Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Search 224, Social Media 0 - My Last Search Insider Column

A lot has happened since I first started writing the Search Insider. There were two US presidential elections. I met and married my wife. Twitter was invented, as was Sprinkles Cupcakes. It's been a pretty good stretch. Here's the last in the series before a new one begins.

Search 224, Social Media 0

It's time for a short trip five years in the making. This is the 224th Search Insider I've written for MediaPost, and most likely my last. As of next week, I'll be switching over to the Social Media Insider.

My first Search Insider was published Friday, July 2, 2004, which was mercifully right before the holiday weekend so presumably no one read it. It was about Web design, a topic I'm not sure I've ever known anything about, but I had to start somewhere. Over the years, along with analyzing updates from the major search engines, parsing research, and covering events, I've tried to dig up lesser known examples of how consumers search to illustrate the evolution of the field.

The process required taking a broad view of search, and much of that focus turned to social media. It's only fitting that I visited MediaPost.com's search engine to review all of the Search Insider columns I've written to dig up just how much social media came up in my search coverage. Here's a snapshot:

• MySpace: 24 mentions, the first of which was a fleeting reference in a November 2005 column about Google Base. That was followed by six mentions in 2006, nine in 2007, eight in 2008, and none in 2009.

• Facebook: 27 mentions, the first one in January 2007 describing photo search and tagging on the social network. There were a total of 11 in 2007, 13 in 2008, and three so far in 2009. 

• Twitter: 17 mentions, starting in October 2007 with a dedicated column about listening to tweets. Following that one piece in 2007, there were 10 in 2008 and six already this year.

• Social media (exact phrase): 28 mentions, starting in October 2006, nearly a year and a half after the first MySpace mention.

• Social media optimization: four mentions between November 2006 and April 2008.

So yes, social media has come up quite a bit, but it's all relative. I mentioned Microsoft or MSN in 67 columns (30% of the first 223), Yahoo in 118 (53%), and Google in 188 (84%). If I was biased in my coverage, at least it was proportionate with market share.

In wrapping this, I feel that hubristic need to share some words of wisdom with future Search Insider columnists, words that perhaps other writers will also appreciate. If you're in this group, you may wonder how to get a lot of responses to a column. The easiest way is to be a jerk and say things so devoid of substance that you can guarantee dozens of people will comment on what an idiot you are. Even more people will probably say they agree with you, which will undoubtedly feel validating.

While I may not have avoided idiocy, I've yet to try to be a jerk here. Instead, I'll share the three columns that triggered the biggest reader reaction, based on anecdotal experience that includes the volume of email responses:

• "Why Skittles Killed Its Web Site," about the March 2009 branding bombshell (or overhyped redesign, take your pick
• "Braving the New World of Lower Merion," a February 2005 story of visiting a Pennsylvania high school
• "Google Vs. Grandmom," the September 2005 epic saga of my grandmother trying to master the Internet (she has since stopped trying, but she still has an answer for everything, whether or not you have a question)

None of those are about search engine marketing or search engine optimization. Two of them are personal anecdotes, and the other was admittedly a bit of a stretch for Search Insider coverage. Meanwhile, some of the columns that I wrote that I thought were so smart they'd lead to Wall Street Journal stories, book deals, and a motion picture starring Hayden Christensen as me and Kal Penn as Sergey Brin -- well, hardly anyone ever responded to those. I'm still proud of those columns, but the silence can be humbling.

I've made a few mistakes in the process and had a few off weeks, but I've lasted through 224 columns in this series by following one simple rule: respect readers' time and intelligence. I'm grateful for everyone who has perused each edition; I read quite a bit too and appreciate being a part of your reading list.

If the subject interests you at all, I hope you'll look for my contributions to the Social Media Insider starting next Tuesday where I'll join the inimitable Cathy Taylor. What would have seemed like a long journey in 2004 now feels like a logical progression. And after covering Google in 188 columns, expect a regular examination of where search and social media intersect. I'll have plenty to cover there, which should keep me busy until Kal Penn returns to acting -- and returns my calls.

Searchers Don't Pay Retail: A Review of Coupon Searches and Search Engines

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Today's Search Insider column, via MediaPost

It's no secret that Google isn't the best search engine for everything. We saw that in recent explorations of live search and bathroom search engines. Another such area is finding coupons.

Google's a great place to find coupon sites, but then you have to sort through the clutter. I tried a search on "kodak coupons," and it's dizzying trying to figure out if and how you can get 20%, 30%, 35%, or 45%  off at KodakGallery.com, as the headlines of search ads indicate. Some sites we'll look at today make searching for coupons much more manageable.

Google Trends shows that the volume of searches for coupons so far this year is twice as high as in early 2008. The AdWords keyword tool reports that the top 10 coupon terms attracted 46.5 million Google searches in March 2009 alone, with "coupons" and "coupon" accounting for 37 million combined (the others, in order, are: coupon code, printable coupons, coupon codes, free coupons, grocery coupons, coupons.com, online coupons, printable coupon).

