from 23% to 60%) year-over-year.
“Compared to last year, nearly 50% more B2Bs now identify social media as having the most impact on lead generation (2011 vs 2012),” the firm said in its report.
In social media engagement, the firm says, “B2c marketers are ahead with 70% moderately to highly engaged (40% highly engaged), but B2B is catching up, with 63% at those levels of engagement (27% highly engaged), overall, only 1 in 10 have no social
media program.”
90% of B2Bs have some level of Social Media engagement, according to the research, with 63% describing themselves as “moderately to fully engaged,” and 25% “very” to “fully” engaged. The majority of this group, Webmarketing123 says, are seeing a return on their investment. Top areas of investment (for the 60% that spend) are Facebook & LinkedIn (where 40% are active), and Twitter (30%).
Webmarketing123 says that 20% of the marketers active on social media aren’t sure if they’re generating leads, and a full 40% aren’t sure if they’ve closed sales attributable to social media.
We looked more at the search-related data the firm collected here.
Facebook is doing search. We’ve been talking about this for quite some time, but now it has come straight from the mouth of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Should Google consider Facebook a threat in the search department? Do you think Facebook can make search better with all of its data? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Zuckerberg was interviewed by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt Tuesday evening, where he was asked about the possibility of Facebook getting into search. TechCrunch quotes him as saying, “We’re basically doing 1 billion queries a day and we’re not even trying.”
He’s also quoted as saying, “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. At some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on it,” and “Search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers, ‘I have a specific question, answer this question for me.’”
So, from this I take it that Facebook is working towards building some kind of major search offering beyond its current search feature, and that answers will be a major component of that.
Interestingly enough, Facebook seems to have put its Facebook Questions offering to death. This could have factored in here, but apparently Facebook is choosing a different route.
In July, The Sydney Morning Herald talked with Lars Rasmussen, Facebook’s Director of Engineering, and a former Googler (the guy behind Google Maps). In that interview, Rasmussen said he was working on “something very specific which is super exciting,” but stressed that it’s not a “go-after-Google product.”
But, Google has said similar things about how Google+ isn’t a Facebook competitor in the past. It’s all tied together, and these companies are competing, no matter how they want to spin it. They’re competing for time spent online, online identity, and ultimately for ad dollars (not to mention other potential sources of revenue).
Google has plenty of reasons to make regulators see Facebook as a direct competitor. Mark Zuckerberg may have just helped out with that. It’s actually been quite a week in Google’s favor as far as the antitrust discussion goes. The company won a related case in Brazil, a new FTC nominee has written papers opposing antitrust regulation against Google, a report has come out talking about Amazon stealing away more product searches from Google, and then these comments from Zuckerberg.
“I can’t predict what will happen in the future but I don’t think it will make sense for us at this stage to even begin to think about doing web search,” Rasmussen said in the interview. “Google does that so well.”
Well, it has been about two months, so perhaps now is the time. Based on Zuckerberg’s comments, it seems that they’re at least thinking about it.
It is interesting that he said, “Google does that so well,” and not “Google and Bing,” or just “Bing,” considering Facebook’s partnership with Bing. Bing has Facebook social features and Facebook uses Bing for web search results. Microsoft is also an investor in Facebook.
It remains to be seen whether BIng will play a significant role in any search offering that Facebook may have up its sleeve, but clearly Bing isn’t satisfied with the “Google does that so we” philosophy.
As I talked about in another article, however, Facebook’s search offering doesn’t necessarily have to compete with Google in every way to be a relevant product. Twitter Search, for example, isn’t a Google killer, but it sure fills a void that Google is leaving with its lack of realtime search.
Did you know that more people are starting product searches with Amazon and less with Google than they were a few years ago? Amazon search is by no means a Google killer, but it’s taking away searches from Google, just like Twitter is, not to mention countless other sites and apps. Combined, all of these other ways of searching for information can take significantly away from Google searches, and like Amazon and Twitter, Facebook is a pretty big source of information.In one way in particular, it has a major leg up on Google: social data.
In July, Facebook announced that it has 955 million active users. All of them have personal social connections that can be used in a way that Google just can’t. Google can do whatever it wants with Google+, but Facebook is where the real social landscape is, and there’s a lot of potential for Facebook to do something greatly damaging to Google searches here.
Also consider that iOS 6, coming to most iPhone and iPad models (including the new iPhone 5) and the iPod Touch this month will feature heavy Facebook integration. How much data will this add to Facebook? Probably more than any of us can imagine.
“Now it’s easier than ever to interact with the world’s largest social network,” says Apple. “And there’s no need to leave your app to do it. Share a photo to Facebook right from Camera or Photos. Post your location right from Maps. Brag about a high score right from Game Center. If you have your hands full, just ask Siri to post for you. You need to sign in to Facebook only once, and you’ll be off and sharing. Never miss another birthday or get-together, since Facebook events are integrated into Calendar. And your Facebook friends’ profile information is integrated into Contacts, so when they update an email address or phone number you automatically stay up to date. Now that’s something to post about.”
From a business perspective, think about how many brands are on Facebook, engaging with fans and customers, running Pages/Timelines, selling goods, advertising, pushing social campaigns and apps, etc. There is an entire business ecosystem already existent within Facebook, and there’s little question that any major search offering from Facebook would serve to grow this and make it more useful to both businesses and customers (and likely add a lot of revenue for Facebook itself).
Unfortunately, all we can do is speculate about how Facebook will do search at this point, and frankly, that probably won’t do anybody much good, but at least now, we have confirmation from Facebook’s leader that Facebook is indeed thinking about search.
I don’t expect that it’s that far off. Facebook, as it needs to find new revenue streams, has already been putting ads in its search box. I wonder if we’ll see something at f8 (Facebook’s developer conference) this year.
What would you like to see from a Facebook search engine? Is it a good idea? As a business, what kinds of features would you like to see? How about As a user? Would you even use a Facebook search engine? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Google may have just made email marketing even more effective, and more important to your maketing strategy. Thanks to a new feature Google unveiled this week, email is now part of the search experience.
