bing logo

“Following speculation last week that Microsoft was planning to rebrand its search engine, the company has announced that it will be launching Bing on June 3rd.

In addition to a new name, Microsoft is re-positioning itself in the search market as not necessarily a better place to go for navigational queries (i.e. – where’s the official site for my city government?), but rather to help people make what the company is calling “complex decisions.”

For example, Bing is touting its ability to help you with searches in areas like shopping, travel, local businesses, and health-related research. These also happen to be high dollar areas when it comes to search advertising, so it’s no surprise Microsoft is highlighting them.

While you won’t be able to play with Bing until next week, the company has released a promotional site and a number of videos, including a product tour (note: requires Silverlight haha).

Judging from the video, it would appear that the rumors that Microsoft plans to attack Google (Google reviews) in their upcoming ad campaign are well-founded. For example, the line “telling you we found 47 million links isn’t always a great response to your query” is a clear shot at Google’s results.

The product does look significantly different than Microsoft’s current search effort – Live Search. Is it actually better than Google? It will take weeks of hands-on use to figure that out, and Microsoft will have to work hard to lure people into trying it out.

In addition to the ad campaign, Microsoft is bringing over its Cashback Rewards program, rebranded as Bing Cashback. Hitwise has indicated previously that this program, which pays people to use Live Search, is working well. Coupled with a better search engine (tbd), perhaps Microsoft will finally start to snatch at least a little bit of search marketshare from Google.

But in the end, it’s all about the search results, and that is something we’ll need to wait and see about.

stats chart for UK consumer behaviour on holiday searches vs. most things recession based

It’s official. We are in a recession. So in this time of crisis, where the latest news announcements can make a massive difference to the UK consumer, what are they searching for? News on Banking Crisis? Recession? Debt? Switching Suppliers?… or Holidays?

Yes, it appears that when the sh*t hits the fan we all decide to jump ship or at the very least fantasize about what might be (if we were not sitting in negative equity on a £400,000 broom cupboard in central London). In fact, Holiday searches are actually 14 times more popular than the nearest recession term. This may sound trivial but there can be real value for brands who use aspirational or escapist campaigns to promote their product or service during these tough times. Terry Cooney in his book Balancing Acts identifies the power and role media during the American depression of the 1930’s:

“Whether [media] offered visions of order restored, affirmations of work-centered values, or celebrations of a culture … they also held out images … that might be entered through mimicry or consumption.”

People do not want to be confronted with the depression of their daily lives or the fear of tomorrow. A successful campaign would help them focus on the ‘better tomorrow’ (or at least an escape from the ‘worse today’) that they can reach via the brand. With this in mind, one wonders if there has been a better time for the BA, Virgin Atlantic sales (environmental issues to one side)? There has always been a place for aspirational marketing to consumers but for the foreseeable future it’s a space that can be inhabited by more than just the aspirational brands. Now if only my bank could make me think about when it would be good to start saving with them again…

Why not have a play with the Beta of Google’s search insight tool for yourself and see what interesting facts you can find on UK or global search behaviour.

It is generally agreed that when we potter over to Google, hunting for enormously exciting topics to read about, we want it to return the best results possible for a search. But who or what should decide what those “best” results are? Option one – is a machine. Since its conception in 1998, Google has based results on its Page Rank™ algorithm. A method of measuring a page’s importance based on its incoming links, which – it is generally accepted – was Google’s major unique selling point. One of the keys to Page Rank’s success was its pure objectivity. All pages were born equal in Google’s eyes, and had to “earn” their rank by other pages “voting” for them via an incoming link. Google’s – or anyone else’s – personal opinion of a given page was effectively irrelevant.

However there are problems with this which first started to surface a few years ago. Google appeared to be struggling. With the Internet growing at a rate of 10 million pages per day, they appeared to be struggling to find a relevant page for all those obscure topics out there. The tiny amount of relevant content was slowly getting lost in all of the rubbish (and porn).

Option two – is a human. The best current example of a large human created information resource is Wikipedia. Written and reviewed by humans, Wikipedia is a collection of over 9.1 million pages covering almost all topics of interest. Because Wikipedia is peer reviewed so closely, you can almost guarantee a relevant page is returned, whether you’re searching for “Aabenraa”, “Zaafaraniyeh” or “Basil Brush” – the lovable anthropomorphic fox. But there are obvious problems with this. A human created resource is subject to bias. Even when reviewed by large numbers of people, cultural bias still exists.

So why is this relevant? Well – in my opinion – Google has hit a wall (again) when it comes to returning relevant content using purely machine learning. With the Internet now containing more than 1 trillion (that’s 1,000,000,000,000) pages, Google’s job in finding those top 10 relevant pages for a given term is now harder than ever. At the end of the day – for now at least – a computer cannot fully comprehend all of the possible variations a given search term could mean, and the relevance (if any) that those variations can have with each other.

