August 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Google search dominance boggles
Nielsen//NetRatings issued its search engine share rankings for the month of July this afternoon and I thought it would be worthwhile sharing them with readers.
It is a bit mind-boggling that in July, Google had more than 4 billion searchers.
The total number of searches was over 6 billion, or about one search for every man, woman and child alive on the earth today.
Top 10 Search Providers for July 2007, ranked by Number of Searches
(U.S.)
+-------------------------+-----------+------------+-----
| Provider Searches | Share of Searches
| (000)
| Google Search | 4,143,752 | 53.3% |
| Yahoo! Search | 1,559,745 | 20.1% |
| MSN/Windows | 1,057,064 | 13.6% |
| AOL Search | 407,988 | 5.2% |
| Ask.com Search | 143,513 | 1.8% |
| My Web Search | 69,145 | 0.9% |
| BellSouth Search | 40,374 | 0.5% |
| Comcast Search | 37,311 | 0.5% |
| Dogpile.com | 25,675 0.3% |
| My Way Search | 24,534 | 0.3% |
+-------------------------+-----------+------------+--------------+
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, August 2007
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on August 20, 2007 12:37 PM
August 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Niche search services could herald hard times ahead for the Web's own 800-pound Gorillla
Nothing lasts forever. And while Google is riding high on the crest of a wave, there is an almost imperceptible undercurrent that could spell trouble for the search giant's future.
First things first: Google makes its money delivering targeted advertising to the millions of people around the world who use its search engine.
If you own a swimming-pool supply company, you'd best buy Google keywords that cover this territory so that swimming-pool shoppers will come to your site.
On this, Google has built an empire.
Yes, there are other avenues Google is pursuing -- most notably Web 2.0 applications and, more recently, telecom. But to date, grant me that these remain unproven as major revenue streams for Google.
So what is this "imperceptible undercurrent" tickling that part of my brain that thinks about business?
Niche, vertical, boutique -- call them what you will -- search engines. These search service providers are looking at various search technologies to optimize specialized searches.
Take ZoomInfo, for example, which uses semantic search to offer search results limited strictly to business information. I don't intend to get into the guts of how a semantic search engine actually works, but suffice it to say, by using NLU (Natural Language Understanding), which can make sense of unstructured data, semantic search is better equipped to narrow down search results to a far more manageable number than Google does.
There are numerous examples of vertical search engines, such as WebMD, Travelocity, Orbitz, Petfinder, Kayak, Monster, and CareerBuilder.
Let's say you want to find a company that sells Web analytics software. Try searching on Google and then ZoomInfo, and see which provides the most relevant results.
Doing so, I got 66.8 million hits on Google.
As a registered user, I got 234 hits on ZoomInfo. But here is a sample of the first three hits from each:
Google:
Omniture Web Analytics
www.omniture.com See sample real-time reports that make your website decisions better.Web Analytics
www.WebTrends.com Want Actionable Web Analytics? Call WebTrends at 877.932.8736Web analytics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from ...
ZoomInfo:
www.websidestory.com
San Diego, CA
Revenue: $64.5 Million
Employees: 214
WebSideStory is a leading provider of on-demand Web analytics services. WebSideStory's services collect data from Web browsers, process that data and deliver reports of online behavior to its customers on demand. More than 700 enterprise customers worldwide use WebSideStory's services to... more ...Omniture Inc (NASDAQ: OMTR)
www.omniture.com
Orem, UT
Revenue: $42.8 Million
Employees: 342
Omniture, Inc. is a leading provider of online business optimization software, enabling customers to manage and enhance online, offline and multi-channel business initiatives. Omniture's software, which it hosts and delivers to its customers as an on-demand subscription service, enables... moreCoremetrics, Inc.
www.coremetrics.com
San Mateo, CA
Revenue: $16.9 Million
Employees: 215
Coremetrics is the leading provider of digital marketing optimization solutions. Its solutions generate high return on online marketing investment and continue to pay daily dividends in improved marketing performance. Over 1,100 online business sites, transacting over $15 billion this... more
Which service offers the more relevant information in a useful format? You be the judge.
But before you scoff at the idea of Google becoming irrelevant, let me tell you about an industry I used to work in and one that I know well: magazine publishing.
In the '50s and for the better part of the '60s, the major publications were general-interest magazines such as "Life" and "Look." Their reasons for failing were complex, but two key factors played significant roles.
First, their reader bases grew so large that they could no longer support the millions of subscribers with a reasonable ad rate. At some point, advertisers decided they could reach the same audience, or an even larger segment of that audience, at the same ad rate on television.
Will Google have to trim back its search capabilities as it scales out and the company's rising infrastructure costs start to compete with what it can reasonably charge for a keyword?
The second factor that led to the demise of these magazines was niche publishing. "Life" was meant to serve a cross-section of the population, but alternatives aimed at target audiences started popping up -- "Ski Magazine" for skiers, motorcycle magazines, surfboarding magazines, and so on.