“Sometimes the best answer to your question isn’t available on the public web—it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email,” says Google’s Amit Singhal. “We think you shouldn’t have to be your own mini-search engine to find the most useful information—it should just work. A search is a search, and we want our results to be truly universal. So we’re developing a way to find this information for you that’s useful and unobtrusive, and we’d love your feedback.”
You can sign up for the field trial here. The first million people to sign up can use it for now (once they get an email confirmation from Google, which can take some time, and Google accepts them – some won’t make it in). It’s only accessible in English on Google.com with @gmail addresses, for the time being, and is currently not available for Google Apps accounts.
“We’re working on some even more useful features,” says Singhal. “For example, if you search for [my flights] we will organize flight confirmation emails for any upcoming trips in a beautifully easy-to-read way right on the search results page.”
It will be very interesting to see what other niche-specific features Google might add in the future. Whatever they may be, they could factor into your email marketing plan.
Earlier this year, Google consolidated its privacy policies into one main policy spanning across Google products. This enables Google to use data from one product across its other products (who knows where else Gmail messages might appear in the future).
Some Gmail users keep a whole lot of emails in their Gmail accounts. One of the main selling points of Gmail when it was unveiled back in 2004, was that it had a ridiculous amount of storage capacity, so you didn’t have to worry about deleting emails. That’s a lot of content that can pile up. Highly personalized content that may just be relevant to some of your searches, even if you’ve forgotten about it. Until now, it’s been behind a wall that Google was not accessing from search, even though it was a wall that Google always had access to.
Email marketers may want to consider how their messages could perform in the long term.
VatorNews just reported on a study from Monetate, indicating that email converts better than search and social combined. What effect will emails in search have? Any additional conversions from search would simply be the icing on top of the email cake. An added bonus.
Reporter Krystal Peak says the report found that “social converted at 0.59%, while search was almost 5X better at 2.59%.”
“The real winners are those troves of emails filling up all of our inboxes right now,” she adds. “Converting 4.25%, email deals are converting people to sales eight times better than social.”
That’s exactly my point. Those emails that would otherwise just be filling up your inbox, most likely never to be seen again, can now serve a new purpose, surfacing in search results.
While for now, it’s only in limited trial mode, it stands to reason that Google will open up this feature for broad use in time.
Obviously, email campaigns are going to hit much more than Gmail users, but that doesn’t mean Google’s competitors won’t look at incorporating similar features into their products. It’s not hard to imagine Bing doing this with their new Outlook.com email service, for example. And who’s to say that Google won’t partner with other email providers sometime down the road.
Either way, Gmail has over 400 million active users. It stands to reason that many of them are using Google Search. Depending on how many opt into Google’s new feature (assuming that it expands beyond the trial period), that’s potentially a lot of people your email messages could be reaching well beyond the send date, at a time when they’re perhaps even more relevant than they were on that date.
It’s something to think about. What do you think? Comment here.
The search industry has witnessed multiple changes over the past couple of years. Among the most notable changes are social, mobile, and local being integrated into search results. While each of these play a big role in the search evolution that has occurred, I think it’s fair to say that social tops the list.
How has social media influenced your search experience? Do you prefer its integration, or would you rather have the “old search” model back? Let us know.
The influx of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and now players such as Pinterest has all dramatically impacted how users search. With Google as the dominant search engine, it has obviously pushed its social endeavors aggressively to become the leader in both sectors. After Larry Page became Google’s CEO, reports circulated that he was tying all employees’ bonuses to the success of Google’s social strategy.
What’s more, in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, when asked if he was concerned about Facebook’s competition in search, Page answered with: “It’s something that we take seriously just like we do social media.”
According to Grant Simmons, the Director of SEO and Social Product at The Search Agency, Google has been worried for some time about competition, especially in social. Although the latest statistics show that Google+ has over 100 million users, it’s clear that it is not gaining the same traction that Facebook did.
In addition, Google has made some drastic moves including Search Plus Your World and the recent launch of its Knowledge Graph, both of which are designed to improve users’ search experience by making it simpler, personal, and more social. Interestingly though, as Simmons pointed out to us, these recent announcements from Google are similar to products from other companies, AKA competitors.
He told us that Google has rolled out lots of “me too” announcements and that it is “trying to differentiate itself by copying.”
“The Knowledge Graph is certainly to address some of that,” he went on to say, “but I think also, it’s more like to them looking forward to how they can get Google to be more sticky and also more competitive.”
The push, however, of Google’s social products into search has not exactly set well with users or the search industry as a whole. Although the tone could change and users might begin to find Google’s products useful, it could also turn users away.
“With the alternative search engines whether it’s social search or whether it’s media search or whether it’s just mobile search, I think that Google is a little bit concerned,” explained Simmons,” and tying in their 400-500 million users into search results makes sense, it’s just whether users will get a little bit overcome by Google products always being pushed; or, whether it’s gonna be something they adopt because it’s useful to them.”
When talking about social and the possibilities of a search engine though, one can’t rule out Facebook. At this point, Bing powers the search function on Facebook, but given the social giant’s wide range of data, it’s likely got something up its own sleeve in the search department.
“I think Facebook has to get into some type of search leveraging the data they have,” said Simmons. “They’re already working on it, I’m sure.”
But, as Jessica Lee of The Search Agency pointed out on GigaOM, Facebook can’t exactly compete with Google’s more than 8.6 billion indexed pages. Simmons believes Facebook will use its “Like” system, Open Graph, user profiles, and other data it has acquired toward its search curation product.
“What they do have is they have a core or a connection between lots of pages that have likes on them,” he said. “They have, within Facebook, an understanding of what you do like from a page standpoint, what your connections are, what you talk about within Faceboook, and I think by leveraging that data, they can get a pretty good understanding of what you’re looking for, what you like, [and] what you might connect with on a more relevant basis.”
