Google Plus Box Coming to Financial Queries
March 7, 2007
The Google Plus box has received a lot of attention lately in local queries. The new expanded results for financial data will be rolling out soon for financial queries.
Right now, if one searches for a stock symbol, it’s pretty straightforward that one is looking for financial data, so Google shows the information directly in the search result.
However, for ambiguous queries where one might be looking for financial data, or might be looking for something different, Google is adding the Plus Box to the results.
Here’s a screenshot of the plus box for ‘General Electric’:
Google has done a nice job of allowing for more information to be found in a search result without cluttering the initial results.
My question is: Is adding all of this additional information directly into the search results lowering the amount of traffic Google sends to websites?
When Google launched, their goal was for someone to spend as few seconds as possible on their search results. If they delivered the perfect search result, then one could go from a result to a webpage in moments.
Now, with additional information being added to the search page itself, does this keep more users just on the search page, and not going to additional places for information in some instances?
Yahoo Developer Network Launches Code Search
February 14, 2007
Yahoo just announced that you can now search the Yahoo Developer Network code base using Krugle.
I found this interesting as I just did a quick writeup on my favorite code search engines in which someone from Krugle responded a couple of times.
Google Maps Now Showing Subway Icons
February 11, 2007
Google maps has recently started showing subway stops on maps. It seems much more prominent to see these icons on the directions page than on the general maps page.
However, if you were traveling to Chicago, this map would be quite confusing.
First off, several of those metros don’t connect. While the pins mark the stations, Chicago has several different trains that run downtown (named ‘the el’) and one often has to switch trains (and know where to transfer) to find a destination.
The second aspect is that mapping software doesn’t seem to take under ground vs above ground into determining directions. I will admit that the above is probably a trick query, it’s for Intelligentsia Coffee’s Pedway location (the pedway is an underground walkway that connects several parts of downtown Chicago. There’s no way to drive to this location, but you’d never know it from the map’s directions.
Overall, it’s probably a precursor of things to come. It would be very useful to be able to use a search engine’s mapping site to find public transportation directions. New York and Chicago can be difficult cities to navigate by car. It’s often faster and easier (once one understands the systems) to use public transportation. However, easy access to that information can sometimes be difficult.
Transitchicago.com is useful for finding door to door public transportation directions. However, if you’re trying to find a restaurant, read reviews, see what’s close, and then want directions to that restaurant, a search engine is the more logical choice to find that information.
Hopefully, we can look forward to finding public transportation directions on maps.google.com sometime in the near future. It would be an extremely useful tool.
Favorite Code Search Engines
February 10, 2007
Being only slightly technical, I like to use code search engines to find examples that are being implemented or help files without the clutter of non-relevant sites.
Here are my favorite code search engines:
http://www.allthecode.com - This one is good for java and some more technical code. It’s not great for finding example code on webpages.
http://www.google.com/codesearch - This is one of my favorites for finding onpage code.
http://www.krugle.com - Allows you to search for code by specific language. Sometimes I don’t find what I’m looking for, especially when it’s onpage.
http://www.koders.com - This one seems to be the most complete as far as finding information. However, sometimes it can be clunky to use as the UI isn’t always intuitive.
Google adds Maps to Main Search Results
July 17, 2006
Google has often included vertical search results within it’s main results. Often these are from Google Base or Google Local. Google has recently added a new twist on this feature and started showing map results when the search is an explicit business name.
If you want to check to see if a map comes up for your business, the first thing is to do an explicit search of ‘Your Business Name’ and ‘Your City’. If you don’t see a map in the results, there seem to be two different answers. The first is that your business is not listed in Google Local (more on how to be listed below). The second is that there are many locations and Google isn’t quite sure which results to display. Results for Wal-mart, Target, Starbucks did not bring up a map in Google Search.
Let’s first look at the three types of results Google may show on a local query.
Ads are sponsored listings through Google AdWords.
