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Yahoo, Google, Nokia, and JumpTap offered a fascinating glimpse of developments at the major mobile search engines recently, revealing an inside view of how mobile search operates, how it is evolving, and where it's going.

A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, December 4-7, 2006, Chicago, IL.

Mobile search vs. web search


"Mobile search is different from standard, PC-based Web search in three ways," said Matt Tengler, Product Manager at JumpTap, a Massachusetts-based firm that helps wireless operators deliver a mobile search experience for subscribers and advertising partners:

Content: "Currently, mobile content is dominated by mobile consumables, such as ring tones," he said.

Form factor: "The first page becomes the first few search results," he said.

Opportunities: "A personal device is always on," he said, "presenting more customized advertising opportunities."

Mikio Matsuo, Product Manager of Multimedia Experiences at Nokia Mobile Search, added, "Mobile search is the ultimate advertising platform. "A mobile phone is personal, always on, or always with a person," he said. "There is a great opportunity for search and mobile maps - adding relevant icons to mobile maps." Yahoo launched its search engine advertising for mobile phones in September 2006.

However, mobile search has a number of barriers to content delivery. Usability is a concern because user interfaces need to mature. And there is a limited amount of content outside of a few key verticals.

"Given a mobile phone's limited screen real estate," said Paul Yiu, Product Manager of Mobile Search at Yahoo, "what Yahoo has done is have one box - no room for tabs. Then, we determine the most likely type of search. For example, a search for 'Starbucks' is most likely a local search."

Limited screen real estate also does not encourage longer query strings. Currently, the average number of keywords per query is 2.3 on standard Web searches. Tengler presented some data from his organization:

Percentage of searches Number of query words
50.0% 1
33.9% 2
10.5% 3
3.7% 4
"Fifty percent of mobile searches represent the top seven categories," said Tengler.

Categories Percentage of mobile searches
NavigationCategorie 16%
Music/ring tones 10%
Entertainment 8%
Sports 6%
Reference 5%
Local 4%
Shopping 2%

Despite mobile search limitations, the mobile search engine reps have seen a steady growth in unique users, searches per user, and average transaction amount. For example, at the Japanese Web site Rakuten.com, the average transaction on both the personal computer (PC) and on a mobile phone is $80. "We are seeing the same trends in Europe and the USA," said Agarwal.

How to optimize for mobile search engine

Yiu presented the following tips and guidelines on optimizing content for mobile search engines:

Write short, concise titles.
Adhere to mobile standards (validator.w3c.org)
Connect, or link to, legitimate and popular Web sites.
Make sure you are not disallowing mobile crawlers from spidering your site.
Submit your mobile site for inclusion here
Agarwal recommended presenting content in a format more usable, more engaging, and tailored for mobile. "Convert your Web site to see what it looks like, tweak it, and publish to the mobile platform," he recommended. One tool that will show what a Web site looks like on a mobile platform is mobilizer.volantis.net. Web site owners can also author Web sites in mobile formats with winksite.com. Google also has a page creator (pages.google.com) to author in XHTML.

Agarwal presented his tips on optimizing content for mobile search:

Design for low-end phones
Keep the URL structure as simple as possible
Specify the doc type in the XML preamble
Specify the character encoding
Keep links descriptive
"If you have a mobile page or pages," he added, "tell us about it on your PC-based site. Link to it. Likewise, allow Googlebot-mobile to crawl your mobile site."

Shari Thurow is the Marketing Director at Grantastic Designs, Inc. and the author of the book Search Engine Visibility.

By Sara Holoubek,
December 14, 2006

Think you know advertising? Think again. The social web is challenging all conventions, from who creates the content to how we define media.

A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, December 4-7, 2006, Chicago, Illinois

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, advertising was defined by Merriam-Webster as follows: "To call public attention to, especially by emphasizing desirable qualities so as to arouse a desire to buy or patronize." The rise of the social web, however, has created a new advertising order where the goal is to partner with the customer so he or she may interact with, or call public attention to, your product or service. This was the vanguard topic of the well-attended SES Chicago session "Advertising in Social Media." Rebecca Lieb moderated as four panelists provided pointers on how best to promote a brand within this new world order.

Gary Stein, Director of Strategy for Ammo Marketing supports a new marketer-consumer balance. "Consumers are won when you meet them as equals." While many firms are bewildered by the amount of user-generated content that either supports or vetoes a brand, Stein applauds efforts to partner with customers, "so that they may partner with you."

"Why must we partner with customers?" a stodgy, old ad man might ask. For Marc Schiller, CEO of Electric Artists, the answer is clear. "What has changed since the Internet bubble in 2000? It became a lot more social." Today, marketers should focus less on connecting with customers, and more on connecting customers with other customers.

This sentiment wais reiterated by Bill Flitter, Vice President, Marketing, of Pheedo, who described interactive marketing as "tell us what you think of what we tell you," and social media as "tell each other." Flitter's firm has had success with this model, most notably by orchestrating the strategic product placement of Citrix's GoToMeeting conferencing service in a popular 3-hour live podcast. The placement was clearly sponsored, and included a live demo, a co-branded landing page, and an opportunity to win a free license. It was a wild success.

As a bonus, Flitter noted that "Social media campaigns keep on giving." In the case of GoToMeeting, the landing page continued to experience high search engine visibility for the brand's top keywords and that there were over 800 mentions of the campaign in the blogosphere. "Ultimately, these social media marketing techniques dramatically outperformed other online advertising vehicles."

Schiller, on the other hand is one of the first to place products in Second Life, the virtual world with over 1.6 million inhabitants and a mission to make the place better than real life. By creating an avatar, residents can network, share ideas and sometimes make a living within the immersive environment. While there is no direct ROI for marketers in Second Life, branding and PR opportunities abound.

This year Schiller's client, Starwood, became the first company to build a prototype of a future real life hotel in Second Life. The effort created an opportunity for Starwood to solicit immediate feedback on the concept and design with minimal effort. In real life, the effort was supported by a blog to track the "build" process. While the concept might seem too futuristic for some, Starwood is not alone. Scion has released virtual cars in Second Life and Major League Baseball simulcast the Home Run Derby in Second Life.

Clearly, all the rules are being broken. Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds, considers this a very good thing. If it were up to him, IAB standards would disappear today. For Copeland, good ads are ads that mimic the social nature of the web. By offering hyperlinks within the ad to other rich conversations, the conversation will ultimately turn towards the brand and the ad itself. To prove his point, he unveiled a series of blog ads that would not be considered aesthetically appealing by traditional standards, but experienced high return.

After a flurry of audience questions, Copeland summed it up best by serving up a question of his own to the audience: "What is advertising anymore?" For curious ad executives, the answer is likely being discussed right now on the social web.

Sara Holoubek is a free agent consultant for the interactive advertising sector and its investors. She can be reached at saraholoubek (at) gmail (dot) com.

By Gary Price,
December 13, 2006

Many popular shopping sites offer mobile versions of their search tools, which can be especially useful for those always on the go.

As Brian Smith, who runs the ComparisonEngines.com site that focuses on online shopping services notes, wireless shopping is not a new idea. He tells us that PriceGrabber offered its first mobile version more than six years ago.

However, as you can see below, shopping sites “going wireless” continue to increase. Here’s a roundup of the mobile search interfaces for some of the web's most popular shopping sites. The boldfaced links navigate to each service's primary web interface. The other links offer mobile access via web-enabled phone or other handheld device, typically with slimmed-down interfaces designed for smaller displays.

Amazon.com

Mobile interface at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/h.html or
http://www.amazon.com/access.