He sees Facebook’s partnership with Bing continuing at least in the short-term, since both parties benefit. In addition, it addresses Google’s integration with Google+ into its search results.
Incidentally, Danny Sullivan in a piece on Search Engine Land in April expressed his doubt for Facebook starting a search engine:
I’ve been asked a lot recently about whether I believe Facebook will create its own search engine, because the rumors that never die have startedagain. I don’t, not a web-wide one.
Among other reasons, I think Facebook won’t because it understands that doing social right, when you’re at the scale Facebook handles, is ensuring that people discover what’s interesting to them rather than having to search for it.
Social = discovery, a kissing cousin of search, but not the same. And social is what Facebook is focused on. That’s plenty to chew on. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said as much repeatedly, such as to Charlie Rose last year, about wanting to do “one thing incredibly well.” That means continuing to perfect social.
Twitter has also been mentioned in the talks of social search engines, but according to Simmons, it already has “robust search,” but it is challenged by a struggling business model.
Going forward, it’s essentially inevitable that social search will play an even greater role in the game of search. The winner, however, is yet to be determined.
Simmons did tell us that SEOs needed to begin thinking about social search and where their audiences are. Most importantly, he believes that brands need to understand that there are different venues and that their audiences will likely need to be approached in different ways.
“We talk about The Search Agency Search Anywhere Optimization or Search Everywhere Optimization as the new SEO, and it really is about where people are searching and where they’re searching and niche-type stuff,” he said.
“The single search venue as the solution to social search probably won’t happen,” he continued. “It’s gonna be more about these connections, affiliations, [and] associations that make sense to me as an individual as opposed to just a personalized search engine like Google.”
How do envision the future of social search? Do you see Google or Facebook playing a role, or could it be a completely different player? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Google has partnered up with ClickZ on a mobile marketing and apps survey. Google says it hopes to “provide a reference point for the state of mobile marketing in 2012.”
They say it just takes three mintes to complete, and they’re giving away two pairs of free passes to the Search Engine Strategies conference and a free iPad. If you take the survey, you’ll be entered into a drawing for one of the prizes.
“The staggering growth of mobile platforms, devices, apps and of course users has inspired an entire generation of marketers and entrepreneurs to take notice,” says Adam Singer from Google’s Analytics team. “But with such rapid change execution and adoption are all over the board.”
The deadline for the survey is 5 p.m. ET June 15. You can take it here.
Google is certainly putting a great deal of focus on mobile marketing this week. The company just announced the integration of its AdMob network into AdWords, so AdWords advertisers have access to AdMob display inventory.
Google wants users to know that they are doing everything that can to facilitate a revolution in online advertising that puts control in the viewers hands. This means they have to reengineer the whole system of buying and selling ads along with the way they are created.
As you know, Google has already made great strides with creating tools and services that make ad creation and refinement a lot more accessible, but more recently, today in fact, they’re meeting with some of their closest customers to discuss how an advertising revolution should proceed. They’re calling it the DoubleClick Insights Conference.
Google’s Vice President of Display Advertising, Neal Mohan will be meeting with industry leaders to discuss how technology is reshaping the environment and how consumer’s relationship with advertising has changed. They will also discuss how advertisers and publishers can work together to create a richer and more engaging marketing experience. The bad news is, the conference is already underway and kicked-off at 9am PST. You can probably still catch some of the conference if you register now.
Today’s Insights Conference Speaker Line-up
Neal Mohan – Vice President, Display Advertising, Google
Terry Kawaja – Founder and CEO, LUMA Partners
David Kenny – Chairman & CEO, The Weather Channel
James Pitaro – Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group
Omar Tawokol – Chief Executive Officer, BlueKai
Greg Stuart – Global CEO of Mobile Marketing Association
Kurt Unkel – President, VivaKi
Shishir Mehrota – Vice President of Product Management, YouTube
Brad Ruffkess – Social Marketing and Connection Strategy, Coca-Cola
Mike Lowenstern – Managing Director of Digital Advertising, R/GA
Peter Minnium – Head of Digital Brand Initiatives, IAB
John Caldwell – Chief Digital Officer, National Geographic Society
If you’ve completely missed the events, that’s okay because all the details are available on the DoubleClick Advertising Blog. Obviously reinventing the way the advertising business functions is going to take an awful lot of conscious effort from a lot of different groups. Framing the challenge is only the first step and I think Google had done a good job.
Here’s how Neal Mohan, VP of Display Ads, explained the rather complex nature that plagues digital advertising initiatives today:
“One of the central challenges we’re looking to solve with this effort is that digital marketing is still incredibly complex—with marketers juggling multiple systems to manage their different digital efforts across banner ads, paid search campaigns, mobile ads, online video and measurement using systems that don’t talk to one another. We think of this a bit like an old school ‘90’s stereo system, with separate CD, cassette and radio players and a mess of wires in the back.”
“What we want to provide to our partners should be more like the intuitive, powerful smartphones we carry in our pockets today—which not only play all our favorite music, but take pictures, keep our schedules and more.”
“Towards this end, DoubleClick Digital Marketing will weave together the technologies that buyers currently use to plan, manage, schedule, deliver and measure their online buys in a way we think will not only help them work smarter and faster, but ultimately be more responsive to their customers and deliver better ads.”
So if you’re interested in the online advertising revolution, you can read more by following this link to Google’s official blog. If you’re interested in starting your own ad campaigns, Google is also a great resource for creation tools and analytics. The DoubleClick Insights Conference runs until 1PM PST today, but updates about the events and speakers will be posted throughout the week.
To say that Yahoo has had its share of problems in the past few years is an understatement. The most recent news of the now former CEO Scott Thompson and his resume scandal has only added to the disorder surrounding Yahoo. The once highly regarded Internet giant has experienced all types of turmoil including numerous management changes, extensive layoffs, and the closing of multiple properties, all of which have raised a lot of questions about the company’s future.