Local results are from Google Local or Google Base.
Organic results are from the natural listings.
Now, let’s take a more in depth look at the possible inventory.
When you see a result like this in the ‘local ad space’ from above, this is a prompt to do a search on Google Base. Listings can be either hand submitted or feed submitted to Google Base.
When you see results with many addresses in them, Google is pulling these listings from Google Local. One can get into Google local by submitting a business directly (requires a pin number to be mailed to you, and then verification. Often takes 4-8 weeks for the entire process to be completed.) or by submitting a feed.
This is the brand new result that Google is now showing. If your business is not in Google Local, it appears that a map will not show for your business. To ensure your business will show up for these results, you need to submit your business to Google Local (or use a service, discussed below).
This is a local.google.com search result. By searching through Google Local, one can determine if your business is in their index. What is interesting about Google local is that a submission may not show up exactly as you submitted it to Google. Basically, Google looks at all the sources it has for a particular business, does some algorithm magic, and then displays what it thinks are the proper results.
In most cases, this works fairly well. However, if you move, change your business phone number, or any information, often the new information will not be shown because in it’s ranking formula, your new information looks incorrect as there is so much other information that is telling Google it’s still the old information.
How does one get their business into Google Local?
There are a few ways. The first is to submit to the Google Business Center. This requires you to first submit your information. Then, Google will email you a pin number (takes 4-6 weeks). Then you must input your pin number into the account your created. Finally, when Google re-compiles their local index, your business will be listed.
The second way is to submit to Google Base. You can login with your Google account and create a listing all about your business. In about 6 weeks, that information will be submitted to Google Local. Again, once the index is recompiled, then your business will be listed.
The last way is to use a Business Distribution Service. Such a service will take your business information and submit it to many local search properties (such as Yahoo Local, Superpages, Judy’s Book, etc). The leader in business data distribution is
RegisterLocal. There, you can create a profile of your business, track all kinds of results (such as phone calls, map views, etc), and even use it for a marketing landing page so that you can see the effectiveness of internet marketing for your business.
MSN Ignoring Robots.txt Files
May 13, 2006
Is MSN ignoring robots.txt files?
Here’s a screenshot from the MSN search for ‘Marissa Meyer’:
Here’s a screenshot of Google.ca’s robots.txt file:
Seems there’s a discrepancy between Google’s robots.txt file disallowing search results to be indexed and MSN having indexed the Google file: www.google.ca/search?q=marissa+meyer+google.
Might be time to start checking MSN results to make sure certain files aren’t being indexed.
Ask Jeeves Final Video and Future Outlook
March 23, 2006
Killing Jeeves might have been one of the most understated viral marketing efforts in quite some time. The SEM community is not known for giving in to viral marketing efforts and sending links, press, and traffic towards these efforts. However, Ask managed to pull it off for several consecutive months.
By announcing the death of an icon months in advance of the actual undertaking, Ask garnered more press from both the SEM community and from main stream media than it had in the previous year (or more). Their query share did not change significantly, however, there community awareness did.
The culmination of this effort was a video and final farewell party at SES in New York. The party centered around a Star Wars Han Solo encased in carbonite theme (pictures on the Ask Blog here).
Ask has a smart marketing department, and the entire death and new releases seemed to be well planned as they didn’t stop at the death of Jeeves. Shortly after his death, Ask has tried to capitalize on the heightened awareness of their product by introducing:
- Maps
- Encyclopedia
- Kids
- Desktop
- Ask Netherlands
- Ask France
- Ask Italy
His death was only a few weeks ago - that’s quite a plethora of offerings in a short time span. While Ask might currently have a small query share, they are the player to watch this year. In order for Ask to really capitalize on their new branding, the time todo so is right now.
If you’re going to watch someone attempt to grab query share from Google this year, it’s going to be Ask vs MSN. Google will maintain the lead, Yahoo will continue to ride in second place with a respectable number, but the dog fight is going to be Ask and MSN fighting for every additional query and user they can recruit to their properties.
