Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Is There A Personal CPM For Search?

K-Fed via Wikipedia

Here's today's MediaPost Search Insider:

Can a bounty for search engine users translate to a personal CPM?

 This question follows MediaPost's OMMA Social event (catch the complete coverage) where  a panel discussed the concept of the personal CPM, when brands put a value on consumers who spread marketing messages. In social media, the concept works perfectly, as consumers can become part of the advertising, whether in an ad through networks that target the social graph, or by consumers alerting friends about their brand interactions.

With search, it's different. Your search activities are not broadcast to all your friends, and if they are, you probably want to switch search engines. Yet there are a number of examples of bounties for searchers that indicate the personal CPM can apply. We'll look at four today: Live Search Cashback, Yahoo Canada's Air Miles partnership, the MouseHunt toolbar, and Prodege's Swagbucks.

Live Search Cashback

The best documented of the four examples, Microsoft's Live Search Cashback lists discounts from retailers that can be sorted by the size of a cash refund or the overall lowest price. In practice, it's hardly different from other forms of comparison shopping: shoppers evaluate retailers on a sliding scale of the lowest priced item by the most trusted marketer. This is the only example here where the value of the searcher is dependent on how much he or she spends.

Microsoft also offers rewards for repeat usage of its  SearchPerks Perk Counter toolbar, which treats search like a carnival: more searches lead to more tickets, which can be redeemed for real-world goods of varying value. The program's registration filled up with one million registrants, and it's slated to end in April. Toolbars are popular ways to reward searchers, as we'll see from the next two examples. Meanwhile, expect Microsoft to keep leading the search industry in made-up compound words. A few suggestions: SearchRewards, WindowsBucks, or UseLiveSearchAndInternetExplorerOrYourOperatingSystemWillCrashHaHaHa.

Yahoo Canada Air Miles

Courtesy of one of my favorite blogs, Three Minds at Organic, comes the story of  Yahoo Canada launching the Air Miles Yahoo Toolbar. Enter 50 queries and you get five Air Miles, up to 30 miles monthly. Is this enough to get people to use the Yahoo Toolbar? You need to run 300 searches just to get those 30 miles. I tried the reward calculator, and it takes 1,175 to 1,450 reward miles to fly round-trip from Montreal to New York, which can be earned over 39 to 48 months. That means up to four years of running 300 queries a month on the toolbar, totaling 14,500 searches. There must be easier ways to travel, like Twitter hitchhiking (or Twitchhiking) around the globe.

MouseHunt

Some things have inexplicable appeal, like Howie Mandel, or the nougat in a 3 Musketeers bar. Add to that list the  Facebook application MouseHunt, which for me has been the most persistently addictive app I've tried.

MouseHunt recently launched a toolbar, where hunters (as we app players call ourselves) earn the especially potent mouse bait called Super Brie+, with three searches yielding one piece and the opportunity to earn three pieces daily; search results come from Yahoo. Players can also earn Super Brie+ by donating to MouseHunt, completing offers, or buying it on the game-hosted black market for virtual gold. MouseHunt's toolbar makes it easy to earn a substantial amount of Super Brie+ monthly. For addicted players, this definitely has the potential to change their search behavior.

Prodege Swagbucks

What do the New York Giants, Snoop Dogg, and Barry Manilow have in common? I'm sure there's a great punchline in there somewhere (try your own in the comments), but the one link I'm aware of is that all have branded search engines through Prodege's Swagbucks.com. I've talked about Prodge before,   and in several presentations I've included screenshots of its  Kevin Federline search engine. To be fully transparent, the swag helped sell me; an autographed photo of K-Fed hangs prominently above my desk. Through Prodege, any query on a branded engine gives the searcher a chance to win Swag Bucks that can be redeemed for prizes from autographs to iPhones. For some reason, an iPhone is worth 84 times a signed K-Fed photo; it should be the other way around.

So, what's your pleasure? Cash, miles, virtual cheese, pseudo-celebrity autographs? The challenge for search engines is trying to change behavior; it's telling that there's no comparable example from Google. It's hardly surprising that so many businesses are trying to quantify the value of increased search usage and will reward consumers accordingly. This economy presents the best time to up the ante. The first search engine to reward searchers with contributions to mortgage and credit card payments may be the recession's best shot at a Google-killer.

This Google May Harm Your Computer

Image by andrewwinn via Flickr

Here's today's column that originally ran in MediaPost.

This Google May Harm Your Computer

Where were you the day Google turned against its users?

If you were lucky, you were sleeping in. It happened Saturday, Jan. 31 at 6:30 a.m. in Mountain View, Calif., 9:30 a.m. in New York, 4:30 p.m. in Jerusalem, 8 p.m. in Delhi, and 10:30 p.m. in Beijing. Checking my own Google Web History, I entered my first query of the morning at 10:27 a.m. EST (looking up driving directions for a wedding that night), two minutes after the last of Google's users encountered a problem.

