SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

July 10, 2009

Google Adds Images Next to Maps in Location-Based Universal Search Results

Google has updated the universal search results for location-based queries. Now, next to the map included at the top of the search results are images.

It doesn't work for all location-based searches, however. A search for Kota, India shows image results but they are further down and no map is included.

A search for Nassau, Bahamas returns a map but not images:

It's not a problem with international searches altogether because a search for Brasilia, Brazil returns the new results:

Still, if you're invested in travel or local search, you'll want to spend some time optimizing for image search, since they're now a big part of Google location-based results.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 8, 2008

SEW Experts: Universal Search Should Be a Plus

Variety in the search results gives online marketers multiple opportunities to rank and gain new listing visibility. But how does the user feel? In today's SEM agency issues column, "Universal Search Should Be a Plus," William Flaiz reminds us that as new listing types begin appearing in results, we often lose sight of whether these listings are really helpful to the user.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 10, 2008

SEW Experts: Universal Search: The (War) Elephant in the Room

When the ancient Romans tried to defend themselves from Hannibal's war elephants, they learned that they needed to throw away their old ideas about war and learn to work together. In today's SEM agency issues column, "Universal Search: The (War) Elephant in the Room," William Flaiz compares universal search to the war elephants, and notes that search marketers must realize that focusing all efforts in harmony is the only way to properly address the challenges it presents.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 14, 2008

Google Incorporates Code Search Results into Universal Search

In news that is likely to make my software-developer husband happy, Google has incorporated Code Search results into its main search results. Blended search results is often referred to as universal search, and in the past has included news, images, videos, etc.

Code Search, which launched in October 2005, competes with other vertical code search sites, such as Krugle. Krugle has a deal with IBM, a partnership with the Yahoo Developers Network, and indexes the Microsoft Codeplex.

via TechCrunch

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 11, 2008

SEW Experts: Think Universal, Act Local

Much of the discussion around Universal search, or blended search, focuses on video and images. In today's Vertical Search column, "Think Universal, Act Local," local search expert Michael Boland explains why local search may be a more important factor; one that has the greatest impact in blended search results.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:00 AM | Permalink

March 26, 2008

Maybe Google's Not Becoming a Portal?

Last week at SES NY, new comScore data on universal search showed that Google was sending more traffic to its own properties than it had been in the past. That led some people (including me) to wonder if that meant Google was becoming more like a portal than a search engine.

But that data appears to miss the larger picture, where Google is sending even more traffic to news sites than it does to Google News. In today's SearchDay, "Is Google Not So Portal-Like After All?," Greg Jarboe digs into the subject, and finds some surprising results.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:05 PM | Permalink

March 19, 2008

Is Google Becoming a Portal?

Google has long held that it is not a portal. Concerns of publishers wary of giving away their content to Google for free have always been met with the response that Google is simply making it easier for people to find the publisher's content.

So what happens if Google stops sending searchers to other publishers' sites? What if Google starts sending people to its own content? Apparently they already have.

According to new data shared at an Orion Panel on universal search at SES New York yesterday by James Lamberti, senior VP of search and media at comScore, Google is showing more universal results than people might think, and it's starting to have an effect on searchers' click patterns, on both organic results and ads.

Lamberti said that in just one week in January, out of 1.2 billion search queries in the U.S., there were 220 million universal search results. That means 17 percent of all searches on Google showed at least one result with video, news, images, maps, weather, or stocks. Looking at it from the individual searchers angle, the data shows that of the 87 million people who searched during that same week in January, 57 percent of them saw some type of universal search result. Of those, 38 percent saw a video result, 34 percent saw news, 19 percent saw images, and 15 percent saw multiple types of results.

Now, smart search marketers have been paying attention to images, video, news and other types of content for years now. This might just make more people realize how important that has become. That's not the big news here.

What's more important than that is the fact that, based on that one week's data, fewer ads seem to be showing up, and searchers are clicking on those ads less.

What's significant is that many searchers are getting their answer right on the SERP, and not clicking through to a final destination page. That behavior is most evident on searches that return maps, stock quotes, or weather, but it's also happening quite often for video and images.

And when Google is sending people to other sites, more and more often, they're sending them to Google-owned sites like YouTube, Google News, and Google Finance. Google sent nearly 400 million search referrals to their own media properties over six months. That includes 148 million referrals to YouTube and 173 million to Google Images, the comScore data show.