One option Google has is to start applying human editorial judgement to their search results. This however would surely go against Google’s founding principle. Then again, there are signs that Google are starting to consider just that. Their Terms and Conditions used to state that “Google’s indices are indexed by Google’s automated machinery and computers”, but this disclaimer has now been removed. Perhaps the most interesting development to this effect is Google’s recent interface change. When you now perform a search on Google whilst signed in, you are graciously supplied with additional controls relating to their “SearchWiki”. As you can see from the image below, we are now given the options to “Promote” or “Remove” a URL (using the icons to the right of the page’s title).

Now initially, using these options only affects what you (you being the person currently signed into Google) see. However Marissa Meyer (Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google) has stated that “in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes”. Now this comment, made at Le Web conference in Paris last December, is enormously significant. This is – for the first time – Google admitting that they are going to use human generated information to affect their search results.

So what are the ramifications of this? Well I could go on for quite a while about these, but let’s just stick to the key factors. First, this is going to affect the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry. At present SEO “experts” can go about their task with the sure knowledge that Google will treat the site they’re working on with the pure, unemotional objectivity as every other site online. However once human subjectivity is added into the mixing bowl, all this changes. At this point it doesn’t matter if you have the perfect keywords in just the right positions around your site, if enough users don’t agree that your site matches the search term, then that alone could send it tumbling down the search results.

The other key factor is trust from the perspective of objectivity. One of the reasons for Google’s mass popularity is that when you enter a term to search for, you can be sure that the results returned are not there due to any bias, be it political, religious, cultural etc. However if Google do decide to go down this path, then it’s quite likely that we will start to see a bias on the side of those who choose to use tools such as the SearchWiki. This might not only affect our faith in Google, but more importantly – from Google’s perspective at least – advertisers’ trust in Google. After all, nobody is going to want to advertise with a company who appears to be favouring a competitor.

So what would you rather? An objective search engine run by a machine that returns ok results, or a subjective search engine run by humans that gives “better” results (assuming you side with the bias)?

As I sit here endlessly typing different search criteria into Google hoping that I will find some little gem that I have never stumbled on before, I can’t help feeling a little frustrated. As much as I can appreciate it is not nearly as interesting as any subject matter that Carrie Bradshaw would be chatting about, I do feel that it is for me, and others who share my job role in like-minded agencies, worth asking the question………..Why is there NO decent scheduling software available?

I told you it wasn’t riveting stuff and I’d like to say that I am urging people to tell me that I am wrong, or that I haven’t looked in the right places etc., and I am hoping that there may be some miracle out there that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and actually does what I need it to. People will laugh but scheduling is really important and yes yes I live for it, and in reality an agency can’t function properly without it. It would be great to find software that is easily updatable and makes it easy to get information across to the rest of the agency.

Every bit of software I come across is project management software. It all boasts some miracle time saving devise and the magic that is knowing everything regarding a project, and as important as this is, and yes it is important, I can’t for love nor money find a solution that actually deals with managing people. Not projects, not money but people and time.

All they seem to offer me is a calendar!!!!!!!! or if I’m lucky multiple calendars! I mean for crying out loud are you kidding me. I have, it has to be said, worked in this industry for longer than I care to admit, and I have been in an agency or two in my time, and all I ever come across is people who work in production or creative services who spend their lives updating excel documents like I do. So I see a gap in the market. An actual solution for agencies who want to deal with their sales pipelines, CRM of clients, general project management stuff, invoicing and yes somewhere to actually organise all deadlines and people. So someone I am hoping will hear my cry for help and point me in the right direction. Failing that I’ll ask my extremely clever development team to make me something spectacular.

The universe according to a true Londoner

Well, rather lost in Galaxy. A Tag Galaxy to be more specific. A nice new Flickr search tool from some German developers. A simple interface belies an engrossing site and slick animation touches that will have you hooked for some time.

Start by entering a tag for Flickr – being a Londoner my imagination stretched as far as ‘London’.

You can then zoom in to London or choose a ’satellite’ tag. Big Ben was my next obvious choice (my name being Benn, of course). The camera pans through space and shows the combined tag cloud.

Big Ben is my stage name...

The nice thing here is that planets are positioned based on the amount of relevant links they have. They also orbit your central tag. It’s all very pretty. You can go further by clicking a planet. Clicking the central planet produces a flat render of the planet and then the images start to appear in a quite majestic/ Matrix way…

What Big Ben looks like without any clothes

The photos are coming...

... like flies around (ahem).

The transformation is complete.

Then you just browse around the globe to find the image you want and zoom in – you can even go to the Flickr page.

corny Big Ben image

OK, so you can search on Flickr just as easily and a lot faster but who cares. This is a much more immersive and fun way of doing things and if you have the time to play and search for images then why not? You’ll soon find you’ll be clicking on planets, spinning them, rotating them on their axis, and thumbing through all the images contained inside. I wonder if they do an API of this? I feel a widget coming on…

Whilst looking for somewhere to live in London (that offers more than one bedroom for less than £1 million pounds and therefore is affordable on the income of someone who doesn’t own an Arab state’s oil reserves) I recently stumbled upon probably the best property website – Nestoria.

