Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Corporate VP of MSN, Yusuf Mehdi, demonstrated their new MSN web search and desktop search tool in a presentation for financial analysts on Thursday. I can hear the winds of change coming on the search engine front. They seem to be ramping up to rain on Google's IPO parade by debuting their new search technolgy around the same time. The desktop search will be released with new version of Windows--probably not until 2006--but I'm sure we'll see the "new and improved" MSN search go public well before then.

Article on InfoWorld

MSN launched a beta version of their MSNBC Newsbot - a news scanning service similar to Google News. It appears that MSN is using technology from Moreover.com for their news service.

Apparently this morning's outages at Google were due to a new strain of the infamous MyDoom virus/trojan that sends a "get" query to the search engines for all domains in a user's address book.

More info on InternetNews.com

Google's search engine was apparently down Monday morning, giving error messages when visitors to the company's site attempted searches.

from News.com

I haven't actually tried Blinkx search tool to try it out yet, but it is supposed to be able to display search results based on "ideas" rather than keywords. It gets the idea of what you might be looking for based on the web pages, email, or other files you're viewing. It sounds a lot like the way Google scans the page to determine which ads to show for Adwords/Adsense. Although it is a downloadable app that smells like adware, the Blinkx website states that they are totally against spyware and adware. This is a little confusing since they offer advertisers space in their "shopping channel" which appears to be the only channel featuring commercial (paid) listings. However, they do offer the option to disable the ads. Is this the future of search? I don't know about that, but it is an interesting concept. I'll try it out and let you know what I think.

More info/download tool from Blinkx.com

Google's much-anticipated IPO just got a little closer with an amended filing that prices the company's shares between $108 and $135 each with proceeds expected at around $1.66 billion.

Read Article on InternetNews.com

It's not really news that paid search marketing (natural, too) is a serious lesson in the economics of supply and demand. As more and more advertisers catch on to the idea that search marketing actually yields measurable results, the supply is having a hard time keeping up with the demand. Even with search growing at a decent rate, search volume is just not able to keep up with advertiser demand. This shortage of search volume is driving up search prices like crazy. I believe the increased bid prices also increase the value of unpaid or natural search listings. Natural search is one of those "secret" market tactics that writers never seem to mention in stories like this one. Perhaps because it's not considered an advertising channel because it doesn't cost anything and you can't just buy your way in like you can with paid search. The author of this article from the NY Times makes a valid point (citing data from NetRatings) about the limited supply of keyword searches, and it's always interesting to read the point of view of non-search marketing professionals who write about search marketing.

Here's an excerpt:

"SEARCH engines like Yahoo and Google have spawned bidding wars among a growing number of marketers who want to place their ads next to search results. That is a beautiful thing for Yahoo and Google, of course, but in the long term, some analysts think it could haunt them.

According to a report to be released today by the Internet research firm Nielsen//NetRatings, the demand for search advertising is growing far more quickly than the supply of available advertising spots. The report's author, Kenneth Cassar, said the implications could be far reaching.

'In the long term, we'll hit a wall where a lot of the search buys that make sense today won't make sense anymore because prices will have risen so high,' Mr. Cassar said. 'So for the search engines to grow their revenues, they'll have to increase supply.'"


Read entire article on The New York Times (Reg. required)

Apparently BBC wants to get a piece of the broadband ISP and search engine markets. According to the article from Digital Media Europe, BBC wants to create a search engine that will compete with Google. What does that mean, exatly? I'm not sure. Everybody and their dog wants to create a search engine and compete with Google, but will it actually be something that can compete with Google? They've got to have some darn good technology if they're serious about competing Google. Yahoo and MSN are having a hard time keeping up with Google in earch, and they're the closest thing Google has to competitors right now.

Sounds like the BBC may already be extending beyond it's "public service remit" as it is, and I'm sure the private sector ISPs in the UK wouldn't be too happy about having to compete with BBC. Regardless of all that stuff, do these guys really have the search technology to compete with Google? Or will they just reuse someone elses search engine database and algorithm? Or worse, will they put out a second rate search engine and tout it as a serious alternative to "real" search engines like Google?

"What does being number one in search really mean to your business?" asks Young-Bean Song, director of analytics and the Atlas Institute, Atlas DMT. "Just like any other marketing channel, success for search is about balancing cost and volume. Understanding those trade-offs is the focus of this research."

"'Paying for the number one ranking may not be the best strategy for all advertisers,' commented Song. 'For some marketers the cost of traffic associated with the top ranking may be too high. On the other hand, some marketers are forgoing the top spot, without really knowing how many customers they are losing to their competitors. Most advertisers don't know whether they are paying too much, or needlessly missing out on sales.' "

Press Release from Atlas DMT

"Google has acquired Picasa, a Pasadena, Calif.-based digital photography company, in a move aimed at further cementing its relationship with consumers. Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

Picasa develops and sells software that lets users to organize and share digital photographs. Besides its eponymous photo organization product, which retails for $29, the company also publishes a free application called Hello. Hello allows users to browse photos in tandem through a peer-to-peer instant messaging-style interface. Both are available in Windows versions only."

Read the Article on Clickz

Google announced yesterday it will list on the Nasdaq — a big blow to the all-electronic exchange's chief rival, the New York Stock Exchange.

"Musicplasma is similar to the Kartoo meta search engine. Enter the name of a musician, and you'll see a collection of colored balls featuring musician names or bands as search results. The musician you searched on is at the center of the map, and closely related artists are positioned nearby. The size of the circle around a musician's name indicates popularity."

AFrom SearchEngineWatch

This is a pretty cool visual search tool.

"Yahoo! is testing a new look and feel for its search results pages, just a week after Microsoft's MSN made some changes of its own."

This "news" from Clickz.com

I've actually seen that search page on yahoo a few months back. It could have been as far back as when they quit using Google's search results. They quietly have been testing it for a while. They just had to let the cat out of the bag since MSN got so much publicity about their Google-esqe search page.

Interested in seeing MSN's new search engine? Take a look at the MSN Sandbox. They've opened up their alpha test of the new search engine to curious webmasters or whoever cares what MSN is up to. I haven't done a lot of experimenting with it yet, but so far, the results seem very relevant. You see results that are a lot different from what you see at Google and Yahoo, but very relevant. Some people I've talked to about it say these new MSN results are the most relevant they've seen from any of the major search engines.

I'm not sure when MSN will feel confident enough with their new search engine to have it replace Yahoo's results, but they seem to be moving in that direction. Today's changes to their search engine including simplifying the search page and filtering out Yahoo paid inclusion lead me to believe they are on their way towards that goal. I expect the full transition will happen before the end of the year, possibly within the next couple months.

I wouldn't be surprised to see MSN speed things up with the release of their new search with Google's upcoming IPO in the works. They want to make sure they don't lose any more of the market share Google's already taken, and I'm sure they'll make a big push to get some of those users back.