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Search Industry Maturing
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor,
StepForth Placement Inc. (http://www.stepforth.com)
(c) 2005

This has been yet another week of tremendous change in the
search sector. Several announcements competed for space with
each other over the past seven days, each of which adds to the
growing tapestry of services that comprise the search-marketing
metaverse.

The search engine marketing industry has evolved as users began
to take advantage of new features, tools and innovations offered
by search engines. An example of previous evolutionary periods
would be the emergence of pay-per-click advertising and the
attendant rise of search-marketing firms specializing in AdWords
and Overture. As long as there are methods for finding and
retrieving information in digital databases by using keywords or
similar identifiers, there will be a search-marketing industry.
How that industry operates in the future depends on how the
search engines operate and how consumer-tendencies evolve.

Will the Butler Go Big?
The biggest story was the $1.85-billion acquisition of Ask
Jeeves by InterActiveCorp (IAC), the online vertical-sales
empire built by Barry Diller. Ask Jeeves is considered the
fourth most influential search firm, however it remains firmly
in the shadow of the Big-3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN). IAC owns
many of the largest Internet properties including, Hotels.com,
Expedia, Ticketmaster, CitySearch and Match.com. It also owns
the Home Shopping Network and is finalizing the purchase of the
massive US catalogue retailer Cornerstone Brands. The addition
of an Ask Jeeves powered search box to every one of IAC's
websites is expected to be the first obvious effect from the
acquisition. Another almost instant effect is the sudden increase
in the relevance of Ask Jeeves. The sheer size of IAC and the
number of additional services that can be offered under the Ask
Jeeves brand will almost certainly increase their user numbers,
which have held steady around the 5% mark for almost two years.
The addition of a fourth entity to the current "Big-3" would add
more diversity for search engine users as Teoma (the actual
engine that powers Ask Jeeves) uses a unique and very accurate
ranking algorithm.

As Ask Jeeves becomes more relevant to search engine users, it
will in turn become more relevant to search engine optimizers.
This is encouraging because like MSN and Yahoo, Teoma places far
more weight on site-content and relational linking than it does
on the sheer number and relevance of links like Google does.
With three of the largest four search engines more interested in
what a site says than what its link partners do, the art of SEO
copy-writing might replace the artful dodge of link-spamming as
the "trick" consumers associate with SEO.

Expanding Real Estate Through Better Technology
The activity of the first three months of this year has started
to change how most users relate to search. The Internet is
fundamentally a user-driven environment. While the possibility
exists that a thousand geniuses hunched over their keyboards
might produce something as powerful as a Shakespearian script,
that something is useless if Internet users don't adopt it. When
Internet users do choose to adopt a new technology or product,
they tend to do so in droves, thus fundamentally changing the
environment. A recent example would be the rise of the
Bloggosphere. Three years ago, most journalists had never heard
of bloggers. Today, so many bloggers consider themselves
journalists the face of journalism has changed.

For search marketers, environmental changes borne by the mass
adoption of new technologies can be both boon and bust.
Historically, the rise of Google changed the practices of the
search engine optimization sector by forcing link-building as an
increasingly complicated component in most campaigns. The rise
in popularity of Blogs gave search marketers a lot of new real
estate to play with which, in turn, forced Google to lower the
importance of Blogs as an information source in its index.
Google is only one example of how a chain-reaction of change
affecting the search sector can cause a chain of events
affecting the larger Internet environment.

Another example is the pending emergence of audio and video
files as components of search. Each of the Big-3, along with AOL
and Ask Jeeves is interested in capitalizing on commercial video
and/or audio content. This is a realm where two forces dictate
the actions of the search engines. The first is trend - lines
being drawn by Internet users including a rise of interest in
"pod-casting", video-conferencing/education, and image/video
sharing. The second force is the ability (and willingness) of
advertisers to adapt their online-marketing channels to meet new
technical challenges.