The company’s “Search Alliance” with Microsoft leaves plenty of questions about the company’s future in search, as well, but there are rumors going around that the deal may not play out as planned. We spoke with Kevin Ryan, the CEO of Motivity Marketing, who says that based on rumors floating around in the industry, the search alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft might not make its projected 10-year tenure.
“There’s a lot of rumors in the business that [it] isn’t going well, and that it’s not going to make the full-decade run,” he tells us. “So, if I’m Yahoo, I’m spending a little bit of money trying to figure out how we can get that search bucket going.”
“Yahoo effectively threw in the towel with search,” says Ryan of the alliance.
Despite the many reports on the struggling search alliance, David Pann, the General Manager of Search Networks at Microsoft, spoke with us last year and pointed out that the companies had already experienced success, even in its early stages.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Okay, well, you didn’t do this, you didn’t that – it’s a failure,’” Pann explained. “I don’t think of that. I think that, given where we are, and given the complexity of the relationship… we’re actually making very good progress.”
However, if the rumors are true and Yahoo does pull out of its agreement with Microsoft, the company will have to begin thinking about search again. The only other option would be to sell its search business completely.
According to Ryan, there are several instances that could be credited as catalysts for Yahoo’s downward sprial, but he believes its Panama search ad platform played a large role in beginning the downfall. Panama was Yahoo’s attempt to monetize search, as Google did, but instead, Ryan says it was an “abject failure” for Yahoo.
Ryan compares Yahoo’s current situation to what happened with Ask. The former search engine pulled out of the search industry in 2010 and has now transformed itself into a questions and answers service with an emphasis on mobile.
There are some who would likely consider Yahoo to be a former search engine as well. Yahoo is currently in the process of reinventing itself as a media company, but the company’s short-term leaders have had difficulty in making this transition. Ryan, however, doesn’t believe this particular attempt is the best option for Yahoo.
“Stop trying to reverse engineer HuffPo,” said Ryan, “and create something new.”
But, Yahoo’s performance as a media company has been nothing to shake a stick at, and for many, Yahoo’s homepage works very well as a portal to the Web. Just take a look at Yahoo’s realtime homepage view counter at any given day. So far today (at 8:30AM Pacific), the page has already seen over 73 million views .
Still, Ryan tells us that Yahoo should reinvest in its core business, in which search plays a very big role. With a renewed focus in this area, he believes Yahoo could better serve consumers and also advertisers, which could help it get back on the right track.
Ryan told us there could be opportunities for Yahoo in terms of social development. Both Google and Bing have yet to completely succeed in social, which leaves an open door for Yahoo. He believes that a renewed focus on search combined with the opportunities in social could help to begin to turn Yahoo around. In addition, Ryan would like to see Yahoo make drastic changes internally in order to streamline its processes and improve its culture.
“I hope that the change that Yahoo makes will be very internal,” he said. “I hope that the culture internally will become much more positive, but we’ll see.”
At this point, Ross Levinsohn is Yahoo’s interim CEO. Although some people believe he will become the permanent CEO, Yahoo has not indicated any official word for who its next leader will be.
It’s inevitable that changes will happen at Yahoo in the coming months, but what they will be and whether or not they will be effective in saving the company are both still in question. On the positive side, Yahoo was able to finally reach an agreement with Alibaba Group. The $7 billion deal will require Yahoo to sell back half its stake in the Chinese company, but it brings resolution to one of its many problems.
Earlier this week, we posted an article about an investigation from blogger Josh Davis, which exposed marketing firm iAcquire for allegedly purchasing backlinks for clients. Davis’ report caught the attention of Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts:
Now, it turns out that iAcquire has been de-indexed from Google (along with other parties involved in the scandal, according to Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz). Schwartz even got iAcquire’s Director of Inbound Marketing to mention this on Twitter:
On the topic of whether or not its better for companies to run their own SEO in-house, Davis told WebProNews, “It is hard to say. From small businesses all the way up to large corporations there are so many hours in the day. SEO seems to be one area where considerable oversight is needed as various black and grey hat techniques still seem to be part of some SEO companies’ toolboxes.”
As far as trust a firm not to engage in paid linking on your behalf, Davis says, “Backlink monitoring is certainly a key. There are a number of enterprise grade resources that provide daily updates on links. In my case I was just using a crude, free backlink service, but this space is filled with vendors who offer high quality monitoring. Having a third party do an audit of links might also be needed when a large company’s reputation is at stake.”
There’s an interesting Kickstarter project called Gooey Search, which bills itself as “Google on Steroids with Privacy”. It was developed by a small software company called Visual Purple. The tool comes in the form of an iPad app, as well as a Firefox add-on. I would assume it would be expanded to other platforms, should it reach its funding goal.
Visual Purple’s Megan Rutherford reached out to us to tell us a little about the project. First, check out the video:
“We’ve been building bleeding-edge technology and advanced training simulations for years,” she says. “Recently, we developed and launched a professional data discovery tool for analysts and researchers. The tool is GisterPRO, and does some very powerful things such as read unstructured data – things computers don’t normally like to read.”
“We agonized over finding a way to bring this technology to the rest of us,” she adds. “Then, we stumbled upon Kickstarter.”
“Like most people, Google is our go-to search engine,” the Kickstarter page says. “From our extensive study of the mathematics of language, we found a great way to combine smart web bots and intelligent reading technology. Our technology reads every Google result, strips out the spam, and bubbles up only the best results along with the strongest concepts in a kinetic, Gooey Graph.”
It strips out the spam and bubbles up the best results? Maybe Google should be checking this out as a possible acquisition target, given all the complaints that have been going around regarding the Penguin update.
“Instead of marketing tags, these concepts are discovered entities that empower you to interact with and explore Google results like never before. Gooey makes search fun and rewarding for kids of all ages,” the page continues. “All you have to do is type your search terms into the search bar (just like you would any Google search). We issue your search to Google but our smart bots literally check every result returned – verifying each link and reading each document for you.”
