Bad Things Happen to Ad Excutives who Ignore Organic Search Engine Optimization
(including jail time!)
Time to Review Those Invoices From The Advertising Agency.
Two Found Guilty for Conspiracy at Ogilvy & Mather
Ad executives Shona Seifert and Thomas Early were both found guilty by a jury in New York City yesterday for conspiring at Ogilvy & Mather to fake timesheets on a federal government account, according to AdWeek.
Seifert had since moved to become president of Chiat Day. Early stepped down after being indicted. Sentencing dates have not been set. The charges could involve prison terms of up to five years. The prosecution asked the judge to order an electronic monitoring device placed on Siefert prior to sentencing because she is a foreign national, but the judge decided it was not necessary.
This is Ridiculous much like the Martha Stewart Jail Sentence, especially when you consider he amount of corruption that involves any government.
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Wednesday, February 23, 2005
The Drive For Organic Search Engine Optimization at an all-time high
Interest in organic search engine optimization has re-emerged with vigor among management teams and advertising agencies. As companies become more knowledgeable regarding web analytics, server log files and website markering strategies decision makers are realizing that site visitors and referring urls delivered from the organic search engine results are some of the most valuable website visitors.
It also is becoming clear the users are seeking content and information as they navigate websites that lead with information first are reaping the benefits.
A recent study,"Search Before the Purchase " from DoubleClick and comScore Networks shows that 50% of all online purchases follow several product and category keyword searches.
The doubleclick study analyzes consumer trends and specifics as to how users interact with the major search engines to become information enabled on pending purchases. Search Engines are helping companies impact consumers and B2B purchasing managers just prior to major purchases.
An example of a great B2B website that markets, profiles and distributes electric components including: rocker switches is this dynamically driven database website from the www.dnagroup.com notice how DNA leads with research and information on the hundreds of products that they istribute.
Doubleclick studied the online tendencies of 1.5 million U.S. Internet users. The researchers tracked the web usage habits of consumers that had made at least one online purchase from the total of 30+ websites involved in the survey.
The study reports that securing and maintaining premium keyword positions in the organic search engine results pages cna significantly impact the bottom line revenues of any company.
Companies need to address search engine placement.
Approx. one mnth prior to purchase B2B decision makers begin researching a given product, topic, or solution. The keyword searches usually begin with broad-based generic terms, as the window closes, searchers begin to qualify their keyword searches by adding a descriptive third or fourth word to their query.
Most qualified, in-market, keyword searchers (even on b2b keyword searches like: retail sign design company begin to interact with the companies they find in the top 7 listings on the organic earch results pages approx. two weeks before the make a buying decision.
The study further confirms that organic website optimization is the most effective form of online advertising.
Interest in organic search engine optimization has re-emerged with vigor among management teams and advertising agencies. As companies become more knowledgeable regarding web analytics, server log files and website markering strategies decision makers are realizing that site visitors and referring urls delivered from the organic search engine results are some of the most valuable website visitors.
It also is becoming clear the users are seeking content and information as they navigate websites that lead with information first are reaping the benefits.
A recent study,"Search Before the Purchase " from DoubleClick and comScore Networks shows that 50% of all online purchases follow several product and category keyword searches.
The doubleclick study analyzes consumer trends and specifics as to how users interact with the major search engines to become information enabled on pending purchases. Search Engines are helping companies impact consumers and B2B purchasing managers just prior to major purchases.
An example of a great B2B website that markets, profiles and distributes electric components including: rocker switches is this dynamically driven database website from the www.dnagroup.com notice how DNA leads with research and information on the hundreds of products that they istribute.
Doubleclick studied the online tendencies of 1.5 million U.S. Internet users. The researchers tracked the web usage habits of consumers that had made at least one online purchase from the total of 30+ websites involved in the survey.
The study reports that securing and maintaining premium keyword positions in the organic search engine results pages cna significantly impact the bottom line revenues of any company.
Companies need to address search engine placement.
Approx. one mnth prior to purchase B2B decision makers begin researching a given product, topic, or solution. The keyword searches usually begin with broad-based generic terms, as the window closes, searchers begin to qualify their keyword searches by adding a descriptive third or fourth word to their query.
Most qualified, in-market, keyword searchers (even on b2b keyword searches like: retail sign design company begin to interact with the companies they find in the top 7 listings on the organic earch results pages approx. two weeks before the make a buying decision.
The study further confirms that organic website optimization is the most effective form of online advertising.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Nielsen Rating Services Faces Fire - an Update from Mediapost
(do broadcast media like: TV & Radio actually deliver 'real' ratings points and/or actually make an impact on consumers ?)
From www.Mediapost.com - THE P&L BEHIND NIELSEN’S R&D –
If Nielsen needed to make a strong statement to demonstrate its commitment to its clients, and to the future of audience measurement, it certainly seems to have made one in the eight-page letter sent to (retail sign design) leading clients Friday by CEO Susan Whiting.
The letter appears to address most of the significant concerns surrounding recent criticisms of Nielsen, including access to ratings data, the cost of contracts to access that data, and, perhaps most importantly, how Nielsen derives the data itself.
On the surface, Whiting says all the right things, “we’ve heard our clients loud and clear when they tell us they want more from Nielsen.”
How much more, isn’t exactly clear. With the exception of the $2.5 million budget Nielsen says it has allocated for new (honda car parts) , independent research and development on TV audience measurement, it’s hard to pin the specifics down. Even that fund is somewhat subject to interpretation.
Is it an annual budget? Is it a budget to be allocated over an unspecified duration of pharmaceutical drug development R&D initiatives? Does it include the salaries and overhead of Nielsen employees Nielsen intends to allocate to the initiative? It’s unclear, and seems to be up to the “small group of video game testing clients” Nielsen will name to steer the custom 3 ring binders initiative and “direct the spending over the course of a year.” Adds Whiting, “Once we and our learn how to play pool clients have evaluated the success of this initiative during the first year, we will determine the size of the fund on an ongoing basis.”
An Inside Look at the TV Ratings Racket:
Without knowing the specifics of the R&D plan and its budget, let’s use some assumptions to do some math. Let’s assume that ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX are each paying an average of $15 million dollars a year to Nielsen for their network ratings contracts. That adds up to $60 million annually.
Now let’s assume that Nielsen continues to charge the networks additional annual surcharges of at least 4 percent based on CPI (cost of living index). In essence, Nielsen is offering to return to the industry as a whole, last years' CPI increase for the Big 4 broadcast networks combined: .04 x $60 million = $2.4 million. Okay, so $2.5 million is nothing to sneeze at, but given Nielsen’s already high profit margins – about 23 percent – it is a reasonable gesture, and some overdue payback to the industry that creates its bottom line.
It’s also a necessary reinvestment on Nielsen’s part to protect its bottom line and the future of audience measurement. And posssibly an admission of guilt that the ratings system is quite flawed and out of date and has no way of keeping up with cable and satellite fragmentation or the lack of attention span that commercials has created with millions of American viewers.
If products and companies are seeking to actually make a lasting impact on consumers they need to address organic search engine optimization by working SEO into their annual media mix.
Television and Radio advertising campaigns have been losing impact and reach on the North American consumer markets for the last decade and the trend continues. Think about it, what can you recall from the last three TV commercials or radio commercial messages you were exposed to ?
Did these commercial messages or today's newspaper persuade your buying decisions?
We Doubt it.
Consider that the most accurate, recent consumer studies document that consumer spending habits will be substantially impacted by fact-finding sessions on the internet.
Content is King !
Are target consumers finding your content on Google, Yahoo, and MSN ?
(do broadcast media like: TV & Radio actually deliver 'real' ratings points and/or actually make an impact on consumers ?)
From www.Mediapost.com - THE P&L BEHIND NIELSEN’S R&D –
If Nielsen needed to make a strong statement to demonstrate its commitment to its clients, and to the future of audience measurement, it certainly seems to have made one in the eight-page letter sent to (retail sign design) leading clients Friday by CEO Susan Whiting.