It wasn't a full-day breakdown; it was 40 minutes rolled out during an hour-long window. During that time, any Google search triggered the warning "This site may harm your computer" for every result. That day, five of the top 25 listings in Google Hot Trends were related to the glitch, including numbers one and three.

So what did we learn from this? Google needs to learn the most; it provides little value for its users and advertisers when it scares everyone away from surfing the Web. What about the rest of us though? Here are a few thoughts:

Google is Global
There are few unifying global forces with greater appeal than Google. ComScore reports that in December 2008, Google sites reached 77% of the world's online audience, or 776 million people. The day's not far off when there will be more Googlers than there will be Indians or Chinese. To that point, if there's a catastrophe in Delhi, it might take time for the effects to ripple out to the eastern state of Assam, but when there's a catastrophe in Mountain View, the whole world can feel the impact at once.

While in Israel seven years ago, I experienced New Year's Eve as a meaningful event for the first time. Israelis in their 20s told me that it was their favorite holiday of the year -- not the national Independence Day or the festive Jewish holiday of Purim -- because it was the one day they were celebrating with everyone else around the world. Google has that similar way of crossing boundaries. Now, I may be searching for the text of President Obama's inauguration address and someone else may be entering the query "death to America" (mercifully, a phrase with scant activity in Google Trends ), but at least we can have some common ground.

We Need Options
A telling comment came from the user "someguy" on Silicon Alley Insider. He wrote, "I was using Google at that time and it happened to me! I was very confused, but gave up and tried again later and everything was fine. You know, the odd question is: Why didn't I just try to use another search engine?"

Why didn't you, someguy? It's probably because you're fairly typical, at least as far as U.S. Internet users go. Check out Compete's 2008 trends for Exhibit A, slide 5 in particular. Google's users are two and a half times as loyal as Yahoo's, and they're about five times as loyal as the users of Live Search, Ask.com, and AOL. When Google's on the fritz, it's like when your favorite TV news network suffers an outage when they're airing the weather. Sure, you could check out 10 other networks, but enough people will probably think, "Ehh, I'll look out the window."

It's in everyone's best interests, except perhaps Google's, to have robust competition among search engines in every country. This is more of a prayer than an action item; I don't want to start giving out alms to needy engines, nor would I lobby for a search engine bailout. But I hope that just as Google weathered the dot-com bust nearly a decade ago to emerge as one of the world's most heralded businesses, this economic downturn will reignite search competition. Even that may not be enough in the short term to encourage consumers to consider alternatives.

How Bad Was This?
In Google Blog Search, there were 5,523 references to "this site may harm your computer" and "Google" from Saturday through Monday afternoon, when this column was being written. Combining that search with other terms, 2,189 included "error" (40%), 1,022 included "glitch," 430 included "bug," 88 included "meltdown," 27 included "blunder," 8 included "tragedy," and 5 included "catastrophe." As a control, 7 included "ice cream" and none included "emu" (as for the former, Google also scans other content on the page such as article roundups and comments, so some false positives tend to appear).

This column's headline and lede aside, the coverage of what happened was largely free of melodrama. It was an error, glitch, or a bug that could happen to anyone, and this time it happened to Google.

In Google We Trust

We continually trust that Google will bring us safely to our destinations and keep our computers free from harm. When Google tells us it's protecting us, our first instinct is to believe it. That's why it's so frightening for all other publishers to have Google label their sites as harmful.

Google can afford a few glitches. The danger is if it cries wolf too often, then all of its warnings will be for naught, and the erosion of trust will extend far beyond Google.

That would be a catastrophe, but that hasn't happened. This was just a glitch.

One Search, 17 Ways - Searching from the Web, Mobile, Twitter, Cars, and Beyond

This is the latest in a series of posts about and inspired by discussion's with Ford's executive team at CES, including a conversation with CEO Alan Mulally, an interview with Director of Connected Services Doug VanDagens about the future of in-car search, the full interview with VanDagens, and an interview with Ford President of the Americas Mark Fields on imagining cars as social networks.

Below is my MediaPost column that ran today that expands on these ideas.

One Search, 17 Ways

Inspector Gadget via WikipediaAfter the Consumer Electronics Show this month, where I met with the executives from Ford and heard about  their ambitious voice search plans, I kept wondering how the ability to conduct voice searches from their cars will change how people search, communicate, access information, and drive. It then made me wonder about all of the venues and devices people can search from. At CES, Dick Tracy, James Bond, and Inspector Gadget would have had a field day testing out the latest gizmos (if they could avoid Gadget's nemesis Dr. Claw tricking them into joining a booby-trapped tweet-up).

These new devices aren't meant to be solely for Inspectors; they're supposed to be for all of us. Here's a vision for how searches will differ when conducted in different settings from different devices. In all of these situations, we'll take the example of a young, female, Dallas-based professional named Penny who's searching for the best cupcakes.

