Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Mahalo? Ma-ho-hum

Another day, another search engine getting some buzz.

This one, Mahalo, has some pedigree behind it - well, if you can call it that. Jason Calacanis, the entrepreneur behind WeblogsInc, is the CEO. Calacanis is notoriously against any kind of search engine optimization, so it's fitting that this doesn't apply in Mahalo's ranking. What do you get when you take the SEO out of the SE? In my book, a pretty poor excuse for an engine.

Here are a few problems I have with Mahalo:

1) It takes too long to scan the results. They're categorized, but there aren't descriptions - it's hard to differentiate one link from another.

2) It's all human powered, which means it's arbitrary. I'm also skeptical that any kind of Wiki-style search engine will ever gain traction. For a search on John McCain, for instance, Amazon and IMDB are the third and fourth links - is this really what people want? And why do CBS News (with a news article) and Fox News (with a video link) get priority over other sites?

3) Lon Harris wrote the McCain page. Lelah wrote the cake page. Jonathan wrote the page on apple, the fruit (disambiguated from Apple, the computer company and Apple, the record label). Who are you people? It's funny, I wouldn't really trust my friends to choose the most relevant search results for me. I have very few friends (Cara excluded) with whom I share the vast majority of interests and preferences. I don't even trust all the links the email and IM me. So why the heck would I trust Lon, Lelah, and Jonathan?

It's funny, when we get into the trust issue. I trust my camera to work, but I wouldn't trust a friend to take pictures for me. I trust my TV to work, but I wouldn't trust a friend to program my digital video recorder (DVR). I trust my search engine to work, but I wouldn't trust anyone with ranking my search results. Yet I do trust Sony for my camera, JVC for my TV, and Google for my search engine. (I wonder if friends of Larry Page and Sergey Brin have that issue.)

What do you think - would you trust someone else to rank your search results? And do you trust Mahalo?

UPDATE:

I forgot to mention that Mahalo also doesn't link to sites with adult content. It doesn't stand a chance.

Google vs. Grandmom vs. Tom Clancy

Some of the warmest responses I ever received to a Search Insider column were for a column that fittingly had almost nothing to do with search. It was called "Google vs. Grandmom," the story of my grandmother's quest to embrace the Internet.

Over the course of her life, that's been among the most trivial of her trials. I'm proud to share here, if you'll forgive the digression, that my grandmother is now a published author. I read her book Through Siberia with Bed & Babies: A Holocaust Survivor's Joys & Sorrows when I went to visit her Memorial Day weekend, and it's amazing how well she was able to capture her life story, mostly from the 1939 through the 1960s. She's also featured in Holocaust Survivors of South Jersey: Portraits of Resilience.

When making my way through her book, it was hard to read about so many of her family members who were murdered, people who have no descendants to read their memoirs. Yet in moving beyond that, I can't resist taking pride in this most recent of my grandmother's myriad accomplishments - alas, one she couldn't share with her husband and my namesake, David Berkowitz.

For those who care to read the original column, it's available at MediaPost and reprinted below in the extended entry, as the column pre-dated this blog by about two months.

Baby Name Optimization - Search Insider

Part of my intention with this blog is to use it as a scratchpad so that some of the posts can be fleshed out into more substantial ideas. That's why readers of this blog already saw much of the meat of today's column on Baby Name Optimization in a post last week. The full column's below and continues in the extended entry; it's about twice the length of the original blog post, so if you read and liked the first one, this adds a bit more, especially in terms of tying it into marketing best practices. This column, as always, can also be found at MediaPost.

Baby Name Optimization
By David Berkowitz

Want proof that you can optimize anything? What about devising a strategy to optimize search results around the name of your unborn offspring?

The idea came from a snippet on Boston.com sent in by loyal reader (and future wife) Cara Adelglass: “According to The Wall Street Journal, some expectant parents are beginning to Google prospective baby names to ensure that their kids won’t face too much competition in securing a high search rank.’ What’s the perfect baby shower present for a soon-to-be newborn who has already been search-engine optimized? Buy the Web domain that matches their name.”

That’s sound strategizing. It has that echo of Jack Welch, who insisted that General Electric should only be in businesses where it could take first or second place in market share. By that line of thought, Joe Smith is probably not your best bet unless you’re spending millions on optimization, and celebrity names are out of the question (alas, that rules out Brad Pitt Berkowitz as a potential name for my future progeny).

You don’t want to stop just at the research phase, though. Below are ten more tips for baby name optimization. Note that while this column is tongue-in-cheek, these best practices can be applied to your business. You’d want to research potential business and product names for what listings come up in major search engines, and you’d often be wise to apply many of the baby name optimization tactics that follow.

Consumer Generated Gaming

This is clearly where gaming is going - you take an active role in creating it. That's what worked so well for The Sims.

Link: PlayMyGame

Fooled by Randomness, but not Fake Reviews

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, has one of the worst websites I've ever seen.

He also has one of the best sections I've ever seen:

FAKERS: Reviewers who appear to not have read my book (which did not stop them from writing a review)

There's only one review there right now, but I love the header.