The letter appears to address most of the significant concerns surrounding recent criticisms of Nielsen, including access to ratings data, the cost of contracts to access that data, and, perhaps most importantly, how Nielsen derives the data itself.
On the surface, Whiting says all the right things, “we’ve heard our clients loud and clear when they tell us they want more from Nielsen.”
How much more, isn’t exactly clear. With the exception of the $2.5 million budget Nielsen says it has allocated for new (honda car parts) , independent research and development on TV audience measurement, it’s hard to pin the specifics down. Even that fund is somewhat subject to interpretation.
Is it an annual budget? Is it a budget to be allocated over an unspecified duration of pharmaceutical drug development R&D initiatives? Does it include the salaries and overhead of Nielsen employees Nielsen intends to allocate to the initiative? It’s unclear, and seems to be up to the “small group of video game testing clients” Nielsen will name to steer the custom 3 ring binders initiative and “direct the spending over the course of a year.” Adds Whiting, “Once we and our learn how to play pool clients have evaluated the success of this initiative during the first year, we will determine the size of the fund on an ongoing basis.”
An Inside Look at the TV Ratings Racket:
Without knowing the specifics of the R&D plan and its budget, let’s use some assumptions to do some math. Let’s assume that ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX are each paying an average of $15 million dollars a year to Nielsen for their network ratings contracts. That adds up to $60 million annually.
Now let’s assume that Nielsen continues to charge the networks additional annual surcharges of at least 4 percent based on CPI (cost of living index). In essence, Nielsen is offering to return to the industry as a whole, last years' CPI increase for the Big 4 broadcast networks combined: .04 x $60 million = $2.4 million. Okay, so $2.5 million is nothing to sneeze at, but given Nielsen’s already high profit margins – about 23 percent – it is a reasonable gesture, and some overdue payback to the industry that creates its bottom line.
It’s also a necessary reinvestment on Nielsen’s part to protect its bottom line and the future of audience measurement. And posssibly an admission of guilt that the ratings system is quite flawed and out of date and has no way of keeping up with cable and satellite fragmentation or the lack of attention span that commercials has created with millions of American viewers.
If products and companies are seeking to actually make a lasting impact on consumers they need to address organic search engine optimization by working SEO into their annual media mix.
Television and Radio advertising campaigns have been losing impact and reach on the North American consumer markets for the last decade and the trend continues. Think about it, what can you recall from the last three TV commercials or radio commercial messages you were exposed to ?
Did these commercial messages or today's newspaper persuade your buying decisions?
We Doubt it.
Consider that the most accurate, recent consumer studies document that consumer spending habits will be substantially impacted by fact-finding sessions on the internet.
Content is King !
Are target consumers finding your content on Google, Yahoo, and MSN ?
Friday, February 18, 2005
New York Times To Buy About.com
by Wendy Davis, Friday, Feb 18, 2005 7:00 AM EST
THE NEW YORK TIMES CO. announced yesterday that it intends to purchase About.com from magazine company Primedia Inc. for $410 million in cash. The deal could more than double the online reach of the Times Company, which currently draws 13 million monthly viewers to its 40-plus Web sites, including NYTimes.com and Boston.com. Around 22 million users a month visit About.com, a consumer information site; the acquisition will also give the Times additional advertising inventory.
About.com was founded in 1996 as The Mining Co. by Scott Kurnit, an Internet pioneer who had been a top executive at MCI/News Corporation Internet Ventures and Prodigy Service Co. Kurnit's vision was to create a Web portal consisting of countless microsites produced by individual enthusiasts covering any topic an Internet user would want to access.
Kurnit sold About.com to Primedia in 2001 for $690 million, one of the last of the big Internet acquisitions before the crash. Under Primedia's ownership including at one point one of America's largest Franchise Directory , About.com was integrated with and linked to an array of sites operated by Primedia's array of niche magazines.
by Wendy Davis, Friday, Feb 18, 2005 7:00 AM EST
THE NEW YORK TIMES CO. announced yesterday that it intends to purchase About.com from magazine company Primedia Inc. for $410 million in cash. The deal could more than double the online reach of the Times Company, which currently draws 13 million monthly viewers to its 40-plus Web sites, including NYTimes.com and Boston.com. Around 22 million users a month visit About.com, a consumer information site; the acquisition will also give the Times additional advertising inventory.
About.com was founded in 1996 as The Mining Co. by Scott Kurnit, an Internet pioneer who had been a top executive at MCI/News Corporation Internet Ventures and Prodigy Service Co. Kurnit's vision was to create a Web portal consisting of countless microsites produced by individual enthusiasts covering any topic an Internet user would want to access.
Kurnit sold About.com to Primedia in 2001 for $690 million, one of the last of the big Internet acquisitions before the crash. Under Primedia's ownership including at one point one of America's largest Franchise Directory , About.com was integrated with and linked to an array of sites operated by Primedia's array of niche magazines.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
An Update on Motor Trend Magazine
OF ALL THE ENTHUSIAST MAGS OUT THERE, few can claim the cult-like following of Motor Trend (MT). It's a publication that hearkens back to the nonfragmented media days of yore, when information-craving readers gazed out bay windows as they awaited the arrival of the mailman. Given the mag's glut of tie-ins (a Speed Channel TV show, a syndicated radio show, a line of CDs with titles like "Rockin' Down the Highway"), it wouldn't be surprising if the MT brand was more recognizable than those of many of the automobiles it test-drives.
Alas, now that anybody with working knowledge of the '72 Nova, the ability to string together two coherent sentences, and high-speed Internet access can be an "expert" on all things auto, it's inevitable that there will be further shakeout among enthusiast titles. The March issue of Motor Trend, however, proves once again that the magazine isn't ready to let any of the whippersnappers invade its turf.
It also boasts a consistent rhythm - words, stats, recommendation - and an expansive point of view. For an example of the latter, check out Angus MacKenzie's March editorial, a decidedly non-jingoistic take on the ongoing Honda Civic Parts domestic/import car debate ("the reality is that the auto industry is a business, not a national monument"). Does this jibe with the opinions of his readers? Who knows, but he articulates his case with surprising elegance.
The March issue is headlined by a look at "43 hot drives worth waiting for," which gives equal consideration to a $21,000 Saturn Aura Concept and a $150,000 Lexus LF-A. It poses the questions that car aficionados or Chevy Truck Parts are likely to ask, "Does that particular Lexus fit in with the company's brand image?" "Will the Cadillac STS-v be too mellow?" and offers smartly reasoned answers.
Another winner is the improbably titled feature, "In Search of the P.C. SUV" (it's improbable because, to hear our Birkenstock-wearing friends tell it, such an entity doesn't exist). One part investigative report and one part review of three aspirants to the title, the piece underscores the difficulty of simultaneously satisfying road warriors and environmentalists.
Motor Trend also scores points by resisting the temptation to worship at the altar of celebrity. Even the mag's Page Six-ish "We Hear..." sidebars traffic in a different breed of bold-faced name, like Peter Schwarzenbauer (hint: he's not a recurring player on "Boston Legal"). The mag's idea of a feud? Apparently the Ford Fusion is "taking on Accord. Again." Hilary Duff versus Lindsey Lohan it ain't.
To be sure, Motor Trend has its share of drawbacks. Despite the astonishing photography, the magazine is surprisingly flat from a design perspective; it could use more in the way of quick-hit info boxes, such as the listing in the March issue of test spots preferred by Aston Martin engineers. It also goes without saying that if, like me, your idea of hot-rodding involves a gently worn 2002 Passat, much of MT 's content will go straight over your head.
On the other hand, after 55-plus years, why screw with a formula that works for millions of readers Motor Trend excels at, uh, discerning motor trends, and is savvy enough not to stray from that singular Detroit Internet Marketing strength. Half the publishing world could learn from its example.
