What’s Fresh?

This is my favorite thing in my inbox at the moment.

*Excerpts from MediaPost Publications’s Search insider, July 23 by Aaron Goldman

I’m Snoozing, I’m Snoring

In the style of It’s Raining, It’s Pouring

I’m snoozing, I’m snoring,

Your search results are boring.

Your market share

is barely there.

Will Cashback get you roaring?

Bostock and Yang Went to Great Pains

In the style of Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill

Bostock and Yang

Went to great pains

To avoid an outright acquisition.

They played tough,

$44 billion wasn’t enough.

Then they retreated their position.

Yankee Google

In the style of Yankee Doodle

Yankee Google took over the town,

It’s PR spin smooth as a zamboni.

Stuck creative in its cap,

Scaring Mad Ave cronies.

Yankee Google keep it up,

Automating media, that’s dandy.

And now finally some transparency,

Now this is really handy.

Veoh is known for breaking new ground in the online space, but their new advertising program could revolutionize the way advertisers purchase advertisements online and how consumers are exposed to them.  The program (being release out of beta today) will group viewers into buckets based upon their past searching, tagging, commenting, and viewing activities.

One could ask if a user watches videos online that fit into their true interests or if they primarily watch pieces that are considered viral (have you seen the water skiing chipmunk?!)?  For YouTube this may be true, but Veoh offers the largest library of online TV resulting in more interest based viewership.  Veoh is even claiming that during beta the program’s ads preformed twice as well as the non-targeted versions.

It will be very interesting to see how this technology develops and what it does to Veoh’s position in the industry.

A joint press conference is set between the top two search firms and speculation about the announcement is abuzz around the net. An insider at one of the companies is saying that they will be announcing an official search partnership and the departure of a top Yahoo! executive. The partnership will have Yahoo! outsourcing possible all of its search marketing (and maybe search) to Google.

What does this mean for the internet as we know it? Does Google really need control?

Any thoughts?

UPDATE: 3:26  Yahoo!  announces a non-exclusive online advertising agreement with Google

Of course, there’s been a lot of discussion of Microsoft’s ‘cash rebate’ plan for search ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24760487/) over here at GearyI. A few comments in Kim’s innovation session down here in San Diego today made me ponder it’s wider implications. We were briefly discussing marketing cultures of scarcity vs. abundance. (i.e., the scarcity model says “there are (x) many customers, and we MUST COMPLETE LIKE CRAZY for them.” Abundance model says “customers come to great ideas – and the entire customer pie grows beyond expectation when we create a good ecosystem to attract them. We do not focus as much on competition as we do on creating great ideas that attract customers.”)

Now if that doesn’t sound like Microsoft and Google going at it, I’m not sure what does.

One interesting post in the blogsphere commenting on all this: machinist blog on salon.com:

http://www.salon.com/tech/machinist/blog/2008/05/23/microsoft_books_search/index.html

It’s an excellent example of the scarcity model (Microsoft) vs the abundance model (Google) at work. As Farhad points out – some monetary effects are less obvious than others. To paraphrase: “If you were a programmer, do you want to work for the visionary company . . . or the one who’s stated focus is their revenue goals?”

If markets are ecosystems, so are companies. And having goals that keep employees inspired – and attract ones with inspiration – is a competitive advantage. Believing that advantage translates to revenue? Well, that’s the whole abundance model, isn’t it? It goes a little outside the spreadsheet.

Sarah

Bankrate is a great illustration of the good that can come of maintaining budgets for organic and paid search marketing — even in a recession.

As the subprime crisis hit in the third quarter of 2007, Bankrate’s advertisers faced hard times.

Even during that difficult quarter, organic traffic accounted for 75% of Bankrate’s traffic. Meanwhile, paid search brought in 14% of traffic, and partner traffic brought in the remaining 11%.

In the face of the recession, Tom Evans, Bankrate’s CEO, didn’t just maintain his company’s search engine budget — he increased it. And he’s laughing all the way to the bank.

“We believe that organic traffic is less susceptible to competitive market dynamics, and is reflected in driving higher margins to our bottom line,” Evans explained. “Organic traffic continues to grow at double digits …[unique visits] for every single month this year have been higher than the same month last year.”

Furthermore, Evans remarked, “I think the reason we do so well in SEO is we have an enormous amount of content. We have an enormous amount of tools and calculators, and I think we have done a good job from SEO with, we have got literally millions of links into the site and out of the site, and I think that it really helps.”

In other words, rather than gaming the system, Evans recognizes the value of giving searchers — and search engines — lots of great content that naturally attracts incoming links. With its wealth of interactive content, Bankrate is in a great position to continue capturing a superior share of search traffic and qualified leads.

Even in a recession, sites like Bankrate can capture search engine marketing leads at a relatively low cost per acquisition. Realizing this fact is helping Bankrate survive and even thrive during the subprime crisis.

For more about Tom Evans’ take on the value of search engine marketing, visit SearchEngineWatch.

Geary Interactive continues to prove it’s ability to provide digital marketing solutions for a wide variety of clients. Geary Interactive was named one of the top agencies offering services to B-2-B clients by B2B Magazine, and our newly acquired search marketing firm Fathom Online was also named a top search engine marketing vendor.

Exciting news this morning. Microsoft bids $45000000000.00 for Yahoo!

…however, the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. People are shorting Yahoo stock thinking they will say no to the unsolicited offer. It will be fun to follow how it pans out. It seems like a very complex deal, with a mix of cash and stock, and it will need to get approved by the FCC and EU.

On the bright side for Google, it may speed up and guarantee the EU’s approval of the DoubleClick Google buyout.

Ars Technica did a great review of Google’s “Alternate Views Search Results” experiment. To take some of the new features for a first hand test run visit this page. On a similar note, Yahoo has been testing the integration of delicious social bookmarking into their search results pages.

So what does this mean for searchers?

A few weeks back Ars Technica did another posting title “The ‘Google Generation’ not so hot at Googling, after all” after review of a report published by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee. The short version of the report is that even the generation that has grown up Googling everything and unaware of a world without Google still isn’t very good at formatting their search queries. Current search engine results pages on the top three engines are fairly straight forward and simple. They got a bit more complex with the introduction of universal search, however they are still a basic and static page. If searchers are having trouble finding what they want now, how will searchers be able to handle dealing with more complex search results with timelines and maps thrown into the mix? Maybe it will create a completely new industry in which you will need to hire search professionals that are highly skilled at sorting through the information via the search engines. Maybe training classes that teach people how to maximize the value of search and search engines will run along side Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop courses. Either way it is going to require every searcher young and old to learn how to use the more sophisticated searches to find the answers they are looking for.

So what does this mean for the search industry?

My first thought is that this will extend the long tail of search phrases. Search marketers will need to start thinking about more complex queries with dates and locations. Also, dependent on how the suggested searches are displayed (logically it would be by highest search count to lowest?) it will likely drive up the traffic on the suggested terms that are shown first. Secondly, whomever came up with the “SEO is dead”theory, I think the morphing of search results will give new challenges and opportunities to our industry. Lastly, it will force search marketers to focus even more on creating high quality websites with multiple types of content to stay competitive with their search engine visibility.

An announcement came today via TechCrunch that Yahoo has begun testing the integration of delicious bookmarking into their standard search results. The posting states that it’s unclear whether the data from delicious is affecting the search rankings as of yet, however it seems like the next logical step. It has always seemed that adding user input into search engine results as a clear next step to improve algorithmic relevance. It appears that Yahoo might actually be a step ahead of Google for once!