INDOORS

Home PC

Query: "best cupcakes dallas tx." Penny has a craving for something sweet after dinner, so she spends a few minutes trying to find recommendations. She uses Yahoo where, thanks to SearchMonkey, reviews from Yelp and Citysearch appear on the search engine results page.

Work PC

Query: "cupcakes plano tx." It's her receptionist's birthday and Penny wants to find something near the office.

ON THE GO

Twitter

Query: "does anyone have any favorite cupcake places in dallas? I hope sam's not following me or it'll ruin the surprise :)" She texts this to 40404 and uses  TweetReplies.com to get responses emailed to her.

Twitter Search

Query: "cupcakes dallas." Thinking she might not have too many followers in or from Dallas, she can also check search.twitter.com to see if anyone has mentioned this recently.

SMS: Search Engines

Query: "sprinkles dallas tx." Over lunch, Penny overheard her receptionist raving about the cupcake place Sprinkles, so Penny decided to go a bit out of her way. She forgot the exact address though, so she sent a text message to GOOGLE (466453) while she was at a light.

SMS: Q&A Services

Query: "anyone know where to get the best cupcakes in dallas" sent to [email protected]. Other Mosio users then respond with answers. She could do this through her iPhone as well.

WAP (Mobile Web)

Query: "sprinkles dallas tx" entered in Internet Explorer on her smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.

iPhone: Google

Query "sprinklers dallas to." She's still having a little trouble with the touch-screen keyboard and the auto-complete features. Trying again, she gets it.

iPhone: Google Voice

Query: "cupcakes" and then "dallas texas." Fortunately, with Sprinkles Cupcakes being the official name of the business, it's even easier to find the listing.

Voice Search

Query: "cupcakes" and then "dallas texas." She used 1-800-FREE-411, though she could have tried 800-GOOG-411 too.

Car: GPS

Query: "bakery". On her GPS device, Penny selects "search nearby" and then picks the closest category match. Right now it doesn't return the most relevant or most comprehensive results for this query, but it works better for others.

NEW AND EMERGING

Car: Voice

Query: "I'm looking for cupcakes in Dallas, Texas." She tells this to her 2009 Ford Focus equipped with the latest Sync platform.

Airplane

Query: "best cupcakes san francisco." During a month of business travel, Penny flies from New York to San Francisco and winds up on an American Airlines Boeing 767-200 plane equipped with Aircell-powered in-flight Wi-Fi. Determined to sample the best cupcakes at her destination, she boots up her laptop, goes to Google, and finds Kara's Cupcakes as the well-optimized top listing.

Wristwatch

Query: "meilleurs gâteaux paris" spoken into her LG Touch Watch Phone, set to debut in Europe later this year (Penny's quite the polyglot). The phone's capabilities will include voice recognition and text messaging, so she'll get to choose her method of searching.

TV

Query: "cupcakes 75023" entered on her Samsung with Intel software running Yahoo widgets. There was plenty of buzz about this at CES. Penny may find the initial technology frustrating compared to what she's used to on PCs and mobile devices until remote controls better mimic keyboard functionality.

Augmented Reality

Instead of entering a query, Penny may be able to put on a special set of glasses and scan her surroundings for store names and reviews. The headsets and eyewear from Vuzix now link up to other portable devices such as iPods and camcorders, but they keep including more functionality within the gadgets themselves.

Word of Mouth

Query: "Know any good cupcake places in Dallas?" The past, present, and future of searching are anchored in word of mouth. It's not always the most efficient; it might take Penny 20 minutes to think of people she knows living in the right area who enjoy cupcakes and would have opinions on which ones are the best. But when she calls her friend Quimby and he tells her she HAS to check out Sprinkles, there's no question where she'll wind up.

Have You Driven a Search Engine Lately? - Ford on Cars as Search Engines

 

Today's MediaPost column is excerpted from my Ford interviews at CES. This week I'll also post the full videos and transcripts.

Have You Driven a Search Engine Lately?

YOU MAY be used to using your phone as a search engine, and you've seen ideas for years about your TV serving as a search engine, but have you thought about your car as a search engine?

The idea had occurred to me before. Fittingly, the last section of my final column of 2008 noted one trend to watch this year is that "your car engine's your search engine." I wrote, "Then there's vehicle telematics -- anyone who's searched for a restaurant, attraction, or drugstore via a GPS device on the road will appreciate how valuable that can be." 

Ford Motor Company has an even more ambitious vision for the future of in-car search engines. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, I met a number of executives from Ford at Social Media Club's Ultimate Blogger Dinner, including CEO Alan Mulally. I seized the chance to record video interviews with Ford's President of the Americas Mark Fields and Director of Connected Services Doug VanDagens. The full interviews, including text and video, will soon run on my blog, but I've excerpted segments with VanDagens that address how consumers search from their cars.

David Berkowitz: Do you want to share what you're doing?

