SLOW Movement

NY Times: Using Google's Data to Reach Consumers

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December 22, 2011

Using Google’s Data to Reach Consumers

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

THE viruses that Google researchers usually focus on are those that strike computers, but in recent years, they have studied those that infect people, too.

Google correlated billions of flu-related Web searches from 2003 to 2008 with actual Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data over the same period. Then, because Web searchers’ Internet addresses indicated location, Google devised a formula to estimate regional flu activity based solely on searches, with a reporting lag of only about a day, outdoing C.D.C. flu reports, which typically are published a week or two after outbreaks.

In 2009, researchers from Google and the C.D.C. wrote an article summarizing their findings in the journal Nature, and stated that the new predictive model — now called Google Flu Trends and accessible in an interactive format online — could be a boon to public health. “Up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics,” they wrote.

What the researchers probably did not predict was that the Google flu data would end up being the cornerstone of an advertising campaign.

For the Vicks Behind Ear Thermometer, a new product that determines temperature when placed in the soft area behind the ear, marketers wanted to reach mothers, the primary purchasers of thermometers.

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A mobile campaign by Blue Chip Marketing Worldwide, which is based in Chicago, places the ads for the thermometer within popular apps like Pandora that collect basic details about users, including their sex and whether they are parents, and can pinpoint specific demographics to receive ads.

But not all mothers will see the ad on their smartphones. Rather, the ads will be sent only to devices that, according to Google, are in regions experiencing a high incidence of flu. Also, the ads will only be delivered to mothers within two miles of retailers that carry the thermometer, including Walmart, Target and Babies “R” Us.

“Flu levels in your area are high,” says the banner ad within an app. “Be prepared with Vicks revolutionary Behind Ear Thermometer.”

Tapping the ad, which also notes the nearest store that sells the thermometer (“Buy at Rite Aid .3 miles away.”), brings users to a product page with items including an informational video and a list of nearby retailers. Tapping a retailer reveals directions there.

Also handling the campaign, which was introduced in a limited way early in December and will be at full throttle when flu season peaks in January and February, is Where, the location-based mobile advertising network that is a division of PayPal, a unit of eBay.

“It understands how this mom lives and shops, and she receives the message in the most relevant manner,” said Stanton Kawer, chief executive of Blue Chip, about the campaign. “It is so fantastically targeted that it’s really amazing.”

The new thermometer is made by Kaz, which through licensing agreements markets thermometers under the Vicks and Braun brands (both owned by Procter & Gamble), and which also makes Vicks humidifiers.

Sales for thermometers follow flu season, picking up in October, peaking in January and February, and tapering off in March and April, according to Lara Peterson, a vice president for marketing at Kaz, a subsidiary of Helen of Troy Limited.

Smartphones are used by 53 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 and 64 percent of those 25 to 34, according to Nielsen. Google reports that 79 percent of owners use them for shopping purposes like comparing prices and locating a retailer.

Organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics now recommend against mercury thermometers (citing the danger of both mercury and glass). Sales of digital thermometers are up, growing about 17 percent from 2005 to 2010, according to a report from Mintel, a market research firm.

The American Academy of Pediatrics still recommends taking temperature rectally for newborns under 3 months, and not taking it orally until children are at least 4 years old. The newest generation of digital thermometers measure parts of the body including the underarm, forehead and inside the ear.

The new Vicks thermometer, with a suggested retail price of $40 to $50, is the first in the category made specifically to measure behind the ear, according to Ms. Peterson, of Kaz.

“It measures fever in a very noninvasive way,” said Ms. Peterson, adding that the location’s proximity to the carotid artery, which carries blood to the brain, ensures accurate readings.

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Because feverish children can be particularly fidgety, the ease of use strikes a chord with parents. Kaz recently commissioned a study where the device was used to take the temperature of napping babies at a day care center, and 95 percent slept through it.

In addition to print and online advertising, also by Blue Chip, commercials for the thermometer will be shown in more than 2,600 pediatricians’ offices for two months beginning Jan. 15, through a deal with KidCare TV, which provides informational programming to waiting rooms.

As for the mobile campaign aimed at mothers in high-flu areas, Brian Morrissey, editor in chief of Digiday, an online publication that covers digital marketing and media, said being tracked by advertisers had a “creepy factor” for some consumers.

Many Facebook users, for example, balked when in 2007 it introduced Beacon, a program that shared their online purchases with their social network. “Creepiness comes in when consumers are surprised,” Mr. Morrissey said.

But he predicted consumers would actually like the thermometer campaign.

“It seems like they’ll pull it off, because they’re using the data in a smart way, for advertising that’s more relevant and useful,” Mr. Morrissey said.

NY Times: Can Recipe Search Engines Make You a Better Cook

 

 

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May 17, 2011

Can Recipe Search Engines Make You a Better Cook?

By JULIA MOSKIN

LET’S say you have invited four people for dinner on Saturday. It’s now Wednesday morning, and reality is setting in. On the guest list: two pescatarians, a “Top Chef” fanboy and a gluten avoider. Also, spring is in the air; local asparagus, arriving now. The challenge, as always: how to find dishes that are reliable, delicious and gastronomically correct?

The year has brought a rush of new recipe search engines designed to solve such quandaries. In February, Google introduced a tool called Recipe Search that lets you specify ingredients you do or do not want to use. (For example, a general search for “chili” can be refined — by, say, a Texas-chili purist in Austin — to exclude any recipe that calls for beans.) Microsoft’s Bing browser has had its own recipe function for more than a year, and allows you to search within a single source, like a blog.

