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September 27, 2007

September 27, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: September 27, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 6:17 PM | Permalink

Marchex Connects Its Local-Vertical Network

When Marchex added its OpenList technology to its 100,000 local and vertical sites in June, it marked the beginning of a process to turn a localized domain portfolio into a network of local sites. Today, it launched the hub of that network at OpenList.com, and expanded the network to 150,000 sites.

The OpenList network is made up of sites that are both local and vertical, such as NewYorkDoctors.com, TopekaDining.com, or IndianapolisAutoRepair.com. The sites are filled with local business information from Localeze, as well as reviews and other data crawled by OpenList, as well as content from partners, including the newly added OpenTable, Contractors.com, HealthGrades, and Judy's Book. Much of the content currently centers around restaurants and hotels, which were the first niches OpenList focused on when it started four years ago.

The OpenList technology allows users to search the site, or browse by categories. They can then drill down to filter results by several other factors, such as business type, cuisine of a restaurant, price level, rating level, or other features. Results are displayed on a Yahoo-powered map

Users can search from OpenList.com, or from one of the many local domains, which are powered by OpenList. Marchex displays contextual text ads it sells itself, backfilled by ads from Yahoo. Much of the traffic is currently driven by direct navigation to the local sites, but an increasing amount comes from search engines that index those pages. This is expected to increase as the sites are filled with more local content.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:10 PM | Permalink

Happy Birthday Google

Google is celebrating its 9th birthday today. With little fanfare, except for the logo change, the search engine has obviously had more pressing things on its mind - like dealing with the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights Committee on the Judiciary.

Interestingly though, if you google Google, they have the 9th birthday announcement in their SERP description. I wonder if Larry and Sergey will go to their favorite Burger King store and reminisce about the old days?

Posted by aussiewebmaster at 2:19 PM | Permalink

Social media vs. "pre-Web 2.0" portals like Yahoo News

Martin LaMonica of the CNET News.com Tech news blog spotted this ironic moment at EmTech. While Kevin Rose of Digg, Tariq Krim of NetVibes, and Garret Camp of StumbleUpon were predicting a growing role for community-oriented sites in the media industry, a survey of attendees done during the panel found the majority of people at the conference said they rely on traditional news outlets and "pre-Web 2.0" portals like Yahoo News. Ironic, ain't it?

Posted by GregJarboe at 12:32 PM | Permalink

Overview of Microsoft Searchification

I attended the Microsoft Searchification event yesterday. The most important thing that happened here is that Microsoft has finally suceeded in offering a differentiated search product, and this is what made the day so important.

Brad Goldberg started the day with an overview presentation on some basic facts about the search market. One very interesting data set presented by him was a market share table:

EngineUsersUser shareQuery share
Live Search69M37%11%
Yahoo104M56%23%
Google142M77%56%
Source: comScore

Looking closely at this table you will see that 37% of all people who search, do at least some of their searching using Live Search. However, the query share is only 11%. The observation was then made that this indicated that this was an indicator that Live Search was not suceeding in statisfying its customers.

Then Mr. Goldberg stated that a large part of their intention with this release is to address this issue. This is an interesting focus, although it does assume that simply improving the relevance and quality of Live Search's results will be enough to convert many of those 37% to doing a larger percentage of their searches on Live Search.

Nontheless, it's a compelling notion. Micosoft does capture a lot of search volume as a result of the integration of Live Search into MSN. They also have very large user bases with Microsoft Messenger and Hotmail. So they can keep putting search back in front of their user base.