More Amazon:

Search Amazon.com SMS
Wireless with TicTap
Search Amazon.co.uk Via SMS with txtbux
Amazon-OnTheGo
Become.com

The main url http://www.become.com does a nice job of detecting browsers from mobile devices, so there's no special URL for mobile access.

ebay

Mobile interface at: http://wap2.bonfiremedia.com/

Froogle

Mobile interface at: http://wml.froogle.com or via SMS http://www.google.com/mobile/sms/index.html

Frucall

Frucall is a new free service that brings you Internet shopping when you are in a store or on the street. Frucall does not need any software downloads to your phone, or SMS data plans. I covered Frucall briefly in a ResourceShelf mention, and ComparisonEngines.com ran an interview with Frucall's CEO.

Pricegrabber

Mobile interface at: http://www.atpgw.com

Smarter.com

Mobile interface at: Details here.

XP Bargains

PDA Interface: http://www.xpbargains.com/pda.php
WAP Interface: http://www.xpbargains.com/wap.php

Yahoo Shopping (Beta)

Mobile interface at: http://us.wap.yahoo.com/p/shopping; more info about the new service >here.

And, a few lesser known mobile shopping search services:

ShopWiki Mobile
SCANBUY
Sifter, a location-based shopping search (here’s an interview with the CEO.
UpSnap
Gary Price is a professional librarian and the founder of ResourceShelf, and is currently Director of Online Information Resources for Ask.com.

Search Headlines

By Greg Sterling,
December 7, 2006

New research suggests that internet users are increasingly relying on search to find local service businesses, potentially taking mind-share away from traditional print yellow pages and classified advertising.

Nielsen//NetRatings and local search engine marketing firm WebVisible conducted a survey in August to determine whether and how U.S. consumers were using the Internet to find local service businesses. Using Nielsen's consumer panel, respondents were qualified in terms of whether they had used the Internet to find a local service provider and whether they had done so within the past 90 days.

There were 2,866 survey respondents overall, 70% of which had used the Internet to search for a local service business. Forty-six percent (1,319 respondents) had done so in the past 90 days. The survey emphasized the use of sponsored links as a part of this process.

The following discussion of the data pertains almost exclusively to the 46% of survey respondents who had conducted one or more searches online for a local service business within the past 90 days.

The missing geo-modifiers

One of the issues with local search is defining what constitutes a "local search" in the first place. It's not as obvious as one might think. In its definition of "local search" comScore has historically tracked traffic volumes on Internet yellow pages sites, mapping sites, selected "local search engines" and general search engines where queries have geographic modifiers. As inclusive as that definitions may sound, it's a fairly "conservative" approach that, in my view, fails to capture a broad range local search behavior where the query is ambiguous but there's a local intent behind it.

While I was still at The Kelsey Group we developed the first market estimate of local search volumes based on my conversations with search engines, together with empirical user research that sought to capture their intentions and behavior.

The estimate we developed was that about 20% of search engine traffic had a local intent. Others had higher estimates (Nielsen) or lower estimates (comScore). But this was a number we felt fairly strong about.

I subsequently asked Jim Larrison, then of comScore, to do a more in-depth analysis of user behavior from their data. I argued to Larrison, for example, that queries for lawyers (e.g., "divorce lawyer") are inherently local because they involve almost exclusive offline fulfillment and should thus be considered local searches even if there is a missing geo-modifier. Beyond lawyers, there are numerous other examples of "implicit local searches." What Larrison eventually determined, looking more deeply and broadly at actual user behavior, is that local intent was behind up to 40% of online search/"directional" lookups.

Now back to WebVisible's research, which appears to support the idea that a large percentage of searches with a local intent don't appear as such because they lack geographic modifiers. Here's what the research determined about respondents' local search query formulation:

51% used a general service term to search ("dentist")
49% used a general service term and regional term ("dentist in Cleveland")
23% used a specific business name ("Dr. Bob's Dental")
19% used a specific service term to search ("root canal")

(Respondents had the option of answering more than one)

Interestingly, younger respondents (18-24) were more likely to use a geographic modifier than older users in the sample. But overall 51% of the actual, local search behavior didn't carry a geo-modifier - that's striking.

It strongly argues that search engines should be serving locally targeted ads against commercial queries in almost all service categories where there's no local modifier because the probability is extremely high that the user is looking for a local business. In addition, geotargeted ads tend to perform better for the engine and the advertiser.

It takes three...

There's the old U.S. animated television commercial from the 1970s for "Tootsie Pop" in which a boy asks a wise old owl, "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?" It would seem the answer given - three - equally applies to local search for services. According to the Nielsen-WebVisible research:

When searching for a local service online, respondents said they typically require three searches to find the information that they need.

It's not clear from the data, however, whether this was in a single sitting or successive occasions. Phone the dominant contact method.

Among the various ways of contacting local businesses, the telephone (as one might expect) emerged as the dominant way users contacted or would hypothetically contact a local service business:

68% said they would most likely use the phone number on the website to contact a vendor
16% said they would contact a vendor by email
11% said they would most likely contact a vendor via an online form
6% said they would visit a vendor in-person

This suggests that phone tracking should be used, if not already, to prove value to local search advertisers. It captures the dominant user method of making contact, which might otherwise be invisible to local businesses. It also argues indirectly in favor of pay per phone call.

Latent conversions

Among the 46% respondent group, most didn't convert immediately. Conversions or merchant contacts came after a second round of search behavior in which users looked up contact information again. This is consistent with other studies reflecting conversion latency in general search user behavior. Here's what the Nielsen-WebVisible data showed:

35% of respondents saved the business' phone number
27% searched a second time
23% had bookmarked the service vendor's website
5% used a phone book to find the service vendor
11% did not contact the vendor a second time

There are some product implications here, as well as clear marketing takeaways. Sixty-two percent of respondents are going back to find the phone number in subsequent search sessions. The method by which users "saved" the local business phone number (in the top category) was not specified. Presumably it wasn't through the site itself but by doing something traditional like writing it down. This latency argues in favor of personalization, whether passive or conscious (i.e., "recent searches" or "my directory") to enable users to quickly and easily get back to their earlier search results.

These data also argue that businesses should buy their own names as paid search terms. This is because even though they may not want to pay in instances when users are looking specifically for them, they must nonetheless be visible when consumers seek them out. If a business fails to appear when a consumer performs a "white pages" search (for the business name) a competitor has an opportunity to intercept that consumer.

Search driving offline word-of-mouth

One of the most interesting findings of the Nielsen-WebVisible survey was that 54% of the respondents who'd conducted a local search within the past 90 days reported later referring a friend to a local business they discovered via search. Of the 54% making such a referral, this is how they did it:

59% verbally recommended the business
38% e-mailed a link to a friend
3% wrote a favorable review on a consumer website
1% other form of recommendation

One of the immediate takeaways for publishers is to be sure that listings can be easily shared with others. But what is really striking is that there's a powerful secondary benefit here: the local service business is generating positive word of mouth indirectly from online advertising. While on one level consumer satisfaction and good service always generate positive word of mouth, the idea that the actual cost of paid search, considered broadly, may actually be less per lead than it appears is worthy of further investigation.

Satisfaction levels high

Finally, among those who had conducted a search in the past 90 days:

89% of respondents found search to be "somewhat effective" or "very effective" to find local services in their area
8% were "neutral" about search's effectiveness
Only a tiny 3% said their experiences with local search were "somewhat ineffective" or "very ineffective"
These data are interesting for two reasons. We "in the industry" complain about the limitations of the available data (incompleteness and/or inaccuracy). There's also frequent discussion about how much room there is for improvement of the local search applications themselves. However on both counts, according to this research, consumers seem to be quite happy about their experiences despite the limitations of the current incarnations of local search.