“On the right side of the Graphic User Interface (GUI for short) is Gooey Graph – an alive, real-time network diagram of discovered concepts,” the page explains. “Just play with Gooey Graph by deleting or stacking concepts to quickly sort results and find what you need.”
Rutherford says Gooey Search is designed to bring “professional-grade data discovery technology to the rest of us”.
“The sub-rosa story is that Gooey brings complete privacy, anonymity and automatic entity extraction to Google searches while neutralizing ‘Filter Bubble’ biasing of search results,” she says.
You might remember Kayak, a popular travel search site, filed for an IPO back at the end of 2010, but poor market conditions caused them to hold off. As Robert Birge, Kayak’s chief marketing officer put it, “some companies have no choice but to move forward into…unsettled markets, we are happy to wait; it’s just that simple”.
Their first quarter 2012 financial report reveals a net income of $4.1 million and a 39% increase in revenue when compared with the same quarter last year. Revenue reached over $73 million for this quarter. With the IPO Kayak plans to raise about $150 million. According to CNBC, part of the renewed interest in the offering comes from competition by ITA. ITA is a similar travel search site recently purchased by Google, which poses a considerable risk to Kayak.
We will be watching the Kayak IPO closely as it is one of the first tech IPO’s to follow the much anticipated Facebook IPO which begins tomorrow. Check back regularly for updates on Kayak and Facebook.
A new study conducted by Greenlight, a digital marketing agency, suggests that Google+ could be more successful than had been previously expected and that Facebook, should it actually launch a search engine, would capture nearly a fourth of the global search market immediately upon launching it. Given this market share, a Facebook search engine would instantaneously barge through all non-Google search engines to secure the spot of second most-used search engine in the world (excepting China, Japan, and Russia).
The comScore ranking of search engine market shares for March 2012 show that Google claims 66.4%, Microsoft (which includes Bing) includes 15.3%, and Yahoo! has 13.8%. However, Greenlight’s survey, “Search & Social Survey (2011-2012),” which included responses from 500 people ranging from students to medical stuff to the unemployed, shows that a solid 5% would “definitely” use a Facebook search engine as an alternative to Google while another 12% said they’d probably use Facebook’s search engine. Facebook’s acquisition of a quarter of the search market would rely on its ability to convince those without any search engine loyalty, namely the 27% of respondents who replied “Maybe, but only if it was better than Google and Bing,” that its unique search engine is what they need. But even without proselytizing its search engine to the wandering internet user, Facebook would still probably amass 17% already, which would still push it into second place given you have to imagine every other search engine company’s numbers would go down a little bit – and that’s a worse-case scenario.
“These stats therefore suggest Facebook could capture around 22% of the global search market by simply launching its own search engine tomorrow morning (the ‘Definitely’, ‘Probably’, and half of the ‘Don’t know’ respondents combined),” said Greenlight CEO Andreas Pouros in a statement. “It wouldn’t need to be a spectacular engine either, just well integrated into the Facebook experience and generally competent.”
Greenlight projects that Facebook could increase its search market share to a maximum of 50%, but that dexterous feat would include some Asgardian levels of force and strategy.
And even if Facebook’s search engine was soaring through the market with the force of Ragnarok, it’s still going to have some staunch resistance from Google and what it’s been able to do with social search thus far. In the same Greenlight study, 23% of Google users said they’ve been using the +1 feature on search results, which the firm says may be more than what had been assumed initially.
Google’s +1’s still lag behind the 35% of people who Like a brand or company on Facebook, but Facebook’s had a healthy head-start on Google+ and, given Google+‘s relatively young state, most of the world’s top brands haven’t even launched a dedicated Google+ page for their companies.
Given that a Facebook search engine would likely be regarded as an instant success in the world of search, Google very well might need to begin worrying about the very real possibility that it’s going to have a juggernaut of a challenger sometime in the near future. It could be one reason why Google’s been tweakingits search algorithms so much lately.
Do you agree with Greenlight’s speculation that Facebook’s search engine would be an immediate challenge to Google’s search dominance? Would you be welcoming or hesitant of a Facebook search engine? Chime in below with your thoughts.
Yahoo! Small Business launched the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard today, a free platform that allows businesses to seek out new marketing channels and to get a better picture of marketing results, site stats and brand reputation, all in one place.
Below is a screen of the Online Reputation Management Pro feature on the new dashboard:
Key features include:
Online reputation management: Pulls information from up to 8,000 sources (including Facebook and Twitter) Search engine and directory listings: Enables monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, covering over 100 sites (including Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and more) Site traffic analysis: Enables users to understand key website performance metrics (including Google Analytics) Small business-focused news and advice: Provided from Yahoo! Small Business Advisor Campaign tracking: Provides email marketing, SEO, and SEM campaign tracking (must subscribe to these services) Support: 24/7 in-house free customer support
Below is the Site Traffic interface:
Also included is Local Visibility Pro:
The advanced features of the platform include:
Local Visibility Pro: Small businesses can increase their online visibility by submitting their business information to over 100 search engines and directories Reputation Management Pro: Users get more comprehensive data, plus the ability to track their competitors, receive email alerts, and share positive customer comments via social channels or email Integrated campaign tracking: Small businesses can also attract new customers by taking advantage of marketing services from featured, best-in-class third party marketing vendors, including Constant Contact and OrangeSoda, and display and monitor results from campaigns with those vendors from within the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard
Shannon Parker Hane, Director of Product Marketing, Yahoo! Small Business, states, “We created the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard to help small business owners who feel overwhelmed by online marketing options and monitoring a wide range of sites and social networks to keep up with customer feedback. Now, within a single tool customers can conveniently evaluate their marketing options, campaign results and online reputation without having to search across the Web for information.”
Do you ever feel the search results that Google yields are too mainstream? Are you looking to explore the cavernous, cobweb-laden outer reaches of the interwebs? If you want to spend some time on some deep discovery, Million Short might be your ticket.
