Kevin Bacon YouTube video on Graham Norton
On Graham Norton last night Kevin Bacon pointed out this video of him on YouTube
As the TV program ended there were 1800 views. Today there’s over 8000. Was expecting more from TV, but not bad
Google to provide opt-out options for secondary search box
According to a Google representative in the UK, they plan to allow an option in your webmaster tools which will give you control over the secondary search box.
This has been debated to death ever since it appeared with little consensus. So, an opt out seems to be the best option
Google testing in-site search box on brand searches: leaves a funny smell
If you haven’t seen it then it looks like this
At first glance seems like another useful addition by Google. Except on closer inspection this is not a search box for products or holidays in this case provided by Virgin, but a search box for other pages on the site. Same as the one in the Google toolbar – quite handy if the search functionality of the website is a bit crap. But for specialist vertical searches like travel where Google has managed to fail so far, I’m not sure.
When it’s bought out into the results like this, I start to question the motive. On the one hand it’s great that a user can search deeper into the site, but the problem I have is the way these new results are displayed, back into a normal results page, but this time you have to compete against all the paid search ads.
To demonstrate –
If you wanted to find a holiday in Antigua from Virgin, you’d ordinarily search for Virgin Holidays, and then go to the site and search for Antigua using their holiday search functionality. The chances are you’d find one.
But now, instead of going to the site, you could be persuaded to search for Antigua using the additional search box provided by Google. And this is what you’d get
So now virgin has to compete with all the paid search ads from competitors and if they’re lucky the user may click on their own PPC ad. You may be able protect your trademark for a brand search, but not for the generic term.
Let’s hope this never comes out properly without the option to turn it off from your Google webmaster tools console.
VRM Hub meeting in London
If you didn’t get a chance to come up to this time then Adriana Lukas and Ian Delaney has great write ups. If you really have no idea what I’m talking about then you should look up the VRM project wiki and the VRM one-pager on Adriana’s blog.
This should be a regular monthly, so look out for the dates on the project wiki. see you next time…
IAB Engage for search 2008
I’ve always had huge respect for the IAB and Guy Phillips, so was delighted to have the opportunity to speak at their annual search event.
The subjects covered by the various speakers were diverse ranging from analysing offline to online behaviour to the emergence of mobile. Unfortunately I was still travelling up from Brighton during the first session, so missed most of it. I’d really like to see a copy of Google guy, Mark Britten’s presentation on future search – it was very interesting by all accounts.
One thing you couldn’t help but notice was how far search had come along. It was an ideal place to talk about SEO from a connected and people centric view point. It wasn’t that long ago, where most search conferences consisted mainly of technical presentation, packed entirely with geek-speak in bullets.
Google video ads on search results
On Thursday Google started testing video ads on some search results pages.
Marissa Mayer explained this was in response to the impact of blended results. When video, news and images are included in regular results, the eye scans to the images first and ignores the ads.
“With universal search, something is getting shaken up a bit on the bottom part of the page,” she said. “The ads on the top part of the page should match.”
The screenshot of an Enquiro eye-tracking study shows clearly the traditional golden triangle being displaced by a very different scan when an image is introduced to the results page. The eye scans first to the image, and then to the text alongside the image before continuing at the top left hand corner of the page.
Using the same argument we could question what happens when a multimedia ad is included in a results page where there are no universal results – will advertisers have an advantage over natural results? Also does this mean all advertisers use MM in order to compete for attention? Guess we’ll need to see how this evolves.
One of the most advance technologies deployed with Google universal search was the ability to compare relevance of ordinary text documents with video, images and news. This ability to compare apples with pairs and position them on the same page based on user needs – promoted an important question ‘Will Google blend advertising with regular listing?” Marissa Mayer’s answer then was characteristically vague –
“I do think that this opens the door for the introduction of richer mediums into the result page,” she said, adding, that search results in any form should encompass the best answer no matter the medium. “For us, ads are answers as well…. And so I was hoping that we could bring some of these same advances in terms of the richness of media to ads.”
Well now they have.
Search as direct response to brand
Traditionally, search has been used strictly for direct marketing – selling boxes. The branding benefits have been an added value thrown in but rarely paid for.
With MM ad formats on search results, Google may protest about being seen as a media company, but, the migration of traditional display dollars to search is inevitable. The introduction of multimedia ads will be a real threat to the current dominance of search by DM. At the very least the lines will blur between brand and DM or we’ll see a more severe displacement of DM as a result of higher click costs driven by the budgets available for brand.
With the slowing economy and advertisers increasingly moving to online channels, Google for the first time in the last two years saw a decline in share of online ad-spend. John Battelle argued this was due to brand advertisers preferring to spend their money on display ads distributed on content sites, as oppose to search properties. So it’s not entirely surprising that Google would try to make their search space more attractive to brand advertisers.
When Google Universal launched everyone knew this was a big deal, but we’re only just starting to see it playing out. For advertisers there’s a real opportunity to combine targeting synonymous with the pull marketing power of search with the capabilities of multimedia display advertising.
Just another node in the graph
On Friday, Google announced the launch of their Social graph API , which promises to take us another step closer to portability. They plan to crawl our connections across social networks where profiles are public. This data can then be ported by social application developers to provide users with the choice of picking their friends from a list presented to them, instead of having to build their network from scratch every time.
But the closer we step towards fully automated approaches to portability the more the ownership of this data becomes an issue. But that’s a discussion for another time. When I get my head around Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) and finally write about it.
But for now, I like where Google’s heading with this API
Is Google worried about the Microsoft takeover of Yahoo?
I really wasn’t expecting this post on the official Google blog by David Drummond. He’s certainly not a fan of the deal and points out in no uncertain terms the need for openness and Microsoft’s dodgy past on the subject. I thought at least some of his comments could be considered a little over the top if not downright slanderous. If they didn’t actually have any substance I’d be expecting a law suit from Microsoft. Guess being Google’s Chief legal officer must mean he’s considered his words very carefully.
Will Yahoo! Accept Microsoft’s offer?
After years of speculation, Microsoft has finally jumped in with what seems to be an offer too good to be true. The offer of $42 Billion which is 60% above the current share value makes it pretty serious and it doesn’t leave much room for a counter.
I’d be extremely surprised if Yahoo! turns this down, though in some ways I hope they do.
For many people in the advertising and marketing space, the partnership could provide a plausible contender for Google. And at least on paper the numbers add up. But if all we can expect is increased market share based purely on combining their current capital then I’m worried.
Capitalising trough integration is a big job, and I really hope at least Yahoo’s resent plans get some airtime. I had little faith in Microsoft’s search engine or their advertising product, and apart from the maps and video, I wasn’t sure if they really should have bothered entering this space in the first place.
Yahoo! is a different story, no one could deny their heritage and while they may have been spanked by Google, they have a strong userbase and social assets including flikr and delicious. It was a matter of bringing all this together – and over the last few months I believe they’ve making all the right noises for a comeback. I really hope we still get to see some of their ideas come to fruition.
Anything that reduces choice for the end user is got to be a bad thing unless we get some real innovation. I’m not holding my breath for that.
Cop in trouble for hanging out in a porn neighbourhood
A School Cop is being investigated for linking to a friend’s MySpace page containing a link to a porn site. Why? Because you could get to this porn site in just a few clicks from his profile page. Hmmm, you could get to the same page with just one click from Google.
I’m not expecting a prosecution. But, it does beg the question, could you be judged by your link network. Can the Law and potential employers use this data to discriminate against you? Let’s hope not. After all there’s only sex degrees of separation amongst all of us.