OF ALL THE ENTHUSIAST MAGS OUT THERE, few can claim the cult-like following of Motor Trend (MT). It's a publication that hearkens back to the nonfragmented media days of yore, when information-craving readers gazed out bay windows as they awaited the arrival of the mailman. Given the mag's glut of tie-ins (a Speed Channel TV show, a syndicated radio show, a line of CDs with titles like "Rockin' Down the Highway"), it wouldn't be surprising if the MT brand was more recognizable than those of many of the automobiles it test-drives.
Alas, now that anybody with working knowledge of the '72 Nova, the ability to string together two coherent sentences, and high-speed Internet access can be an "expert" on all things auto, it's inevitable that there will be further shakeout among enthusiast titles. The March issue of Motor Trend, however, proves once again that the magazine isn't ready to let any of the whippersnappers invade its turf.
It also boasts a consistent rhythm - words, stats, recommendation - and an expansive point of view. For an example of the latter, check out Angus MacKenzie's March editorial, a decidedly non-jingoistic take on the ongoing Honda Civic Parts domestic/import car debate ("the reality is that the auto industry is a business, not a national monument"). Does this jibe with the opinions of his readers? Who knows, but he articulates his case with surprising elegance.
The March issue is headlined by a look at "43 hot drives worth waiting for," which gives equal consideration to a $21,000 Saturn Aura Concept and a $150,000 Lexus LF-A. It poses the questions that car aficionados or Chevy Truck Parts are likely to ask, "Does that particular Lexus fit in with the company's brand image?" "Will the Cadillac STS-v be too mellow?" and offers smartly reasoned answers.
Another winner is the improbably titled feature, "In Search of the P.C. SUV" (it's improbable because, to hear our Birkenstock-wearing friends tell it, such an entity doesn't exist). One part investigative report and one part review of three aspirants to the title, the piece underscores the difficulty of simultaneously satisfying road warriors and environmentalists.
Motor Trend also scores points by resisting the temptation to worship at the altar of celebrity. Even the mag's Page Six-ish "We Hear..." sidebars traffic in a different breed of bold-faced name, like Peter Schwarzenbauer (hint: he's not a recurring player on "Boston Legal"). The mag's idea of a feud? Apparently the Ford Fusion is "taking on Accord. Again." Hilary Duff versus Lindsey Lohan it ain't.
To be sure, Motor Trend has its share of drawbacks. Despite the astonishing photography, the magazine is surprisingly flat from a design perspective; it could use more in the way of quick-hit info boxes, such as the listing in the March issue of test spots preferred by Aston Martin engineers. It also goes without saying that if, like me, your idea of hot-rodding involves a gently worn 2002 Passat, much of MT 's content will go straight over your head.
On the other hand, after 55-plus years, why screw with a formula that works for millions of readers Motor Trend excels at, uh, discerning motor trends, and is savvy enough not to stray from that singular Detroit Internet Marketing strength. Half the publishing world could learn from its example.
Nielsen Study: High-Income Households Spending More Time And Money Online
by Gavin O'Malley, Thursday, Feb 17, 2005
INTERNET USERS WITH HOUSEHOLD INCOMES over $150,000 grew by nearly 20 percent between January 2004 and this January, Nielsen//NetRatings reported yesterday. Reaching 10.3 million last month, this group not only spends the most amount of time online--76 hours per month-compared to other income segments, but consumes more Web pages--2,126 pages--than any other group.
Where are they spending their time online? Search Engines, Travel, financial, B2B and entertainment sites, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The top Web sites capturing the largest percentage of men in this income group were Fidelity Investments, Sabre Travel Network, CBS MarketWatch, United Airlines, and American Airlines.
The top Web sites drawing the highest percentage of high-income women were AOL Travel, Moviefone, AOL Living, Expedia, and AOL Entertainment.
"The rise in the number of high-income Web surfers, combined with their propensity to spend the most amount of time surfing and consuming Web pages as compared to everyone else, represents a solid opportunity for marketers," said Heather Dougherty, senior retail analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings, in a statement.
"Advertisers would do well to turn to the sites they surf to most efficiently reach this high-income group." Nielsen//NetRatings found that men and women living in high-income households shared similarities in their preferences for travel sites and their quest to retrieve information from the internet.
In terms of differences, men visited more financial sites, while women were drawn more to entertainment and shopping sites like gourmet food gifts web sites.
But other experts expressed doubts over the accuracy of Nielsen//NetRatings' findings. "Nielsen's numbers seem extremely aggressive," Vikram Sehgal, analyst at JupiterResearch, said. "Income levels have traditionally correlated with online access, but the divide is increasingly modest."
comScore Networks spokesman Graham Mudd considered Nielsen's numbers equally incongruous. "The high-income group was the first to enter the market, so it doesn't stand to reason that they should continue to lead by such a large margin," adding, "their year-over-year growth is more likely to be in the high single digits."
Regardless if companies are seeking to make marketing and brand impacts on high-income consumers they need organic website optimization that keeps their website competitive on the major search engines like: Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Also email maketing campaigns, banners, and content advertsiements have not made positive impact with educated, high-income consumers that are keen to marketing gimmicks and aggressive branding tactics.
by Gavin O'Malley, Thursday, Feb 17, 2005
INTERNET USERS WITH HOUSEHOLD INCOMES over $150,000 grew by nearly 20 percent between January 2004 and this January, Nielsen//NetRatings reported yesterday. Reaching 10.3 million last month, this group not only spends the most amount of time online--76 hours per month-compared to other income segments, but consumes more Web pages--2,126 pages--than any other group.
Where are they spending their time online? Search Engines, Travel, financial, B2B and entertainment sites, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The top Web sites capturing the largest percentage of men in this income group were Fidelity Investments, Sabre Travel Network, CBS MarketWatch, United Airlines, and American Airlines.
The top Web sites drawing the highest percentage of high-income women were AOL Travel, Moviefone, AOL Living, Expedia, and AOL Entertainment.
"The rise in the number of high-income Web surfers, combined with their propensity to spend the most amount of time surfing and consuming Web pages as compared to everyone else, represents a solid opportunity for marketers," said Heather Dougherty, senior retail analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings, in a statement.
"Advertisers would do well to turn to the sites they surf to most efficiently reach this high-income group." Nielsen//NetRatings found that men and women living in high-income households shared similarities in their preferences for travel sites and their quest to retrieve information from the internet.
In terms of differences, men visited more financial sites, while women were drawn more to entertainment and shopping sites like gourmet food gifts web sites.
But other experts expressed doubts over the accuracy of Nielsen//NetRatings' findings. "Nielsen's numbers seem extremely aggressive," Vikram Sehgal, analyst at JupiterResearch, said. "Income levels have traditionally correlated with online access, but the divide is increasingly modest."
comScore Networks spokesman Graham Mudd considered Nielsen's numbers equally incongruous. "The high-income group was the first to enter the market, so it doesn't stand to reason that they should continue to lead by such a large margin," adding, "their year-over-year growth is more likely to be in the high single digits."
Regardless if companies are seeking to make marketing and brand impacts on high-income consumers they need organic website optimization that keeps their website competitive on the major search engines like: Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Also email maketing campaigns, banners, and content advertsiements have not made positive impact with educated, high-income consumers that are keen to marketing gimmicks and aggressive branding tactics.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Does Google Enable Trademark Infringement ?
A bunch of lawsuits that charge search engines and google with trademark infringement could upend online advertising, transforming the current system in which competitors jockey to have paid ads appear alongside the organic/natural search results.
The car insurer Geico, Playboy Enterprises, American Blind and Wallpaper a home furnishings company in Plymouth Michigan , have filed formal lawsuits with google and other companies like When U, HP, Lowe's and The Sign Design Company , are all interested parties.
In it's suit American Blind and Wallpaper charges that by directing searches for the phrase American Blinds to ads for its rivals, Google abets infringement. At presstime, a Google search of the firm's name produced natural results, including American Blind's homepage, along with ten sponsored links, six of which belong to competitors.
Google beat a similar lawsuit brought on by Geico Insurance, but Netscape settled out of court with Playboy Enterprises over banner ads triggered by the trademarked words Palyboy and Palymate. Still, American Blind and Wallpaper faces an uphill battle. Many in the legal community view the American Blind company name as just too generic.