By Grant Crowell,
December 28, 2006

One of the more potentially advantageous yet wholly underused areas for optimization is in image search engines. Yet while site owners and merchants are more often seeing their images show up in the regular search results, few have come to understand the benefits of image search optimization. And for professional optimizers, it requires a much broader understanding and specialization over what traditional search allows.

A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, December 6th, Chicago, IL.

Image search, by one definition, is query results, accompanied by thumbnail graphics and supplanted by contextual information, that best match users' search queries. Such information can be generated and submitted by the image creator, by site owner where the image resides, or by 3rd party reviewers.

Places where image search results appear, and are indexable into general search engines' contextual results, include:

Major search engines - either within contextual search results or vertical image search
Photo sharing sites (Flickr, Webshots, PBase, Fotki)
Social image sharing sites (MySpace, Facebook)
The panel, consisting of both image search specialists and search engine product managers, concurred that image search is the fastest growing vertical in the search arena today. Statistics from Hitwise show it to achieve 90% growth year after year, with over 360,000 searches per month across the top search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN, and AOL. All in the "Big 5" have a search vertical dedicated specifically to image results, with 3 of them (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) integrating images into some contextual search results.

Within Google, image search is the leading vertical by far.

"Image search results are being pushed up more and more into the contextual (web) search results, and to improve usability," said Chris Smith, Head of Technology and Development of SuperPages.com by Idearc Media.

The image search engine leaders

Of the "Big 5" in the contextual search arena, Google enjoys a wide lead over its competitors. Statistics produced from Hitwise show Google image search to have approximately 72% of all image searches. Google easily holds the largest market share of searches for any search vertical, with its image vertical search even outnumbering the overall total searches for both Ask and AOL combined.

Both Liana Evans, Search Marketing Manager for Commerce360, and Smith attribute Google's dominance to several factors: its already large database and length of time in the marketplace, its dedication to its vertical properties, and its easy access for users to submit images.

Adding to the list of Google advantages in this vertical is its 'Enhanced Image Search' feature, a new feature found in Google's Webmaster Tools section. It allows site owners additional optimization capabilities with images, by allowing other people (volunteers) do the optimization for you. Site owners participate in the program by clicking the "enable enhanced image search" link for one's site. It then submits the photos found on the owner's site into its image program. The next step allows participating users to tag the images for the site owner. Two users will see the same image and attempt to tag the image with keywords; with users receiving points for matching tags.

"It's a free way of getting even more keyword signals for Google," said Smith. "It may be seen as a fairly authoritative way for image reference and may be ranking well in Google's image search results."

"People love participating in the enhanced image search; we've had great success with it so far," said Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google. Smith, however opined that its continued participation may depend on Google's ability to provide added incentives for users.

The panelists agreed that image search optimization is a necessity for merchants to incorporate into their marketing plans. "Shoppers are visual. They simply need to see what they're buying," said Evans. She also said she regarded image optimization as "the next frontier of search for merchants."

According to Evans, image search optimization offers the following advantages:

Free product promotion. "Its another avenue of search marketing without having to pay for the click."
More optimization opportunities than regular search alone. Smith added that photo sharing sites Social image sharing sites have more contextual clues that search engines can use for their ranking criteria. "There's a lot more signals involved than regular web pages."
Less competition. "Image search right now is a widely underused area for retailers. Some spaces have very few retailers or no major retailers at all."
Evans attests that features natural to image search—easier to optimize, free inclusion, and less competition from major retailers - create special advantages of image search optimization for niche markets and smaller retailers.

"This is one case where smaller retailers without large content management systems can hold an advantage," said Evans. "Smaller retailers have direct control over picture descriptions, picture names and content that is directly around the pictures and on the page. Content Management Systems have a lot more constraints on content and files names and therefore it is a lot more difficult to optimize for image search," she said.

Image Optimization Tips

The panelists offered the following tips for optimizing images for search engines:

Image originality. The panelists agree that there is a special advantage to taking original photos, even if you are a retailer who already receives photos elsewhere such as from a manufacturer. "The more control you have over the images on your site the better." says Evans. "You can brand them with your logo, url or trademark. It also allows you as the retailer to present the product in the best possible way that will convert with your own audience, not to mention allowing you to present the features in a different way than other competitors.


Image quality. Start off with good quality pictures, and make necessary resolution adjustments between your full size images and your thumbnails. Smith mentions that pictures with good contrast tend to work better. "When they're reduced down to the thumbnail size, stronger contrast is needed to better discern image, which will lead to more people clicking and linking to image." he says.


Image formatting. Thurow advises saving photos as JPG files, and other graphic image types as GIFs "Search engines are going to interpret a GIF as a standard graphic image with 256 colors," Thurow said, "and JPGs as photos (because photos have millions of colors." says said Shari Thurow, Webmaster and Marketing Director at Grantastic Designs, Inc..


Image naming. "Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file," says Thurow. "The image name will appear beneath the graphic image in search results. It helps to communicate to searchers that they are viewing the desired graphic image. "Do NOT expect your photo editing program's default settings to give you optimized file names," she continued. "Default names communicate nothing to the search engines on their own. Make sure to set up your own file naming structure in advance."


Tagging - More content is "King" It's a given to make sure that your images match the actual products and keywords you place in there, along with ample descriptions of what you're featuring. But you should also take full advantage of the many special contextual tags for social sites with image search. Not only are image names given more weight than regular search results, but you can also add special tags such as captions, comments, cross-grouping, location, and themes.


Expand audience base. Be broad in your subject matter. Image search is not just for retailers directly reaching customers. "There are all sorts of innovative ways you can get people interested in your company and hence build up traffic and conversions. For example, factories might show steps in product manufactures, hotels might show furniture & decorative art in addition to details on their rooms, and restaurants might show picturesque views or special event rooms."


Expand audience base. Be broad in your subject matter. Image search is not just for retailers directly reaching customers. "There are all sorts of innovative ways you can get people interested in your company and hence build up traffic and conversions. For example, factories might show steps in product manufactures, hotels might show furniture & decorative art in addition to details on their rooms, and restaurants might show picturesque views or special event rooms."


Optimize the page with the image. Optimize the page the image appears on can be just as important as optimizing the image itself. "Optimizing the actual page for contextual search improves graphic images search," Thurow added. "Search engines also look at text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy." says Thurow. "Text within the anchor tag and next to anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings," said Thurow. "If you can reasonably put labels and captions on key graphic images, try and do so."


Optimize the page with the image. Optimize the page the image appears on can be just as important as optimizing the image itself. "Optimizing the actual page for contextual search improves graphic images search," Thurow added. "Search engines also look at text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy." says Thurow. "Text within the anchor tag and next to anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings," said Thurow. "If you can reasonably put labels and captions on key graphic images, try and do so."


File organization. Both Evans and Thurow mentioned of crucial importance is creating an image folder on your web server space that's accessible to the search engines. "Do not robots exclude your graphic images directory or limit search engine access to graphic-image files." says Thurow. Another big mistake people make is putting their 'click to see larger image' inside of a JavaScript link. When you do that, you are limiting search engines' access to that image file."


Usability is "Queen". According to Thurow, usability is very important in image search optimization. "It's one thing for a graphic image to show up at the top of image search results," she said. "It's another thing to get people to click on the link to the image and go to your site. Writing alternative text (which shows up in Google Image search results) that is keyword stuffed is not going to inspire people to click on the link in that image to your site." Smith also added that sometimes adding a not directly onto a region of a photo can invite users to comment and participate."