A few weeks before Google’s new tool was introduced, Foodily went live, with all results integrated with Facebook so that you can see which recipes your friends say they like. A new, photo-heavy site, Cookzillas, the brainchild of a passionate cook in Bucharest, Romania, who happens to be a multimedia programmer, has more global recommendations than the United States-based engines, with English, Australian and Canadian sites in its scope.

With 10 million recipe searches a day on Google alone, the results surely influence what Americans eat. But when you idly type in “cookies” — the most common recipe search, according to Google — do these systems evaluate recipes the way a good cook would, by the clarity of their directions, the helpfulness of their warnings, the tastiness of the results? Probably not, based on extensive test-runs of the new tools.

“Their challenge is to translate ‘yummy’ into digital fingerprints,” said Paul Kennard, an expert in building Web traffic.

Search engines used to rank recipes largely by popularity, according to the number of times they had been clicked and linked to from other sites. The newer models try to evaluate recipes and rank them by quality according to ever-changing, supposedly highly nuanced criteria, including the number of reviews, links and photographs each recipe has, as well as its popularity.

Jack Benzell, a designer of Google’s algorithm, said in an interview that although the company’s search will never be able to decide whether Thomas Keller’s brownies or Ina Garten’s are inherently better, the results are as nuanced and valuable as any others performed by Google, say, for new tires or Florida weather.

But in query after query that I made in Google and in Bing, recipes from large sites like allrecipes.com and foodnetwork.com often occupied all top 10 results slots. Longer recipes with more detailed content, like the ones at popular food blogs like 101 Cookbooks or Chez Pim, rarely appeared on the first page of results. And results that are not found in the first two pages rarely are seen at all, according to experts.

Andrea Cutright of Foodily says that Google and Bing searches give preference to big sites because the algorithms are designed by programmers who are not cooks.

“You need people who understand ingredients, not just keywords and coding,” she said. “Knowing that an aubergine is the same as an eggplant, or that drumsticks equal chicken legs, simply gives better results.”

With my friend the chili purist in mind, I ran a search for bean-free chili through all four engines. Over all, they were only intermittently successful at providing recipes that matched what I was looking for.

At Foodily, the No. 1 recipe from “chili no beans” was a winner — Tex-Mex Chili from Fine Cooking, an excellent recipe that I’ve made many times. But the next two results, one from nomeatathlete.com and the other from allrecipes.com — were packed with beans. On Cookzillas, once I subtracted beans from the search, the engine abandoned beef as well, leaving me with a venison chili, a green chili with pork and a turkey chili as the top three.

At Google Recipe Search, I searched for chili and then unchecked the box for beans, and the No. 1 recipe was for chili powder, not what I’d wanted. The second was a poorly rated recipe from Guy Fieri at foodnetwork.com, and the third was a highly rated one from Bobby Flay at the same site; there was no clue as to why the lower-rated recipe did better in the results.

AT Bing, the No. 1 recipe, “My Chili” by Michelle at allrecipes.com, has 413 enthusiastic reviews, most of them dotted with exclamation points. But it also has ground beef and canned tomato sauce, which would give that chili purist fits. The second and third recipes that popped up were from delish.com, a recipe site owned by Microsoft, Bing’s parent company. They seemed solid enough, but results from delish.com did not turn up in the other search engines, which made me wonder if Bing was weighted in that direction.

Not surprisingly, Web-fluent cooks have come up with their own search strategies.

Soraya Darabi, who is a founder of foodspotting.com and a digital strategist for ABC, said, surprisingly, that she still leans toward recipes from solid, old-media sources like Bon Appétit magazine except when it comes to desserts.

“Niche blogs are the best, because the people who write them really know their stuff,” she said, citing Sugar Plum as a specialist in all-American desserts like shoofly pie.

Adriana Guillen, a therapist in Brooklyn who often rates recipes online, said that she looks for longer recipes. “It doesn’t mean that the recipe takes longer to make,” she said, “it means that the recipe is more helpful.”

A lovely photograph can signal a solid, tested recipe or something else entirely. “If the photo doesn’t match the recipe, or looks like it was done by a food stylist when the recipe clearly is by a home cook, that should be a red flag,” said Michael Chu, a software engineer who also writes about food at Cooking for Engineers.

So what are recipe search results based on? According to Mr. Benzell, search engines love the taste of data: chunks called “rich snippets” that sound like an appetizer but hold information like cooking time, nutrition information, yield and author. So recipes with long headnotes, hilarious prose or detailed instructions may be ignored in favor of recipes with starred ratings, specific cooking times or nutritional information coded in a specific way. Providing such content is a prime element in search-engine optimization, the sometimes shadowy business of trying to loft one’s site to the top of a heap of results.

Duane Forrester, a product manager for Bing, said that it looks at more than recipe formatting. “There are roughly a thousand factors that we look at in any given search,” he said, including how long the average user stays on a recipe page and the number of links it has, where they come from, where they lead to.

The dominance of behemoth cooking sites in search results enrages many food bloggers.

“I think we all believe that there should be something fair and democratic about search,” said Deb Perelman, a blogger whose recipes at Smitten Kitchen — smittenkitchen.com — still turn up fairly often using the new engines. “If a team of developers can push any recipe up top, how good can that recipe search be?”

In a methodical post on her Web site food52.com, the former New York Times writer Amanda Hesser carved up Google’s Recipe Search, saying that many recipes it favored contained information that was coded in ways that boosted them in the rankings, even if that information was obviously inaccurate. (With help from Google, she found a cassoulet recipe that was supposed to weigh in at just 77 calories a serving, although a serving included a lamb shank and one whole sausage. Another cassoulet’s cooking time was given as one minute.)