There are several implications to this data, once it's been tested, retested and fully examined. If this data is supported by more studies, it could spell trouble for site owners, advertisers, and even Google itself. As James said during the Orion Panel at SES New York Tuesday afternoon, "If the search engine results pages begin to operate as a destination, a lot of things change for those of us in this room."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 8:44 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Uncovering the Real Universal Search

There appears to be a lot more non-text results showing up in Google searches than many people expect. The effects this will have on searchers, and advertisers, may be a bit disturbing to some. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Uncovering the Real Universal Search," Kevin Ryan looks at some new data on universal search that comScore shared at SES New York.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 7:09 AM | Permalink

March 5, 2008

SEW Experts: The Beginning of the End? Or the End of the Beginning?

ComScore's recent data showing flat paid search growth for Google led many in the media to declare that the paid search sky was falling. But the rush to judgment was wrong, and there are other factors involved. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "The Beginning of the End? Or the End of the Beginning?," Kevin Ryan outlines the saga of misread numbers, media's desire to show failure that isn't there, and the fickleness of financial markets.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

February 23, 2008

Searching for Gotti in the Brave New JackassWorld

So I was reading Techmeme, clicked thru to the Times of London story on Apax Partners bidding on Reed Business Information (£1.25 billion publisher of Variety, New Scientist, Computer Weekly et.al.) to merge with eMap (bought for a cool £1 billion) and Incisive Media (that would be us).

Then I noticed another TL story on the power of search in the jackass world: "Microtrends: gangsta spray tans."

U.S.-based sports blog (more of an online lad mag) barstoolsports.com posted pix of spray-tanned Guidos. If only the barstool blogger had googled the Gotti-wannabes before labeling them "New Jersey Freakshows."

The London Times reporter Tom Whitwell asked, "What makes a young man paint himself orange, put on a skin-tight T-shirt and pose like a supermodel?"

Whitwell called the pix "a window on a bizarre and unexpected underworld." (Not if you had mobsters in your extended family, as I did. Or grew up in my neighborhood, as I did.)

The barstoolsports blogger thought the pix were taken in Jersey clubs. Jersey guys said no way, "Long Island." (I would've guessed Staten Island.)

The truth? Europe. The Old Country. One more reason theworld needs Google Universal Search.

The pix were from PartyPhoto.hu a Hungarian Website showing musclehead, spray-tanned club kids in Vienna, home of Sigmund Freud and more tellingly, erstwhile home of Governor Schwarzenegger. Ahh-nuld. That explains it.

Of course barstoolsports might've been tipped off by the .hu domain in the big red PartyPhoto.hu letters imprinted on one jpg they published.

As the astute Times reporter noted, the club kids were no doubt inspired by the grandchildren of the late (reputed) Mafia boss John Gotti.

(Like Michael Corleone and the Italian American Anti Defamation League we deny the existence of any organization by the name of Mafia or La Cosa Nostra.)

We do believe in the 24 hour takeover of MTV Studios today by Jackassworld.com, the just-hardlaunched Johnny Knoxville blog Frederick Marckini tipped us off to at SES London (at the cocktail reception, not during his SEO keynote address, natch).

But that's another bizarro world search story ...

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 6:29 PM | Permalink

January 31, 2008

Google's Marissa Mayer Looks Beyond Universal Search to Social Search

In an interview with VentureBeat, Google VP Marissa Mayer says that social search is one avenue Google is pursuing to improve relevance in future iterations of its search engine. The algorithms could incorporate search history from a searcher's Gmail contacts, or input from human experts, as startups like Mahalo, Search Wikia, Collarity and Eurekster are doing (in different ways).

Some ways to incorporate social data into search results that Mayer mentioned include:

  1. Labeling or annotating search results, similar to the way social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and StumbleUpon let users add comments and tags to sites they find.
  2. Show results from "users like you," the technique used expertly by Amazon.com to help shoppers discover new products they may not have even known they wanted.
  3. Using aggregate search histories of friends (or Gmail contacts) to influence search results

When asked what Google will look like ten years from now, Mayer replied, "I think one way it will be better is in understanding more about you and understanding more about your social context: Who your friends are, what you like to do, where you are. It's hard to imagine that the search engine ten years from now isn't advised by those things."

Social search is expected by many to define the next generation of search. According to search historian Danny Sullivan, search 1.0 used on-page elements to rank pages, search 2.0 added external linking, and search 3.0 is the current state, with universal search and blended search. Search 4.0 will incorporate these social factors.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 4:22 PM | Permalink

January 24, 2008

SEW Experts: Why Search Is Still Prehistoric

Search is evolving as universal search or blended search results crawl into the SERPs, but it's still primitive. In today's Brand Equity column, "Why Search Is Still Prehistoric," Eric Qualman outlines how user feedback, personalization, and other nascent technologies will lead to changes for search marketers, and search engines.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

January 18, 2008

$100,000 First Prize: Universal Search Engine Survivor Singapore

Universal Search will reach an inflection point when video and audio files are fully searchable. The best and brightest minds in the search industry will one day solve the problem of multimedia meta tag "hit-and-miss."

