Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I've heard this a hundred times before...another A-list blogger is claiming that 'search is broken'. This time it's Steve Rubel who says search doesn't work. He goes on to admit that nearly everyone uses search engines (I think the 91% figure from PEW is low) and that we are largely satisfied. His argument for search being broken is that there are so many different types of content across all the various social networks, personal accounts, and whatever else, that can't be searched from one central place. I don't think that means search is broken, maybe it just hasn't evolved to that point, yet. Think back a few years compared to now and look at all the different content types we're able to search. We've come a long way, baby. And with desktop search tools like X1, Google Desktop search and others, a centralized, truly universal search is getting closer every day.

Labels: search

I just read a very interesting report out of Penn State about an experiment they performed to see how a search engine brand influences the perception of relevance. They displayed the exact same set of search results for various keywords, but formatted with different search engine's logo/layout. Surprisingly, Yahoo came out with the best scores. I'm sure brand plays an important part in people's perception of search relevance, but I'm not sure I trust their results completely based on the sample size (32 people) and the methodology used. I hope this spawns some additional research into this concept of branding/search.

Labels: branding, search, yahoo

I figured the year-end Zeitgeist data wasn't necessarily just a list of the most popular searches for the year. This hunch was confirmed by this post on the Google blog that explains how they compile the data for that report. Basically, they look for keyword searches that were unique to 2006. It makes sense to highlight these poipular searches instead of just offering up the same list of "maps", "dictionary", "yellow pages", "games", etc. every single year. I'm hoping to find some time in the next few days to review all the various "top searches in 2006" lists from the different search engines to see if I can pull anything useful from them.

I may or may not have time for that due to the extra business of getting ready for a week-long vaction the second week of January.

Labels: 2006, google, search, zeitgeist