According to Andrea Cutright of Foodily, the demand for nutrition information as a priority comes from users. Many people use recipe search tools to avoid certain foods — like milk, flour or sugar — for health reasons, she said, not as a path to transcendent cuisine.

The Paris-based food blogger David Lebovitz said that, since the introduction of Recipe Search, traffic to davidlebovitz.com has dropped noticeably. A regular Google search for “dulce de leche brownies” used to bring up his recipe in the first few pages.

In the new Recipe Search, he said, as many as 3,000 other sites come up first, many of which have simply copied his recipe into their own archive: a common practice that, he said, is now rewarded by Google’s programming.

“Everyone is just trying to scramble to the top of the list,” he said. “I write recipes for readers, not for search engines, and I am being penalized for it.”

Meg Hourihan, who was one of the first serious food bloggers, said that she no longer trusts the crowd-sourced recipe ratings that Google and Bing rely on.

Unless she already knows and likes the source of the recipe and the reviews, she keeps scrolling.

“I don’t necessarily even trust my friends to recommend recipes,” she said. “I mean, which friends are we talking about? The ones who order in six nights a week?”

Ultimately, searching for the “best” recipe online is still like Internet dating — you might well stumble upon a great match, but if you do, it won’t be because the search engine knows what you like.

Finally, desperately seeking a great asparagus recipe for my imaginary dinner party, I tried out one last new search engine, this one independent and, in its way, radical. Eat Your Books does not publish any recipes at all. Instead, the founder, Jane Kelly, is indexing the recipes in thousands of cookbooks.

Eat Your Books does charge for this service; $2.50 a month or $25 a year. So far, it has built up around 80,000 searchable titles, with authors from Édouard de Pomiane to Rachael Ray to Heston Blumenthal. I found thousands of recipes for asparagus contained in books I already own, including one for asparagus vinaigrette with tarragon from “The Anatomy of a Dish,” by the chef Diane Forley. I’d made it years ago, loved it, dog-eared it and promptly lost track of it: the book is in my basement.

Google couldn’t find it — but that’s what I would serve on Saturday night.

The Telegraph: Robert Bunsen's birthday marked with Google Doodle

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8417723/Robert-Bunsens-birthday-marked-with-Google-Doodle.html

Google

Robert Bunsen's birthday marked with Google Doodle

Robert Bunsen, the German scientist who developed the Bunsen burner, has been honoured on what would have been his 200th birthday with a Google Doodle.

Robert Bunsen's Google Doodle 

8:00AM BST 31 Mar 2011

19 Comments

The distinctive laboratory gas burner used by generations of schoolchildren in science lessons takes centre stage in an animated graphic on Google's home page.

It shows a flame changing colour from blue to purple as a multicoloured chemicals bubble in a series of pots and test tubes while steam flies out of a coffee pot.

Born in Gottingen, Germany, on March 31 1811, Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen was a prominent chemist in his day who discovered the elements caesium and rubidium and developed the Bunsen cell battery.

But he is best remembered for the distinctive gas burner he developed with his laboratory assistant Peter Desaga in 1854 and 1855 to study the colour spectrum of different heated elements.

It was during the construction of new lab facilities at Heidelberg University that he came up with the idea.

NY Times: Advertisers in Europe May Face Limits in Use of Keywords

 

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March 24, 2011

Advertisers in Europe May Face Limits in Use of Keywords

By ERIC PFANNER

PARIS — An adviser to the highest European Union court recommended Thursday that some restrictions be placed on the rights of advertisers to use the names of rivals as keywords to generate sponsored links on Internet search engines.

If the court goes along with the opinion, the decision could make some advertisers more cautious in their purchase of the search ads on Google, one of the fastest-growing areas of marketing in recent years, analysts said.

“With this opinion, Google’s customers may well reconsider how extensively they want to use a competitor’s mark as an AdWord,” said Kirsten Gilbert, a partner at Marks & Clerk Solicitors in London, referring to Google’s search advertising program.

The opinion was prepared by an advocate general to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, which is reviewing a lawsuit by Interflora, the flower delivery service, against the British retailer Marks & Spencer, which has a competing florist operation.

A search under the word “Interflora” on Google’s search engine in Britain turns up sponsored advertisements for three different Web sites: Marks & Spencer’s, Asda’s and Interflora’s. Interflora argues that this misleads consumers.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of cases in Europe in which the parameters of search engine advertising, which generates more than $20 billion a year for Google, are being defined.

In a landmark decision last year, the Court of Justice ruled that Google was not liable for trademark infringement in a case brought by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and other brand owners. LVMH argued that Google should block other advertisers from buying search keywords under LVMH trademarks like Louis Vuitton, saying these were often used to direct consumers to sites selling fake handbags and committing other trademark violations.

Rather than suing Google, Interflora went after a user of the service, Marks & Spencer. Nevertheless, if the court goes along with the advocate general’s opinion, something it generally does, the decision could have financial ramifications for Google if advertisers have less latitude to buy rivals’ brand names as keywords for so-called sponsored links, analysts said.

They added, however, that the effects could be limited by the specifics of the case, which centered on the possibility that consumers might be confused by Marks & Spencer’s ads, thinking that they were actually directing people to Interflora’s own network of florists.

The advocate general, Niilo Jääskinen, said advertisers should be blocked from buying rival trademarks as keywords if an ad “does not enable an average Internet user, or enables the said user only with difficulty, to ascertain whether the goods or services referred to in the ad originate from the proprietor of the trademark or an undertaking economically connected to it or from a third party.”