Until then, Meta Tag, you're it.

Singapore is offering a $100,000 grand prize as an incentive to promote the opening of Fusionopolis. Enter here.

The Star Challenge 2008 pits teams and individuals "in a global competition to complete search engine challenges with the ultimate goal: develop a "universal search" engine that goes beyond universal search to get inside rich media.

The race: a total of 4 Challenges and 3 Knockout rounds.

The searchable media? Available to search teams in July-August 2008. Finalists will be announced on August 23, 2008.

I saw the story first in Channel News Asia (via Yahoo News), but the lede didn't quite capture the concept of universal search, multimedia search, or even who wants to be a billionaire:

If you have an idea for the next YouTube or Facebook, you could win US$100,000.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 4:24 PM | Permalink

January 15, 2008

SEW Experts: Google Universal Search Makes SEO More Powerful

Universal Search, a.k.a. blended search, is changing the SEO game. In today's au Natural column, "Google Universal Search Makes SEO More Powerful," Mark Jackson warns that search marketers need to understand universal search before their competitors do. Universal or blended search will be the SERP of the future.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2007

Free Google Flip Video Camcorder --No purchase necessary

OK, strike "no purchase necessary." Free Flip video camcorder: "big purchase necessary?"

Google gave big-time advertisers and SEMs (whose clients spend big) a Flip Video Ultra Series camcorder with recording time up to 30 min. and 1GB internal memory.

Search marketer Shimon Sandler recorded an Oscar-worthy short film (YouTubed) of his Google Video Ultra gift being unwrapped. You'll watch the film again and again, if only to get into the Xmas spirit of green envy that children of all ages feel during the Holiday Season.

Google Flip flopped with all the SEMs who only received Google 2GB USB memory cards instead of the Google Flip (with MSRP of $149.99!). The 2GoogleByte USB card was described by our friends at SERoundtable as more or less a lump of coal -- way inferior to last year's Google gift gadget: a sweet digital picture frame.

It would seem only the FTC approves of Google acquisitions these days.

Here at Search Engine Watch, we'll be providing the P.O. Box for Google Customer Returns and the address of the secret Google Gift Exchange location.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 6:46 PM | Permalink

September 10, 2007

TurnHere announces new video distribution partnerships and products

Today TurnHere, the online video enterprise, announced their expansion in the video search space new distribution partnerships with book-centric sites and an enhanced video gadget for improving on the book search experience.

My new blog features an interview with TurnHere's CEO Bradley Inman, along with in in-depth review of TurnHere's claims of "deep partnerships" with the major search portals, along with a review of their new book widget technology.

Posted by Grant Crowell at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 7, 2007

Google discusses multimedia ads in Universal Search results

Google executives discussed the possibility of bundling image or video ads into Google Universal Search, during the CitiGroup Technology Conference in New York this past Thursday.

As reported by Tameka Kee at MediaPost, Google's group business product manager Nicholas Fox says that Google has had internal discussions on how to incorporate visual advertisements in search engine results pages (SERPs) that best match search query relevancy.

According to Sundar Pinchai, Google's director of product managment, Images and video have the potential to be more relevant than simple text ads in at least some situations, but cautions that "the images and video ads you see today on content networks are not what will work." Incorporating these type of ads in SERPs could lead to ad blindness and hurt business in the long-term.

While Google's comments suggest that multimedia advertising will eventually be established to some degree in universal search results, they are not something for advertisers to include in their plans for this year. Google says that any approach they undertake with incorporating multimedia ads will be slow, cautionary, and incremental.

Currently, Google allows advertisers to run both video and image ads in their Contextual network, which is separate from search. Those ads, along with text ads, have been claimed by search advertisers of having lower content relevancy than with SERPs. While Google has been making some appeasements with adjustment ad pricing and network placement control advertisers in the contextual program, advertisers already feel their multimedia creatives would be much better suited directly to search.

Will all things considered, Google is correct in determining that ad relevancy for multimedia will have to be higher when showing up on its own search pages than how they currently have them on 3rd party sites.

Posted by Grant Crowell at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 29, 2007

SEW Experts: Waiting for Google to Exhale

In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Waiting for Google to Exhale," Kevin Ryan asks what universal search and refined paid search are really changing.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

July 10, 2007

Are You Scared of Universal Search?

Google's switch in May to Universal Search has more than a few marketers awash with panic over loss of rankings – and understandably so – since some have lost visibility due to other digital content such as video, images, or blogs, etc. occupying valuable real estate within the search results.