It should be a fun few months to watch these two maneuver around the web and the additional offerings they bring to users in their recruiting efforts.
Goodbye to Jeeves - The Final Video:
Hitbox’s Conversion Information Only Tells Half The Story
February 19, 2006
Hitbox released conversion stats by search engine. However, those statistics only tell part of the story. When determining where and how to advertise, those are not statistics one should rely upon to make financial decisions.
All traffic converts differently by industry, offer, search engine, paid, organic, b2b, b2c, etc. While averages are good to know for benchmarking your own success, it should not be used as a solid figure until you have all the facts associated with any study.
Here are the conversion numbers from the Hitbox Press Release:
| Search Engine | Median Conversion Rate |
| AOL | 6.17% |
| MSN | 6.03% |
| Yahoo! | 4.07% |
| 3.83% |
Hitbox did make note of the following two items:
- Study examines only the conversion rate, not the ROI generated by each major search engine
- E-commerce sample: The select business-to-consumer e-commerce sites used in this study generate more than $3 billion in annual online sales
One other important consideration to note in this study, WebSideStory officials said, is that the conversion rates are likely higher than industry averages because the sample sites are using best-of-class web analytics to improve their search engine marketing and optimization.
Source: Hitbox Press Release
What this table doesn’t show:
- PPC vs Organic Conversions
- Content Match vs Search Conversions
- Rich media & Banner Ad Conversions
If one considers the Organic vs PPC Click Through Rates on any search engine results page from this ClickZ Article:
| Engine | Natural Search Results % | Paid Ads % |
| All Engines | 60.5 | 39.5 |
| 72.3 | 27.7 | |
| Yahoo! | 60.8 | 39.2 |
| AOL | 50 | 50 |
| MSN | 28.8 | 71.2 |
It is possible, the PPC vs Organic Conversion Rates could look like this:
| Search Engine |
% Organic Traffic | Organic Conversion Rate | % PPC Traffic | PPC Conversion Rate | Overall Conversion Rate |
| 72.3 | 3% | 39.5 | 7.27% | 5.04% | |
| Yahoo! | 60.8 | 5.1% | 27.7 | 3.51% | 4.07% |
| AOL | 50 | 3% | 39.2 | 11.91% | 6.17% |
| MSN | 28.8 | 5% | 71.2 | 6.44% | 6.03% |
Note: The above chart is for explaining a point - it is not based on any factual numbers.
In the above chart, we suddenly have a very different picture of what could be the potential highest converting traffic sources for each search engine.
While, with any numbers, we could make assumptions (like on Google, due to the PPC relevancy factors, PPC conversions are higher than organic listings or maybe, due to how Yahoo appears on those with a 800×600 screen resolution, surfers click a lot of ads at the top of the page, but the higher conversion rates come from those looking further into the search results) - they are just that: assumptions.
Test your traffic by source. Not just by engine. Not just by PPC. Test traffic by source (PPC, organic, banners) by engine by keyword.
Only by drilling down into the conversions can one really understand how various traffic streams convert for your particular website.
Microsoft to Power Blogs through Xbox
January 28, 2006
Microsoft’s Xbox, it’s flagship gaming product, is going to incorporate the Xbox with Spaces (Microsoft’s blogging platform) and then allow bloggers to monetize the blogs with Kanoodle (as reported by eWeek).
Microsoft’s impossible to find Xbox is internet enabled. Its users make up much of the ever elusive 18-25 male demographic. To date, the Xbox has allowed one to organize music and some other features, but hasn’t had any major internet capabilities outside of the gaming concept.
Kanoodle is a pay per click service that also serves contextual ads (ads based upon the text of a webpage).
This deal could allow Xbox users to post directly to a blog, keep track of high scores, cheats, tips, and anything else related to gaming (or just their life in general as many blogs are very similar to diaries), and make money off of the ads. Most likely it would be a revenue sharing deal with Microsoft. MS will handle the ad serving, the gamers write the content, they split the ad revenue.