Nestoria is a website along the same lines as rightmove.com and FindaProperty.com – lots of properties brought together by one website. Where it differs is in the implementation of this idea. In my mind, Nestoria is how you would build a website to search for property if you really sat down and thought about it.

Borrowing heavily from Google, Nestoria has a number of features that make it stand out from the crowd:

• Uncluttered entry point
  Using the classic Google-style search page, Nestoria keeps the homepage simple. Everything is focussed on the one job at hand – identifying what you’re looking for.
• Intuitive functionality
  Start typing and a list of possible towns and areas appear. Sliders to pick minimum and maximum price as well as number of bedrooms. The whole site is filled with small features like this that make it very easy to use.
• API
  Again, taking the lead from Google, Nestoria offer an API to allow other developers to use the core engine. This feature in itself could well be the key to success – just look at the success of the Google maps API, used widely on the Internet (and on this site!)
• Cutting edge
  Nestoria provide not only an RSS feed of properties but also a geographically-focussed KML feed. The look and feel of the site is slick and technology is well used to improve the user experience. There’s even a Facebook app (although I’m not 100% convinced it has any purpose!)

It is interesting to see just how focussed the site is on the single job of finding property. There are no real details of any of the properties (pictures, floor plans etc..), it simply links off to other websites for these details.

The website is all about locating a property in an area, and finding out about that area. This is where Nestoria excels, providing information on census, local government, fire, health, parking, schools, shops, tax, transport and even photos of the area – everything you could need to know to get a feel for an area.

If there are any downsides it is perhaps that you can’t look at any photos of the houses (usually the one quick thing that gives me a thumbs up or thumbs down). And maybe the name “Nestoria”!

Overall a well executed property search engine… and I’m off to find a house!

On Tuesday I spent the day at the Being Digital Mashup conference. It was a really interesting and insightful day – although there were way too many pitches crammed into the programme.

For those of you that didn’t attend, I’ve put together a summary of the key predictions from the event, outlining what is going to happen within digital marketing over the next 5 years:

• Media fragmentation and the decline of mass audiences will continue as there will be constant shifts in the way consumers live their lives, but this should be seen as a positive instead of a negative. After all, ad spend can be reduced through advertising to smaller fragmented audiences, as there is less money wasted on irrelevant audiences. Advertisers will need to create innovative and targeted ‘marketing pieces’ for their consumers, reaching them via their niche channels.
• Although it is often thought that young people watch less TV than they used to, research shows that there has been a 10% increase in the time that 16-24 year olds spend watching TV each day (since 1997 their daily viewing has increased from 1.61 hours to 1.77) and this is likely to remain constant.
• The penetration of mobile internet is currently at 30%, but with continued promotion from the iPhone and other key players in the mobile industry, this is going to see huge growth.
• Most sites will have an element of social networking or online community in the near future, as consumers continue to want this functionality.
• Online shopping is not going to take over or replace offline retail. Research has proven that consumers like being able to use a combination of online, store and call centre when shopping, and when given this option to shop across multiple channels, consumers exhibit a higher degree of loyalty – their average relationship ‘lifetime’ with the brand is 2 ½ times greater which is very valuable. As a result, the future will see online and retail work hand-in-hand.

However, the two areas that I think are going to have the greatest significance over the next five years are branded content and location. Predictions for these topics are:

• Branded content is going to be huge over the next five years and brands are likely to benefit hugely from being associated with entertaining or relevant content, as indicated by Nigel Conway from Nestle. Their annual advertising budget currently stands at around £5bn, of which £3.5bn is spent on TV advertising. However, Nigel believes that in 7 years time, this £3.5bn will be spent on branded content. Research has shown that branded content is the most popular of all advertising formats, with 67% of all consumers finding it acceptable or valuable.
• Location is going to play a major part over the next few years, as GPS and mobile internet become more widespread. We all know how to find things on a map if we have the postcode, and with GPS we will all know where people are located – but the key question is how do marketers use this data to add real value to consumers? Many companies are trying to create 3D search interfaces and immersive environments for consumers but at the moment they are too expensive and very difficult to develop, and despite all efforts the interfaces are really hard to use.

My prediction is that whoever can create a user friendly, and ultimately useful and valuable location mashup for consumers will be much much richer in the next five years.

Lycos Europe, one of the dominating search giants of the 90s, is now up for auction. Unable to compete with Google’s power, the search engine ran into net losses of EUR 5.9 million for the first quarter this year, according to PaidContent.

Dresdner Kleinwort is now Lycos’ advisor in its bid to find a new strategy – which should clearly start with trimming their fat. They don’t need to be so big to be competitive. Small and flexible teams are really successful today, because they can react quickly to the frequent changes in the Internet world – something that Lycos has not done.

However, this may be difficult for Lycos. There have already been a number of cost-cutting measures undertaken at Lycos Europe recently, eliminating around EUR 6.2 million. But there were still losses.

Good luck to whoever takes Lycos on…

It’s an idea and ideas are a good thing. Ideas that contribute to energy efficiency are even better. So set Blackle as your homepage and do your bit.