Analytics firm Compete's blog reported that visitors to top coupon sites are up an average of 170% from March 2008 to March 2009. The blog distinguishes between two categories, "those primarily offering manufacturer coupons (40¢ off Viva paper towels), and those primarily offering retailer-specific coupons (25% off your Target purchase)." It then notes, "Of all searches containing the word ‘coupon,' the share captured by retailer-coupon sites grew by 30% year-over-year in March, while manufacturer-coupon share shrank by 11%."

Compete singles out some of these retailer coupon sites, including RetailMeNot, the fastest growing coupon site among the top five in the category. It's one of my favorite sites, one I go to before completing most of my online purchases. Please don't ask me why (I swear I'm doing alright during this economic crisis), but I recently ordered prints from Snapfish valued at 72 cents and went on RetailMeNot, where I found a code to save 14 cents off my order. It's addictive. And heck, if I'm going to rank all my habits, this is one of the better ones, right behind calling Grandmom.

What's so brilliant about the site is its perfect role at the end of the purchase funnel. When you have a sense of where you're considering buying something from, you can enter the Web site on RetailMeNot, and it will list all of the coupon codes. The coupons are ranked by how many other people used that code successfully, so the most reliable rise to the top while the duds drop out of view. In that sense, it's a massive time-saver as well as a money-saver.

It hardly works for every site. Amazon rarely has any listings unless it's specifically promoting some service. And for some merchants, there's an error that appears that reads, "Sorry for the inconvenience but this merchant has specifically requested to have all user contributed coupons removed from the RetailMeNot system." From my experience, those retailers don't have coupons publicly available anyway, so it's not just RetailMeNot that's singled out.

Other sites are trying similar approaches. One I like is Tjoos, even if I can't always remember how to spell it. It's meant to be a play on "choose," but I can't tell you how many times I misspelled it when entering it into my browser.  According to Compete, Tjoos had about one-tenth of RetailMeNot's traffic in March, while growing three times as fast (off a much smaller base) over the past year.

The one twist Tjoos offers is that it has its own specialists who confirm that coupon codes work. Other coupon users can also contribute whether the coupons worked. As this column was written, Tjoos claimed to have 133,000 online stores, 20,000 verified coupons out of 165,000, and nearly 1,400 exclusive coupons. By comparison, RetailMeNot claims that over the past few years, its users have shared over 100,000 discounts at over 20,000 stores. The numbers aren't as important as whether the sites have current coupons for stores where consumers are shopping, and from the anecdotal tests I tried, they both perform admirably.

You'll find both Tjoos and RetailMeNot in Google when searching for discounts. Once you have a favorite way to seek a discount, though, Google's importance diminishes.

Why Google Needs Twitter Search

Twitter Search by Dave Delaney via Flickr

Here’s Today’s MediaPost column. You can read my previous coverage on why Google should buy Twitter on the Ad Age Digital Next blog.

Google's probably not buying Twitter, despite rumors last week that it might. Whether Google should do so depends on many issues, including the price and monetization potential. Yet it's increasingly clear that Google needs something like Twitter to fill a gaping hole in its search portfolio that didn't exist until Twitter exposed it.

The hole is real-time search or live search (lowercase, as opposed to Microsoft's Live Search). Google's index updates rapidly, but not fast enough. Right now, Google has a number of assets that vary by how useful they are for recent searches:

· Google Trends: This tool, rather than a search engine, can take a day or so to update. And its utility lies in its information about queries rather than providing information in response to queries.

· Google Search: Often updated within hours, it pulls even more recent content from Google News to stay relevant for breaking stories. The rest of the links for any given query are sometimes recent but often from different timeframes.

· Google News and Google Blog Search: These two are interrelated. Often blogs have opinions and information that aren't covered by major news sources. Yet just as often, a news story breaks and blogs then respond.

· Google Hot Trends: This is as close to Twitter as Google gets right now, but it's often unintelligible. While researching this column, " capital of Iceland" was the No. 1 hot trend, but it wasn't clear whether this was because of travel interest, searches relating to the country's economy, or something else altogether. One of the supposedly relevant blog posts it brings up is from 2007.

There's nothing from Google that perfectly addresses what's happening right now unless it's a breaking news story. Meanwhile, Twitter Search is training marketers and consumers that it's possible to search the content of live conversations. FriendFeed is another contender to watch here, as its beta release places even more emphasis on its live feed of users' activity from across the Web. Facebook, which is the most popular service for sharing live updates, has no way to search all the updates, and its Lexicon trend tool has limited functionality.

So why does live search matter at all?

· Marketers get immediate feedback. It's like a Bloomberg terminal for buzz. Just like with financial data, there's a lot of noise that comes out of it, but those alerts can give marketers an edge for responding when something pressing comes up.