Million Short’s name says it all. It’s a search engine that brings back results that are a million sites short of what you’d find in Google. You can chose to remove the top million, hundred thousand, ten thousand, and on down to just one hundred from your results.
Million Short is an experimental web search engine (really, more of a discovery engine) that allows you to REMOVE the top million (or top 100k, 10k, 1k, 100) sites from the results set. We thought might be somewhat interesting to see what we’d find if we just removed an entire slice of the web.
The thinking was the same popular sites (we’re not saying popular equals irrelevant) show up again and again, Million Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don’t make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason (poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, competitive keyword(s) etc.). Most people don’t look beyond page 1 when doing a search and now they don’t have to.
For instance, let’s say that I used Million Short to search “Hipster.” Gone are results from Wikpedia, Urban dictionary, WikiHow, KnowYourMeme, and even latfh.com (Look at that F*cking Hipster, a popular blog). What it has returned are various sites that I didn’t see even on the 5th page of Google search results (and I didn’t dare go past that). The lone exception was HipsterHandbook, which appeared on the 1st page of both engines.
In theory, Million Short is helping you discover stuff that you would never ever see using Google or even Bing or Yahoo!. It’s stuff that would be buried under hundreds of pages of search results. Let’s look at another example, a search for “The Beatles.”
Million Short failed to remove the top search result from a Google search of “The Beatles,” which was thebeatles.com. But everything that follows are deeper sites. Million Short removed (once again) Wikipedia, last.fm, mtv.com, apple.com, amazon.com and a multitude of lyrics and guitar tabs sites from my results.
One result I stumbled upon was from a site called suckmybeatles.com, and it’s basically a guy who really thinks The Beatles blow who posts blog entries and funny pictures detailing this (unpopular) opinion. That was well worth my time, so I guess score one for Million Short.
Million Short was brought to my attention via reddit, so let’s take a look at some of the reviews from the community (which are mixed).
Oddgenetix writes:
I just had a very rewarding experience with this thing. I searched my own name, and through pure serendipity the first result was an artist, with the same name as I. The art he paints is 50’s-60’s pin-up (the old-style classy kind, not the desperate new variety that melded with rockabilly, retro, and reality-tv-tattoo-culture.) Also really sweet looking vintage car ads for cars he imagined, and propaganda-type posters. Shit is so awesome. I threw money at him and got a few paintings, which I will be hanging in my living room, because consequently the paintings are signed with my name and I’m a pretty good liar.
TL;DR I searched my own name and found a same-name artist, so I bought his work and now I’m “a painter.”
Bullshit? Maybe. Entirely plausible for this site? Definitely.
Gsan writes:
This is a nice technique. It’s like searching a whole other internet.
Edit: this is real nice. Look at the sidebar of the sites it blocked, and tell me how many of those you think had what you were looking for? For me the side sites are mostly online stores, and cheap sites like ehow.com and about.com. Good riddance. Google and Bing seem to think I want to buy everything I’m searching for and they really want me to buy it at Amazon.
DrizztDoUrden writes:
This is actually pretty sweet. It reminds me of the gopher days when it was nearly impossible to get exactly what you wanted, but you would learn so much more from the journey.
But FLEABttn writes:
It’s like a search engine designed to find things I’m not looking for!
And nkozyra writes:
These results were shockingly terrible.
Look, Million Short is obviously no Google killer. It’s not even a Yahoo killer. It’s an alternative search engine for people wanting a unique search experience. If you’re looking for popular, relevant information and you want it fast, it’s probably not the way to go. If you’re looking to find some random corners of the internet, it might tickle your fancy.
Just be prepared to find stuff like this as your top result (h/t reddit). ಠ_ಠ
In a letter to investors this week, Google CEO Larry Page expressed Google’s goal to create “a beautifully simple experience across Google”. That’s what the company’s controversial privacy policy change is all about. It’s about tying all of Google’s products together as one Google.
Should data from the various Google services you use be integrated with one another? Tell us what you think.
“Think about basic actions like sharing or recommendations,” wrote Page. “When you find a great article, you want to share that knowledge with people who will find it interesting, too. If you see a great movie, you want to recommend it to friends. Google+ makes sharing super easy by creating a social layer across all our products so users connect with the people who matter to them.”
“When you sign up for Google+, you can use Circles to group people into different categories, such as ‘Friends,’ ‘Family,’ or ‘Rocket Scientists,’ and then engage with them just like in real life,” he continued. “You can recommend great news articles, websites, and videos to specific Circles, or share photos with ‘Family’ straight from your Android device. And the photos are even uploaded for you automatically! To follow people with shared interests, such as photography, just add them to your Circles. And you can share your own ideas with the world, or a smaller group, via the Google+ Stream and have others respond.”
“It’s still early days, and we have a long way to go,” he noted. “But these are tremendously important changes, and with over 120 Google+ integrations to date (including Google Search, YouTube and Android), we are on the right track. Well over 100 million users are active on Google+, and we’re seeing a positive impact across the Web, with Google users being able to recommend search results and videos they like—a goal we’ve had ever since we started the company.”
Now imagine that Google+ had over 800 million users like Facebook. You might be surprised to know that in some ways it already does.
Google’s Vic Gundotra recently explained that Google counts active users as users who sign into Google+ and use another Google product within a month. Google may not be up to the 800 million mark in that regard (though they’re an 1/8 of the way there apparently – not bad for less than a year), but if Google+ is really just a social layer over Google products, you have to consider that Google has a lot more users than that. YouTube itself, in fact, has over 800 million.