Google AdWords needs to address Pay Per Click upgrades to ensure trademark protection policies and also to reduce or eliminate Pay Per Click Fraud. We expect precendent setting court rulings in the coming months that could alter the paid search advertising systems in place at Google and Yahoo/Overture.
A bunch of lawsuits that charge search engines and google with trademark infringement could upend online advertising, transforming the current system in which competitors jockey to have paid ads appear alongside the organic/natural search results.
The car insurer Geico, Playboy Enterprises, American Blind and Wallpaper a home furnishings company in Plymouth Michigan , have filed formal lawsuits with google and other companies like When U, HP, Lowe's and The Sign Design Company , are all interested parties.
In it's suit American Blind and Wallpaper charges that by directing searches for the phrase American Blinds to ads for its rivals, Google abets infringement. At presstime, a Google search of the firm's name produced natural results, including American Blind's homepage, along with ten sponsored links, six of which belong to competitors.
Google beat a similar lawsuit brought on by Geico Insurance, but Netscape settled out of court with Playboy Enterprises over banner ads triggered by the trademarked words Palyboy and Palymate. Still, American Blind and Wallpaper faces an uphill battle. Many in the legal community view the American Blind company name as just too generic.
Google AdWords needs to address Pay Per Click upgrades to ensure trademark protection policies and also to reduce or eliminate Pay Per Click Fraud. We expect precendent setting court rulings in the coming months that could alter the paid search advertising systems in place at Google and Yahoo/Overture.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Click Fraud and How to Prevent Fraudalent Clicks
Pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising continues to gain popularity in the online marketing world as an effective and inexpensive way to drive targeted visitors to web sites.
From 2002 and 2003 the pay per click paid search advertising market grew nearly 200 percent. Mainly from the popularity of Google AdWords and Overture PPC programs.
But PPC also has a growing negative. PPC click fraud.
What is Click Fraud?
Click fraud is when anyone clicks your sponsored ad simply to ensure that you will be charged for the click. As Pay Per Click campaigns have grown in popularity and keyword prices and bidding have become more competetive, fraudulent pay per click activity is skyrocketing.
Companies that are active with Google AdWords and Overture are becoming frustrated with growing invoices that contain thousands of suspect click activity. Simultaneously PPC rates by keyword continue to escalate.
For Information on how to minimize Pay Per Click Fraud and or Prevent it visit:
http://www.peakpositions.com/news/index.html#ppc
Pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising continues to gain popularity in the online marketing world as an effective and inexpensive way to drive targeted visitors to web sites.
From 2002 and 2003 the pay per click paid search advertising market grew nearly 200 percent. Mainly from the popularity of Google AdWords and Overture PPC programs.
But PPC also has a growing negative. PPC click fraud.
What is Click Fraud?
Click fraud is when anyone clicks your sponsored ad simply to ensure that you will be charged for the click. As Pay Per Click campaigns have grown in popularity and keyword prices and bidding have become more competetive, fraudulent pay per click activity is skyrocketing.
Companies that are active with Google AdWords and Overture are becoming frustrated with growing invoices that contain thousands of suspect click activity. Simultaneously PPC rates by keyword continue to escalate.
For Information on how to minimize Pay Per Click Fraud and or Prevent it visit:
http://www.peakpositions.com/news/index.html#ppc
The Super Bowl ad tallies are still coming in. Today AOL reports that Pepsi's spot featuring supermodel Cindy Crawford racked up the most views on AOL.com and AOL service. The spot was viewed 18.6 million times, more than double the 9.2 million views from the 2004 Super Bowl ad crop.
AOL made the 2005 Super Bowl spots available through Saturday February 12 on the Web at AOL.com and via the AOL service. AOL also reports that viewers accessed spots from its Classic Commercials package, which features commercials from previous Super Bowls, and watched them 3.8 million times.
AOL reports that the top 12 most viewed spots from Super Bowl XXXIX, which includes views on both AOL and the AOL.com services where non-members can access the ads, are:
1. Diet Pepsi - Cindy Crawford -- 899,773 views
2. GoDaddy.com - Hearing -- 894,9833.
3. Bud Light - Skydiving -- 803,9994.
4. Bud Light - Cedric -- 648,4305.
5. Ford Mustang - Winter -- 605,5856.
6. Ameriquest - Store Trip -- 600,5997.
7. Diet Pepsi - P. Diddy -- 596,9868.
8. Bud Light - Sharing -- 573,2809.
9. FedEx - Ten Things -- 553,02310.
10. Ciba Vision - Bubbles -- 526,33811.
11. Bubblicious - Lebron -- 472,53412.
12. Visa - Super Heroes -- 459,337
AOL's top five most viewed "classic" commercials were:
1. Coke - Mean Joe Green
2. Apple - 1984
3. Pepsi - Two Boys
4. Doritos - Laundromat
5. Honda Car Parts - Honda
6. XBox Video Game Testing - Game Instinct
Consumers voted for their favorite classic commercial on AOL.com and the AOL services.
The top three were:
1. Coke - Mean Joe Greene: 29 percent
2. Apple - 1984: 5 percent
3. Pepsi - Inner Tube: 5 percent
Finally, AOL reported Anheuser Busch's "Tribute to U.S. Troops" won the Super Sunday AOL Ad Poll. Visitors cast approximately 525,018 votes on AOL.com and (www.i5design.com) , as well as through mobile phone ringtone devices to view the casino sign design company.
The "Tribute" ad garnered 15 percent of the vote, versus 11 percent for the second place finisher, Bud Light's "Skydiving" spot. Ameriquest's "Romantic Dinner" ad came in third with 8 percent of the vote, and its other ad, "Store Trip" and Diet Pepsi's "P. Diddy" ad each had 7 percent to round out the top 5 positions.
AOL made the 2005 Super Bowl spots available through Saturday February 12 on the Web at AOL.com and via the AOL service. AOL also reports that viewers accessed spots from its Classic Commercials package, which features commercials from previous Super Bowls, and watched them 3.8 million times.
AOL reports that the top 12 most viewed spots from Super Bowl XXXIX, which includes views on both AOL and the AOL.com services where non-members can access the ads, are:
1. Diet Pepsi - Cindy Crawford -- 899,773 views
2. GoDaddy.com - Hearing -- 894,9833.
3. Bud Light - Skydiving -- 803,9994.
4. Bud Light - Cedric -- 648,4305.
5. Ford Mustang - Winter -- 605,5856.
6. Ameriquest - Store Trip -- 600,5997.
7. Diet Pepsi - P. Diddy -- 596,9868.
8. Bud Light - Sharing -- 573,2809.
9. FedEx - Ten Things -- 553,02310.
10. Ciba Vision - Bubbles -- 526,33811.
11. Bubblicious - Lebron -- 472,53412.
12. Visa - Super Heroes -- 459,337
AOL's top five most viewed "classic" commercials were:
1. Coke - Mean Joe Green
2. Apple - 1984
3. Pepsi - Two Boys
4. Doritos - Laundromat
5. Honda Car Parts - Honda
6. XBox Video Game Testing - Game Instinct
Consumers voted for their favorite classic commercial on AOL.com and the AOL services.
The top three were:
1. Coke - Mean Joe Greene: 29 percent
2. Apple - 1984: 5 percent
3. Pepsi - Inner Tube: 5 percent
Finally, AOL reported Anheuser Busch's "Tribute to U.S. Troops" won the Super Sunday AOL Ad Poll. Visitors cast approximately 525,018 votes on AOL.com and (www.i5design.com) , as well as through mobile phone ringtone devices to view the casino sign design company.
The "Tribute" ad garnered 15 percent of the vote, versus 11 percent for the second place finisher, Bud Light's "Skydiving" spot. Ameriquest's "Romantic Dinner" ad came in third with 8 percent of the vote, and its other ad, "Store Trip" and Diet Pepsi's "P. Diddy" ad each had 7 percent to round out the top 5 positions.