· Consumers can access immediate information. When I was at South by Southwest, I'd search Twitter for a venue or party name to see how the lines were. If the buzz was that it was a half hour or hour wait, I'd go somewhere else. I didn't care about what the venue was rated on Citysearch, and I didn't need driving directions -- I just needed immediate feedback, and Twitter Search had it.

· It's candid. For better or worse, people are much less prone to censoring themselves when they're sharing what they're doing in the moment. When looking up the Kansas City Hyatt, there's someone who is "alone," "hungry," and "kinda sad." A glass of Apple & Eve pomegranate blueberry juice led to a good morning in Brooklyn. As for my beloved Sprinkles Cupcakes, I learned that a porn star spoils her pets with the specially made doggie cupcakes (lately she's been tweeting about cupcakes far more than porn). Whether you're a consumer or a marketer, this is all very, very real, and sometimes it's useful.

At some point, Google will presumably want and need a live search component. That feature ties into news, local, mobile, and various other specialized search functions, and we're just starting to see compelling ways to mine and apply live search data.

That doesn't mean Google will acquire Twitter anytime soon. There are other ways the relationship can develop, such as Google populating AdSense ad units with marketers' recent tweets. Startups will also try to beat Google at its own game, like Tweefind ranking Twitter posts by the influence of the tweeter. At some point, though, Google will need live search. When Google's ready, the question will be whether any scalable live search platform needs Google.

Searching For Number One

Image via Wikipedia

When you have to go on the go, where do you go? Yes, even the vertical of toilet search engines is rife with competition.

There may be some kinds of searches that are more critical, like when you have an emergency need for a plumber or a proctologist. But on that curve of searches that are both critical to your well-being and likely to arise in an average month, the need for a good bathroom search engine hits that sweet spot; parents with young children will find such engines especially useful.  It's time to seek out the No. 1 bathroom search engine, even when you really need number two.

Divorcing Ms. P

MizPee, the first such engine I heard of, works for San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Manhattan. I had used it once before successfully, but when I tried my home intersection (28^th St and 3^rd Ave) or ZIP code from my Samsung Omnia, it couldn't locate me. It worked better when I entered my building number, though the first location that came up was a children's barbershop, which I'd probably avoid, especially since I don't have kids. The barber's bathroom was rated five rolls of toilet paper, but it was from a single anonymous rating, and I wasn't sure how many rolls could be awarded. Could the owner have tried to game the system? To make matters worse, the first Starbucks it listed didn't exist, the map didn't work even for the wrong address, and there is one closer than it indicated (I should know; I live above one). Rating: 2 squares out of 5. 

Bling for your Bottom

When entering my ZIP code on "premier toilet search engine" Diaroogle, the results were generally five blocks from me, which won't help in case of an emergency. But if you know your ZIP code, you're probably near home or work and have easy access to facilities. Diaroogle fared much better when searching by address, bringing up the first listing for a bar across the street, with a description that included so much detail it noted high quality toilets are downstairs, as opposed to the more pedestrian ground-level stalls. Another plus: very clear Google maps. The site did miss quite a few other restrooms nearby.  Then again, the descriptions for some locations are so good, they make great bathroom reading material. Consider another bar described as "about as charming as TGI Fridays... in West Virginia." An iPhone app is also available. Rating: 3.5 squares.

Short a Potty

Safe2Pee.org says it's in beta and means it. This site isn't yet ready for mobile, or for mass usage. In all of New York, it has 35 listings, disproportionately in the West Village. Rating: Half a square. I considered another half but it stuck to my shoe.

Vortegh e Zugarane?

What about word of mouth? I downloaded the Where's the Bathroom iPhone app that will play a recording of the phrase "Where's the bathroom?" in sixteen languages. Some of the world's most spoken languages are missing, so you won't have any luck learning the question in Hindi, Bengali, or Japanese. But if you happen to run into some Armenians or Mongolians and want a polite way to excuse yourself, this app will serve you well for a mere 99 cents. Rating: 1.5 squares.

Please Don't Squeeze the App

Where's the Bathroom was one of the four apps that came up in a search for "bathroom" in the iPhone store; the other three were for bathroom diversions so you could have something to do when you got there. I had read about another app sponsored by Charmin, but it wasn't coming up under the brand name or "bathroom." I did find it by searching for "sit," which led me to SitOrSquat.

The Charmin app asked me to register, but I'd imagine that wouldn't be my first priority if I was accessing such an app in a time of need. I skipped that and it brought up a number of bathrooms within a block or two, noting for quite a number of them which ones were open, with pictures for the vast majority. A separate option listed bathrooms with changing tables (the nearest one was a bookstore a few blocks away whose bathroom was rated two stars for being "surprisingly unclean"). There weren't many ratings ye,  but I'd easily go with this. You can also find it at SitorSquat.com. Rating: 4.5 squares.