A combination of gamers, blogging, and PPC ads could bring in the best of many worlds for Microsoft. It brings an elusive demographic into a centralized ad serving environment. It has the gamers creating the content, thus allows Microsoft to expand its content base with other people’s writings. To ‘pay’ these writers, it splits the profits with them.
How one will post to Spaces, opt in to the impossible-to-find-Xbox blogging platform, have ad control, and all the small details have yet to be released.
While this seems like small news, it’s a huge step in what I think is Microsoft’s real goal: To control the living room.
Roughly half of the US income is disposable; meaning it is spent on items besides the standard bills & rent. The leading portion of this disposable income is spent on entertainment: anything from iPods to game to DVDs to flat panel TVs, etc. We are an entertainment driven culture.
In the past, control of the living room has been in the hands of the major TV, stereo, and gaming console creators. Microsoft threw its hat into this lucrative market with the media PC and Xbox.
By combining the living room, the internet, and the associated entertainment into a single environment, it seems Microsoft has hopes of further controlling this disposable income. The last offering to really try to combine the living room with the internet was WebTV. WebTV didn’t have a lot of success, but did teach others some good lessons on combining these various aspects.
This interesting combination of the Xbox with the internet also has underpinnings of its own ’social network’ akin to Yahoo’s 360, Friendster, or MySpace. Social networking has been brought up time and time again over the past year by the major players as a way of recruiting and maintaining a stable user base. The goal is to have that user base vested in the site, friends, and content - thus the network owner can offer many free offerings to keep and grow the base, and the user base is thus monetized through ads or subscription fees. Its seen by many as a win-win combination. The user base has the chance to become part of a community and receive their own ’space’ on the web while the network makes money on the user base through a variety of means.
It has yet to be seen how Microsoft will combine all of these aspects in a central environment with the Xbox and Spaces. However, the concept is brilliant. The execution and adoption of users will be the ultimate decider of how well the play is executed.
Yahoo admits no one can detect every fraudulent click
December 31, 2005
Google and Yahoo owe a lot of their growth to the pay per click phenomena of advertising. The majority of Google’s total income (estimates are around 98% of their total income) is from search based advertising.
Pay per click (PPC for short) is a simple system where advertisers bid on a keyword, and then when someone searches that keyword (often called a user query) on a search engine, the advertisers ad is displayed along with the usual search results. If a user clicks on the advertiser’s ad, then the advertiser is charged based on how much they are willing to spend per click.
Advertisers only pay when a searcher clicks on an ad, hence, pay per click.
Click fraud has been unofficially labeled as clicks on pay per click ads originating from illegitimate sources. This can occur for a large variety of reasons from advertisers competition to publishers wishing to line their pockets.
Click fraud has been widely discussed over the past year. The most recent mainstream press was from a Wired article that received some excellent discussion in a WMW thread.
It’s pretty common for search engines to be tight lipped about click fraud, detecting clicks, and what users can do about it.
While click fraud is an issue, so are traffic spikes that appear to be fraud - but aren’t. A syndicated ad onto the front page of CNN or ESPN can receive a huge traffic spike, unfortunately, often these additional clicks don’t always turn into additional sales.
News can also trigger these spikes. In fact, on the same page that Yahoo admits the potential for click fraud, they also acknowledge traffic spikes:
Some keyword markets have a lot of volatility in their quantity of clicks, sometimes leading to traffic spikes that might be interpreted as fraudulent activity. Imagine how many added clicks bidders for the term “Janet Jackson” received after the infamous Super Bowl incident. If you see an unexplained surge in traffic, it can often be related to a news story. Our Click-Through Protection team is trained to identify these click spikes and their possible legitimate sources.
This is a very accurate statement by Yahoo. On several occasions there have been large traffic spikes for niche keywords that appear to be click fraud based on historical search history. However, investigation into the traffic often shows why the spike happened and that they were legitimate visitors.