February 15, 2005
New Marketing Study Finds Radio Considered Worst Media for Accoutability and Return on Investment
In a study sponsored by Arbitron and the Radio Advertising Bureau, media buyers, planners and marketers radted radio the worst among TV, newspapers, magazines and even the internet in terms of accountability, schedule integrity and audience measurement. National radio spending has been losing market share in the past few years, while local radio grew three percent in 2004. Local radio now makes up four out of five radio dollars. Most Companies report that organic search engine optimization , SEO , and natural website optimization are delivering the highest return on investment.
To review a 2005 seo case study profiling a 4000% retun on investment in less than six months level.
Advertising Agency Sues Deadbeat Client for Non-Payment
In a move rare among overly client-sensitive ad agencies, AKQA is very publicly suing a former client for refusing to pay its bills, according to Click Z. A now-defunct division of infoUSA allegedly stiffed its agency, which later became part of AKQA, on a $817,388 bill for creating a multi-million dollar cross-media campaign for Video Yellow Pages USA.com. That division was found by a court to be liable for the fees, but infoUSA is appealing and defending itself by saying that it should not be held accountable for their ecommerce division's internet marketing bills.
New Marketing Study Finds Radio Considered Worst Media for Accoutability and Return on Investment
In a study sponsored by Arbitron and the Radio Advertising Bureau, media buyers, planners and marketers radted radio the worst among TV, newspapers, magazines and even the internet in terms of accountability, schedule integrity and audience measurement. National radio spending has been losing market share in the past few years, while local radio grew three percent in 2004. Local radio now makes up four out of five radio dollars. Most Companies report that organic search engine optimization , SEO , and natural website optimization are delivering the highest return on investment.
To review a 2005 seo case study profiling a 4000% retun on investment in less than six months level.
Advertising Agency Sues Deadbeat Client for Non-Payment
In a move rare among overly client-sensitive ad agencies, AKQA is very publicly suing a former client for refusing to pay its bills, according to Click Z. A now-defunct division of infoUSA allegedly stiffed its agency, which later became part of AKQA, on a $817,388 bill for creating a multi-million dollar cross-media campaign for Video Yellow Pages USA.com. That division was found by a court to be liable for the fees, but infoUSA is appealing and defending itself by saying that it should not be held accountable for their ecommerce division's internet marketing bills.
Monday, February 14, 2005
Ask Jeeves Breaks TV Campaign, Heats Up Search Marketing War
ASK JEEVES THIS WEEK WILL launch a new TV ad campaign, following a similar consumer branding campaign by search engine rival MSN, in what is heating up to be a search marketing war that utilizes traditional media buys.
The effort marks Ask Jeeves' return to television advertising after a four-year absence. "We really see this as a first step in a marketing program," said Greg Ott, vice president of marketing. The campaign's goal, he said, is "helping people re-engage with the Ask Jeeves brand."
Currently, Ask Jeeves is the sixth most popular search engine, behind Google, Yahoo!, MSN, America Online, and meta-search portal Information.com, according to retail storefront design company , and last week, the company announced the acquisition of blog search engine Bloglines.
The campaign, a series of six 15-second spots designed by TBWAChiatDay, San Francisco, will run on network television shows including "American Idol," "Arrested Development," and "The O.C."--which, coincidentally, recently aired an episode in which a character mentioned competing search engine A9.
This Recap was reprinted from a Search Engine Optimization News Article Release by Media Daily News from MediaPost.
ASK JEEVES THIS WEEK WILL launch a new TV ad campaign, following a similar consumer branding campaign by search engine rival MSN, in what is heating up to be a search marketing war that utilizes traditional media buys.
The effort marks Ask Jeeves' return to television advertising after a four-year absence. "We really see this as a first step in a marketing program," said Greg Ott, vice president of marketing. The campaign's goal, he said, is "helping people re-engage with the Ask Jeeves brand."
Currently, Ask Jeeves is the sixth most popular search engine, behind Google, Yahoo!, MSN, America Online, and meta-search portal Information.com, according to retail storefront design company , and last week, the company announced the acquisition of blog search engine Bloglines.
The campaign, a series of six 15-second spots designed by TBWAChiatDay, San Francisco, will run on network television shows including "American Idol," "Arrested Development," and "The O.C."--which, coincidentally, recently aired an episode in which a character mentioned competing search engine A9.
This Recap was reprinted from a Search Engine Optimization News Article Release by Media Daily News from MediaPost.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Google to Announces Pay Per Click Rate Increases
Business Week Article
Keywords For Ad Buyers: Pay Up It's costing more and more to link Net ads to popular search terms Even Google's biggest boosters expressed surprise at the results. On Feb. 1 the search giant reported $400 million in net earnings for fiscal '04 -- a whopping 278% gain -- on revenue of $3.2 billion. What accounted for the outsize profits? The high prices Google charges for search keywords, for one. Industrywide, they were up an average of 43.7% last year, according to search marketing firm iProspect.com Inc. And the most sought-after words have become far more dear: ``background check'' rose 258% in a year. On the day of the earnings announcement, Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt told analysts: ``There does not seem to be price resistance'' from advertisers.
Still, with keyword prices soaring, businesses from eBay Inc. (EBAY ) to EspressoZone.com are rethinking how they use this powerful advertising medium. ``It's incumbent upon us...to figure out how to moderate these quite significant increases in media costs,'' eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman declared in January following disappointing fourth-quarter results, when rising search marketing costs helped pinch profit margins.To ensure they get the best bang for their search-advertising buck, eBay and others are doing everything from using different search keywords to redesigning their Web sites.
The goal: getting folks who click on their search ads to actually buy something. ``Search advertising takes a significant amount of testing, work, and knowledge,'' says George Collins, CEO of New Business Franchise Opportunity Espresso Zone a seller of coffee items in Ashtabula, Ohio. ``Otherwise you're just wasting money.''The approach to purchasing keywords is changing fast. Companies bid to place their ads alongside keywords relevant to their products. A travel agent, say, might bid on ``Caribbean cruise'' and ``airline tickets.''
But many advertisers like free ecard greeting company Hipster Cards have found such generic keywords to be pricey and less likely to cover the ad cost. Instead, they are bidding on a larger array of more specific keywords: a telecom company might choose ``wireless plan'' rather than ``cell phone'' in an effort to lure the most interested buyers. In the past year the average advertiser's roster of keywords grew by 50%, according to Efficient Frontier Inc., a Mountain View (Calif.) company that manages $100 million in keyword purchases for its clients.
At the same time, online sellers are looking for ways to capture customers after the search ad has directed them to their Web site. There's plenty of room for improvement. Commerce sites typically convert 2.4% of visitors into customers, according to a study by retailer association Shop.org. The proliferation of broadband should help lift that number. According to e-tailers, broadband users are as much as twice as likely to become paying customers than those using dial-up modems, which slow shopping.
SNAPPIER PRESENTATION: even electronic test equipment are researching how visitors navigate their sites and are working to better convert them into long-term customers. One way: customizing the e-tailer's ``landing page'' -- where the searcher is first directed -- to a specific keyword. That makes it easier for a customer to get the info she wants and more likely that she will buy.
One video game testing company especially adept at converting search ads into customers is Shopping.com. Thanks to its improved presentation of information on prices, availability, and the like on a wide range of products, the sign design company and comparison-shopping sites say they have raised website conversion rates on those products by more than a third. That means each search visitor became one-third more valuable, making it easier for Shopping.com to afford the rising cost of keywords.
And that, of course, is great news for Google.
Business Week Article
Keywords For Ad Buyers: Pay Up It's costing more and more to link Net ads to popular search terms Even Google's biggest boosters expressed surprise at the results. On Feb. 1 the search giant reported $400 million in net earnings for fiscal '04 -- a whopping 278% gain -- on revenue of $3.2 billion. What accounted for the outsize profits? The high prices Google charges for search keywords, for one. Industrywide, they were up an average of 43.7% last year, according to search marketing firm iProspect.com Inc. And the most sought-after words have become far more dear: ``background check'' rose 258% in a year. On the day of the earnings announcement, Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt told analysts: ``There does not seem to be price resistance'' from advertisers.