Marks & Spencer declined to comment on the opinion. Interflora did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google said the decision was “broadly consistent” with the decision last year.

“We believe that user interest is best served by seeing more relevant ads, ensuring useful and informative advertising for a wide variety of different contexts,” Google said. “We also believe that consumers are smart and are not confused when they see a variety of ads displayed in response to their search queries.”

John Lennon Google Doodle

Nice! The 32-second track in a video player demonstrates Google's innovation through Lennon's popular song "Imagine." 

Search Insider: Wired for Information - A Brain Built To Google

 

Wired For Information: A Brain Built To Google

Gord Hotchkiss, Aug 26, 2010 11:15 AM

In my last Search Insider, I took you on a neurological tour that gave us a glimpse into how our brains are built to read. Today, let's dig deeper into how our brains guide us through an online hunt for information. Brain Scans and Searching First, a recap. In Nicholas Carr's Book, "The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains," I focused on one passage -- and one concept -- in particular. It's likely that our brains have built a short cut for reading. The normal translation from a printed word to a concept usually requires multiple mental steps. But because we read so much, and run across some words frequently, it's probable that our brains have built short cuts to help us recognize those words simply by their shape in mere milliseconds, instantly connecting us with the relevant concept. So, let's hold that thought for a moment The Semel Institute at UCLA recently did a neuroscanning study that monitored what parts of the brain lit up during the act of using a search engine online. What the institute found was that when we become comfortable with the act of searching, our brains become more active. Specifically, the prefrontal cortex, the language centers and the visual cortex all "light up" during the act of searching, as well as some sub-cortical areas.  It's the latter of these that indicates the brain may be using "pre-wired" short cuts to directly connect words and concepts. It's these sub-cortical areas, including the basal ganglia and the hippocampus, where we keep our neural "short cuts."  They form the auto-pilot of the brain. Our Brain's "Waldo" Search Party Now, let's look at another study that may give us another piece of the puzzle in helping us understand how our brain orchestrates the act of searching online. Dr. Robert Desimone at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT found that when we look for something specific, we "picture" it in our mind's eye. This internal visualization in effect "wakes up" our brain and creates a synchronized alarm circuit: a group of neurons that hold the image so that we can instantly recognize it, even in complex surroundings. Think of a "Where's Waldo" puzzle. Our brain creates a mental image of Waldo, activating a "search party" of Waldo neurons that synchronize their activities, sharpening our ability to pick out Waldo in the picture. The synchronization of neural activity allows these neurons to zero in on one aspect of the picture, in effect making it stand out from the surrounding detail  Pirolli's Information Foraging One last academic reference, and then we'll bring the pieces together. Peter Pirolli, from Xerox's PARC, believes we "forage" for information, using the same inherent mechanisms we would use to search for food. So, we hunt for the "scent" of our quarry, but in this case, rather than the smell of food, it's more likely that we lodge the concept of our objective in our heads. And depending on what that concept is, our brains recruit the relevant neurons to help us pick out the right "scent" quickly from its surroundings.  If our quarry is something visual, like a person or thing, we probably picture it. But if our brain believes we'll be hunting in a text-heavy environment, we would probably picture the word instead. This is the way the brain primes us for information foraging. The Googling Brain This starts to paint a fascinating and complex picture of what our brain might be doing as we use a search engine. First, our brain determines our quarry and starts sending "top down" directives so we can very quickly identify it.  Our visual cortex helps us by literally painting a picture of what we might be looking for. If it's a word, our brain becomes sensitized to the shape of the word, helping us recognize it instantly without the heavy lifting of lingual interpretation. Thus primed, we start to scan the search results. This is not reading, this is scanning our environment in mere milliseconds, looking for scent that may lead the way to our prey. If you've ever looked at a real-time eye-tracking session with a search engine, this is exactly the behavior you'd be seeing. When we bring all the pieces together, we realize how instantaneous, primal and intuitive this online foraging is. The slow and rational brain only enters the picture as an afterthought. Googling is done by instinct. Our eyes and brain are connected by a short cut in which decisions are made subconsciously and within milliseconds. This is the forum in which online success is made or missed.