Freshness. Smith recommends that if you're targeting high popularity keywords, try experimenting with re-uploading your pix, since image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and might affect relevancy.

Future of image search

Image search optimizers on the panel expressed their desire to see more opportunities for image search optimizers, such as a keyword research tool specific to image search (like the Overture keyword tool) and the ability to submit image/multimedia specific feeds. "That would allow webmasters to have better control over defining what the image was in relation to content," says Evans.

Right now, 95% of the focus is to what traffic into websites comes from "regular" search, not on images," added Evans. "Once experienced search marketers and/or web analytics analysts start to point out the higher conversion rates and growing traffic from image search, that's when the request for more information will begin to grow."

Grant Crowell is the CEO and Creative Director of Grantastic Designs, Inc., a full-service search engine marketing, web site design, and usability firm.

By Christine Churchill,
December 6, 2006

Ever wanted to spy deep inside a competitors search marketing campaign? A competitive intelligence tool from Hitwise shows you exactly which search terms are driving the most traffic to your competitors' web sites.

This article examines the Hitwise Search Intelligence tool, a hybrid keyword research and competitive intelligence tool. Search Intelligence delivers metrics and reporting views so you can easily evaluate and track a term's usefulness from a
marketers' perspective.

Overall, the tool is powerful, useful, and convenient. It provides a type of competitive intelligence that is user-oriented and delivers comparison data in a form ready for immediate analysis and application. Convenient one-button export features let you send sorted data into Excel or CSV formats so you can weave it into existing reports or custom analysis views.

A suite of tools

The Hitwise Search Intelligence tool is actually a suite, rather than a single tool. It includes lifestyle, demographic, ranking, charting, clickstream as well as the aptly named Search Intelligence tools. The well meshed integration and the distinct features make it particularly useful for online marketers. There are in-depth demographic profiles built in, as well as month, year and 2+ year search capabilities, so a marketer can do competitive analysis on hard-to-track but high-sales-potential seasonal or holiday specific keyword searches.

Hitwise developed the Search Intelligence tool in 2003 and has continually added new types of search reports, driven largely by custo
mer feedback. Though not the only web-based competitive intelligence tool on the market today, Search Intelligence does offer a robust delivery that makes it a worthwhile package.

According to Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research for Hitwise, Search Intelligence provides information on over 800,000 websites in more than 174 industry categories. The data is derived from partnerships with internet service providers and represents 10 million US Internet users (25 million worldwide).

This is an impressive and wide swath of data and the tool lets you slice, dice, and report in a variety of ways. One entry point I found particular
ly useful is their view of "website details." This search point allows you to enter a URL of any site you are interested in tracking. Most large sites are already in the Hitwise database. If the site you are requesting isn't included in the 800,000 sites categorized, you can enter it into the database and wait a few weeks for the tool to gather enough information about the site to make the results meaningful. As there are so many smaller sites, this data-gathering delay is not uncommon among competitive intelligence tools and the Hitwise database comes well stocked.

Multi-faceted click data

yle="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px">For a marketer, one of the more interesting reports focuses on clickstream data—the path users take when clicking links. Hitwise lets you look at clickstream data in a clear and unambiguous way. It's powerful information. Flow lines don't lie and clickstream data can be used to spot leaks in customer retention or bounce-offs to competitors in an easy and accurate way. The power of this feature is its up- and downstream data from a particular website.

Most sophisticated logfile programs can provide site-centric data about domains sending traffic to your own web site, but the Hitwise tool provides a bigger picture. Not only could I see clickstream data co
ming to my site, but Hitwise shows you where users go after they leave your site. Although this information can sometimes be painful to learn (as in cases when you see a competitor ranking high in your downstream list), it gives the marketer feedback on how well their site is performing. What makes this revealing glimpse especially insightful is that this is not information you can get from your own logs.

Getting this view can also be a source of creative inspiration for new information items, products, or services to add to your site. For example, if your site carries high-cost items and many of the downstream clicks are to finance companies, you might want to consider adding financial information on your site or partnering with a financial firm. Additionally, the tool allows the marketer to see clickst
ream data on competing sites. It's an insightful peek into how competitors are getting traffic, where they are losing it, and how their flow patterns compare with your own.

If you want a glimpse of the future of advertising, you can hire a consultant — or you can travel to Britain.

Related
Addenda (December 4, 2006)

The New York Times
Online advertising is racing ahead in Britain, growing at a roughly 40 percent annual rate, and is expected to account for as much as 14 percent of overall ad spending this year, according to media buying agencies. That is the highest level in the world, and more than double the percentage in the United States.

There are big differences between the advertising markets in Britain and the Unites States. In Britain, much of the advertising is national, while there are strong local and regional ad markets in America. Still, some believe that online advertising in Britain provides somewhat of a roadmap for where online ads in the United States and elsewhere may be heading. “The U.S. is so behind,” said Terry S. Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, in a recent speech in London. “It’s certainly lagging the U.K. by at least a year or two.”

More than their American counterparts, British marketers seem to have bought into the oft-touted benefits of Internet advertising: that it is easy to track, enormously effective and a relative bargain. In Britain, as Internet ad spending surges, the overall advertising pie is not growing much at all, and traditional media are the ones losing out.

However, British media are nearly all aimed nationwide in contrast to the United States newspaper and television markets, where local and regional markets are big players. These local markets in the United States have, so far, been slow to move ad money online.

As recently as 2002, many British advertisers were reluctant to go online, too. That year, British advertising online was 1.4 percent compared with 2.5 percent in the United States, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau in Britain and the Interactive Advertising Bureau in the United States. Each bureau tracks online ad spending in their respective countries.

In the following year, Britain overtook the United States, and it has not looked back. In 2005, nearly 8 percent of British ad dollars went online, compared with 4.6 percent in the United States. And, this year, the two bureaus say, the Internet will account for 10.5 percent of British ad spending compared with 5.6 percent in the United States.

Media buying agencies like Group M, the media-buying division of WPP Group, estimate that online ad spending in Britain will be even higher — close to 14 percent of the total this year.

Similarly, broadband access in Britain at first lagged access in the United States, but has since surged. In 2002, 15.7 percent of American households had broadband compared with only 5.1 percent of British homes, according to eMarketer. This year, Britain is ahead, with 47.4 percent of homes having broadband, which is more than the 43.9 percent in the United States.

Some analysts say British advertisers may simply be quicker to embrace new marketing ideas than American companies. “I’d like to think there’s a cultural factor in the U.K., where we’ve been a bit more experimental on some of these things,” said Rob Noss, European chief executive of MindShare Interaction, a new media division of Group M’s MindShare unit.

In the United States, major advertisers are more dependent on traditional media, particularly television. The top 50 advertisers in the United States spent just 3.8 percent of their budgets in the first half of this year on online ads, excluding search-related advertising like that sold by Google, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence.

“Partly driven by scale but also by legacy, there are a lot of traditional budgets that are already laid down,” said Antony M. Young, president of the American division of Optimedia, a media-buying unit of Publicis Groupe.

Ad buyers at the major American brand companies may be reluctant to commit larger sums to the Internet because they believe they do not have control over where their ads appear, analysts say. Many Internet advertisements in the United States are still sold through online networks that place ads on member sites. In Britain, more advertisers work directly with Web publishers, giving them greater say in where and when ads appear.

In contrast, large advertisers in Britain appear to be leading the push onto the Internet. British financial-services companies have been particularly aggressive online spenders, in some cases allocating 30 percent or 40 percent of their advertising budgets to the Internet, Mr. Noss said.