Goo Doo, 'Hoo Doo

So what about the major search engines? Trying the mobile versions of Google and Yahoo, all I get are home renovation and real estate sites. Rating: 0 squares. When you've got to go, go to a specialist.

You Can STILL Handle These SEO Truths - Rebecca Lieb Interview Continues

Still Rebecca Lieb

This week's Search Insider from MediaPost:

Last week, author Rebecca Lieb managed to distill her new book "The Truth about Search Engine Optimization," from 51 chapters into a single truth. How can she top that? In the continuation of the interview, she first addresses what truth means in this context. Then she tackles the biggest SEO myth. She closes with answering a few questions submitted via Twitter, but I didn't limit her response to 140 characters.

Search Insider: Which chapter do you find marketers have the hardest time wrapping their heads around?

Rebecca Lieb: It all depends on the needs of the individual reader, of course, but I think the chapters on using SEO in social media, or in tandem with blogging, online PR, and reputation management, are of particular interest now that the spotlight's on social media in general. Another reason people will appreciate those chapters is because they provide a pretty clear roadmap for highly optimizing messaging with a minimum of expenditure. Budgets are tight these days, have you heard?

SI: Did you ever grapple with whether to call these chapters truths? For instance, one's "The Jury is Out on Paid Links," and another is "In-House or Outsource," where there aren't truths but rather two sides to the issue.

RL: Funny you should ask. Initially, I did grapple with some of these titles and tried hard to write all 51 chapter headers as absolute truths. Luckily, my clear-thinking editor let me relax the absolutes when logic dictated they're not so absolute. Your readers are marketers, so they're well acquainted with the biggest truth in anything marketing-related, which is, "It depends." But really, it is the truth to tell people that paid links have both advantages and disadvantages, and to weigh both arguments. This is, after all, a book, not a consulting engagement.

I hope readers will find the pro and con arguments in chapters such as paid links, in-house or outsourcing, or even the whole concept of what it means to be in number one in search rankings helpful. When there isn't an absolute truth -- and face it, sometimes there just isn't -- I hope I provide enough guidance for people to make educated, informed decisions.

SI: Again, since it's a book of truths, what's the biggest lie or myth you'd love to counter here?

RL: That SEO is a set-it-and-forget-it item you tick off a to-do list. SEO is an ongoing process that's both strategic and tactical. Probably the biggest value in my book is, it illustrates why. There are so many ways to optimize a Web site, and many of them challenge you to look at and think differently about your business. This means thinking from a searcher's perspective, of course (actually, from many searchers' perspectives). But it also means knowing about all the styles and flavors search comes in: local, vertical, directory, images, video, audio, personal -- the list just keeps getting longer. All this innovation is more complicated, sure. But at the same time, it exponentially expands the opportunities to get visible in new ways and in new places, as well as to maintain that visibility.

And if you'll indulge me a second, there's another myth I'd like to bust: that search is for geeks and techno-nerds. I'm not a developer; I'm a writer and editor, but search turns me on. Maybe it's because I'm weird, but maybe it's also because there's just so much interesting strategy and content behind the concepts. Search can really get both brain hemispheres revved -- right and left!

SI: This question comes from @matt_mcgowan on Twitter: How does social media marketing fit in with search engine optimization?

RL: Social media, particularly user-generated content, benefits SEO in myriad ways depending, of course, on the social media channel. Consumer reviews on an ecommerce site Web page, or a review site like Citysearch or Yelp, not only expand keyword-rich text, but provide added credibility for buyers and browsers. Blog platforms are built to be easily crawled and spidered by search engines, so blog content is incredibly search friendly. Social media allows users to provide their own metadata, not only to images and video on sites like Flickr and YouTube, but also directly to product pages on sites such as Amazon. In a sense, social media can be considered a great, collaborative effort to make almost anything on the Web more search-engine-friendly, including sites, images, video, products, and text.

SI: The final question, also via Twitter, comes from @annatalerico: Should companies measure ROI from SEO, and if so, how?

RL: Of course companies should measure ROI from SEO. The how is a bit stickier to answer, because measurement is tied to goals, and every company and Web site has different goals and objectives. These might include more search visibility for important keywords and phrases, e.g. ranking higher in organic search results. But a more ROI-related metric would be tracking not only the traffic that found your site or pages via organic search results, but also tracking how much of that traffic converted into a desired action such as a click or a sale. Other factors play into this, of course, such as optimized landing pages, compelling copy, and a clear call-to-action. Search won't do all that heavy lifting! But if searchers can't find you, they can't take action, so using your analytics package to track changes in search-engine-generated traffic, and the keywords searchers are using to find your pages, are an essential first step in calculating ROI.

If you want to find out more about Lieb and her book, visit RebeccaLieb.com.

