Search Sense

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.

I’ve been reading a very interesting interview with Douglas Merrill, Google’s CTO, for those not familiar with the name. His goal is the same as mine - world domination - not really, I kid - it’s simply to give Google workers the technology they need and keep them safe. That’s what I try to do for iCrossing workers and hopefully without falling into the draconian “protection trap” that so many coporations end up in.

Like Google we have a very tech savvy group of employees at iCrossing which means everyone enjoys much more freedom than most organisations, but I’m thinking why can’t we take it further. Why not the complete freedom to do anything? Focus totally on choice - and let you guys choose from a bunch of different computers, different operating systems, different phones, different tools and support all of them (Jim don’t have a heart attack). It’s not cost-efficient, but on the other hand, wouldn’t productivity soar? OK, we don’t have the benefit of the cash filled pockets of Google and would have the odd financial constraint, but surely we could explore some unauthordox approaches.

Perhaps we could try the Google model of support. Massively more self-service from network hubs and ”tech stops” - take your laptop to a drop-in area in the office for instant ideas, instant solutions, instant kickings - a personal, informal drop in help desk - where solutions are handed out there and then and also get blogged about instantly which the iCrossing community is expected to refer to and self-serve.

Most CTOs would throw a wobbly at the security risks, but if you beef up perimeter protection, build security into the infrastructure as a feature, look for unusual journeys across the enterprise and look to the community to police it can work. Malcolm and I were talking about network audits - tedious, dull, time-consuming, authoritarian - the “unorthordox” alternative is to randomly stream what people are surfing, saying, doing onto community plasmas. Then the whole community can say “Hey, who’s surfing porn and putting my work at risk?” – it is also a pretty cool pictorial snapshot of the day.

Un “author” doxy is decentralised, agile IT, that’s why Scott, Shuo, and David are deeply embedded in business units and not locked away in a glass tower.

Un “author” doxy is looking at how IT supports an internal, enterprise relationship economy that will ebb and flow and change direction. Brand marketers don’t control brands – people do, IT doesn’t control organisations – we do. I intend to do a lot more thinking about the unusual, the unorthodox and I’d love to hear you views.

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.

Without a doubt, the big search news story so far this month is Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. Bloggers and industry analysts indulged in a little “will they, won’t they” speculation as the story dodged a warning shot from Google. Nilhan Jayasinghe was among those speculating, writing:

For many people in the advertising and marketing space, the partnership could provide a plausible contender for Google. And at least on paper the numbers add up. But if all we can expect is increased market share based purely on combining their current capital then I’m worried.

He needn’t have been; Yahoo cruelly spurned Microsoft’s advances. Still, there was even more excitement for the search engine on Valentine’s Day, as reports surfaced that Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace-owning News Corporation was considering a stronger bid. The story rumbles on.

The last fortnight has seen a few blows to openness on the web, with eBay silencing negative seller comments, the government wanting to unplug illegal downloaders, and a US court plugging Wikileaks.

Over on Open, meanwhile, Antony Mayfield was wowed by Gartner’s prediction that two years hence, social lending will account for 10% of the loans market:

Imagine ten percent of your market disappearing in a few years to social marketplace… Of course it’s happened (and then some) already for music, news, classified ads, movies etc - but there’s something thrilling about seeing the forces of change stirred up by the social web reaching the personal finance sector.

Antony’s also been discussing the technology of the US presidential campaigns, and the way that some of the most effective campaigning is being done by people outside of the campaign staff. He shows how wrong the approach can go with a “cringe-inducing” video from Hilary Clinton’s team:

Someone in the room knew it was an abysmal idea and stayed quiet. Let us remember that always, and swear never to be the person who didn’t say: ‘That completely sucks. People will laugh at us.’

I’m loving writing our news feed, for the simple reason that we now have the time to actually read about stuff that’s going on in and around journalism and marketing, and begin to make some sense out of the madness amid which we find ourselves.

Anyway, seen this in the Guardian. There’s another glimpse of the NUJ and where its thinking is at, and some relevance to us and what we’re doing.

Two interesting quotes:

“I don’t think most web users or Orange customers, for that matter, really want to get their news from Orange. They want established news brands.”

She may be right, and this is certainly one of the biggest challenges to overcome if we want the content we produce here to be successful…

“The news industry might not want to stoop to the lows of Hot or Not, but perhaps a little flexibility and creativity when it comes to new formats might just come up with some equally compelling - and underpin all that expensive journalism.”

…and this is our biggest opportunity.