Big British advertisers have also been quick to jump at the opportunities provided by paid search advertising, like that sold by Google and other search engines. Search accounts for 56 percent of Internet ad spending in Britain, compared with 42.5 percent in the United States, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. “We’re all searchaholics,” said Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the bureau’s branch in Britain.

Since retailers in Britain typically operate nationally and deliver online purchases anywhere in the country, searches often lead directly to sales, said Andrew Edwards, European president of Arc, a direct marketing agency affiliated with Leo Burnett. About 3.9 percent of visits to British online retailers’ sites yield purchases, compared with 2.5 percent of American site visits, according to Coremetrics, an e-commerce tracking service.

In Britain, analysts predict that it will not be long until Internet advertising catches up with TV advertising. Group M, for instance, says the Internet could account for 25 percent of British ad spending by 2010. That would place it ahead of television, which accounts for just more than 20 percent now.

Hardest hit has been Britain’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV. Analysts at Numis Securities estimate that ITV’s advertising revenue will fall 13 percent for 2006. Weakened by its loss of advertising, ITV has become a takeover target.

On average, Britons spend 23 hours a week on the Internet, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. The Internet accounts for about a quarter of Britons’ time spent with all media, according to Citigroup, nearly double the percentage in the United States. Americans use their computers an average of 14 hours a week, according to Nielsen Media Research.

TV advertising has held strong in the United States, where about $72.56 billion will be spent on TV ads this year, according to Universal McCann, which is part of the Interpublic Group. That represents a quarter of all ad spending, and that proportion has held roughly steady since 2000.

Local advertisers in the United States have been slow to move money online. This year, for example, local spending on online ads in the United States will be $1.3 billion — or 8 percent of all Internet spending, according to eMarketer. But local ads make up a little more than a third of overall ad sales in the United States.

Ad executives said American TV networks were unlikely to lose as much ground as British networks had. “TV’s just too important for our society,” said Martin Reidy, president of Modem Media, which is part of Digitas. “I don’t think the Internet will ever surpass it here.”

In Britain, the growth of Internet ads seems to be bringing down the amount of money spent in the overall advertising market as well. Growth in spending on advertising and marketing services is set to slow to 0.3 percent this year, according to Group M, after growth of 4.3 percent last year and 6.7 percent in 2004. To many ad executives, this makes sense: online ads are generally much cheaper.

“Every pound withdrawn from traditional media either to be saved or spent online, where supply is in handsome surplus, exerts more deflationary pressure on the total market,” said Group M in a recent report on the British ad market. “And if online proves more productive, advertisers have the option of investing less.”

• Ongoing Click Fraud discussion – A variety of high-profile Click Fraud studies were announced in the second half of 2006, as marketers became more aware of the concept.  Introduced and detailed in SMTrends Issue #11, the subject continued to confuse some marketers, many of whom were unsure of the exact percentage of advertising that was potentially fraudulent.  Avenue A | Razorfish has always been very proactive in handling potentially fraudulent clicks, and updated its Point of View on the subject in November of 2006, as summarized in SMTrends Issue #21.  

• Some are taking a different approach to Click Fraud by researching (PDF) alternate pricing mechanisms for Paid Search advertising.
• Additionally, Google began to offer reports of “Invalid Click Rates” within its system.

By Dennis O'Reilly, PC World
December 28, 2006

Even people who have never opened a Web browser in their life know about Google -- but the undisputed king of search is about much more than just keywords, text ads, and ten-per-page results.

Here's a look at some of the company's other services for Web users.

Alerts: Simply enter any search term you want to monitor, choose one of five categories (News, Blogs, Groups, Web, or Comprehensive), and set your inbox to receive alerts once a day, once a week, or "as-it-happens". I chose the last option for two different terms and received my first alerts about an hour later. You can easily save or delete specific alerts, as well as change their frequency or turn them off altogether.

Catalogs: View images of catalog pages scanned as part of the Google Base service, which lets people add their own information to Google's databases. Most of the catalogs are years old, and few big-name directories are present (five-year-old Hickory Farms and Crate and Barrel catalogs are typical). Many are from small, regional companies, heavy on boating and fishing items, specialty foods, and other niches. You can't order products online, either; instead you call the toll-free number displayed prominently to the left of the catalog pages. If only the information on the grainy, scanned pages were as easy to read. Fans of catalog shopping will likely be disappointed with the service's offerings.

Custom Search Engine: Create your own search engine in your area of expertise, or use the creations of others. If you roll your own engine, you can place it on your own site (even customize its appearance to match that of your site), or add it to Google's list of custom sites and invite others to suggest sites to include in your engine. I created a search engine about Global Positioning System (GPS) devices in just about 15 minutes.

Directory: This service lists sites of interest in various categories, A la mid-1990s Yahoo, Northern Light, and Magellan. Directories seem particularly anachronistic on Google, since keyword searching has replaced such hierarchical lists of topics. However, Internet directories help people unfamiliar with a subject learn more about it without having to know which specific words to search for. In other words, if you're not sure what you're looking for, Web directories such as this one may help you find it.

Pack: With a single download you get a collection of free software that includes the Google Earth 3D geo-browser, the Picasa photo organizer, a screen-saver maker, the Mozilla Firefox browser with Google Toolbar, a six-month subscription to Symantec Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition, Google Talk, the RealPlayer media player, the Skype VoIP client, the Google Desktop utility for searching files on your PC and/or the Web, the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE Personal antispyware program, Adobe Reader 7, Google Video Player, and GalleryPlayer HD Images, which includes ten free high-definition images you can use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. One problem for me is that I already have several of those programs installed on my PC, and the others I don't need or want. Even when I buy a new system, I prefer to install only the applications I know I'll use. Also, PC World always advises that you load new programs one at a time to make correcting installation problems easy. If you download and install all of these programs at once and something goes wrong, you won't know where to begin to troubleshoot.

Specialized Searches: My favorite is U.S. Government Search , which lets you find information on federal government Web sites. Also offered are searches limited to Microsoft, Apple Macintosh, Linux, and BSD (Unix) sites. University Search allows you to search the sites of hundreds of colleges and universities.

Web Accelerator: Designed specifically for broadband users, this service employs special Google servers and caches that it creates on your own PC (separate from your browser's cache) to speed page loads. It doesn't claim to work with all Web sites or pages; but as you browse, the program's icon in your browser toolbar shows the amount of time the tool has saved you in download waits. Though Web Accelerator doesn't work with secured Web pages (those whose URLs begin with https:), some personal information may be included in the nonencrypted pages that it caches, so using it entails some increased security risk. You can turn the accelerator off by clicking its icon in the system tray and choosing the 'Stop Google Web Accelerator' option, or you can manually enter the URLs of sites you wish not to accelerate. Likewise, you can empty the tool's cache by clicking the 'Clear history' button on the program's Preferences screen. I didn't try to verify the accelerator's claims of faster browsing, and after using it for a couple of hours in both Firefox and IE, the program indicated that I had gained only about 20 seconds in each browser. Still, just because I didn't perceive a marked increase in my browsing speed doesn't mean the program fails to work as advertised. I'll keep using it to speed up my 1MB DSL connection until I find a reason not to.

My favorite of these Google freebies is the Custom Search Engine (even though Windows Live Search lets you do something similar by creating a custom search button). In particular, if you run a Web site or blog, you could increase its value to visitors by adding a search engine customized for the site's subject matter. I have high hopes for the Google Web Accelerator, although I haven't yet browsed enough with the tool loaded to know whether it makes a noticeable difference in my page-load speeds. And I imagine I'll find a use for the U.S. Government Search right around next April 15, if not sooner.

by David A. Utter

The same wisdom of crowds that has propelled Wikipedia to prominence could be the key to remaking the search engine; we have to admit that it's an idea we've seen already.