You CAN Handle These SEO Truths - Interview with Author Rebecca Lieb

Image of Rebecca Lieb

Here's this week's colun from MediaPost's Search Insider. It's a Part 1 of 2. For Part 2, please share any other questions you have for Rebecca in the blog's comments, via email to marketersstudio @ gmail . com or Twitter at @dberkowitz . If there are too many, I will still run the answers on the blog. Please submit questions by Friday so I can run them in the Tuesday column.

You CAN Handle These SEO Truths

If you're looking to make sure you're covering all bases with search engine optimization, a good place to start is Rebecca Lieb's new book, "The Truth about Search Engine Optimization." You'll find 51 truths in this book, covering everything from link development to video optimization. They're bite-sized chunks, and if you feel well-versed in some areas but want some help with others, it's easy to flip around and read it in the order that matters most to you.

Lieb, vice president of U.S. operations for Econsultancy, was previously editor in chief of ClickZ Network and also ran Search Engine Watch during some of her tenure there, so she's seen quite a few truths emerge. You can find out more at RebeccaLieb.com.

Meanwhile, it's time to get to the truth behind "The Truth." We'll continue this interview next week, so if you have other questions, post them in the comments or e-mail me and I'll work some into the second round. (Thanks for your questions on Twitter, Anna Talerico (@annatalerico) and Matt McGowan (@matt_mcgowan).

Search Insider: How did you decide on these 51 truths and techniques? Were there any you left off that you really wanted to include? Or did you come across a point where you wanted to stop at, say, 37 and the publisher said, "Give me 51 or no book deal"?

Rebecca Lieb: I'm glad to say that not only is the book about organic search, but the chapter count is totally organic too. That is to say, in writing it, I sat down and made a list of the topics people need to be at least briefed on to approach the subject of SEO holistically. The list totaled 51, and no one at FT Press gave me any arguments -- and neither did the book's highly knowledgeable technical editor, Amanda Watlington.

SI: Who needs this book the most?

RL: Anyone who needs to wrap their head around SEO. This isn't a book about how to code a Web page; it's a book about the concepts of being found online. Tons of people behind a myriad of Web sites are interested in that, from solo bloggers to Fortune 100 companies. It's not a book that's going to throw coding skills or high levels of technical expertise at you, but it will help you understand what makes a Web site "findable." That's useful information for someone not directly involved in SEO, but who's running, say, a marketing department and in the course of their job must have semi-coherent discussions with the people who are doing the nuts-and-bolts SEO stuff.

SI: If you had to write a book called "The One Truth of SEO," what would that one truth be?

RL: Content is king. But content covers a whole lot of bases: there's copy, there are title tags and meta data, there's local and vertical content -- even links can be regarded as content. Behind every great SEO initiative is a solid and sustainable content strategy.

SI: If content is king, where do links fit in the kingdom?

RL: Links point to content, and do so contextually -- at least, the best ones do. Implicitly, links say, "Hey, think this is interesting? Want to know more? Then look over here." A publishing analogy might be that links are the table of contents and footnotes all rolled into one. And links don't just say that to users, they convey the same message to search engine spiders as well. Well-executed and strategically placed links help spiders to better understand and index content. Links also help pave the way for spiders to find related and relevant content. Links are critical to the way you surf the Web, and search engines follow those same paths.

SI: You've been involved in covering this field for some time now. Is there anything that was really new or surprising to you as you put all this together? 

RL: You're right -- I've lived in this space for quite a while, since people were wondering what Google's revenue model was going to be! In the book I've worked hard to underscore the fact that SEO is a continually evolving process that's never done. It can always be improved upon. And that, of course, is because search is new and rapidly evolving. While writing this book, I kept a close eye on developments in universal search, local, vertical, video, and the other newer forms of search that are gaining in importance, both on the Web and to SEO strategies.

Wolfram Alpha And The Holy Grail Of Search

Image by Bernt Rostad via Flickr

Here's today's Search Insider, via MediaPost

Search Insider: Stop! Who would claim to be the Bridge to the Death of Google must answer me these questions three. What is your name?

Search Engine: Today, call me Wolfram Alpha. I was previously known as Microsoft, Powerset, and Cuil.

Search Insider: What is your quest?

Search Engine: To kill Google, of course. Actually, 'Google-killer' is just a term used by lazy journalists. My real quest is to return the answer to any factual question that you may have the nerve to ask, as I discussed on my blog.

Search Insider: What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Search Engine: What do you mean? An African or European swallow? I'll give you the answer to both.

Google: Auuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh!

Okay, perhaps that makes me a Monty Python killer, but people seem to be pretty morbid these days. To wit, by 5 p.m. yesterday, I found 73 references of the phrase "Google killer" in Twitter, all relating to Stephen Wolfram's new search engine, even though it's not due out until May. To be fair, many of the references lampooned the phrase "Google killer" and some saw the upstart as a complement to Google. The writer @burningbird even speculated that it could be a Wikipedia killer. By midday, some of the punditry died down; Wolfram Alpha fell out of the top Twitter trends just as National Napping Day became the hot topic.

