The Search Engine Marketing Kit - Chapter 1

Snapshot of the Search Market

Search engine usage varies substantially from country to country. Here's a snapshot of the top ten search engines in various countries for a given week in December, 2004. The data was provided by Hitwise and should prove valuable to an SEM practitioner who wishes to target campaigns to any of these areas.

The most popular search engines visited by US Internet users for the week ending 12/18/04 are shown in Table 1.2.

Table 1.2. Popular Search Engines: USA

The most popular search engines visited by UK Internet users during the week ending 12/18/04 are displayed in Table 1.3.

Table 1.3. Popular Search Engines: UK

The most popular search engines visited by Australian Internet users in the week ending 12/18/04 are presented in Table 1.4.

Table 1.4. Popular Search Engines: Australia

The most popular search engines visited by New Zealand Internet users in that same week are shown in Table 1.5.

Table 1.5. Popular Search Engines: New Zealand

The most popular search engines visited by Hong Kong Internet users for the week ending 12/18/04 are as show in Table 1.6.

Table 1.6. Popular Search Engines: Hong Kong

The most popular search engines visited by Internet users in Singapore in the week ending 12/18/04 were as shown in Table 1.7 below.

Table 1.7. Popular Search Engines: Singapore

The Future of Search

While search engines today have, without a doubt, reached the point at which they're exceptionally useful, there's still a lot of work to be done before users can trust them for every type of search. Additionally, in terms of search success, a great deal still depends on user knowledge of individual systems.

Anticipated improvements in search technology lie in three major areas: localization, context, and the so-called Semantic Web. The first two deal primarily with gaining a better understanding of users' needs; the third offers opportunities to improve the efficiency of indexing and the quality of search results.

Localization

Many search engines offer local search options, whether they're explicit, such as Google's Local Search, currently in beta, or implicit. For instance, the addition of a zip/postal code to any search on Google or Yahoo! brings local search elements into action. Unfortunately, users aren't used to inputting a zip code when they search.

One of the most famous cities in the world is Springfield, the setting for the popular Simpsons cartoon series. It's sort of a running joke in the series that nobody knows which Springfield they're talking about—there are numerous towns of that name in the United States—although, in reality, the Simpsons live in a purely fictional city. This reflects a major challenge that's inherent in implicit local searches: many cities have the same name.

If an implicit local search isn't possible (as would be the case for a search on real estate Springfield), search engines can prompt users to clarify which city they're looking for—provided it can be identified as a city. But, what if someone searches for marketing wisdom? Do you know whether they want marketing advice, or marketing firms in Wisdom, Montana?

Part of the solution lies in the emerging geo-targeting technologies that attempt to identify users' locations on the basis of their IP addresses. This technology is already used by Google AdWords and Overture to let PPC advertisers target specific locations and exclude others.

Geo-targeting may be part of the overall localization solution, but the current methods suffer two problems that are not so easy to overcome. The first is the use of proxy servers by some Web users, especially those on corporate networks. The firewall through which these users access the Web may be housed a long way from their physical location. This becomes a significant issue with geo-targeting in PPC advertising campaigns, particularly in major business to business markets.

The second problem is that not all local searches are intended for the user's current location. If I'm sitting at my desk in Frisco, Texas, and I search for Cleveland hotels, a geo-targeting system might think that I'm looking for hotels in Cleveland, Texas instead of Cleveland, Ohio.

Given the popularity of the browser toolbar additions distributed by all the major search engines, it's possible that some user profile information may eventually be incorporated into the delivery of search results. That will take care of where the user is coming from. An even bigger problem is figuring out the geographic scope of a Website. The world headquarters of Exxon-Mobil, for example, are in Dallas, Texas, but someone searching for Exxon in Chicago just might be looking for a gas station closer to home.

To determine which country a Website belongs to can be tricky, too. For search engines like Google that offer country-specific search options, this is a very real problem. It's easy to include all sites that use the appropriate country's top level domain (such as .au for Australia), but many sites around the world use .com, .net, .biz, .info and other global TLDs. SitePoint.com, for example, is based in Australia, but serves a global audience. Google's solution is to use IP-based lookups to determine where the DNS servers for the domain are located, but this has caused more than a few problems, and it's basically a "better than nothing" solution.

Despite all these challenges, we can expect search engines to move forward with efforts to localize their search offerings. Localization holds the promise of more relevant results (which helps keep users loyal), and offers substantial profit gains for those using PPC advertising programs.

Context and Personalization

If there's one thing that's destined to shatter the old illusions about search engine optimization, it's the coming rise of context and personalization. Google and Microsoft have already shown personalized search offerings, and the results are simply too compelling to ignore.

Google's Personalized Search system invites the user to select one or more topics from a list, then returns search results that are slightly skewed toward those topics. Depending on the mix of topics selected, it's possible to produce very different results. This system shows how far Google has progressed in its implementation of topic distillation.

Microsoft's system isn't a product yet—it's still a research project—but it provides some very useful insights into the ways that the company's offerings may differ from those of other major players. Called "Stuff I've Seen," it's designed to confine a user's search to Websites or documents that they've already seen.

When you put these two ideas together—as someone certainly will—you get a search that's different for each user, depending on their browsing and searching history. The search toolbars that the major search engines offer as browser plug-ins are already very popular; all they need in order to extend these services is users' permission to gather and use their browse and search data.

Not everyone will climb aboard the personalized search bandwagon (privacy concerns will need to be allayed), but you can expect the search engines to make an effort to promote this kind of service in coming years. My bet is that the majority of users will be happy to share a little semi-anonymous information if it helps them find what they're looking for.

Search results for many queries already differ from one location to the next on some search engines. Given the compelling opportunities created by personalized search, will search engine rankings as we know them today even exist in 2006?

Structure and the Semantic Web

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has a plan for the future of the Web, or at least, the next version of it. The Semantic Web is built on top of the existing Internet structure, in a sense, in that it doesn't really involve eradicating the old Web. The Semantic Web is all about creating structure by providing a great deal more data about the different resources available online.

As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, some search engines already accept XML-based trusted feeds from some Websites, and/or read RDF Site Summary (RSS) files when they're available. Yahoo! has been particularly active in this area.

RSS, and Google-endorsed alternative Atom, are designed to let site owners provide more detailed and structured data about the resources available on their sites. In current practice, this is used mainly to provide news feeds for blogs, news sites, and similar content portals. Other sites can process these news feeds and make headlines and other information available to their visitors.

The Semantic Web is just beginning to take hold, but as more sites offer summaries and structured data, it is inevitable that search engines will find ways to make use of this new information source. It's not going to change the world tomorrow, but it's definitely the shape of things to come.

Summary

The main goal in this chapter was to provide a detailed picture of how search engines work, and where search results come from. To keep you from falling asleep, I've mixed in a few little tidbits and insights that you can use right away.

Note: Note to search engine marketing consultants: as you begin to think of yourself as a professional SEO or SEM consultant (and maybe you already do), I'm sure you can see how this kind of knowledge will help you position yourself in the eyes of clients. People trust experts, and you will certainly be seen as one if you can answer questions in detail, and clear up your client's own misconceptions about search engines.

The next chapter will dig more deeply into the process of search engine optimization, and introduce you to many of the practical aspects of what you've just learned.

That's it for this sample of The Search Engine Marketing Kit. What's next?

Download this chapter in PDF format, and you'll have a copy you can refer to at any time.

Review the kit's table of contents to find out exactly what's included.

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We hope you enjoy The Search Engine Marketing Kit.