Still, with keyword prices soaring, businesses from eBay Inc. (EBAY ) to EspressoZone.com are rethinking how they use this powerful advertising medium. ``It's incumbent upon us...to figure out how to moderate these quite significant increases in media costs,'' eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman declared in January following disappointing fourth-quarter results, when rising search marketing costs helped pinch profit margins.To ensure they get the best bang for their search-advertising buck, eBay and others are doing everything from using different search keywords to redesigning their Web sites.
The goal: getting folks who click on their search ads to actually buy something. ``Search advertising takes a significant amount of testing, work, and knowledge,'' says George Collins, CEO of New Business Franchise Opportunity Espresso Zone a seller of coffee items in Ashtabula, Ohio. ``Otherwise you're just wasting money.''The approach to purchasing keywords is changing fast. Companies bid to place their ads alongside keywords relevant to their products. A travel agent, say, might bid on ``Caribbean cruise'' and ``airline tickets.''
But many advertisers like free ecard greeting company Hipster Cards have found such generic keywords to be pricey and less likely to cover the ad cost. Instead, they are bidding on a larger array of more specific keywords: a telecom company might choose ``wireless plan'' rather than ``cell phone'' in an effort to lure the most interested buyers. In the past year the average advertiser's roster of keywords grew by 50%, according to Efficient Frontier Inc., a Mountain View (Calif.) company that manages $100 million in keyword purchases for its clients.
At the same time, online sellers are looking for ways to capture customers after the search ad has directed them to their Web site. There's plenty of room for improvement. Commerce sites typically convert 2.4% of visitors into customers, according to a study by retailer association Shop.org. The proliferation of broadband should help lift that number. According to e-tailers, broadband users are as much as twice as likely to become paying customers than those using dial-up modems, which slow shopping.
SNAPPIER PRESENTATION: even electronic test equipment are researching how visitors navigate their sites and are working to better convert them into long-term customers. One way: customizing the e-tailer's ``landing page'' -- where the searcher is first directed -- to a specific keyword. That makes it easier for a customer to get the info she wants and more likely that she will buy.
One video game testing company especially adept at converting search ads into customers is Shopping.com. Thanks to its improved presentation of information on prices, availability, and the like on a wide range of products, the sign design company and comparison-shopping sites say they have raised website conversion rates on those products by more than a third. That means each search visitor became one-third more valuable, making it easier for Shopping.com to afford the rising cost of keywords.
And that, of course, is great news for Google.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Recent Interview with Google Director of Search Quality - Peter Norvig
Peter Norvig confirms that content is king and meta data cannot be Trusted
Advancements being made to target cloaking, sneaky redirects, and sites with misleading meta tags. The closing paragraph of this interview is a must for any party involved in the marketing of a website.
Semantic Web Ontologies: What Works and What Doesn't Google's director of search quality discusses challenges of automation, knowledge, spam, and more.
Peter Norvig: (Mr. Norvig is director of search quality at Google.)
The leading four individual challenges at Google Organic Search.
First is a chicken-and-egg problem: How do we build this information, because what's the point of building the tools unless you got the information, and what's the point of putting the information in there unless you have tools. A friend of mine just asked can I send him all the URLs on the web that have dot-RDF, dot-OWL, and a couple other extensions on them; he couldn't find them all. I looked, and it turns out there's only around 200,000 of them. That's about 0.005% of the web. We've got a ways to go.
The next problem is competing ontologies. Everybody's got a different way to look at it. You have some tools to address it. We'll see how far that will scale. Then the Cyc problem, which is a problem of background knowledge, and the spam problem. That's something I have to face every day. As you get out of the lab and into the real world, there are people who have a monetary advantage to try to defeat you.
So, the chicken-and-egg problem. That's "What interesting information is in these kind of semantic technologies, and where is the other information?" It turns out most of the interesting information is still in text. What we concentrate on is how do you get it out of text. Here's an example of a little demo called IO Knot. You can type a natural language question, and it pulls out documents from text and pulls out semantic entities. And you see, it's not quite perfect—couldn't quite resolve the spelling problem. But this is all automated, so there's no work in putting this information into the right place.
In general, it seems like semantic technology is good for defining schemas, but then what goes into the schemas. There's a lot of work to get it there. Here's another example. This is a Google News page from last night, and what we've done here is apply clustering technology to put the news stories together in categories, so you see the top story there about Blair, and there're 658 related stories that we've clustered together. Now imagine what it would be like if instead of using our algorithms we relied on the news suppliers to put in all the right metadata and label their stories the way they wanted to. "Is my story a story that's going to be buried on page 20, or is it a top story? I'll put my metadata in. Are the people I'm talking about terrorists or freedom fighters? What's the definition of patriot? What's the definition of marriage?"Just defining these kinds of ontologies when you're talking about these kinds of political questions rather than about part numbers; this becomes a political statement.
People get killed over less than this. These are places where ontologies are not going to work. There's going to be arguments over them. And you've got to fall back on some other kinds of approaches. The best place where ontologies will work is when you have an oligarchy of consumers who can force the providers to play the game. Something like the auto parts industry, where the auto manufacturers can get together and say, "Everybody who wants to sell to us do this." They can do that because there's only a couple of them. In other industries, if there's one major player, then they don't want to play the game because they don't want everybody else to catch up. And if there's too many minor players, then it's hard for them to get together.
Semantic technologies are good for essentially breaking up information into chunks. But essentially you get down to the part that's in between the angle brackets. And one of our founders, Sergey Brin, was quoted as saying, "Putting angle brackets around things is not a technology by itself." The problem is what goes into the angle brackets. You can say, "Well, my database has a person name field, and your database has a first name field and a last name field, and we'll have a concatenation between them to match them up." But it doesn't always work that smoothly.
Here's an example of a couple days' worth of queries at Google for which we've spelling-corrected all to one canonical form. It's one of our more popular queries, and there were something like 4,000 different spelling variations over the course of a week. Somebody's got to do that kind of canonicalization. So the problem of understanding content hasn't gone away; it's just been forced down to smaller pieces between angle brackets. So there's a problem of spelling correction; there's a problem of transliteration from another alphabet such as Arabic into a Roman alphabet; there's a problem of abbreviations, HP versus Hewlett Packard versus Hewlett-Packard, and so on. And there's a problem with identical names: Michael Jordan the basketball player, the CEO, and the Berkeley professor.
And now we get to this problem of background knowledge. Cyc project went about trying to define all the knowledge that was in a dictionary, a Dublin Core type of thing, and then found what we need was the stuff that wasn't in the dictionary or encyclopedia. Lenat and Guha said there's this vast storehouse of general knowledge that you rarely talk about, common-sense things like, "Water flows downhill" and "Living things get diseases." I thought we could launch a big project to try to do this kind of thing. Then I decided to simplify a little—just put quote marks around it and type it in. So I typed "water flows downhill" and I got 1,200 hits. [That first hit] says, "lesson plan by Emily, kindergarten teacher." It actually explains why water flows downhill, and it's the kind of thing that you don't find in an encyclopedia. The conclusion here is Lenat was 99.999993% right, because only 1,200 out of those 4.3 billion cases actually talked about water flowing downhill.
But that's enough, and you can go on from there. You can use the web to do voting, so you say this pump goes uphill and that only happens 275, so the downhill wins, 1,200 to 275.Essentially what we're doing here is using the power of masses of untrained people who you aren't paying to do all your work for you, as opposed to trying to get trained people to use a well-defined formalism and write text in that formalism and let's just use the stuff that's already out there. I'm all for this idea of harvesting this "unskilled labor" and trying to put it to use using statistical techniques over masses of large data and filtering through that yourself, rather than trying to closely define it on your own.