The buzz all stemmed from Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Twine, blogging about a preview of Wolfram Alpha: "[Wolfram Alpha] may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose... Basically... you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you. It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like Wikipedia.

Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as 'What is the location of Timbuktu?' or 'How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?,' 'What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?,' 'What is the 307th digit of Pi?,' 'Where is the ISS?' or 'When was GOOG worth more than $300?'"

The image that comes to mind is of the computer in the 1957 movie "Desk Set" with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, one of those magical and oversized computing devices that can do everything -- it can even "translate Russian into Chinese," and it's repeatedly referred to as the "electronic brain." Wolfram's 2009 vision is at least as ambitious.

The commentary from Wolfram and Spivack sheds light on how dumb search engines still are. They will find facts, but you still have to do the work compiling them. The "rainfall" question cited by Spivack feels especially pertinent given all the travel planning I've done. Yes, the facts are out there, and I've been able to check a couple weather sites to find the average rainfall of a certain destination over the past five or ten years during a certain time period, but I always hit some wall or another due to poor usability or lack of data.

I just tried querying Google for "average rainfall belize 2003-2008 january february march," and the top results included Belize's election history, country reports for Slovakia and Poland, and weather in Spain. Yes, my query is not one that's asked every day, but I also wouldn't expect search engines to answer it. The engines aren't training us to search smarter. We'll only challenge Google and its peers so much because we can't afford to waste our time sifting through the disappointing results about elections and Poland when we want weather reports for Belize.

I'm not questioning Google's motives here; it's not trying to keep us dumb or make us dumber. Yet there's a big difference between information retrieval and computation. All of the semantic engines I've seen so far focus on making retrieval better, while other engines try to change around the search results page as if it needs some kind of digital feng shui. Wolfram Alpha strikes me (one of the masses who hasn't seen it yet) as solving a new problem. If it succeeds, congratulations, Mr. Wolfram, and thanks in advance. If it doesn't, Wolfram is paving the way for others -- perhaps even Google.

The biggest challenge for Wolfram Alpha has been enumerated often enough: Most people aren't actively looking for an alternative to Google.

Wolfram Alpha: Go and tell everyone that we have been charged with a sacred quest. If they will give us a few moments in May, they can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail of Search.

Search Insider: Well, I'll ask them, but I don't think they will be very keen. Uh, they've already got one, you see.

Wolfram Alpha: What?

Search Insider: They said they've already got one!

Wolfram Alpha: Are you sure they've got one?

Search Insider: Oh yes, it's very nice!

Why Skittles Killed Its Website

Image via Wikipedia

Here's today's column, originally from MediaPost:

When I was six years old, I wrote my first letter to a company when a box of Rice Krispies didn't contain a pack of Rain-Blo bubble gum as advertised (I received a letter back, with two packs of gum). Many more letters followed over the years, from when I discovered the Magnetic Doodle Balls game had only 91 balls instead of the promised "over 100," to when, at age 16, I noticed a version of Broderbund's Print Shop software only represented African Americans as jazz musicians and tribal warriors. It's a hobby I still revive on occasion, while sometimes adapting it to new communication channels -- as with my recent PowerPoint photo essay on a horrible Las Vegas hotel experience.

20 Reasons The Luxor Sucks

View more presentations from David Berkowitz. (tags: trips vegas)

Today, when contacting a company, the first place I'd likely turn is its Web site. I'm saying that tentatively, as Skittles makes me wonder if corporate Web sites will be around much longer. The company's new site seems to herald the fact that the corporate site is nearing its expiration date.

Go to  Skittles.com, which relaunched yesterday, and you'll see very little branded content. All that's branded is a small box the size of an average widget hovering over the top-left of the page. The background, which takes up most of the screen, is a live feed from Twitter Search showing results for the term "Skittles." Tweet a link to this column and mention the word Skittles, and you'll soon see that link appear on Skittles.com (let me know too; I'm @dberkowitz ).

Here's the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.

Skittles.com isn't exactly a top destination online. Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends respectively report the most recent month's Skittles.com unique visitors as 18,000, 15,000, and too few to track. To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, Skittles.com's just another word for nothin' left to lose.

By just about any rational indication, Skittles went too far. Highlighting Twitter Search in particular seems absurd, especially since Twitter tends to skew older relative to other social media properties, and Skittles seems to target a younger audience. I came home and showed Skittles.com to my wife. Her first reaction, before I even told her why I was showing it to her, was, "That's it?" Then she added, "What happens if you don't care about Twitter or don't know about Twitter? It seems like it's only for people who are really technical. I just wouldn't care."