Now consider that Facebook is working on its own search engine. It may only be internal (at least at first), but at 800 million users, even that in itself is enough to potentially take some searches away from Google. In a recent article on this subject, I wrote:
I’ve long maintained that the biggest threat to Google’s search market share is likely not the threat of a single competitor, but the diversification of search in general. People are using more apps than ever (from more devices than ever), and just don’t have to rely on Google (or other traditional search engines) for access to content the way they used to. Take Twitter search, for example, which has become the go-to destination for finding quick info on events and topics in real time. When was the last time you turned to Google’s realtime search feature? It’s been a while, because it’s been MIA since Google’s partnership with Twitter expired last year. Sometimes a Twitter search is simply more relevant than a Google search for new information, despite Google’s increased efforts in freshness.
One Googler told me he thought this paragraph was “dead-on”.
Even if Facebook doesn’t come out with an actual web search engine in the style of Google or Bing, significant improvements to Facebook search (with the right marketing behind it) could chip away a nice chunk of searches that would otherwise go to Google.
But, before we get too far off base here, the point is that Facebook as a whole is a direct competitor to Google as a whole. If you look at it from this perspective (which seems to be the way Google looks at it), search is just a feature. Facebook certainly favors Facebook results in Facebook searches. Web searches are only added on at the end via Bing.
“Activity on the Google+ Stream itself is increasing too,” said Page. “We’re excited about the tremendous speed with which some people have amassed over one million followers, as well as the depth of the discussions taking place among happy, passionate users—all evidence that we’re generating genuine engagement. When I post publicly I get a ton of high quality comments, which makes me happy and encourages me to keep posting. I strongly encourage all of you to follow me on Google+—I love having this new way to communicate and share with all of you!”
In a different portion of his letter called, “next-generation search,” Page basically discussed Search Plus Your World, and a bit about delivering more direct answers in results. Search Plus Your World, if you’re unfamiliar, is the personalization that Google launched earlier this year, which initially put a great deal more emphasis on Google+ content in search results.
It still does this, but Google seems to have toned it down a bit. At one point, Google was ranking Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ Page over his public Facebook profile, which made no sense in terms of relevancy. Google was also ranking the WWE’s Google+ page over its Twitter account, even though the Twitter account was much more popular.
Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename “Prof-2”] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.
Plus, as another Googler recently told us, “Search plus Your World builds upon existing search features such as Social Search, personalized search, and authorship,” some of which Google has had in place for much longer. “You will continue to see existing Social Search features including +1s and content shared by your connections on Google+ and other sites. We’ll continue to look at your Google+ profile to see other content you’ve published online and linked to your profile.”
So what makes one profile more relevant than another? That’s a tricky question that Google is likely to continue to struggle with. It’s not always as easy as the Facebook CEO and his Facebook profile vs. his Google profile. It’s not necessarily as simple as which one has more followers either. The WWE’s Twitter account may have more followers than its Google+ account, but if you don’t use Twitter and you use Google+, the latter is most likely more relevant to you.
Google will likely continue to struggle with relevance vs. social/personalization. It must be hard to grow a social network when you have to promote a rival social network’s content ahead of the content from the one you’re trying to build. Facebook doesn’t have that problem. You wouldn’t go to Facebook and complain if you searched for “Larry Page” and it delivered you a Facebook Page for Larry Page rather than his Google+ profile.
So, as Google has already established itself for years as a web search engine, it faces some major hurdles in this chess match with Facebook that Facebook may not have to worry about, and even if both companies are headed to similar futures (at least in the social and search space), they come from very different backgrounds. They’re both working to the middle of one spectrum from opposite sides – Google from search moving towards social, and Facebook vice versa.
Facebook, at least has the social data to begin with, and is able to partner with another major search engine in Bing, along the way.
From Page’s letter, it is clear that Google is still more focused on search than on social as the overall strategy, with social simply being a means to improve search. But if Google+ is its social strategy, and Google is already favoring Google+ less in its search results, can Google win this battle? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
While Gabriel Stricker is presently listed on Google as Director of Communications for Search, he’s now moved on to the post of VP of Communications for Twitter. Sticker follows Google’s former Senior Media Liaison Karen Wickre, who also went to Twitter roughly seven months ago. And a while before this, Carolyn Penner also jumped ship for Twitter, leaving Google’s PR team.
Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land also notes that Shailesh Rao also recently became VP of International Revenue for Twitter. Rao was formerly the managing director of Google India.
Sticker was working for Google for over 5 years, a period when some employees start to look elsewhere. It would appear that Sticker’s first tweet was to announce his departure from the company.
While at Google, Stricker managed search and search properties – Maps, Earth, News, and Books, as well as use of IP and partnerships. Stricker is also the author of “Mao In The Boardroom,” a best-selling book about guerrilla marketing.
Twitter’s communications team is now full of staff that were once working for Google – one of Sticker’s initial tasks at his new gig might be to explain when Twitter finally plans to go public.
It looks like Facebook is finally taking search more seriously. The company is reportedly working overtime on improving its own search feature, which leads us to wonder if it may even have something bigger up its sleeve. We’ve written about the major opportunities Facebook has to make a big play in the search engine market and go head-to-head with Google several times in the past, and this news does very little to convince us this is not a possibility.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that something like 24 Facebook engineers are working on “an improved search engine,” and the effort is being led by former Googler Lars Rasmussen. Interestingly enough, while I was working on this article I happened to get an email from a Googler pointing the report out to me. They didn’t say as much, but Google no doubt wants more attention brought to the fact that other major web entities have opportunities to compete with them. The EU is expected to make a decision in an antitrust investigation into Google as soon as after Easter.
Bloomberg cites “two people familiar with the project” as providers of this info. Presumably they are from Facebook itself, as the report says they didn’t want to be named because Facebook is in its pre-IPO quiet period. “The goal, they say, is to help users better sift through the volume of content that members create on the site, such as status updates, and the articles, videos, and other information across the Web that people “like” using Facebook’s omnipresent thumbs-up button,” the report, co-authored by Douglas MacMillan and Brad Stone, says. Emphasis added.
That last part is particularly interesting, but more on that later.
