Think search engines are about searching? Think Again!

posted by Carolyn @ 5:15 PM

This presentation has also been published as an article in Information Outlook, March 2004.
http://www.workingfaster.com/2004_business_of_search_engines_final.pdf

The PowerPoint presentation is available through the conference website.
http://www.mla.mb.ca/conference/2005/presentations/Vine.ppt

During this fast-paced and engaging presentation, Rita covered the following topics.

• Why is Search So Hot?
• What Business Are Search Engines in?
• 3 Factors for Search Engine Success
• Keyword Buying Basics
• How Paid Listings Affect Search Results
• How to Search Smarter
  

She also assured us from the beginning that if you feel like you can’t keep up, you’re right. The business of search engines is very complex and changing rapidly. The best strategy seems to be to focus on a few basic concepts and not worry about the details.

Why is Search So Hot?

Why is search so hot? The answer to this question lies in the fact that high-income earners use the web more. Add to this that cookie technology enables better tracking of the marketing and purchasing process, from who clicks on an ad through to who makes a purchase.

What Business Are Search Engines in?

What business are search engines in? Why the advertising business, don’t you know. Even Google has what Rita calls a split personality: as a search savior and an ad-monger. While they are still the only search engine with “pure” results (without paid placement in the results ranking), Google still place ads on top of and to the right of the search results. Apart from ads served up with search results, Google’s AdSense program acts as a third party between advertisers and other websites, generating revenue for websites by placing context sensitive ads on them.

3 Factors for Search Engine Success

One look at the three factors for search engine success (traffic, relevant results and monetization) and it quickly becomes apparent that just because you’re a good search engine doesn’t mean you’re a good business. You have to be making money off of your traffic and relevant results. Can we blame the search engines for being ad machines or should we look instead to our own belief that we can get something for nothing (search results without commercial influence)?

At this point, Rita mentioned another interesting aspect of the search engine business: that of search engines such as Yahoo and Google delivering their content to other search engines such as AOL Search (content from Google) and AltaVista (content from Yahoo). Bruce Clay at http://bruceclay.com has an excellent interactive resource (Search Engine Relationship Chart) that demonstrates the relationships between the various search engines (who feeds who). Below is a linked image of the chart.



Keyword Buying Basics

So how do advertisers get their ads into search engines? It’s called keyword buying. Advertisers buy the keyword searches they want to have associated with their advertising. Whenever you search for “network printers,” your search results are going to include sponsored links from businesses who want to sell you network printers. There are many variables to keyword buying from paid placement on the front page of search results to “pay per click” (PPC) where advertisers only pay for each click on their advertisement.

Keyword buying and paying for placement in search results has become so essential to getting visits to a site that even government websites have been forced to use it in order to increase site traffic. Yet another way that online content providers may be forced into keyword buying is through the advent of local searches. These searches return local advertising based on the searcher’s IP address. Websites will only be listed in the search results if they pay for placement linked to IP addresses.

A final way in which content providers are forced to advertise is by the sheer size of search engine indexes. Indexes have increased in size from 2B pages in 2003 to 10B pages in 2005. As the indexes increase in size, the relevancy of the results goes down and pressure on content providers increases in order to have a favorable placing in the results.

How Paid Listings Affect Search Results

If you think that Google search results are still safe because they keep the ads separate, there is still a secondary effect from ads in that they affect the number of time a site is linked to (more awareness means more people linking) and these in turn affect the pure search results based on page ranking.

Another way in which paid listings affect search results over time can be seen in meta search engines where the results coming from other search engines have been stripped of any indication of paid placement. While a meta-search engine such as Vivisimo may use innovative clustering technology, it is a case of garbage in, garbage out with the content that is being returned in the search results.

How to Search Smarter

Rita predicts that the future of search will see a decline in capability and utility for public free search as the development of better search algorithms will only be done for private intranets. Organization will resort to licensed search tools (at a cost) just to get better quality free information that they can’t locate any other way.

Her suggestions for searching the internet beyond Google include:

• Findarticles.com
• 5 star subject starters such as Librarians Index to the Internet, InfoMine, etc.
• Advanced Google tricks such as limiting searches to .edu domain or .pdf file type
  

Google is easy, research is hard.