In fact, the presentations and demos we saw suggested that Microsoft suceeded in accomplishing several things:

  1. Improving basic search quality and relevance. Certainly a number of examples of this were offered. Of course, the acid test of improved relevance will be revealed across tens of millions of search queries
  2. Showing compelling improvements in Shopping Search for consumer electronics
  3. Providing a completely new look layout for Health search. New features included a set of refinements links up top to help users quickly adapt their search. In addition, the page now has a 3 column layout, with the left column providing access to the latest articles related to your search.
  4. Making some great advances in local search, including their 3D mapping technology
  5. Offering a rich Entertainment search experience that allows people to drill deep in searches related to their favorite stars
  6. Providing a rich and engagin Mobile search experience. Microsoft already had a strong mobile product, and has made it even stronger still
  7. Another area where Microsoft already had a great solution was their Image search product, but they made several enhancements here as well
  8. Unveiling their video search solution, including some great technology for componsing 30 second trailers
  9. Expanded their index from 5B pages to more than 20B pages

I will explore some of these items in more detail over the next week. Net-net, it looks like Microsoft has improved their base search results, and then made a huge effort to improve search quality dramatically in a number of major vertical areas.

Posted by Eric Enge at 9:25 AM | Permalink

Live! From Microsoft Live Search: Trovix Search Found?

Trovix grew up in the Googleplex but would thrive down the road at MS SV Live Search.

Searchification of boring resumes made a name for Trovix, leading to the launch of its free, live jobs search (read: white/blue collar) and recruitment site. Now job candidates can find more suitable jobs; and Jobs, more suitable candidates.

Why would Trovix find itself more at home in Microsoft Live Search than even at Google? Simple. Great artificial minds think alike.

Trovix search technology extracts attributes from job descriptions and CVs the way Microsoft Live Search extracts attributes from online content in key verticals (Shopping; Health, Entertainment, Local). In simple terms, by parsing words, phrases and acronyms their search technologies determine a database of intentions on the fly.

Trovix is a vertical search engine (people/jobs). Live Search aggregates vertical search engines in a SHEL game where the Microsoft prize is the searchers' true intentions; the ultimate payout: a bigger slice of online ad dollars.

Key Trend To Watch: Microsoft Live Search bucks the trend of human intervention in search. Sophisticated filters and algorithms improve relevancy.Lately Google has tried to put a human face on search, emphasizing they're more than just an algorithm.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 2:17 AM | Permalink

Microsoft Updates Live Search

A group of journalists, bloggers, and advertisers spent the day Wednesday at Microsoft's Mountain View offices for a view of several improvements to Live Search. We'll have more coverage of the "Searchification" event itself later today, but I wanted to briefly mention some of the improvements to Live Search that have been made both to its core search technology and in the vertical search areas of entertainment, shopping, local and health. Most of the changes were made to improve the relevance of Live Search results.

"We have made dramatic progress in delivering a better search experience to our customers," said Satya Nadella, corporate VP of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft. "We know what kinds of things consumers are searching for, and we have invested in those key high-interest verticals, including entertainment, shopping, health and local search. With the core platform in place we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time."

To improve the quality of its results, Microsoft has increased the size of its index fourfold, aiming to serve better results for long-tail queries, which it says account for one in five searches. Microsoft also claims that Live Search now better understands customer intent, and offer more relevant query refinements and query suggestions, to help users get to answers more quickly.

Live Search now uses more clickstream data in its algorithms, in order to return more relevant answers. It is also making use of data extraction to gather information around a topic from unstructured data from multiple sources, like ratings and reviews of products, data and reviews of businesses, and celebrity gossip, photos, and video clips.

An interesting move by Microsoft is the expansion of its Instant Answers product. Because "sometimes people are just looking for a specific fact or answer," Instant Answers provide responses to certain queries that have a clear answer. Examples include weather, stocks, Yellow Pages data, recent sports scores, or facts from Encarta.

We'll have more coverage from the Searchification event later today. You can also check out some responses from other attendees:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:01 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Knock It Out of the Linkin' Park!

Is the job of an SEO to drum up valueless links, or to be the driver of creative content and content distribution for clients' Web sites? In today's Link Love column, "Knock It Out of the Linkin' Park!," Sage Lewis says it's time for SEOs to move past getting links just to try to game the search engine system. It's two dimensional thinking; and it's the wrong paradigm.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

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