The last issue is the spam issue. When you're in the lab and you're defining your ontology, everything looks nice and neat. But then you unleash it on the world, and you find out how devious some people are. This is an example; it looks like two pages here. This is actually one page. On the left is the page as Googlebot sees it, and on the right is a page as any other user agent sees it. This website—when it sees Googlebot.com, it serves up the page that it thinks will most convince us to match against it, and then when a regular user comes, it shows the page that it wants to show (CLOAKING).
What this indicates is, one, we've got a lot of work to do to deal with this kind of thing (CLOAKING), but also you CAN'T TRUST THE METADATA.
You can't trust what people are going to say.
In general, search engines have turned away from metadata, and they try to hone in more on what's exactly perceivable to the user.
For the most part we throw away the meta tags, unless there's a good reason to believe them, because they tend to be more deceptive than they are helpful.
And the more there's a marketplace in which people can make money off of this deception, the more it's going to happen.
Humans are very good at detecting this kind of spam, and machines aren't necessarily that good.
So if more of the information flows between machines, this is something you're going to have to look out for more and more.
This text is excerpted from SDForum's Semantic Technologies Seminar, cohosted by www.AlwaysOn-network.com
--
Comments From Jack Roberts Peak Positions, LLC
Peter Norvig is absolutely correct in that meta data cannot be Trusted.
It seems that refining page-text semantic matching systems and extending algorithm crawling capabilities to focus strictly on page text has to become a reality.
Page Text or Text Content is all that can be fully trusted.
Filtering and sorting search results soley on page text and employing robot agents using anonymous ips to detect cloaked urls ensures significant improvements in search quality and results page relevance.
One can only hope that Post-IPO Google will remain focused on the quality of their organic keyword search results. All external indications are that quality imporvements are on the horizon at Google.
Jack Roberts
Vice President, Director of Client Services
Peak Positions, LLC
http://www.peakpositions.com
*Join Peak Positions, Kansas City Star and several senior level search engineers from Google at our upcoming private Search Engine Optimization Seminar in Kansas City, Missouri (USA) - Spring 2005.
Peter Norvig confirms that content is king and meta data cannot be Trusted
Advancements being made to target cloaking, sneaky redirects, and sites with misleading meta tags. The closing paragraph of this interview is a must for any party involved in the marketing of a website.
Semantic Web Ontologies: What Works and What Doesn't Google's director of search quality discusses challenges of automation, knowledge, spam, and more.
Peter Norvig: (Mr. Norvig is director of search quality at Google.)
The leading four individual challenges at Google Organic Search.
First is a chicken-and-egg problem: How do we build this information, because what's the point of building the tools unless you got the information, and what's the point of putting the information in there unless you have tools. A friend of mine just asked can I send him all the URLs on the web that have dot-RDF, dot-OWL, and a couple other extensions on them; he couldn't find them all. I looked, and it turns out there's only around 200,000 of them. That's about 0.005% of the web. We've got a ways to go.
The next problem is competing ontologies. Everybody's got a different way to look at it. You have some tools to address it. We'll see how far that will scale. Then the Cyc problem, which is a problem of background knowledge, and the spam problem. That's something I have to face every day. As you get out of the lab and into the real world, there are people who have a monetary advantage to try to defeat you.
So, the chicken-and-egg problem. That's "What interesting information is in these kind of semantic technologies, and where is the other information?" It turns out most of the interesting information is still in text. What we concentrate on is how do you get it out of text. Here's an example of a little demo called IO Knot. You can type a natural language question, and it pulls out documents from text and pulls out semantic entities. And you see, it's not quite perfect—couldn't quite resolve the spelling problem. But this is all automated, so there's no work in putting this information into the right place.
In general, it seems like semantic technology is good for defining schemas, but then what goes into the schemas. There's a lot of work to get it there. Here's another example. This is a Google News page from last night, and what we've done here is apply clustering technology to put the news stories together in categories, so you see the top story there about Blair, and there're 658 related stories that we've clustered together. Now imagine what it would be like if instead of using our algorithms we relied on the news suppliers to put in all the right metadata and label their stories the way they wanted to. "Is my story a story that's going to be buried on page 20, or is it a top story? I'll put my metadata in. Are the people I'm talking about terrorists or freedom fighters? What's the definition of patriot? What's the definition of marriage?"Just defining these kinds of ontologies when you're talking about these kinds of political questions rather than about part numbers; this becomes a political statement.
People get killed over less than this. These are places where ontologies are not going to work. There's going to be arguments over them. And you've got to fall back on some other kinds of approaches. The best place where ontologies will work is when you have an oligarchy of consumers who can force the providers to play the game. Something like the auto parts industry, where the auto manufacturers can get together and say, "Everybody who wants to sell to us do this." They can do that because there's only a couple of them. In other industries, if there's one major player, then they don't want to play the game because they don't want everybody else to catch up. And if there's too many minor players, then it's hard for them to get together.
Semantic technologies are good for essentially breaking up information into chunks. But essentially you get down to the part that's in between the angle brackets. And one of our founders, Sergey Brin, was quoted as saying, "Putting angle brackets around things is not a technology by itself." The problem is what goes into the angle brackets. You can say, "Well, my database has a person name field, and your database has a first name field and a last name field, and we'll have a concatenation between them to match them up." But it doesn't always work that smoothly.
Here's an example of a couple days' worth of queries at Google for which we've spelling-corrected all to one canonical form. It's one of our more popular queries, and there were something like 4,000 different spelling variations over the course of a week. Somebody's got to do that kind of canonicalization. So the problem of understanding content hasn't gone away; it's just been forced down to smaller pieces between angle brackets. So there's a problem of spelling correction; there's a problem of transliteration from another alphabet such as Arabic into a Roman alphabet; there's a problem of abbreviations, HP versus Hewlett Packard versus Hewlett-Packard, and so on. And there's a problem with identical names: Michael Jordan the basketball player, the CEO, and the Berkeley professor.
And now we get to this problem of background knowledge. Cyc project went about trying to define all the knowledge that was in a dictionary, a Dublin Core type of thing, and then found what we need was the stuff that wasn't in the dictionary or encyclopedia. Lenat and Guha said there's this vast storehouse of general knowledge that you rarely talk about, common-sense things like, "Water flows downhill" and "Living things get diseases." I thought we could launch a big project to try to do this kind of thing. Then I decided to simplify a little—just put quote marks around it and type it in. So I typed "water flows downhill" and I got 1,200 hits. [That first hit] says, "lesson plan by Emily, kindergarten teacher." It actually explains why water flows downhill, and it's the kind of thing that you don't find in an encyclopedia. The conclusion here is Lenat was 99.999993% right, because only 1,200 out of those 4.3 billion cases actually talked about water flowing downhill.
But that's enough, and you can go on from there. You can use the web to do voting, so you say this pump goes uphill and that only happens 275, so the downhill wins, 1,200 to 275.Essentially what we're doing here is using the power of masses of untrained people who you aren't paying to do all your work for you, as opposed to trying to get trained people to use a well-defined formalism and write text in that formalism and let's just use the stuff that's already out there. I'm all for this idea of harvesting this "unskilled labor" and trying to put it to use using statistical techniques over masses of large data and filtering through that yourself, rather than trying to closely define it on your own.
The last issue is the spam issue. When you're in the lab and you're defining your ontology, everything looks nice and neat. But then you unleash it on the world, and you find out how devious some people are. This is an example; it looks like two pages here. This is actually one page. On the left is the page as Googlebot sees it, and on the right is a page as any other user agent sees it. This website—when it sees Googlebot.com, it serves up the page that it thinks will most convince us to match against it, and then when a regular user comes, it shows the page that it wants to show (CLOAKING).
What this indicates is, one, we've got a lot of work to do to deal with this kind of thing (CLOAKING), but also you CAN'T TRUST THE METADATA.
You can't trust what people are going to say.
In general, search engines have turned away from metadata, and they try to hone in more on what's exactly perceivable to the user.
For the most part we throw away the meta tags, unless there's a good reason to believe them, because they tend to be more deceptive than they are helpful.