Search Insider: White Salmon And Black Swans

White Salmon And Black Swans

Gord Hotchkiss, Jul 22, 2010 12:30 PM

The conversation started innocently enough. We were entertaining out-of-town guests at a winery and restaurant overlooking Lake Okanagan. And, as often happens when people visit B.C., they ordered salmon. "You know, I heard that not all salmon are pink. There are actually white salmon." "Really, I've never heard of that." "Well, let's see if there really are white salmon." So, we turned to the arbitrator of all such things: Google. If it can be found on the Web, apparently it exists. Which is an interesting behavior in itself, and a point I'll come back to in a minute. But first, let's talk about why the existence of white salmon is important. A Fish by any Other Color A white salmon is important because it's a black swan. Or, rather, it's a Black Swan. The capitalization is critical, because it's not the animal I'm referring to, but the phenomenon identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name. For all of human history, until the 17th century, it was commonly accepted that all swans were white. But in 1697, Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered a black swan in western Australia. Why is that important? Well, for the vast majority of us, it's not. But what if, for some reason, our world revolves around swans? What if our ability to earn a living depends on the predictably of a swan's natural coloring? Then suddenly, it becomes vitally important. Black Swans -- and white salmon, for that matter -- are outliers. And outliers are important because they cause us to change our view of the world. The normal, regular and expected allow our lives to run down predictable paths. As long as this continues, nothing changes. But the unpredicted, the unknown outlier, is an undeniable occurrence that forces us to reframe our view of things and take a new path. It was a Black Swan that changed the world. According to Taleb, Black Swans have to have three things: they have to lie outside the realm of regular expectations, they have to carry extreme impact, and, when we discover them, they force us to alter our view of things to explain their existence. We have to change our view of the world to accommodate them. Taleb asserts that all of human history has taken a path that pivots on the discovery of Black Swans. Discovering Black Swans Now, back to our dinner conversation. Black Swans only become important when they were discovered. The vastness of the physical world meant that it took us a long time to find that first black swan. But the world today is significantly different than it was in 1697. Today, Black Swans pop up all the time on YouTube or in a blog post. Every single day, somebody somewhere is googling a Black Swan. And, when they find them, Black Swans go viral because the unexpected is naturally fascinating to us. We can't help but talk about it, and today, when we do, chances are it's through a digital channel. The more the world becomes digitally connected and synchronized, the faster word spreads about Black Swans. And when word spreads, we are forced once again to change our view of the world. This means that the pace of change in human history, catalyzed by Black Swan discoveries, is picking up speed. Today, you can't step outside your door without tripping over a Black Swan. The discovery of a Black Swan sets in motion a recurring chain of events. First, we have to acknowledge its existence. Let's call this the Black Swan Googling stage. Then, we have to talk about it. This would be the Black Swan Twitter stage. Then, we have to rationalize its existence, creating an explanation for it -- the Black Swan Wikipedia stage. Then, it becomes an accepted part of our new worldview, the new normal. What used to take centuries to filter through the civilized world now happens in the matter of days, or, at the most, weeks. After all, when I woke up yesterday morning, I didn't know there was such a thing as a white salmon. Today, my world has changed forever.

Businessweek: Google's interactive Pac-Man doodle

 

Google's interactive Pac-Man doodle

Posted by: Helen Walters on May 21, 2010

In honor of the 30th anniversary of everyone’s favorite arcade game, Google has outdone itself. The company has not simply embedded a static artistic homage to Pac-Man on the Google.com homepage, but installed the game itself. Yup, the Google logo has been turned into a Googlified version of the Pac-Man game, and is the company’s first interactive home page. Searchers can hit the “insert coin” button or wait ten seconds to get playing and can then apparently work their way through all 256 levels. Once they’ve won (or, you know, failed miserably) the search engine sends them to a search results page for “Pac-Man 30th anniversary”. Curmudgeons, or those not obsessed with 80s arcade game culture, can search as usual. The doodle was the brainchild of senior user experience design, Marcin Wichary, a self-confessed “Pac-Man enthusiast” (y’think?) along with regular doodler Ryan Germick. The game will be live for 48 hours.

Businessweek: How Google Got Its New Look

Technology May 5, 2010, 12:01PM EST text size: TT

How Google Got Its New Look

The process that led to the redesign of Google's all-important search results page

By Helen Walters

Every day 268 million people use Google (GOOG) to search for something. The query goes in, the company's software delivers back the most relevant links. The interaction is so simple—and the hidden calculation behind the results so complex—that it's no wonder people tend not to notice much about the process. Who bothers to ask the ingredients of a magic formula?

For all of its experiments with maps, books, e-mail, and social networking, Google is still an empire built on search. Ninety-seven percent of the company's $23.7 billion haul in 2009 came from advertising. While Google doesn't break out what each of its individual ad products such as AdWords or AdSense generates, multiple people within the company concede that Google is as dependent on the "Sponsored Links" generated by search queries as an oil nation is on its wells.

Since Google's 1998 debut, the search results page—where a home page query is returned with 10 suggested links on the left and multiple advertiser links on the right—has been through seven subtle redesigns. The most recent, in May 2007, saw the addition of images and video in what was dubbed "universal" search. On May 5, Google unveiled its eighth iteration, which Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search products and user experience, calls "particularly large and particularly important."

Google has long had advanced search capabilities, but they were difficult to find. The goal of redesign eight was to surface them and integrate them into the main results page. Users now get results with an extra column of tools to drill deeper into information. That means a query can be quickly refined to show only results from shopping sites, say, or just videos on a topic, or the latest news results. Add in a new logo and a splash of colorful icons on the left side of the page that guide users through the new options, and the look is noticeably different.

Given that the shift of a few pixels can affect Google's profits, why would the company ever mess with the most successful product in the history of the Internet? "The Web is always changing, evolving, and innovating," says Mayer. "It's important even for sites that people use every day and are very familiar with, like Google, to update their look."

It's not just the look that's been updated. Microsoft's Bing and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have made a case for the past few years that Google's search, based on ranking the overall relevance of a Web page, is outmoded, and that the future lies in an integration of relevance with real-time search. In December, Google conceded the point and announced it would begin indexing the Web in real time to help users organize the cacophony emanating from social media.

Some in the search industry are skeptical of introducing such complexity to the results pages. "Advanced search almost never works," says Jakob Nielsen, principal of the Norman Nielsen Group and co-author of the book Eyetracking Web Usability. "People don't want to use a search engine. They want to get away from a search engine. That's the reason the advertising works so well—the search engine is one site they want to get away from so they might go to an advertiser." In other words, Google has thrived precisely because it hasn't tried to envelop its users in a full-frills experience.