Honestly, I don’t know which came first: niche publishing or the advertisers that wanted to be part of it. Of course, there were always niche magazines. Suddenly, however, advertisers understood their value. When that happened, niche publishing took off.
Back then, Bill Ziff was the first master of this, with a stable of magazines aimed at a variety of subjects, including everything from golfing to skiing to flying. Later, he took the model to high tech. Of course, for the benefit of my own career, I'd best add that IDG's Pat McGovern is the reigning grand master in the high-tech genre.
I worked for a number of smaller New York publishers who turned the idea of niche publishing into an art form. First, they would do what the industry called a "one shot." If the one-time-only magazine earned respectable newsstand sales, the publisher would make it a quarterly, then a bi-monthly. If the ads took off, voilà, it was a monthly publication.
Look at "PC Magazine." It had so much advertising that it went semi-monthly at one point just to accommodate all those who wanted in.
Should you sell Google short? Probably not. But also keep in mind, nothing lasts forever.
Or as Frank Sinatra sang it, "That's life, that's what all the people say. You're ridin' high in April, shot down in May."
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on August 14, 2007 03:00 AM
April 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Improving search has less to do with goosing numbers than honing the relevancy of results
A year ago March, Neil Holloway, president of Microsoft's Europe, Middle East, and Africa operations, boasted about how good Microsoft's search engine would become in six months.
"What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google. The quality of our search and the relevance of our search from a solution perspective to the consumer will be more relevant," Holloway said.
This got him into a lot of hot water, at least in the blogosphere where he was roundly lambasted for making the claim. He went on John Battelle's Searchblog to explain what he really meant to say.
"[W]e are committed to investing in R&D aimed at providing a search service, initially in the US in six months, that performs better than the current industry wide standard of one in two urls being connected to the subject of the original query. I also said that our aim is to perform as good, or better, in that respect than Google. This is a long term goal. I did not put a date to it as this is work in progress," he posted.
Yes, you did put a date to it, Mr. Holloway. See your quote directly above.
Nevertheless, a year later I decided to perform a search or two on Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo to see what kind of results I would get.
First, I searched for the "Gospel of Judas," a recent archeological discovery of a lost Gospel written about A.D. 185.
Google gave me 1,390,000 returns; Yahoo, 1,800,000; and MSN Search, less than 500,000.
That's quantity, but what about the quality -- or relevancy, as it is called -- of the search results?
This time I searched on the phrase "search fatigue" (this time, quotes included), which is only now becoming recognized as a problem, mostly by reference librarians who see it every day, in online searching. More about that later.
Here, Google returned 1,890 results; Yahoo, 431; MSN, 329.
Only Google returned multiple results on the phenomenon of search fatigue as it refers to online searches on the first page. MSN and Yahoo had only a single relevant result on the second page, nothing on the first.
As you can see, one year later Microsoft loses out to Google both on quantity and quality of results. Why the largest software company in the world can't do better is beyond my ken.
However, the truth is that all of the current consumer search engines are inadequate. Only the most dedicated researcher would wade through 431 results, let alone a million or more. The rest of us will definitely suffer from search fatigue.
Is there a cure?
I suggest that you get a copy of the March 2007 print edition of American Libraries magazine and read Jeffrey Beall's article, "Search Fatigue: Finding a Cure for the Database Blues." Beall is a catalog librarian and assistant professor at the Auraria Library, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center. Beall offers some search-fatigue antibiotics.
Search fatigue, according to Beall, is a feeling of dissatisfaction when search results do not return the desired information.
"The root cause of search fatigue," Beall told me, “is a lack of rich metadata and a system that can exploit the metadata."
For example, metadata-enabled searching, as you find in a library when it searches through its databases for resources, "allows for precise author, title, and subject searches," Beall says. In other words, it looks only in the fields you request, rather than searching through the entire document. If you name the author, it looks only in the author field of each document, thus returning only relevant hits.
Beall says libraries also use "controlled" vocabularies, meaning that if someone searches for information on cannibalism, they will also receive resources that use the synonym "anthropophagy."
After my talk with Beall, my advice to Microsoft and Holloway is to go to the folks sitting behind the library reference desk. They can probably tell you how to create a better search engine than Google more than anyone else on the planet.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on April 10, 2007 03:00 AM
April 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft issues de facto 'no comment' on search progress
My Reality Check column for next Tuesday will be on search engines, and I look into the claim made by Microsoft in March of 2006 that it would have a search engine better than Google's.
I contacted Microsoft to request an interview with an executive to get an update on the company's progress in building that search engine.
I just received the following response via email:
"Unfortunately, we're unable to provide a spokesperson for your request at this time."
They suggested I send an email.
It is amazing to me, considering the size of Microsoft (approximately 76,000 employees) and the importance that Microsoft has placed on search over the last two years that it could not find one person to talk to me. I guess it really does need a better search engine.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on April 5, 2007 03:06 PM