Doug VanDagens: I'm the director of connected services, so I'm responsible for connecting our vehicles with all the services off-board -- satellite radio, an Internet connection, HD radio, things along those lines. So we've got a whole host of awesome services, some that we've just announced back in December.

What we're announcing here at the show is an ability to connect to the Internet through a normal voice plan. So all you need is your phone, and we can take Sync through Bluetooth, connect to your phone, and connect out to Tellme, which is a best-in-class voice portal, and Microsoft now owns those assets. From there we can direct you to a number of Internet data sources. We can send the GPS information from the vehicle, we can send diagnostic information over your voice plan, and then we have traffic, directions, business search, and information, all Internet-based.

DB: So have you done some initial testing to see how people are already using this -- or is this really just rolling off the shelves now?

DV: It's just rolling off... It will be available in the spring, but the coolest thing about it is, it's going to be available on every new vehicle we're going to make in 2009, from the Focus to the high-end cars.

You'll have access to Internet information. You can personalize it. If you want news you can go in and say, "I want technology news," "I want business news." It'll be read to you. You can get sports, news, weather. Later this year we're going to introduce movies and stock prices.

You can get navigation information, so you can go out and say, "Find me the closest Starbucks," and it will go out, based on your location, and find the closest Starbucks to you, analyze the traffic conditions, tell you how to get there the fastest way, and download the directions to your car. The call will end, and now you'll get turn-by-turn directions. It will say, "Turn right at 200 yards," "Turn right now," it will take you anywhere you want to go. It will do business search -- you can get the phone number. And all of this is free for three years.

DB: Does this work in conjunction with GPS or more as a replacement?

DV: We use GPS in the vehicles. Starting in January, all of our new vehicles will have GPS. So we send the location from the car so we know where you are. You can say things like, "Search nearby," and they'll find anything that you want nearby. You can do a business search, you can do it by category, you can do it by actual business name, by proximity. So you can say, "Find me an Italian restaurant."

DB: What is Ford getting out of this by making it a free service?

DV: We're making our customers happy. We're offering something to them that nobody else is offering. It's free navigation, free business search, free directions, free information, and all you need is your cell phone.

DB: Have you been taking this for a test drive yourself?

DV: We are fast to the market. We just got the first version of this over Christmas. So we took it out and we've been running with it and it works great.

DB: The car was one of the few places people couldn't readily search before, and search is so ingrained in people's lives. How do you think your new service is playing into that fact?  How might this change consumer behavior?

DV: I think the first thing it does is, it makes it safer to drive your vehicle. Right now when people want to find a place to go or use their phone or an MP3 player, they're doing it anyway. They're looking down and dialing. This makes your car safer to use because if you need to find a place to go, it will automatically do it through voice. Our priority is voice. You can just talk to it, keep your hands on the wheel, your eyes on the road, and you get the information you need. That's the first thing it'll do.

The second thing it'll do is it will make access to information that you need fun. You can get the latest technology news. You can personalize your sports, you can personalize the weather. So it makes the driving experience fun and safe.

 

Discovering Hot Spots From YouTube Insights

Image by via CrunchBase

The most valuable benefit of marketing videos on YouTube may not be the views but what you learn about the viewers.

Last week, we talked about YouTube's Sponsored Video ad platform and how it's a complement to, but not replacement for, traditional search engine marketing. If you do find value in driving video views, you'll be even more excited about what YouTube tells you about those viewers. We'll review some examples of what Insights tells you and how you can use it.

There are five categories of reports in Insights: Views, Popularity, Demographics, Discovery, and Hot Spots. The first three are straightforward, where you can find out: how many views your video has received over time with breakouts by state, country, and continent;  the relative popularity of your video compared to others on YouTube; and age and gender breakdowns for the video's viewers. The last two require a closer look.

Discovery

This is the dashboard you'll love most as a search marketing junkie. You can find out how and where people are watching the video, including options such as YouTube search, an embedded player, Google search, external links (Twitter is included here), related videos, and a "viral/other" category that means it was passed along via email or IM.

With the search categories, you can click to see which terms people are using. Want to build a keyword list to market your video through Sponsored Video or AdWords? Start with the most effective terms from this list. Maybe there are searches you'd expect to see but don't; consumers either aren't using those terms, or your video isn't optimized for those queries.  Similarly, your video might be ranking for unexpected queries. This all presents new optimization opportunities. And if you optimize well for YouTube's search engine, those videos could potentially rank higher in Google, too.

The referring sources for embedded videos should also be monitored. Would these sources want to embed more of your content? Are there other ways to forge deeper relationships? Would related sites be interested?

Hot Spots

With Hot Spots, you can find out which segments of a video are capturing the most attention, provided the video has enough views. There's an average attention line for your video; "cold" segments indicate viewer drop-off or a lack of repeat viewing, while "hot" areas indicate repeat viewing. I'll use an example of a video clip I posted where  I posed as a Weather.com anchor (see the  write-up from Christina Kerley for the background). There's an introductory segment in the clip that's cold, though it gradually gains steam. Then, 12 seconds into it, right as I start the broadcast, it heats up for the next 30 seconds.