Still, the competitive landscape is changing. In March, Facebook surpassed Google as the most visited Web site in the U.S. Microsoft has unveiled its own plans for Bing, which currently comes in a distant third in the battle for eyeballs but is making a play in searches along topics such as travel and shopping. Bing recently rolled out a design that adjusts the user interface of search. So if it's clear a user is looking to buy a plane ticket, Bing morphs into a travel engine. "It's a very radical departure from the dominant paradigm of the link-based system on the Web," says Stefan Weitz, director of Bing. "For every query, presenting results back with the same user experience doesn't make sense. You want to book a flight or track a flight, why display a bunch of links? That's illogical."

All the tweaks Google has made complicate its algorithm—and none of them can be allowed to complicate its interface. "They have to try to continue to innovate and evolve the product but stick to keeping things simple," says Andy Miedler, senior technology analyst at St. Louis investment bank Edward Jones. "People have grown to love the simplicity of Google." Every previous redesign has negotiated the demands of simplicity and complexity while improving Google's bottom line.

Google allowed Bloomberg Businessweek access to the core design team of 16 staffers in March, as the company was fixing bugs and gearing up to roll out the redesign—a process marked by collaboration between people who create wild illustrations with dry-erase markers and mathematical types who write in precise code. The atmosphere was loose, though the pressure of the job—engage the new decentralized, socialized Web while still driving users to the advertisers paying the bills—generated its share of stress. "There's a lot of weight associated with the project," says product manager Nundu Janakiram, the point person between engineering, design, and the five other departments involved in the project. "Everyone feels invested in the search engine; it ties together the company. We have to get this right."

Every Google page must work seamlessly on countless different computer makes, connection speeds, browsers, and screen sizes. It also must be optimized to keep people searching and clicking as fast as possible. Just thinking about the technical requirements can drive designers mad. So when the team assigned to Search Results V8 first gathered in the summer of 2009 in a small room at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, they opted not to think about requirements at all.

Janakiram, a 24-year-old Stanford grad, Web designer Jon Wiley, a 34-year-old ex-improv artist, and two visual designers mocked up hundreds of different results pages that turned everything users know about Google inside out. "Anything we could move around, we moved around," says Janakiram. Navigation tools were switched from the left to the right side of the screen. Colors changed from Google's muted blue to variations with Crayola-like vibrancy. Link styles got tweaked and modules were inverted. One proposal crammed every pixel on the page with information. Another added display advertising.

The wild-ideas phase was a good mind-clearing exercise—and mostly just that. When it came time for the designers and engineers to move into a larger space together and get serious about the new look, the exigencies of reworking one of the world's most profitable Web pages couldn't be held off. "We tend to focus on an evolutionary model where you can bring users along with you vs. dropping them into some completely radical experience," says Wiley, who once ran the Web operation for Texas Governor Rick Perry and who joined Google in November 2006. The engineers try to view themselves as enablers rather than wet blankets. "Sometimes a designer will tell you what they want, and you'll tell them you can give them 90 percent of that with a quarter of the work," says Nate Gaylinn, the technical lead on the project. "If it's really worth it to have the right experience, then you have to put in the extra work. But if it's a minor detail that you can argue either way, we'll take the easier route."

Most of those details are hashed out at a daily "stand-up" meeting of 10 people or so, held at 4:07 p.m. (Google co-founder Sergey Brin once estimated that it took seven minutes to walk across the Google campus; it's now company tradition that meetings end on the hour and new ones start seven minutes later.) Everyone working on the project gathers standing up, to make sure no one gets too comfortable and no time is wasted during the rapid-fire update. Janakiram, balancing a keyboard on the back of his chair, takes notes throughout. "The whole concept of the stand-up is to talk through what everyone's doing," says Gaylinn. "So if someone's working on what you're working on, you can discover and collaborate, not duplicate." Every proposed feature is put through a user interface review conducted by members of the larger search team, who work nearby and police proposed changes to make sure they won't have an unfavorable impact on the search-engine infrastructure. "They're making sure we don't screw up," says Gaylinn.

By October 2009 the team had its first functional prototype ready for "dogfooding"—in which all of the company's 20,000 employees can opt to test a new product. The internal focus group members can log bugs or simply comment on the design. Google won't say how many staffers took part, nor will it release the text of any comments. Janakiram will reveal that at its peak the team received a piece of feedback every 10 seconds and that not all of the responses were helpful. Even Google employees, he says, will send a message to let designers know they think their work is terrible.

One immediate focus of the feedback was the search button: The designers had turned it blue. "We got a lot of people telling us they found the button distracting, or they usually hit enter to search, or their gaze was going to the box, not the results," says Janakiram.

In addition to dogfooding, Google researchers ran 19 test subjects through hour-long eyetracking sessions to monitor responses to various aspects of the new design. Eyetracking has come a long way since the early 20th century, when objects were glued to a test subject's eyeballs. Now multiple cameras are built into computer screens, and the technique provides detailed analysis of where someone browsing a Web page is actually looking. Users often read Web pages as two lines across the top followed by a vertical stripe down the left side of the screen, in what's known as the "F-pattern."

During eyetracking, the engineers and designers sat in an adjoining room and gawked through a two-way mirror while users tried out various incarnations of the new search results page. Each participant was given prescribed tasks to search for so that the Google team could see the page in action. In a test staged during Bloomberg Businessweek's visit, a user was told to imagine his niece was writing a report about Michael Jackson, and he was tasked with helping her find specific information. When users got distracted—as they were by the same blue search button the dogfooders objected to—or failed to grasp how they were supposed to interact with the page, it meant it was time to scrap an idea. In other instances eyetracking data helped designers decide between different colors and type sizes.

