Search Sense

Amazon’s web services are an intriguing hotbed of innovation. As an example take Mechanical Turk a “crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks” [Source: Wikipedia].

In essence small repetitive tasks that computers either do badly, slowly or not at all, are available for people to complete in exchange for a small financial reward. The service is setup so that programmers can incorporate people-power seamlessly into existing code. Some examples include:

• · Analysing human perceptions of colour
• · Determining the relevancy between web pages and keywords
• · Paraphrasing and rewriting product descriptions
• · Collecting 12,000 drawings of sheep facing left for your thesis
  

Don’t give up the day job just yet though, rewards for completing a Human Intelligence Task (HIT) range from $0.02 for 5 minute tasks to $75.00 for an 8 hour brain-marathon.

Why do people complete the tasks if the rewards are minimal? You’re familiar perhaps with Dr Kawashima’s recent Brain Training success – it’s made Mr Nintendo a lot of money. Where there once were crosswords and then Sudoku now there are HITs. Be it for momentary diversion, light entertainment or simple self-satisfaction, the fact is that people are actively contributing to Amazon’s hive-mind starter-kit.

It interests me because Efficient Frontier have completed tens of thousands of repetitive SEM-related tasks (eg assessing keyword relevancy) using the service, and SkyPromote apparently have a staff of 120 ‘virtual workers’. I welcome such intelligent competition and all-out innovation in our industry, but above all I’m happy to see humanity realise that for some tasks silicon still just can’t compete with a good old human brain.

Related Links:

Katharine Mieszkowski’s article posted on Life (not) as We Know It

Dolores blog – a blog all about MTurk experiments

[Photo via bistrosavage on Flickr]

As mentioned in Joe’s previous blog post, Google last week announced changes to its pay-per-click trademark policy which for the first time will allow any company to buy keywords associated with a rival’s brand name.

We’ve had a great deal of interest from our clients and industry journalists, who are keen to understand the implications and effect of Google’s plans to allow any company to bid on competitor brand names.

So we asked Paul Doleman, our CTO and Head of Paid Search, to give his advice and opinion on:

• What has happened and why
• Google’s motivation behind the policy change
• How it might affect the market and businesses
• The likely impact to brand owners

Find out what Paul has to say…(advise using your headphones)

The policy comes into effect in May, ahead of which the debate will no doubt continue. For example, Travolution discussed the impact to travel brands in an article posted yesterday.

Google’s latest innovations in the way it displays search results in its natural listings has huge implications for user experience and the way we create websites.

‘Sitelinks’ emerged late last year. They are the links that appear under the number 1 search listing that enable you to click directly on a main navigational link that resides on the destination site - think of them as shortcuts. OK, so this helps us get from A-B better and extends the brand’s success at capturing search real estate - effectively pushing other sites lower down the results page.

This example for Woolworths illustrates the natural search navigation at work:

A good overview of Sitelinks can be found on the Google Webmastercentral blog here.

More recently Google has started presenting a ’secondary search’ box within the natural results. This allows people to search all pages that Google has from a site without leaving the search engine. Which means that the much of the huge usability investment you may have made can be by-passed in a click…

The implications are more clear than ever. Search friendly site design means taking into account the whole user journey, from search through to action. This extends the idea of usability from optimising e.g. a shopping cart process into the way people navigate through brand networks.

Now x this by every device and interface Google will interact with people in 3 years time. Wow.

Once we accept that we have lost control of the ‘home page’, and that every page on our site can now reside somewhere else before the click,we can start to put search at the heart of our creative planning. not an original idea, but one that I will keep repeating until someone tells me I am insane, and then I will not believe them.

Technopedia has a round up of the top marketing articles of 2007. With over 250 articles, this is an extremely comprehensive and useful resource. There are articles covering all the various online marketing services we offer such as SEO, paid search, social media, web development, and content.

Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007