The days of a website being a picture that contained a thousand
words are long over. Today's successful websites can be found
using a multiple number of search-tools such as; image search,
local search, video search, audio search and organic search. A
successful search-campaign also involves making sure a reference
to the site is virtually forced on users through contextual
advertising programs such as Overture and AdWords. The
establishment of a corporate blog for clients is the last step
of a highly sophisticated search marketing campaign. By offering
better technologies, search engines offer marketers much larger
tracts of real estate to work from. User adoption of many of
these technologies pushes search marketers to figure out how to
best use them as well.

Moving to Mainstream
Ultimately, the effect of user adoption of new technologies
makes the Internet an increasingly important tool in most
people's real-life experiences. Many grandparents who witnessed
the birth of the automobile and air-travel adopted Email to stay
in-touch with grandchildren who often live hundreds of miles away
(another example of social change borne by the mass adoption of
technology, several generations ago). Many suggest if the
grandparent phenomena didn't manifest the way it did, AOL would
never have grown, CD-duplication might not have evolved so
quickly, and makers of real drink-coasters wouldn't have gone
out of business. The point is a massive group of users made AOL
important by becoming early adopters of the service. AOL became
mainstream because a huge chunk of the market adopted AOL. A
similar phenomenon is happening in the search engine marketing
industry.

Over the past two years, the world of big business became a very
active participant in search marketing. Vague interest had
existed in previous years, however search was seen as a chaotic
world that could rarely be quantified in a board meeting. It was
the rise of Overture and AdWords that put "search" in the center
of corporate radar screens. Pay-per-click advertising became a
dominant business model simply because mainstream business
managers saw a system they could fully understand. Even though
PPC tends to cost more and produce poorer results than organic
placements, corporate advertisers continue to buy-in to a system
they can easily explain to others. The adoption of PPC by major
advertisers has had a highly beneficial effect on the long-term
business of search but a somewhat detrimental effect on the
short-term business of search marketing. The amazing
distribution of paid-search advertising through contextual
delivery programs (such as Google's AdSense or Gmail and
Overture's Content Match), made PPC advertising appear to be a
multi-basket carrier for the eggs of corporate advertising.
While corporate advertisers might have adopted PPC advertising,
Internet users, for the most part, have not. A culture-gap in
the adoption of search-technologies now exists between
advertisers and consumers. With large amounts of money poured
into paid results users tend to click far less often then they
do with organic results. It is also the reason many Fortune 1000
companies are not found in the Top10 organic results under
keywords relating to their products or services.

This culture-gap has led to a shift in the thinking and
strategies of search engine marketers. When examining how search
engine users work with search results, it has been noted that
user's eyes follow an F pattern. Searchers look up and down to
mentally rank results and then closely examine the Top5 organic
results before their attention trails to those "below the fold"
and the PPC results that tend to appear to the right hand side
of the screen. This user behaviour, combined with a tendency to
heavily research before purchasing, is the cornerstone of the
emerging Search as Branding concept of marketing. This concept
states that search is simply another form of advertising, taking
advantage of one or more increasingly mainstream information
channels to express a message on behalf of a client. While it
might be a more sophisticated medium, it is still a mainstream
medium where what works and what does not work is dictated
entirely by the users. The key to the Search as Branding theory
is repeated placement across as much real estate as possible.

As the technology behind search matures, so does the industry
serving businesses using search as a means of advertising.
Business is growing in the search sector as innovation spurs
innovation and change begets change. Clearly, Internet users are
about to be presented with a revolution of information and
entertainment options, some of which will change the very nature
of how our society relates to finding and retrieving
information. The search marketing industry thrives on real
estate and the ultimate effect of the evolution of search is a
larger share of much more interesting real estate to work with.

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Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing
expert based in Victoria BC.  Jim writes and edits full-time for
StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine
Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes
the opportunity to share his experience through interviews,
articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at
jimhedger@stepforth.com
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