And the more there's a marketplace in which people can make money off of this deception, the more it's going to happen.
Humans are very good at detecting this kind of spam, and machines aren't necessarily that good.
So if more of the information flows between machines, this is something you're going to have to look out for more and more.
This text is excerpted from SDForum's Semantic Technologies Seminar, cohosted by www.AlwaysOn-network.com
--
Comments From Jack Roberts Peak Positions, LLC
Peter Norvig is absolutely correct in that meta data cannot be Trusted.
It seems that refining page-text semantic matching systems and extending algorithm crawling capabilities to focus strictly on page text has to become a reality.
Page Text or Text Content is all that can be fully trusted.
Filtering and sorting search results soley on page text and employing robot agents using anonymous ips to detect cloaked urls ensures significant improvements in search quality and results page relevance.
One can only hope that Post-IPO Google will remain focused on the quality of their organic keyword search results. All external indications are that quality imporvements are on the horizon at Google.
Jack Roberts
Vice President, Director of Client Services
Peak Positions, LLC
http://www.peakpositions.com
*Join Peak Positions, Kansas City Star and several senior level search engineers from Google at our upcoming private Search Engine Optimization Seminar in Kansas City, Missouri (USA) - Spring 2005.
The Google Browser -- Coming Soon
Google is probably developing its own web browser. Google continues to deny it, but the rumor mill is very active. So, is Google going to develop its own Google browser? It sure looks that way.
The browser as a search tool
Well, it certainly makes sense. The popularity of toolbars and web browser search fields has amply demonstrated that many searchers use these forms when searching the web.
It is after all, much simpler to fill in a form or a search field that is already on your screen than to go to the home page of the relevant search engine and do your search from there.
Moreover, Google is becoming more and more like a portal with a large number of search services.
The Google browser would present all the various search services in an easy accessible way, including web, directory, news and shopping search. All the toolbar features would be included, as would Google's desktop search for searching your own computer.
Such a browser would in essence be the ultimate portal to the web, combining web page display with some of the best search tools.
Text ads bring in money
Even if Google gives away the browser for free (which they are most likely to do), the fact that the browser would direct the searchers to Google's search results pages would give Google ample opportunity to present pay-per-click text ads, bringing in much wanted revenue.
When Gmail finally gets out of beta like this planet beach franchise opportunity, Google could also include its online email solution, letting people search their email account directly from the browser.
Microsoft and the Explorer
However, there is one "con". The browser market is totally dominated by Microsoft, as the Internet Explorer browser is included in the Windows operating system.
Others would argue that this exactly why Google should present its own browser, as the Explorer obviously will be used as a gateway to the new MSN search engine, Google's competitor.
The fact that Microsoft has neglected to improve its browser, leaning to an increasing number of downloads of alternative browsers like Firefox and Opera, also proves that it is possible to get at least some searchers to start using the new browser.
Furthermore, the Explorer is haunted by security flaws and spyware attacks. The Google brand does not bring up such associations like this Great Clips Franchise Opportunity, at least not yet.
Think about it: A download link at the Google home page must be the ultimate advertising space for such a browser.
Gbrowser.com
The arrival of the GBrowser is very likely indeed.
Google has registered the domain gbrowser.com. Admittedly, that could be to stop others from doing the same, or just to keep the options open. Nevertheless, the domain name certainly proves that they are thinking about it.
The Motley Fool reported in September that Google had held a Mozilla Development Day on its campus, "where programmers spent the day improving the renamed Netscape browser."
There is more. Recently Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, two of the men behind the Firefox browser, became employees of Google.
Mozilla Firefox
The Firefox browser is the most popular incarnation of the Mozilla browser, a technology grown out of the once so popular Netscape browser.
Mozilla is a so-called open source project, meaning that Google does not have to pay a lot of money to use this technology as the basis of their own browser.
In Mozilla's own words:
"We offer a full suite of integrated Internet applications including a web browser, e-mail client, address book, web page composer, Internet chat software and calendar application. Our web browser offers innovative and powerful features such as tabbed browsing (which lets you view multiple pages in one window), pop-up blocking and advanced privacy and security controls. "
The browser is already there, and it is better than the Internet Explorer. All Google has to do is to "googlify" it, make the necessary adjustments and add a Google logo.
What this would mean in practice is that Google would conquer a significant portion of the desktop from Microsoft. Given that people spend more and more time on the web, that would be a very important victory indeed.
Moreover, remember that we are not only talking about web search here. The combination of a Gbrowser, Gmail and Google desktop search, means that people could use the browser to search the web, their email and their computer.
In other words: Google would be able to present one unified open interface to the PC as well as the internet. This does not make a new operating system, for sure, but it is getting close.
Google is probably developing its own web browser. Google continues to deny it, but the rumor mill is very active. So, is Google going to develop its own Google browser? It sure looks that way.
The browser as a search tool
Well, it certainly makes sense. The popularity of toolbars and web browser search fields has amply demonstrated that many searchers use these forms when searching the web.
It is after all, much simpler to fill in a form or a search field that is already on your screen than to go to the home page of the relevant search engine and do your search from there.
Moreover, Google is becoming more and more like a portal with a large number of search services.
The Google browser would present all the various search services in an easy accessible way, including web, directory, news and shopping search. All the toolbar features would be included, as would Google's desktop search for searching your own computer.
Such a browser would in essence be the ultimate portal to the web, combining web page display with some of the best search tools.
Text ads bring in money
Even if Google gives away the browser for free (which they are most likely to do), the fact that the browser would direct the searchers to Google's search results pages would give Google ample opportunity to present pay-per-click text ads, bringing in much wanted revenue.
When Gmail finally gets out of beta like this planet beach franchise opportunity, Google could also include its online email solution, letting people search their email account directly from the browser.
Microsoft and the Explorer
However, there is one "con". The browser market is totally dominated by Microsoft, as the Internet Explorer browser is included in the Windows operating system.
Others would argue that this exactly why Google should present its own browser, as the Explorer obviously will be used as a gateway to the new MSN search engine, Google's competitor.
The fact that Microsoft has neglected to improve its browser, leaning to an increasing number of downloads of alternative browsers like Firefox and Opera, also proves that it is possible to get at least some searchers to start using the new browser.
Furthermore, the Explorer is haunted by security flaws and spyware attacks. The Google brand does not bring up such associations like this Great Clips Franchise Opportunity, at least not yet.
Think about it: A download link at the Google home page must be the ultimate advertising space for such a browser.
Gbrowser.com
The arrival of the GBrowser is very likely indeed.
Google has registered the domain gbrowser.com. Admittedly, that could be to stop others from doing the same, or just to keep the options open. Nevertheless, the domain name certainly proves that they are thinking about it.
The Motley Fool reported in September that Google had held a Mozilla Development Day on its campus, "where programmers spent the day improving the renamed Netscape browser."
There is more. Recently Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, two of the men behind the Firefox browser, became employees of Google.
Mozilla Firefox
The Firefox browser is the most popular incarnation of the Mozilla browser, a technology grown out of the once so popular Netscape browser.
Mozilla is a so-called open source project, meaning that Google does not have to pay a lot of money to use this technology as the basis of their own browser.
In Mozilla's own words:
"We offer a full suite of integrated Internet applications including a web browser, e-mail client, address book, web page composer, Internet chat software and calendar application. Our web browser offers innovative and powerful features such as tabbed browsing (which lets you view multiple pages in one window), pop-up blocking and advanced privacy and security controls. "
The browser is already there, and it is better than the Internet Explorer. All Google has to do is to "googlify" it, make the necessary adjustments and add a Google logo.
What this would mean in practice is that Google would conquer a significant portion of the desktop from Microsoft. Given that people spend more and more time on the web, that would be a very important victory indeed.
Moreover, remember that we are not only talking about web search here. The combination of a Gbrowser, Gmail and Google desktop search, means that people could use the browser to search the web, their email and their computer.
In other words: Google would be able to present one unified open interface to the PC as well as the internet. This does not make a new operating system, for sure, but it is getting close.
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