This is also one reason that it’s very important to stay on top of the news and your keywords. If the advertisers for ‘Janet Jackson’ had anticipated the additional traffic and paused those keywords, they wouldn’t have received clicks from those searching for additional info on the incident.
However, this isn’t to say one should always pause keywords when a story breaks. There are times that a news story can propel sales as well as additional traffic. One must determine user intent for the search on those keywords to make an appropriate decision.
Back to the click fraud issue. While Yahoo has made a few public statements (and many in private at conferences), Google has stayed very quiet about how they track fraudulent clicks. Yahoo has mentioned a few points, however, this is one of the more specific published pieces of information to date:
Yahoo! Search Marketing’s click protection systems are in operation 24 hours a day, monitoring each click and filtering out those that are questionable or clearly unqualified. To do this, we track search-and-click patterns across more than 50 data points—including IP address, users’ session information and browser information, and pattern recognition—to help detect invalid clicks.
50 data points is quite a lot . I’ve hard Google engineers discuss in private that they do snapshots of browser versions, screen resolution, if cookies and java are enabled, etc - and put together information about a system to help determine if someone moving through anonymous proxies is in fact the same system, hence, it could be related to click fraud.
Onto the juicy part, Yahoo admits no one can detect every fraudulent click.
From the Yahoo Search Marketing Handbook:
We acknowledge that no system, no matter how sophisticated, can detect every invalid click. While bid prices will ultimately reflect the true quality of the traffic, Yahoo! Search Marketing continues to spend substantial time and money to make sure that our technology leads the industry. To further our efforts, we also rely on, and encourage, our advertisers to bring possible invalid clicks to our attention.
This is a very interesting acknowledgment. It’s also very true. Click fraud done randomly with sophisticated technology is nearly impossible (if not completely impossible) to detect.
While the click fraud department probably receives both many cases of fraudulent and legitimate clicks, there have been many stories about Yahoo just giving refunds when the traffic doesn’t ‘appear right’. This could be a case where a word had a sudden spike in traffic for no reason. Of course, Yahoo doesn’t state if they found illegitimate clicks, but they go ahead and refund the money anyway as the traffic just doesn’t adhere to a normal pattern.
I do believe the media has made more out of click fraud that actually exists. Often these stories are spurred on by ‘click fraud detection companies’. Since these companies receive more clients the more they can convince the public click fraud is a huge issue, of course they like the spin that click fraud makes up a large percentage of all visitors.
In any case, it is interesting to note what Yahoo has published in this new handbook (which is an excellent read if you use Yahoo Search Marketing PPC).
The general consensus of click fraud in 2006 looks like this:
- Click fraud will continue to be an issue.
- The search engines will continue to develop better technology in fighting it.
- Frauders will continue to develop better systems for perpetuating click fraud.
- Advertisers sit in the middle, monitor their clicks, and suffer the consequences of fraud.
Many of the media stories about click fraud leave the impression that advertisers are very helpless in the issue. However, many marketers have stated that they adjust bids by conversion and ROI (return on investment) so click fraud is already taken into account based on the various markets. In these instances, the total dollars available to the search engines don’t rise. If click fraud were less prevalent, these advertisers would just bid higher as their conversion rates would be even higher.
So who does click fraud really hurt? Actually, everyone. Due to the media stories, less advertisers try search marketing. The less marketers, the less search engines make. And don’t forget the searchers - they do like (and click) on these ads (the proof is in Google’s net worth and advertisers ROI).
It’s good to see Yahoo acknowledge click fraud. Only by search engines and advertisers working together will it be stopped. One group alone doesn’t have enough data to see all the search and click patterns. Without all of the data patterns, there is no way to tell if clicks are legitimate or fraudulent. If everyone starts to work together in data collection and sharing, then click fraud will start to be a battle that the PPC engines can win.
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