What might I do if I'm a marketer? One idea is that with Sponsored Video ads, I could draw attention to the hot part of the video. If it's a certain cast member people are watching, play that up. If people keep rewinding a racy segment, allude to that. While it's not always easy to predict what the best parts will be ahead of time, usually it's easy to understand why the Hot Spots are on fire.

Let's say you're trying to get the word out through digital word of mouth -- reaching out to bloggers and other online influencers. These people might not have the attention span to watch a two-minute clip. But if you tell them to check out the best 20 seconds so they'll know why it's perfect for their audience, you might strike a chord with those influencers -- and their audiences. Such a strategy can build up links to improve that video's ranking in natural search results, and sometimes they'll link to your homepage or other properties, giving you even more Google juice.

That's a Wrap

I'd love to be able to combine these reports even more. For instance, what if you could combine Demographics and Discovery to learn the search terms by age, gender, and country? Might Hot Spots differ for different types of users? All of this could continue to provide even more fuel for video marketing.

Until then, there's enough here to keep busy with. The more views you can attract for your videos, the better the information will be, so it's a virtuous circle that's augmented when you apply the intelligence to improving your campaigns.

Pausing To Rate YouTube’s Sponsored Video

Image via CrunchBase

Let’s agree right away that YouTube’s Sponsored Video isn’t the next Google Killer.

It’s not even the next Yahoo killer, even though comScore recently reported that YouTube is now the second largest search engine. Fittingly, around the time that the comScore news broke, Google publicly launched search-triggered Sponsored Video ads on YouTube. Does this mean marketers need to consider YouTube over Yahoo and Microsoft?

It’s not going to quite work out that way. First, it’s helpful to understand how YouTube search ads work:

• You need to promote a video that’s on YouTube. This is designed to drive video views, not site traffic.

• You must have uploaded the video through your YouTube account. For my trial, I used this video I titled “Soufflecam,” a grainy, shaky shot of a waiter serving chocolate soufflé while at a dinner with New York Times columnist David Pogue.

• You can target videos for words and phrases, and they’re supposed to be relevant to the video, though I’ve found many ads running on completely irrelevant terms. Presumably Google is focusing on driving up inventory for now rather than fine-tuning relevance. For my video, I used phrases like “chocolate soufflé” — surely a top query.

• Ads run on a cost-per-click basis.

This is all very different from search advertising. With a typical search engine marketing campaign, not only are direct response metrics critical, but you get penalized for branding messaging. With sponsored videos, you have some flexibility to include branding, and you’re promoting content.

Taking a step back, the consumer mindset is very different on Google and YouTube. On Google, a consumer might be looking to buy a new car. On YouTube, a consumer might be looking for a cool car commercial. Viewing that commercial might improve various branding metrics, but there will be a large percentage of people who just want to watch the commercial that everyone’s talking about.

Google and YouTube also differ in terms of the marketers they attract. Google AdWords opened up to everyone. It got to the point where marketers stopped asking if they should advertise on Google and instead asked how much they could spend there while still reaping a return on ad spending. Google’s not the most important platform for every marketer, but every marketer needs to consider it, and just about everyone can get at least some value out of it.

YouTube Sponsored Video is something else entirely. Yes, more marketers are uploading videos to YouTube, but how many of those videos will benefit from paid promotion? Some marketers can quantify it. Movie studios want to get people to watch their trailers, and they understand the value of it. Bands can use music videos to try to fill up a venue. Marketers can also pay to promote their responses to major issues and crises, such as when JetBlue founder and then CEO David Neeleman published a video apology for a string of lengthy delays. At the time, that segment might have benefited from Sponsored Video. Today, that apology comes up first when I searched for “JetBlue” on YouTube, so JetBlue might want to run an ad to direct searchers to something a little more upbeat.

While more marketers will find ways to use Sponsored Video, it won’t be for everyone. Not everyone’s in the brand-building business online, and not everyone who is will have video assets that are good enough to merit promotion on YouTube. Marketers who try to promote subpar content may find themselves with negative reviews and ratings, so it’s important to be selective.

On the flipside, video ratings are included in the Sponsored Video ad, so great videos will attract even more viewers with their four- and five-star ratings. I searched for James Bond on YouTube the Monday after the latest movie premiere and an ad from Activision appeared promoting a trailer for the video game based on the movie. The game trailer is rated five stars, and clicking the video shows it received 19 ratings, so YouTube’s community validates Activision several times throughout the experience. That’s unique to YouTube, and the advertiser benefits even without a click (in some ways, the advertiser benefits more without clicks since impressions are free).

The first step, as Activision learned, is uploading good content. There’s no official Quality Score, but don’t get lulled into a false sense of complacency. While Google won’t judge you here, your potential customers will.