While the engineers and designers pored over eyetracking results, Google statisticians conducted months-long experiments with hundreds of thousands of live users. (One advantage of having 268 million users a day is that you can roll out new products to a fraction of them and still have the benefits of a large sample size.) Google wants more searches and more clicks on its Sponsored Links, and anything that slows the process or inhibits clicking can have disastrous effects on profits.

Toward the end of the redesign process the statisticians focused on the slightly expanded gap between the Google search box and the first result. "No human being will notice they spend on average 10 milliseconds longer to click on a search result," says software engineer Patrick Riley. "But if all users take 10 extra milliseconds, we need to be concerned." This analysis was fed back to the designers, who adjusted accordingly. "We take the quantitative and qualitative feedback together with our own intuitions about how the search results pages should be working, and we iterate on the design," says Janakiram.

The focus on metrics is a deeply ingrained part of Google's culture. Brin and co-founder Larry Page are both engineers, and they've been consistent in expressing a belief that form must always follow function. (Page has gone so far as to wonder why the home page needs anything except an empty search box.) That doesn't mean designers have to like it. Douglas Bowman, Google's first visual designer, left the company in March 2009—and lit the Web equivalent of a bonfire on his way out the door. In a post on stopdesign.com, Bowman claimed that at Google, data "becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions." He noted that one project was delayed when a team couldn't decide between two blues—so it tested 41 different shades between them. "I had a recent debate over whether a border should be three, four, or five pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case," wrote Bowman, who is now the creative director at Twitter.

Other ex-Google design stars acknowledge that the emphasis on data can be grating. Jeffrey Veen, who joined Google as design director in 2006, says "the designers I worked with were fantastic but very formally trained in human computer interaction rather than having MFAs. That frames how design happens at Google." Veen, who left the company in 2008, adds: "None of the colleagues I would want to hire would be able to get a job at Google because of the computer-science-based requirements."

Mayer, the vice-president of search products, doesn't buy the criticism. "We're not curtailing instinct at all," she says. "We need that to fuel the innovation engine that yields great designs from Google. What we can do is use the power of the Internet and the measurability of it to figure out in a scientific way if something is a good idea or not." Wiley, V8's chief designer, insists he's comfortable with the mission and understands that search design is not intended to wow users. "It's like lighting design or sound design in a movie," he says. "If you're sitting watching a movie and you say, 'that's really great sound design!' then that's probably not right.…I don't want someone to say 'look at this gorgeous search results page!' I want them to say 'where's my…?' And click, they've gone."

In the period leading up to the rollout, changes continued. Some were major: The launch date slipped five times. A plan to include a widget underneath the search query box so users could tailor results to their location was dropped after engineers decided the technology didn't perform consistently enough. A feature offering users a way to look for similar types of results was renamed from "Not Entirely Unlike" (an oblique homage to sci-fi author Douglas Adams) to the less whimsical, more intuitive "Something Different."

As the redesign was being unveiled to the world via a blog post penned by Mayer, the team continued working. For the engineers, launch is the most critical and nerve-racking time. "We'll definitely be biting our fingernails. You can't just turn this on with a switch," says Gaylinn. Even as the team breaks up and moves onto different projects, changes will continue. "In many ways the project never really completely ends," says Janakiram. "There are always improvements to be made."

Helen Walters is the editor of Innovation and Design at Bloomberg BusinessWeek .

Econsultancy.com: The White House unleashes Adwords against Wall Street

The White House unleashes AdWords against Wall Street

Posted 22 April 2010 13:38pm by Patricio Robles with 3 comments

Imagine for a minute that you're the president of the United States and you're trying to make the case against Wall Street. What's the best way to do it? As the president, you have almost unlimited access to the traditional media, but that's not always enough today.

So U.S. president Barack Obama, whose use of the internet arguably helped him win the presidency, isn't relying on the mainstream media to promote his Wall Street reform agenda; he's using Google. And he's going straight for the jugular by bidding on topical keywords related to embattled investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against the powerful bank. The allegation: it committed fraud when it helped a billionaire hedge fund manager structure and sell a mortgage-related investment that was designed to fail. The lawsuit couldn't have come at a worse time for Wall Street. President Obama is pushing hard for Wall Street reform legislation, and not surprisingly the lawsuit has become a prominent talking point for politicians who support the legislation.

But the Obama administration isn't content to just sit around and hope that the American public . When you do a search on Google for 'goldman sachs sec' or 'goldman sachs fraud' and even 'goldman sachs' itself, you're likely to be greeted with an ad from the president himself:

In my opinion, these ads are not only bold, especially given the fact that one wouldn't expect the White House to use paid search so aggressively. But they're a very good example of a strategic paid search campaign. Here's why:

• The keywords are carefully selected. How many people are searching for 'wall street reform'? Answer: almost certainly far fewer than those who are searching for Goldman Sachs-related keywords. And even if a person doesn't click on the ad, having the top paid spot for key Goldman Sachs search phrases is generating lots and lots of impressions for Obama's Wall Street reform message. That's crucial because in politics, mind share matters.
• The keywords are timely. The White House's keywords are not just carefully selected; they're timely. By quickly leveraging the lawsuit against Goldman Sachs and bidding on related keywords shortly thereafter, the Obama administration is far more likely to get real value for its paid search buck. In my opinion, treating keyword selection as an ongoing process and not a once-and-done exercise is an area where many paid search clients fail, but that's clearly not the case here.
• The campaign isn't too broad. While the White House is doing battle with Wall Street, it's not going overboard with its paid search campaign. A search for keywords related to other banks, such as JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, don't appear to bring up the White House ads. This is probably a good thing; not only would keywords relating to other banks probably not generate nearly as much effective exposure, they could potentially support an argument that the White House is on a vindictive crusade against Wall Street.