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, Wikipedia has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Brittanica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
-- with sincere apologies to Douglas Adams

With plenty of blogosphere discussion about Search Wikia, the new project from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, it may be instructive to talk briefly about what it isn't first.

It's not Wikipedia.

It isn't a project for Amazon.com, although Jeff Bezos' company is an investor in Search Wikia's backing company, Wikia Inc.

The final version won't be called Wikiasari, which was the name of a different project.

No one has seen a screenshot of Search Wikia, no matter what TechCrunch says.

What it is, or rather will be if Wales can make it happen, will be a search engine where content has been vetted by users as an alternative to conventional web search. Spread the word, Wales has asked:

I am looking for people to continue the development of a wiki-inspired search engine. Specifically community members who would like to help build people-powered search results and developers to help us build an open-source alternative for web search.

Current web search is broken, according to Wales. "It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency."

The idea interests us because we've seen a similar approach developed practically in our backyard, online at PreFound.com. PreFound does search with a social approach, incorporating tagging and sharing with search results that others have already found online.

I asked Steve Mansfield, PreFound's CEO, for his thoughts on Search Wikia and Wales' approach. He was pleased to share his perspective, presented here:

It's exciting to see Wales and the Wiki people getting involved in Search. For the first time, people are saying Social Search can compete with Google and that is a critical mind-shift compared to what the media has been saying over the last year.

It's hard to say if it will be competitive model-wise with PreFound or other models like Wink, but just the attention this announcement is getting in the media and therefore a wider audience is fantastic for the Social Search genre. Partnering with Amazon was also great for marketing and technological reasons.

Today, searches for many topics on sites like Google return Wikipedia entries very high in the search results. In the future, perhaps Search Wikia will draw results that others have found on Google and elsewhere instead.

Posted December 28th, 2006 by Gord Hotchkiss

Right about this time of year, you’ll see two things coming in your inbox in the way of search-related columns. First, there’s predictions for 2007 accompanied by scorecards of success for last year’s predictions; second, recaps of the top searches of 2006. I didn’t make any predictions last year, so I figure it’s too late to jump on the particular bandwagon, but as to the second, I’m fully on board! Last year, I took a look across the major engines and was somewhat disheartened with the lack of intellectual depth that was shown in our collective quest for knowledge. So, how did we fare this year?

Google Coming Clean?

Let’s start with Google. Unfortunately, one has to read between the lines on these various reports. The list isn’t actually the real list for any of them.. These lists are heavily filtered, and in Google’s case, seemingly altered to a substantial degree. Here is its reported top 10:

Bebo
Myspace
World Cup
Metacafe
Radioblog
Wikipedia
Video
Rebelde
Mininova
Wiki

A little investigative work at Google Trends (thanks to Danny Sullivan) soon uncovered the inconsistencies. Google’s reported No. 1 term, “bebo,” actually has nowhere near the volume of “myspace” and “world cup.” In fact, “bebo” is almost flat-lined at the bottom. I suppose there are internal excuses Google might have for the inconsistencies, including aggregation of misspellings, but just how many ways can you misspell bebo anyway?

The list actually becomes more interesting when you include some of the terms that got filtered out. A quick look shows that Google is often used for navigation. Terms like myspace and wikipedia are not queries for information, but a quick way to get to a site. Google has already deleted many navigational terms from the list, so let’s add the big ones, Yahoo, Google, MSN and YouTube and see what the trend chart looks like. Now we see the true search volumes, and that a lot of people are using Google to get from point A to B. What is a little disturbing is that searches for “Google” on Google hold the No. 2 spot, just behind Yahoo. This drips with irony, and not a little stupidity. “Hey..how do I get to Google? Oh..wait a minute, I’ll just search on Google” Duh!

Yahoo on the Red Carpet

Meanwhile, Yahoo seems to turning into the “Entertainment Tonight” of search engines. Once you navigate through the incredibly annoying user interface they slammed on it (please Yahoo, take two Jakob Nielsens and call me in the morning) you find that the top 10 on Yahoo are:

Britney Spears
WWE
Shakira
Jessica Simpson
Paris Hilton
American Idol
Beyonce Knowles
Chris Brown
Pamela Anderson
Lindsay Lohan

This is almost too sad to comment on. Almost. If these are the best things that searchers can throw at Yahoo, no wonder they’re struggling in the search engine showdown. It’s the equivalent of the tabloid rack at the grocery checkout counter.

Yahoo also allows a peek at other countries’ top-ten lists as well. Last year, the Germans showed a blend of Teutonic practicality and pure kinkiness, and nothing seems to have changed this year. The loosely translated Top Ten are as follows:

Weather

Route Planner

Erotica

Telephone Directory

Chat

Greeting Cards

Horoscopes

Games

Web

Paris Hilton

Well, at least wife swapping didn’t make the list this year.

The Brit Top Ten shows they love their dirt:

Heather Mills McCartney
Pete Burns
Big Brother
The Ordinary Boys
World Cup
Steve Irwin
Borat
Notting Hill Carnival
Zidane
Kate Moss

And my fellow Canadians? Well, at least we’re consistent, if not terribly exciting. NHL (The National Hockey League) tops the list once again.

The Search Engine formerly known as MSN

The MSN (now Live) list also shows a bias towards the entertainment side, but it also showed how out of touch I was with pop culture:

Ronaldinho

Shakira

Paris Hilton

Britney Spears

Harry Potter

Eminem

Pamela Anderson

Hilary Duff

Rebelde

Angelina Jolie

Okay, Britney I know, Pam I know, Paris I know. Who the heck is Ronaldinho–or what’s a Rebelde? I’ve since been clued in by soccer fans and a quick check on Wikipedia. Ronaldhino was FIFA World Player of the Year in 2004 and “Rebelde” is a Mexican TV series, for those of you equally pop-cult ignorant.

In the final analysis, what’s striking about these lists is what the search engines seem to be used for. Google has become the main intersection of the Web. Its top searches make clear its role as a traffic clearinghouse, routing millions of users through the results page as they navigate from point A to B. It’s infrastructural and essential. The top searches on Yahoo and MSN tell a different story–one of idle curiosity, no pressing plans and killing time. In a nutshell, this story crystallizes the fundamental problem Yahoo and Microsoft face if they hope to challenge Google as the king of the search hill. They have to become essential.

Happy New Year!

The first thing that you will do when you read this list is say “This list isn’t just about search!” And you will be right. 2006 was a year that saw the definition of search expand. Search to me has become an all-encompassing word. Search is information. Search is media. Search is social interaction. Search is life.

MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia made their way into the conversations of housewives in Indiana and CEOs on Wall Street. Google’s mantra of “Do No Evil” was questioned over and over. Microsoft and Ask begged to be noticed. Yahoo! just begged for the year to end and 2007 to arrive.

Successful marketers adapted to the ever-changing landscape and saw search as more than algorithms. They embraced social networks and looked to capitalize on their surging popularity. SEO’s cousin SMO was born.

2006 was an event-filled year to say the least..