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Have Gadget, Will Search - Searching from the iPod Touch, Amazon Kindle, and Chumby

Image by The Rocketeer via Flickr

Today's Search Insider, Originally Published in MediaPost

The biggest prediction I’ll make for 2009 is that it will be the first year where the device you search from will matter almost as much as what your query is. Having mobile scale as a viable search marketing channel will be the biggest driver, but this extends beyond smartphones. Consider how GPS is making in-car telematics mainstream.

As I’ve been trying out some alternative devices lately, today we’ll look at the search experience on the iPod Touch, Amazon’s Kindle, and the Chumby.

iPod Touch
It’s a different mentality searching from the iPod Touch than from an iPhone. Both devices are similar, except for three key differences: the iPod Touch relies on Wi-Fi rather than the 3G/Wi-Fi combo the iPhone uses; there’s no GPS for the Touch, but it can hone in on location via Wi-Fi signals; and the Touch doesn’t have a camera.

Searching Google from the Touch delivers a mobile version of search results, where some ads appear above the natural results, but there are no ads to the right. Yahoo and Live.com also use the single-column approach. While it can vary from publisher to publisher, the experience is generally a hybrid of the Web and mobile, and as it evolves will only get better as a practical but powerful search driver.

I’m not yet willing to rely on AT&T and switch to the iPhone as a phone, but I love the Touch interface more than my Samsung i760 smartphone. When I want to quickly check email in the morning or look up a few things on the road, I reach for the Touch first, with the Samsung as a backup. As more data comes out, marketers will come to have a better understanding of what Touch users search for.

Kindle
I’m not ready to give up on books (or bookshelves) quite yet, but after plowing through Philip Roth’s “Indignation” on Amazon’s Kindle, I’ll keep it on me for awhile. It was great traveling on an overnight trip to Boston where I could finish “Indignation” and download another book on the road rather than taking two volumes with me.

The Kindle’s experimental options include a Web browser, with bookmarks to Google, Yahoo Finance, and the Yellow Pages. Amazon operates on what it calls the “Whispernet,” a free Wi-Fi based connection to Sprint’s EVDO data network that has worked well anywhere I’ve tried to use it.

Trying to search Google on the Kindle requires several extra clicks to enter the term in the field and search. The concept of the first page of results is different here too, as you generally need to hit the “next” button to cycle through a few screens. Google’s results come from its PDA-optimized browser, although on the Kindle it’s in black and white. I couldn’t find any ads running.

The most useful search engine on the Kindle is its NowNow service where you can ask a question and humans respond with the result, sometimes within minutes. I asked it which U.S. president was the first to be inaugurated in January, and I received a page of facts and links about Franklin D. Roosevelt and his 1937 inauguration.

Chumby
The Chumby, a Wi-Fi enabled touch-screen device, is an odd duck of a gadget. You can select from a constantly growing list of Web sites, games, and utilities to add, and the Chumby cycles through them every 30 to 60 seconds; if you interact with one, it will stay on longer.

Some selections are meant for viewing, like clocks, while others are designed for interaction, like the addictive game Chumball. Certain selections can be personalized, like Facebook or Twitter, where you can view friends’ updates. Most have some interactive component. The Chumby can even play videos such as David Letterman’s Top Ten lists, which update daily.

There’s no actual search engine on the Chumby. With Yahoo Buzz or Google Trends, you can view recent top movers, but you can’t search beyond that. Google News shows top stories, but no other information beyond a brief synopsis. You can preprogram a query for Google Blog Search and Chumby will show the latest results, but that’s it. The best search experience I found is with the Twitter Search module, where you can enter a query through the Chumby’s on-screen keyboard.

Looking Forward

If mobile devices are considered the third screen (after the TV and computer), the Kindle must rank somewhere around the 11th screen — and the Chumby might be the 28th. Don’t even try to figure out the iPod Touch, which alternates between acting like the first screen when playing videos, the second screen when running applications, and the third screen when accessing the mobile Web. With all of these Web-enabled screens, there are opportunities for searching. The nature of the device, from its usability to where and why people use it, will impact the queries.

Not all screens will be search drivers. I’d be surprised if any agencies started to specialize in CMO — Chumby marketing optimization — or KIBRO — Kindle browser optimization. But since it’s easier to build in Web accessibility to a wider array of affordable devices aimed at the mass market, search engines will spill over into the new frontiers — and when searches from these devices reach any magnitude of scale, marketers will inevitably follow.

Google's 2001 Time Warp

Originally published in MediaPost . It might help to read this column aloud in the voice of Andy Rooney. I do a pretty good Andy Rooney - good enough that my wife hates it, and it's why we don't watch 60 Minutes much.

Google's 2001 Time Warp

What were you searching for in January 2001?

Google can jog your memory, as it brought back the earliest index it has in honor of its tenth anniversary. That was the month President George W. Bush was inaugurated, Andre Agassi won his third Australian Open, and the Indian state of Gujarat endured an earthquake that killed 30,000 people (thanks go to  mapreport.com, and to  Jennifer Kim on Twitter,  for the story idea).