An aside: for a brief but real review, Fooled by Randomness is a must-read. Black Swan regurgitates much of Fooled by Randomness and adds a few new ideas. As disappointing as it was at first to read such a derivative sequel, what's new is worth reading, and a refresher course on Fooled by Randomness was useful.

Tearing IMDB's Ticket

I've been an avid user of the Internet Movie Database for years. It's the best site ever for settling bar bets. It could, of course, do better.

Two quick points of feedback for them - unsolicited, of course, but worth sharing:

1) To send them any feedback, you must register. How much do they want to avoid anyone writing them? Yes, I'm sure they're bombarded with questions they can't help with such as how to contact actors and people who disagree with a movie's ratings, but that's about as harsh a take on customer service as I've seen anywhere. How many hoops are they trying to make their visitors jump through?

2) Even more annoying, IMDB serves 30-second ads before movie trailers. This is one of my biggest pet peeve, and a favorite example for how to screw up online video. A movie trailer, if they haven't caught on, is an ad - generally a 2-minute ad for a 120-minute film. So IMDB, in its infinite wisdom, serves ads before other ads. Do they think their users are that dumb? It's bad enough to get a 30-second spot running before 2 minutes of any type of content, but running ads before ads is insulting, and a great way to alienate its audience. Apple.com has a much better trailer site anyway.

From Vertical To Universal To Holistic

Here's today's column, originally published in MediaPost, which continues in the extended entry.

GOOGLE JUST GOT MORE HONEST. That's the main premise behind its universal search announcement last week. Honesty has a way of making a lot of people worried, but the immediate implications for marketers are minimal. It does, however, provide marketers with the impetus to institute a long-term holistic optimization strategy. More on that in a minute.

To recap the news, Google's new universal search initiative incorporates some of its vertical and specialized search results into the main search engine results page. Google has been working on this for years; Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer blogged that this initiative has been in the works since 2001.

Google's bloggers say that the first iteration of universal search right now centers on video, news, local, and books. Searches with video results showcase the most dramatic changes. For instance, for a search on coke mentos, Google includes three videos in the results, two from Google Video and one from YouTube. Each of the video results has a thumbnail image from the video, along with a "watch video" link which, when clicked, opens the video right in the body of the results. All three of those videos can be played at the same time. The purity of text-only search results is waning at last.

Marketers in all likelihood have one of three reactions to the universal search news:

Microsoft Viral Video and Blog: "Bring the Love Back"

Microsoft creates a clever video and blog to encourage advertisers to open up to consumers and communicate, rather than talk to them. So how well will Microsoft facilitate this?

read more | digg story

MySpace More Addictive Than Facebook - Quantcast

I keep turning to Quantcast more and more for web research, as it offers metrics on traffic, demographics, keywords visitors use to find a site, related sites, and other good data. On a whim I decided to check out MySpace vs. Facebook. (The links go right to Quantcast's pages for them.) MySpace is ranked 6th of all sites, and Facebook comes in at 15.

What I found really interesting is that MySpace attracts a higher share of addicts (heavy site users), which surprises me. Facebook, with its easy way to keep tabs on what all your friends are doing, seems much more addictive. Both of their numbers are impressive though: MySpace has only 22% of its audience listed as Passers-By compared to Facebook's 29%, while MySpace gets 75% of visits from Addicts and 99% from the combined Addicts and Regulars compared to 63% and 98% for Facebook. I'll be curious to see how those numbers trend over time.

Baby Name Optimization (BNO) - 10 Tips for Expectant Parents

You can't make this up. Rather than strange but true, it's crazy but rational. From Boston.com (via Cara):

According to The Wall Street Journal, some expectant parents ‘‘are beginning to Google prospective baby names to ensure that their kids won’t face too much competition in securing a high search rank.’’ What’s the perfect baby shower present for a soon-to-be newborn who has already been search-engine optimized? Buy the Web domain that matches their name.

Why stop there? Once you're comfortable with your choice, here are 10 tips for Baby Name Optimization:

1. Write a press release the day your baby's born with the baby's name in the headline and optimize that.
2. Buy all potential domain name misspellings of your baby's name. If it's a girl, buy versions of the last name of any potential suitor you have in mind.
3. Film the birth, and tag every second of it, then syndicate it to dozens of video sites. At least one will have to be around by your kid's communion or bar mitzvah, right?
4. Blog as if you're the baby. Then, when your kid is old enough to blog, blog as if you're his or her therapist.
5. Tag your baby.
6. Create a Wikipedia entry for your baby. If it's rejected, claim a parent is Britney Spears, Brad Pitt, Paris Hilton, David Arquette, Oprah, or all of the above.
7. Digg your baby.
8. Googlebomb your baby's domain around the phrase "world's cutest baby," "future Nobel laureate," or, if you are a celebrity already, "E! feature in the making"
9. Be sure to update meta tags every so often, as your kid's prom date would be horrified to see "spitting up" and "potty training" as some of his or her most relevant keywords.
10. Every few years, change your child's name to something new that has less search competition - though beware... this will bring entirely new meaning to "your baby's in the sandbox."