Facebook’s Search Feature
If you use Facebook (and given that Facebook has over 800 million users, there’s a good chance you do), you probably know that its search feature isn’t the greatest or most efficient tool for finding information. Sure, there are plenty of options to refine your search. You can view results by: all results, people, pages, places, groups, apps, events, music, web results, posts by friends, public posts, or posts in groups. Even still, the results are often unhelpful – even the filtered results.
Given Facebook’s enormous user base and all of the content that is posted to the social network every day, a competent search engine is needed badly. Just think how much more useful Facebook would be if you could easily use it to find things. As a business, think about how much better Facebook could work for you if you could better optimize for its search feature, and it delivered your product or service’s page to people searching with relevant needs – or perhaps better yet, when their friends are talking about or checking in at your business.
Facebook As A Search Engine
Again, there are a reported two dozen engineers working on improving Facebook’s search feature. It sounds like they’re really putting a lot of time and effort into it now. If it turns out to be a major improvement and is that useful, competing with Google for searches seems inevitable at one level or another.
Consider the emphasis Google and other search engines are putting on social these days. Earlier this year, Google launched “Search Plus Your World,” delivering results much more based on your social circles – particularly your Google+ circles. One major flaw to this approach is that people just aren’t using Google+ the way they’re using Facebook, no matter how Google chooses to deem a user an active user.
For many people (about 800 million or so), a Facebook search engine would much more closely resemble “search, plus their world”.
There are quite a few interesting angles to consider, should a true Facebook search engine become a reality. Would it be available only to users? Facebook has a whole lot of public content. Being signed in would only serve to make the results more personalized – kind of like with Google today – the main difference being that personalization with Facebook data is much more likely to be relevant than personalization based on Google+ interaction. This is not a slight on Google+ as a service. It’s just a fact that Facebook has been around for far longer, and has way more active users who engage with their closest friends and family members on a daily basis, sharing tons of photos, videos, status updates and links to web content.
Would Facebook even bother to index the public web the way Google and its peers do? Right now, Facebook uses Bing to pad its search results with web results. Facebook could continue this indefinitely, or it could simply compete with Bing too, somewhere down the road. Facebook doesn’t need to index the web the way Google does, however, to put a dent into Google’s search market share. Even if it can convince users to use its own revamped search feature for certain kinds of queries, that’s queries that users don’t need Google for.
I’ve long maintained that the biggest threat to Google’s search market share is likely not the threat of a single competitor, but the diversification of search in general. People are using more apps than ever (from more devices than ever), and just don’t have to rely on Google (or other traditional search engines) for access to content the way they used to. Take Twitter search, for example, which has become the go-to destination for finding quick info on events and topics in real time. When was the last time you turned to Google’s realtime search feature? It’s been a while, because it’s been MIA since Google’s partnership with Twitter expired last year. Sometimes a Twitter search is simply more relevant than a Google search for new information, despite Google’s increased efforts in freshness.
Google may even be setting itself up to push users to a Facebook search engine, should one arise. There has been a fair amount of discontent expressed regarding Google’s addition of Search Plus Your World. Much of this has no doubt been exaggerated by the media, but there is discontent there. What if Facebook had a marketing plan to go along with this hypothetical search engine? It shouldn’t be too hard for them to play that “search plus your actual world” angle up.
They’ve already done this to some extent. Not officially, exactly, but remember “Focus On The User” from Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross (with some help from engineers at Twitter and MySpace)?
And speaking of Twitter and MySpace, who’s to say they wouldn’t support a Facebook search engine, and lend access to their respective social data to make an even bigger, highly personalized social search engine? That could be incredibly powerful.
A conversation between two Business Insider writers would suggest that we won’t see Facebook as a “favorite web search engine any time soon,” but again, it doesn’t have to replace Google to make an impact.
About a year ago, we talked about a patent Facebook was awarded, called, “Visual tags for search results generated from social network information”. The description for that was:
Search results, including sponsored links and algorithmic search results, are generated in response to a query, and are marked based on frequency of clicks on the search results by members of social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation from the member who submitted the query. The markers are visual tags and comprise either a text string or an image.
That’s something else to keep in mind.
Revenue
There’s certainly plenty of opportunity to sell more Facebook ads (which are already getting pretty popular with businesses). It’s going to be much more about revenue at Facebook in the post-IPO world. Facebook is already superior to Google in terms of ad targeting by interest and demographic, as users can be targeted based on very specific things they have “liked”. Add search to the mix, and you also get users while they’re actively seeking something out – Google’s strong point. That’s the best of both worlds.
Facebook won’t have to please shareholders by showing that it can be a better search engine than Google, but if they can create a search engine or even just an internal search feature that people want to use, there is a huge opportunity to make plenty of revenue from that. It just may also result in some portion of searches that may have otherwise gone to Google (or Yahoo, Bing, Ask or whatever) to go to Facebook instead, along with more cumulative time spent on Facebook.
What do you think? Would you use a Facebook search engine as a user? As an advertiser would you consider it an attractive option? How about an AdSense-like ad network for publishers? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Google Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik opened Search Engine Strategies New York this morning with a keynote, which was largely advising digital marketers to get better and more focused in their marketing strategies.
Ashley Zeckman at TopRank Online Marketing Blog put together a nice recap of the keynote with 7 things he taught her about optimization. She provides more explanation, but these essentially boiled down to: don’t just optimize for a small group of people, identify both micro and macro conversions, focus on a more broad scale, salary should be based on economic value you deliver, figure out how to move past the 2% (because it only delivers short-term value) and understanding/testing/being “less wrong” are the key things to do when participating in multiple channels.
1. Focus on measuring holistic success.
2. Be less wrong over time. Understand, test, learn.
3. Rethink social. Dig into the So what?, Where?, and Why? .
4. Stop guessing. Use controlled experiments.
5. Have insane focus. Have a clear line of sight.
He told us that Google has rolled out lots of “me too” announcements and that it is “trying to differentiate itself by copying.”
According to Ryan, there are several instances that could be credited as catalysts for 