Here's a rare opportunity to experience the Web as it once was, when it was about half as old as it is now, if you date the origin to the launch of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993.

So, how do search results on Google compare then and now?

In 2001, "myspace" led to data storage site freediskspace.com, "facebook" brought up several obscure links from Harvard and Princeton, and "youtube" did not match any documents. There was no sign of Wikipedia, which launched that January, except for references to its early incarnation as part of the Nupedia encyclopedia project. "Hulu" referred to a San Francisco-based Hawaiian dance company. "Twitter" meant a lot of things, but mostly nothing (to many, the same holds true today).

IPod meant the Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System. DVR meant just about anything, but there was a reference from Sigma Designs to a digital video recorder (the technology existed; TiVo's IPO was in 1999). Android didn't refer to mobile phones, but there was at least one reference to mobile robots.

In 2001, "Dell laptops" brought up lots of Geeky results revolving around Linux and wireless networking. That was well before the news story entitled "Dell laptop explodes at Japanese conference" etched itself into the top ten search results, where the 2006 story still resides.

Starbucks detractors have been a constant. Back then, there was Starbucked.com in the third result, and now it's IHateStarbucks.com at number eight.

Few brands fared worse than Al Gore's by early 2001. Nogore.com ranked second in Google, and several sites on the first page took jabs at him.

We're reminded by searching on their names that in 2001, Barack Obama was a state legislator (with all of 768 results indexed for his name without quotes), John McCain was still running with his "Straight Talk America" theme after falling short in the 2000 Republican primaries, Joe Biden was continuing his Senate career, and Sarah Palin was, for Google's purposes, a ghost (there were no results for her name in quotes).

The Y2K bug was still fresh in people's minds - and in Google's results. The top site was Y2K.gov, an official governmental clearinghouse of important information. The sixth result promoted a free report on "How the Year 2000 Millennium Bug will bankrupt Social Security and Medicare, crash the world's stock markets, paralyze the West's military…" Maybe we should blame today's economic crisis on Y2K.

In 2001, "Bailout" led to stories about Korea and Japan, and Chrysler and Microsoft.

"Katrina" then referred to anyone and everyone — a photographer, a traveler in Africa, an Australian country singer.

By January 2001, "Harry Potter" fans had had six months to read the fourth book in the series. The first film hadn't even been released.

Tune into these now top-ranking results as they showed up in 2001: "Heroes" brought up a page on Greek mythology, "Lost" brought up a site about the "Jurassic Park" sequel "The Lost World," and "Entourage" brought up a site about a Microsoft e-mail manager.

MediaPost was then "an on-line contact directory of all advertising media professionals." Now it's "an online resource for all advertising media professionals" (based on the search results description).

More tagline evolutions: Google was "Web Directory the web organized by topic," and now it "Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images." Yahoo went from "Personalized content and search options. Chatrooms, free e-mail, clubs, and pager" to "the world's most visited home page…" Microsoft was "Find software, solutions and answers. Support, and Microsoft news." Now it's "Get product information, support, and news from Microsoft" — at least something's still the same.

In 2001, there were no signs of Petco Park, Citizens Bank Park, or the Washington Nationals. There still aren't many signs of the Washington Nationals — at least in October baseball.

In 2001, three of the top ten results for "patriots" referred to the New England football team. Today, the team commands all natural results but one.

In early 2001, the first Google listing about me ranked #71 when typing David Berkowitz (without quotes), though my writing appeared first when searching for "Dave Berkowitz." Now I have three listings in the top ten for David, one for Dave.

Comparing the indexes from 2001 and 2008, it hardly seems like the same search engine. Now there are images, videos, quick answers, news stories, related searches, desktop results, books, personalized results, and of course ads. There's also greater competition to appear on page one.

Despite all the changes, the results page is still mostly a bunch of left-aligned blocks of links and text with their blue headlines on the white background. The content of the index has changed far more than the user experience, while the results have become more relevant. We'll see if that strategy keeps them around for their 20th anniversary.

The Browser Search War Winners, or The Column I Didn't Want You to Read

So a funny thing happened on the way to publication.

I wrote the column below Sunday night. I didn't even finish it. As I wrapped it up, I felt like it was really all about Firefox, and the rest of it didn't matter, and there wasn't too much of what's new here.

So I wrote another column. One I was pretty happy with. A little lifestyle-ish, not as deep - but I thought a better read.

I sent in my column earlier than usual. Except I sent in the wrong column. Just attached the wrong file. D'OH!

Anyway, since it's out there on MediaPost, I'll put up the other column. It's not my favorite. I didn't even finish it. I'll publish the one I meant to shortly.

Thanks for bearing with me. We'll soon return to our regularly scheduled writing.

The Browser Search War Winners

Posted October 7th, 2008 by David Berkowitz

With browsers turning their address bars into search bars, as we discussed last week, which browser delivers the best search experience?