John Tawadros, COO of iProspect, will help calm your nerves with his advice for using Universal Search to your advantage in today's SearchDay, "Google Universal: Friend or Foe?"

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:20 AM | Permalink

June 8, 2007

Universal Search Boosting Map, Video Traffic

Hitwise's Bill Tancer has published an analysis of traffic data on Google's various properties, comparing them before and after the Universal Search launch on May 16.

The big winner is Google Maps, whose visits rose 20.34 percent from May 12 to June 2. Google's video properties benefited as well, with YouTube visits up 8.26 percent and Google Video up 1.41 percent. Image Search and Google News lost traffic, dipping 7.22 percent and 7.84 percent respectively.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 3:53 PM | Permalink

June 6, 2007

Google Universal Search: What's it Mean, Really?

While some industry-watchers are cheering Google's recent moves, others are yawning. Range Online's Phil Stelter digs into what Universal Search really means for Google, and for search marketers, in today's SearchDay, "Distilling Universal Search."

"What once had a handful of sources and some cleanly-evolved methods now has dozens of sources with varying methods. We have some interesting challenges ahead of us. We are ceding more control to the almighty algorithm. At the same time, if we are doing our jobs well, it simply means shifting some priorities," writes Stelter.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 4:57 PM | Permalink

May 25, 2007

The Impact of Universal Search

Gord Hotchkiss wrote an article titled An Intimate View Of The World Through Google's Eyes on Search Insider yesterday. The article provides some excellent thinking on how Google's Universal Search and Google's drive towards personalization will mesh.

A couple of Gord's comments stood out for me: "I can't help but think that personalization will drive universal search", and "Google will be able to be more confident in offering a much richer and more diverse set of universal results when you can tap into previous search and Web history". I agree with Gord that personalization will do a lot to empower universal search, and vice versa.

At another point, Gord also indicates that he thinks that "universal search, in one fell swoop, makes the idea of vertical search irrelevant". I see the impact of universal search on vertical search a little bit differently. Improving horizontal web search will certainly impact certain types of vertical search opportunities. Some of these search properties may well be affected significantly.

But, I also think that vertical search is such a deep topic that universal search can't possible impact all of it. For example, there is a huge amount of vertical search in the B2B space. Outsell recently forecast that the B2B vertical search market would exceed $1.0 B in revenue in 2009 (not too far away!).

I also think that there are plenty of vertical search engines that use completely different contextual crawling methods, or use and integrate specialty data bases which are not easily interpreted by, or may not even be accessible by, a web search crawler. I suspect that borh of these scenarios will be unaffected by Universal Search.

However, as noted above, I also think that there are plenty of "thin vertical search engines" where the value add is pretty minimal, and these could be affected in a big way.

Posted by at 11:47 AM | Permalink

May 24, 2007

Google's Cross-Language Search Launches

The cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) technology which Google VP Udi Manber previewed at Searchology last week has launched, according to the Google Blog. The technology has been built into Google Translate. It allows users to type in a query in one language, and instruct Google to find results from another language.

Google will translate the query into that other language, find results, and then translate those results into the original query language to present to the user. In effect, this allows users to seamlessly search documents in foreign languages as easily as they search in their own language.

An example is [wine tasting events in Bordeaux].

Google admits the translations are not always perfect, as illustrated by a search of Japanese Web sites for Boston Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, or a search of Spanish sites for soccer team Real Madrid. But of course, the product is still in beta.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:40 AM | Permalink

May 18, 2007

Will Universal Search Drive Growth of Google's Vertical Search Properties?

I attended the Searchology event at Google in Mountain View this past Wednesday. For those of you who read my article Will Universal Search Mean Universal Domination?, you already know I like what Google has done with this initiative.

There are some aspects that I think will be particularly interesting about this. Historically, many users have never tried any of the other search products, such as image search, local, video, etc. People simply get used to the idea that they go to one place and do their search there. They get in the habit of getting all their answers from the web search engine.

The problem is that this may not always provide the most relevant answer. By integrating all of their search assets into Universal Search, Google accomplishes two things:

  1. Potentially provides a more relevant search result
  2. Exposes other search properties to a broader audience of users

I think this second item may be the hidden gem of Universal Search. Exposing these other search tools through the traditional web search interface may actually increase the useage of the vertical search tools, potentially in a dramatic way. While the old saying is "Familiarity breeds contempt", the reality is that making people familiar with tools that can help them is likely to breed usage.

Bottom line: In addition to the potential relevance gains, Google may also get a tremendous burst of growth to it's other search properties.

Posted by at 9:44 AM | Permalink

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