101. Google offers domain registrations (12/14)

100. Ms. Dewey puts the sexy back in search

99. A proliferation of new, free tools led by SEO for Firefox, SEOmoz’s Page Strength Tool and Performancing for Bloggers

98. Google opens larger New York City office (10/3)

97. Stephen Colbert vs. Wikipedia (8/2)

96. Tom Brady vs. Yahoo! (12/7)

95. Google vs. Belgium Newspapers

94. Google Pack released (1/6) but Trillian is dumped (5/19)

93. Secret to getting billions of pages indexed in Google revealed (6/17)

92. Google Reader users can share their feeds (3/24)

91. Google Base Accepts Payments (2/27), and eBay Express follows

90. Google shows off new toys: Google Page Creator and Google Notebook

89. CarPhone Warehouse purchases AOL UK (10/11)

88. Google and Dell create personalized homepage (1/7)

87. Amazon launches their own CPC program ClickRiver Ads (11/5)

86. Yahoo & IBM team up on corporate search (12/13)

85. Adam Lasnik is hired by Google as Search Evangelist (5/12) which was predicted over a year ago

84. Yahoo! and Ask embark on huge traditional ad campaigns but still remain at 2 & 4 respectively in searchers

83. RH Donnelley buys Local Launch (9/7), MediaWhiz acquires Text Link Ads (11/7)

82. Lycos Teams with Ask for Ads (11/1)

81. DMOZ editor corruption exposed (publicly) (8/18)

80. Google Buys dMarc Radio Advertising (1/17), then launches Partnership Initiative with Newspapers (11/6) and Radio (11/7)

79. Yahoo partners with newspapers to offer job marketing content (11/20)

78. UTube sues YouTube (11/1) and then begins selling ringtone, poker and sex ads (12/13)

77. SEO is put down by Jason Calacanis, Ted Leonsis and Bill Pasternak/Kevin Lee - leading to some interesting contests and fact-based retorts about the Half-Truths of Talking Frogs

76. Web reaches 100,000,000 site milestone (11/1)

75. Start-ups score big names: Robert Scoble Leaves Microsoft for PodTech (6/10) and Tim Converse leaves Yahoo for Powerset (12/18)

74. Orkut’s Brazilian Popularity Soars (4/10)

73. The revolving door at SearchEngineWatch - Gary Price leaves SearchEngineWatch for Ask (2/9) and Barry Schwartz takes his place (2/9) but then leaves with Danny to Search Engine Land (11/20)

72. Corporate search engine personnel moves - Steve Berkowitz leaves Ask for MSN (4/22), Udi Manber Leaves Amazon for Google (2/8) and the Microsoft “Brain Drain” has Managers Leaving to Google (7/1)

71. Corporate moves in the SEO world - Todd Malicoat leaves WeBuildPages (3/30), Andy Beal leaves Fortune Interactive (8/4), Mike Grehan leaves MarketSmart (8/3) followed by Garrett French (10/30) and Jake Baillie Leaves TrueLocal (12/22)

70. Florida spammer is fined $11 billion dollars

69. Google launches Book Search (8/30)

68. Google acquires Writely (3/6) and then JotSpot (10/31)

67. Microsoft launches Live Spaces social network (8/3)

66. Yahoo! launches new Video site (5/31)

65. Microsoft announces plans for July 2008 transitioning out of Bill Gates (6/15)

64. Google Sitemaps becomes Webmaster Central (8/8)

63. Conde Nast acquires Reddit

62. Wal-Mart (10/9) and Sony (12/12) learn that the blogosphere is very transparent

61. Google acquires Measure Map blog analytics software (2/15)

60. Microsoft acquires web analytics firm DeepMetrix (5/3)

59. Google opens Online Video Store (1/7)

58. Tracking Memes - led by Techmeme, Tailrank & Megite

57. Though Shall Not Google - Google is declared a verb (7/6) but Google doesn’t like it (12/26)

56. Yahoo acquires Bix.com (11/16)

55. Google announces Google Checkout (6/29), competes with eBay-owned Paypal (7/6)

54. Yahoo settles click fraud suit (6/28)

53. Google launches Docs & Spreadsheets (10/10)

52. Sponsored blog posting services ReviewMe, PayPerPost & Blogvertise make a splash and lead to the FTC ‘encouraging’ disclosures from bloggers (12/20)

51. Google agrees to censor results in China (1/24)

50. Microsoft Small Business Directory stops accepting new submissions (11/15)

49. Australia suggests that permission be granted to index web pages (11/2)

48. Google Bombing as a political tactic (7/19)

47. Foreign search engines threaten Google’s international presence: Baidu in China and Japan (12/4), Quaero in France and Theseus in Germany (12/21)

46. Wikipedia founder announces plans to launch search engine (12/23)

45. Google launches Google Trends (5/10)

44. Google News Comes out of Beta (1/23)

43. Netscape launches Digg-like site (6/14), Jason Calacanis lures users with money (7/18) but leaves Netscape shortly thereafter (11/17) for a position at Sequoia Capital (12/5)

42. Yahoo and eBay join to fight the Google and Microsoft giants (5/26)

41. Yahoo launches Search Builder (8/7)

40. Google CSE (Custom Search Engine) announced (10/23)

39. Google begins notifying webmasters of penalties (4/26)

38. Socially-governed video search sites launched: StumbleVideo (12/13), Digg (12/18), Megite (12/26), and Tailrank (12/26)

37. Microsoft launches Internet Explorer 7 (10/18) and Mozilla launches Firefox 2 (10/24)

36. Yahoo focuses on integrating social components in brand websites (12/1)

35. Time Magazine names YOU ‘Person of the Year‘

34. AskCity Launches (12/4)

33. The rise of Internet Celebrities: LonelyGirl15, Christine Dolce, and Ze Frank proving that sometimes you don’t have to even be real to be famous online

32. Microsoft signs ad deal with Facebook (8/23) but perhaps the bigger story is the non-acquisition of Facebook by Yahoo! (9/21)

31. The Arbitrage Debate Rages

30. KinderStart sues Google over PageRank and traffic (3/18) but the lawsuit is dismissed (7/13)

29. Google will not give in to the DOJ’s search request out of privacy concerns (2/18) but the DOJ says it is not a privacy issue (2/27). Google is forced to give up data (3/14), but not all of it (3/17)

28. AOL leaks user search data (8/7) leading us to AOL Searcher No. 4417749 (8/9)

27. 90% of all email now spam

26. Microsoft launches adCenter and drops Yahoo! Search Marketing ads (5/4)

25. Social networks are the most searched for terms of the year on Google, followed by wikis and video, together totaling 60% of the Top 10 (12/18)

24. MySpace auctions off search business (6/14) and Google wins the auction - resulting in a 3-year $1-billion dollar deal (8/7)

23. Widgets take off - led by YouTube and MyBlogLog

22. AOL goes free (8/2) and begins to focus on SEO (11/3)

21. Google shuts down Answers (11/28) while Yahoo! integrates their own Answers into the SERPs (a rare up moment in Yahoo’s year)

20. Yahoo announces Panama Search Advertising System (4/6), which is delayed and results in profit dips for Yahoo but it then launches in October (10/19)

19. Google tops $500 a share (11/21)

18. Local search continues to gain momentum (9/28)

17. Click fraud findings are addressed (7/21) and online giants join the fight (8/4) but does click fraud threaten the foundation of online ads? (10/21)

16. Google says click fraud worries are overblown (8/9) despite the $90 million click fraud settlement (7/28) and Google’s claim that their click fraud rate is less than 2% (12/11)

15. Microsoft introduces new search engine (3/8) and then redirects search.msn.com to Live.com (9/14)

14. MySpace traffic tops Yahoo’s in November (12/19)

13. The Butler is Dead - AskJeeves rebrands itself to Ask.com (2/20)

12. Link Baiting and what Paris Hilton can teach us

11. Two Words - Quality Score

10. nofollow concerns (7/7) leads to some high profile sites changing their no-follow policies