I assembled a panel of judges (OK, me) and put together a scientifically ironclad roster of searches (what came to mind while watching TV Sunday night) and put them to the test. All searches were conducted at the same time. The goal was to discover which browsers among Firefox 3.0.3, Google Chrome 0.2.149.30, and Internet Explorer 8.0.6 (the latest versions) were the best at delivering the most relevant sites from searches conducted through their address bars. When results led to a page of search results, I stuck with the browsers' default engines: Google for Chrome and Firefox, and Live Search for IE8.

Shamwow
I saw a commercial for the Shamwow, a towel that sops up everything. By the looks of it, you can put this towel in the Atlantic Ocean, sop it all up, and then dump it out in the Pacific. If we haven't figured out enough ways to screw with the planet, this might be the next best thing to cloud seeding.
Firefox: It went right to Shamwow.com, the official site.
Chrome: It brought up a search, with Shamwow.com listed first.
IE: It brought up a search, with an ad for rival cloth Zorbees advertising above Shamwow.com as the first natural link.
Verdict: Firefox is a time-saver here.

Giants
For sports fans, this is a somewhat ambiguous search. According to Google Trends, searches for the San Francisco Giants tend to be highest March through August (a sign of a team not often in playoff contention), and searches for New York Giants surge August through early January (last season's Super Bowl run was one major exception, reaching record levels in early February). Since 2004, searches on the generic "giants" have been 10 times either of the locally modified queries. Right now, of course, it's football season, so engines could presumably tweak results based on what's currently relevant.
Firefox: It led to Google's search results with a brief football box score from NFL.com followed by the NY Giants official site at Giants.com.
Chrome: Same as Firefox.
IE: Its search results brought up Giants.com as the top link.
Verdict: For someone who sought a quick recap of the game, Chrome won out by providing relevant information, more than was easily evident on Giants.com with a quick scan.

Mortgage Rates
Many now are more worried about qualifying for a mortgage rather than just the rates, but it's still a perennially hot search.
Firefox: You're taken directly to Bankrate.com. How's that for prime placement?
Google: Search results have Mortgage101.com as the top natural result, under a slew of ads.
IE: Bankrate tops the search results, but well down the page under ads and a section for top news articles.

Mortgage Calculator
After the first test, I went back to Google Trends and found this query is more than twice as popular as "mortgage rates", and it's typically more of a 3:1 margin, except for Q1 2008, where rates twice briefly topped calculators.
Firefox: It brought me right to mortgage-calc.com.
Chrome: Search results had the same site up top for natural results.
IE: Its search results had Bankrate on top, preventing Mortgage-Calc.com from the hatrick.

Obama and McCain
I ran the one-word last-name searches.
Firefox: You go right to barackobama.com and johnmccain.com. I just noticed, in a somewhat ironic twist given their demographic strengths, that Obama's site looks far more buttoned up and McCain's looks much more youthful.
Chrome: Search results have the candidates' official sites on top.
IE: For Obama, search results have two ads on top — first for the official site, and then, puzzlingly, for search.live.com/cashback, where you can buy Obama books and Halloween masks. Then there are images, news results, and then the official site topping natural results. For McCain, there's just the one ad for McCain's site, then several news results, and then Wikipedia's McCain page topping McCain.com.

MediaPost
Firefox goes to MediaPost.com. Chrome and IE search, with MediaPost.com coming out on top.

Apple
Same as MediaPost, with Firefox directing to Apple.com and the others searching.

Yahoo Searchmonkey Now Matters

I've been following Yahoo Searchmonkey pretty closely, just waiting for its enhanced search listings to matter.

While I don't want to take too much credit - I won't take any, really - within days of posting a presentation about Serchmonkey's usability, they cut out a few of the steps.

The bigger change took a bit longer. My biggest problem is that if Searchmonkey improves results, Yahoo should do it automatically for users, or at least make it easy for webmasters to do it behind the scene with no user intervention. I mentioned as much in a column called The Customization Conundrum:

SearchMonkey can evolve into a service like Sitemaps, the protocol for Webmasters to help search engines crawl their sites. The end user generally has no clue that sitemaps exist, but sitemaps improve the search experience nonetheless.

Yahoo's now coming around. Here's the pertinent info from CNET's Webware:

The hitch for most companies that might want to use SearchMonkey to gussy up their own search results on Yahoo, though, is that they generally must convince users go to a SearchMonkey application gallery and enable that specific SearchMonkey behavior. But on Thursday night, Yahoo switched on three SearchMonkey options so all searchers will see enhanced results from Yelp, a site that lets members review restaurants and other businesses, Yahoo Local, which connects people with nearby businesses, and LinkedIn, which lets members keep in touch with contacts...

Yahoo said on its Search blog Friday that it's judicious about which SearchMonkey applications it chooses to switch on.

Innovation like this is precisely why I hope Yahoo finds a way to stick it out independently.