But why would anyone care about what Skittles has to say? What, pray tell, could Skittles ever say that was so important, unless we woke up one day to find out that eating Skittles is the world's tastiest cancer cure, or alternatively that Skittles lower men's sperm count. Then, perhaps, the world will listen.

Consider the alternative. On Facebook, Skittles has nearly 600,000 fans. In other words, Skittles has over 30 times the number of fans on Facebook than it has monthly visitors to its site by the most generous estimate. It's little wonder that one of the six tabs on Skittles.com links to its Facebook Page, in the same way as it does for Twitter Search with the official mini-site as an overlay. The Media tab links to Flickr and YouTube and unearths some interesting brand research; a good number of the photos on Flickr seem to be of pets named Skittles. Maybe Skittles.com should add another tab linking to pet social networks Dogster and Catster.

There are risks to what Skittles is doing, the biggest of which is a brand hijack. When I checked earlier yesterday, someone wrote, "Skittles suck! Skittles suck! Skittles suck! #skittles". When I checked later, it devolved further, with several posts including "Skittles" and the word "gay" written repeatedly, along with "Skittles" paired with a derogatory term for African Americans. Other posts were nonsensical or irrelevant, such as when an Ohio man named Nathan wrote, "Funny. Skittles was the name of the twinkie that was hitting on me Saturday night (because I was in the kilt)."

Most brands don't need to scrap their sites. Brands are allowed to control their own spot on the Web and offer something of value to their visitors best as they can. If they do highlight their social media presence, it should fit as part of a more coherent strategy. Otherwise, they'll have to face people like my wife, who will wonder what else there is and why they should care.

Praise Skittles for making a statement, though. Through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia, it can reach far more people than it can through Skittles.com. Skittles still needs Skittles.com, if for nothing else than controlling its own domain and posting some nutritional facts and contact information for the handful of people who need it. Yet its social media strategy is a mess. While Skittles.com is dominated by Twitter Search,  twitter.com/skittles has one follower, three updates, and is run by Sara -- who appears to be a cat.

Epilogue:

Between writing this column and its publication less than 24 hours later, Skittles apparently got skittish over the user-generated content on its homepage and set the default background to its Facebook Page. Still, the Twitter Search feed is live under the Chatter tab.

The 10 Most Moving Search Engines

Here's the latest column from MediaPost. Any time you're up for some bhaktsa marku, send me a note.

Dalai Lama by Getty Images via Daylife

Over the weekend, under the gaze of a painting of the Dalai Lama at Tibetan Kitchen, I savored my dessert of bhaktsa marku while thinking of all the search engines that helped get me to that place. And by "that place" I don't mean the Tibetan restaurant, but rather my new Manhattan neighborhood where my wife and I dined out for the first time as residents. Below are ten search engines that helped with the moving process.

1)  LinkedIn: This is the first search engine we used; it's how my wife found our real estate broker. What's funny is that my wife, a lawyer working for New York City Department of Health, thought to use LinkedIn when it hadn't occurred to me.

2) StreetEasy: There are a lot of real estate sites out there, but for New York City, StreetEasy seemed to have the most comprehensive information about apartment listings presented in the most navigable format. The blog Curbed also came in handy when digging up dirt on buildings, especially a few new construction units we considered.

3) Google Maps: It's even better now for New Yorkers with subway directions. Before it launched, I'd often turn to HopStop to figure out how to get to the various listings.

4) Delicious: What was the name of that moving company I used a couple years ago? Where did I buy boxes? I often think of Delicious as my second brain, the more organized one with fewer memory leaks. I posted some real estate-related sites in my public bookmarks, while I hid other links, such as for specific apartment listings.

5) Citimove: I've used this reverse auction site for several consecutive moves. You list what you have to move and get bids for your job, only disclosing your contact information when you're ready. There are some checks for verified reviews to add to its trustworthiness.

6) Amazon: I've been doing a lot of product research for the move, from home office supplies to electronics upgrades. All searches included Amazon, as did a number of the purchases. Their reliability remains strong for delivering what they're supposed to in a reasonable amount of time. They didn't win all my business, though; I completed a couple of the larger transactions elsewhere.

7) CNET Reviews: Every time I searched for an electronics product, I wound up on CNET. It wasn't always intentional; sometimes I'd use a search engine to find product reviews and CNET would rank prominently in the natural results. CNET helped me rethink which flat-screen TV to buy, and it recommended other products like speakers that I had no plans on buying.

8) Google Product Search: Google managed to be Amazon's biggest competitor for my new-home shopping. The thousands of reviews of merchants added enough of a degree of trustworthiness so that it was more feasible to explore alternatives to the Amazon default. I also gravitated toward merchants that accepted Google Checkout, which I used more in the past two months than I ever have just so I didn't have to register with a seller for a one-time small-ticket purchase.