9. Digg updates their algorithm (9/8), changes their look (12/18) and bans lots of legit sites in the process (12/21)

8. Google’s ‘minus thirty’ penalty

7. Congress bans Internet gambling (10/2)

6. The Peanut Butter Manifesto (11/18) and Yahoo reorganizing its operations (12/5)

5. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft support Universal Sitemaps Standard (11/16)

4. Google rolls out BigDaddy (1/4)

3. Social Media Optimization and its dark side

2. Danny Sullivan leaves Search Engine Watch (8/29) launches Search Engine Land (12/11) and the Search Marketing Expo conference and Search Marketing Now webcasts (12/5)

And the biggest story of the year? Well I was going to pull a Time Magazine and say that you were the biggest story of the year but I changed my mind in about two seconds flat on that. So unless you are Chad Hurley or Steve Chen - you’ll have to wait until 2007…


1. Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion (10/9)

Posted by Chris Winfield

By Jeffrey Gangemi

Here's what you should know if you are moving your brick-and-mortar to the Web or building a Web-only business

Part I: Taking Your Brick-and-Mortar Online
American Pearl had been a successful jewelry store in New York City's diamond district for almost 50 years when Eddie Bakhash took over the company from his father, Charlie, in 1997. One of Eddie's first moves was to take the brick-and-mortar company online. Since then, he says, sales have grown yearly at a rate of 20%. Last year they surged to almost $20 million?with 20% in person and 80% online.

Bakhash attributes some of his company's success to having a well-known and respected store, and good word of mouth. But, he says, the key was constructing a site that builds trust with the consumer, while educating them about the product or service offered. "We tell the truth, showcase the product, and recreate the world that the product comes from through a variety of rich media," says Bakhash.

Retailers like Bakhash are aware that doing business online boosts sales. A 2006 Forrester Research study of 174 retailers found that online retail sales rose last year by 25%, to $176.4 billion, and are expected to rise 20% in 2006, to $211.4 billion. By 2010, sales should reach $329 billion.

HELPFUL SERVICES. If you are contemplating taking your brick-and-and mortar online, don't think you have to set up the site yourself. Providers such as Yahoo! Stores (YHOO), FreeMerchant, or LiteCommerce can create an online storefront that is easy and affordable (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/05/06, "An Online Business for $3,000").

"Small businesses inherently have built their business themselves. A lot of people look at doing everything themselves?the backend servers, all the infrastructure, learning HTML. Whether selling products or not, you don't have to do that anymore," says Jimmy Duvall, director of e-commerce products for Yahoo! Small Business.

Once the site is up, don't start conducting business until it's been tested and deemed ready. Make sure all the site's features are working, since customers today expect the same good service and quality online that they find in regular shops.

And just because the site is up, don't think your work is done. You have to update continuously (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/8/2006 "Treating Your Web Site Like One of Your Best Employees"). If you have outdated information, "you could be losing sales and causing customer dissatisfaction," says Harry Hollines, vice-president for channels and business development at Englewood (Colo.) direct marketing consultant Verio, which also offers a service to help small businesses update their sites.

When your site is running on all cylinders, then it's time to think about traffic. Develop a plan for generating buzz online (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/17/06 "Building Good Web Buzz") and search engine optimization (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/6/2006, "How SEO Upped the Revenues").

ONLINE STREET CRED. Many small businesses?almost half of those surveyed by Forrester?are also using cross-promotions between their offline and online stores to boost sales. But while promotions can often increase sales, don't overwhelm your loyal customers.

"It's important to be an active online marketer, while making sure not to overload people with offers after they've been nice enough to patronize your store in the first place," says Kim Gordon, president of the National Marketing Federation, an outfit based in South Florida that counsels small business owners on marketing (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/21/2006, "Building a Web Presence on the Cheap").

Don't take for granted that potential customers will believe every offer of a discount or sale. People can sense a scam, even if it's virtual. That's why credibility is just as hard to come by in cyberspace as in the real world, and there are multiple ways to establish it.

Having a high-quality site goes a long way. But for e-commerce, having an established and reputable payment system like PayPal or WorldPay can turn a nonbeliever into a customer.

If you've been running a brick-and-mortar business for a long time, it might seem unnecessary to have to prove your credibility all over again. But that's the name of the game in the online world, once you've found a way to get people to visit your site in the first place. Those who succeed find that a new world of customers awaits them.

Part II: What Not to Do When Building a Web-only Business

Kieden, a San Francisco software startup that helps companies track the success of their Google (GOOG) keyword advertising, launched in January and was snapped up by Salesforce.com (CRM) just eight months later (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/22/2006, "Salesforce Dives into the Mash Pit"). Salesforce hopes Kieden's application will help integrate its core customer-management program with Google's AdWords service, significantly improving advertisers' ability to track click conversion.

Kieden co-founder Kraig Swensrud says his company's launch was successful both because of what the company didn't do and what it did. Most importantly, he says, it resisted the urge to take on an entire industry.

"Ours was originally a grand vision, to help all companies understand return on investment from online advertising programs," says Swensrud. To develop such a broad application, Swensrud reckons, would have taken several years. So the company narrowed its target customer to users of both Salesforce.com and Google.

For innovative companies like Kieden, doing business online offers no shortage of opportunities. But when starting one, there are plenty of missteps to avoid. Be sure to choose a differentiated product or service and master it before looking to expand. "If you're the small guy, you're not going to come in and get noticed, unless you have something different," says Melissa Payner, CEO of BlueFly (BFLY), an online-only designer apparel retailer with about 80 employees and $60 million in revenue last year.

ALL ABOUT AGILITY. For online video store Netflix (NFLX), the key was not trying to perfect its service before taking it online, says Neil Hunt, chief product officer. When it launched in 1999, Netflix' speed to market and subsequent agility was mission critical in its unlikely bid to compete with Blockbuster (BBI) (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/25/2006, (see "Netflix").

Although acting speedily is dangerous for businesses looking to transfer from bricks and mortar to online, it can be the key to success for Web-only outfits. Getting the product out there not only puts pressure on the competition but also provides an earlier opportunity to get customer feedback.

"Don't believe that you understand the whole business model from the beginning. We built stuff quick and dirty [before launching in 1999], because we didn't want to spend all this time and money working on the wrong thing," says Hunt.

The experience helped Netflix find what its users wanted and deliver it with gusto. Hunt says his company's willingness to adapt is the major reason it now boasts over 5 million subscribers, a number he says continues to double every 18 months.

ENCOURAGING IMITATION. Companies offering great services that customers begin buzzing about can't neglect the need for scalability. Get the servers in place and the Web technology up to speed immediately, and make sure it's set for multiple years of rapid growth, says Hunt.

Also, don't think that one or two players in the market means there's no room for a new one. "In the past, the first brand out the door in old businesses tended to do well. But with the Internet, the second mouse gets the cheese?look at Yahoo, eBay (EBAY), and Monster (MNST). It's encouraging for small online startups to look at what people are doing and do it better," says Marcel Legrand, senior vice-president for strategy and development at Monster.

Photo sharing and printing service Snapfish was the 127th to market. Today, Snapfish is the largest photo sharing site in the world, with 30 million users. That's up from 14 million in early 2005, when it was acquired by Hewlett Packard (HPQ).

Seven years after launching, general manager Ben Nelson says Snapfish is still working to serve its primary demographic, a hypothetical customer named Emily. Emily, who Nelson says makes up about 80% of the market, is a woman who takes a lot of photos and looks for value, convenience, and easy-to-use service.

"If we constantly work to serve the biggest market segment, we're probably in pretty good shape with the rest," says Nelson. The formula worked for Snapfish. Keep these strategies in mind to help make your Web-only business flourish, too.