9) Crate and Barrel: The on-site search engine here got enough use that it helped turn our apartment into a satellite showroom.

10) MenuPages: The most important question a New Yorker faces when moving is figuring out where to eat (what's the point of living here if you're more than a few blocks from a good bagel, pizza, or sushi source?). Where I moved, an area affectionately dubbed Curry Hill for its abundance of Indian restaurants, is one of those neighborhoods that suffers from too many options rather than too few, so MenuPages helps narrow the field.

All of these engines competed with one other major source: word of mouth. It was word of mouth that led us to our real estate lawyer and mortgage broker. Word of mouth also won out for specialized purchases such as a folding bicycle. Search engines still won the day overall, though, beating out word-of-mouth recommendations for a real estate broker, moving company, and television.

But everything was interconnected. We found the real estate broker on LinkedIn who introduced us to the lawyer, and the lawyer referred us to the mortgage broker. None of it happened in a vacuum. Right, vacuum... one more thing I need to buy, which I'll have to search for -- unless you have any good recommendations.

Minor Miracles And Major Feats of First-Page Rankings

I originally planned on calling today's MediaPost column "Feeding the 5,000, Ten Plagues, and First-Page Rankings," in a reference to miracles. My wife thought it was too obscure and wordy. I let MediaPost's editors break the tie and they agreed. So, now that it has a more logical title, enjoy the rest of the column, originally published in MediaPost.

Minor Miracles And Major Feats of First-Page Rankings

Nate Elliott by Alex Dunne via Flickr

Videos are more likely than text to get on the first page of Google's search results, according to Forrester Research's Nate Elliott. This is a huge story, but there's an even bigger angle: getting on the first page of Google's search results is really, really hard.

I missed Nate's initial blog post, but fortunately caught the subsequent NewTeeVee analysis. NewTeeVee reported, "Videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages..." In a single sentence, this sums up the need for the importance of including videos as part of a search engine optimization program. Done -- I'm sold.

Read the comments to Nate's post for a few other perspectives, like Max Kalehoff describing how the viral nature of great videos makes them search engine bait, and Billy Ye noting how video results have a relatively fleeting presence in the top rankings compared to Web sites that maintain their authority more consistently. All of this matters, but if you have any video assets, you must consider how you're optimizing them. Say Nate's analysis is off and the real effect is 23x or 10x instead of 53x. Would you treat the study any differently? I wouldn't.

The numbers grew even more staggering. Nate blogged, "There were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results -- giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results." Odds are, since you're reading this, you probably have a professional or deep personal connection to some Web site or another. I'd say the odds of you Googling that site from time to time are pretty high too. If you Google a popular query and the site ranks on the first page, you're witnessing a minor technological miracle, and a marvel of dedication by the rocket scientists you have working with you.

Nate looked at 40 of the most popular queries, so his study is focused on terms that are extremely popular. These are areas where there are massive amounts of content developed, both intentionally (to compete for prime search engine rankings) and organically (almost as a rule, popular queries will also be popular subjects for people and businesses to naturally create content around).

The research makes certain case studies seem all the more remarkable. One of my favorite SEO practitioners is a doctor in Dallas who has been optimizing listings around Google long before many of his patients were finding him that way. As I was writing this, I ran a search on "dallas botox," a popular and competitive term; Google Trends notes that five of the top-10 cities in Texas indexed for searches on "Botox" are in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. This doctor appeared as the top local business result and four of the top-10 organic listings, translating to five first-page rankings. I didn't see any ads for him this time, presumably because he calculated that with five first-page rankings, he can allocate his budget elsewhere.

Google says 92,700 results are competing for a spot on the first page, and while I'll allow Nate to calculate the odds of the doctor's feat, Dr. Adelglass should be pretty proud of himself. The odds of getting just one first-page ranking are daunting enough, but five? I'm not just applauding him because he's my father-in-law (if I really wanted to kiss up to him, I'd plug his main site, Skintastic.com, which is all about "making you more beautiful™"; on that note, please don't ask for the slogan of my father's gastroenterology practice). I just happen to be related to a guy who epitomizes what you can achieve in the face of these now quantifiably insurmountable odds.

There's a lot you can do with Nate's research. He provides a roadmap for the opportunity for video optimization, and you can go to town supporting your video strategy with YouTube Insights, as I described in a previous column. As with any research study, I also keep thinking of the follow-ups I'd like to see. How well do videos appear in the less frequent mid-tail searches? And what if this was applied beyond video? What are the odds of a business ranking on the first page of Google above the main natural search results in the local index, as my father-in-law does? And then there are books, images, products, and news, to name a few other universal search categories.

After reading over Nate's work and the related coverage, I'm left amazed by the odds against marketers, and it gives me even greater appreciation for this field I've been involved with now for half a decade. I'm even all the more impressed with the Skintastics out there who saw this coming long before "Google" was a verb.