All in all, it's clear that the tech savvy of Barack Obama and his staff didn't end when he entered the White House. While many will debate the appropriateness of his administration's use of Google AdWords, and Wall Street reform itself, one thing is clear: politicians looking to deliver a message but who ignore the virtues do so at their own detriment.

Source: http://econsultancy.com/blog/5787-the-white-house-unleashes-adwords-against-wall-street

FT: China and the west - Full circle

China and the west: Full circle

By James Kynge

Published: January 15 2010 22:42 | Last updated: January 15 2010 22:42

A 17th century map placing China at the centre of the world

Just as cicadas thrum more urgently at the start of autumn, sensing that the end is nigh, internet users in China have been seizing in animated fashion on what one called “the last crazy days of Google.cn”.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lex: Googlopoly - Jan-15

In depth: Google versus China - Dec-21

Silicon Valley questions Google stance - Jan-15

Beijing seeks to limit Google fallout - Jan-15

Cyberattacks aimed at defence groups - Jan-14

Dissident detained in southern China - Jan-15

With the US technology giant allowing uncensored searches in Chinese for the first time, citizens of the People’s Republic are this week indulging their curiosity ahead of a widely expected crackdown.

“I’ve been doing all sorts of crazy searches, really distracting myself from my work,” says one. “I’ve done Tiananmen Square, the love affairs of national leaders, the corruption of leaders’ children. Everything.”

Another internet user says the buzz of illicit abandon is reminiscent of the mood in Tiananmen Square itself, shortly before the People’s Liberation Army crushed the protests there in 1989. “There is no way that Google will get away with this. They will have to leave China for sure,” he adds.

The surreptitious joys of “netizens” may not be alone in existing on borrowed time. Google’s defiance of China’s censorship regime is indicative of much more than a single company’s decision to reassert its open-society principles over the pragmatism by which it originally entered the Chinese market, agreeing then to self-censor in return for business licences. Google’s move may suggest that the accommodations made by western companies in China can extend only so far before contorted values snap back into place.

More broadly, though, Google’s actions present at least a symbolic challenge to a broad swath of assumptions that has underpinned the west’s engagement with China over the past 30 years. In particular, they raise the question as to whether missionary capitalism – the prevalent but fuzzy belief that the west’s commercial engagement may somehow bring about a Chinese political liberalisation – has ever been more than a naive hope.

In Google’s experience, for example, the longer it operated in China, the more search words it was forced to ban and the greater the number of cyberattacks it fielded from Chinese sources.

In fact, in the opinion of several Chinese officials, the process of engagement in which successive US and other western governments have invested so much time and effort, may not have enamoured the Chinese public to the west at all. One senior Communist party official, speaking on condition of anonymity several weeks prior to Google’s move, said he saw a general regression in public disposition to the west.

“Even though Chinese, and especially Chinese youth, know the west better than ever before and there are many more exchanges and contacts between China and your countries than in the past, the west is less popular now among Chinese people than at any time since ‘reform and opening’ began [in 1978],” the official said. Indeed, anyone who regularly reads the postings of Chinese netizens will notice that comments critical of the west frequently far outnumber those that are positive.

Against this backdrop, Google’s decision prompts one of the simplest but furthest-reaching questions of all: how should the west deal with China? Or, to put a finer point on it, how can an international system created under Pax Americana to serve the interests of the west accommodate a rising giant that is set to remain different in almost every aspect – politics, values, history, natural endowments and per capita wealth – from the incumbent ruling order?

Even posing the question can elicit shock. James Mann, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, notes in his 2007 book, The China Fantasy, that although it is still theoretically possible that the country may yet morph into a democracy that promotes civil liberties and fosters an independent judiciary, the belief that this is a likely outcome is sheer self-delusion.

“America hasn’t thought much about what it might mean for the United States and the rest of the world to have a repressive, one-party state in China three decades from now because it is widely assumed that China is destined for a political liberalisation, leading eventually to democracy,” Mr Mann writes.

Multinational corporations are particularly susceptible to this type of China delusion, partly because the job of the person appointed to run China operations depends on being able to persuade his or her board that, although there may be difficulties, things are headed in a broadly benign direction. But if the definition of benign deployed by such China boosters includes assurances that the rule of law, protection for intellectual property, civil liberties and democracy will soon take root, the board may be in for a long wait.

As Kellee Tsai makes clear in her 2007 book, Capitalism Without Democracy, Beijing expends considerable effort to neutralise mechanisms by which its capitalist economy might create pressures for the formation of democratic checks and balances. One main strategy has been to keep the private sector loyal to the ruling Communist party. In 2003, for example, some 34 per cent of private entrepreneurs were party members, up from just 7 per cent in 1991.

If China therefore remains resolutely different from other countries that have prospered under Pax Americana even as it joins the world, how should the west react? One school of thought sees acceptance as key. “To think that commercial engagement by the west would change China misunderstands the nature of how change is likely to occur in China,” says Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford University. “Change has to come from within.”

According to Prof Mitter, China and the west should drop any pretence at harmony in their relationship and seek not to accentuate their similarities but to understand the context of their manifold differences. His position is echoed by some Chinese academics, who see Beijing’s inclination towards characterising its bilateral relationships in officially positive terms as unhelpful.

“China is a huge, independent and successful country that doesn’t want to be dictated to by the west,” says Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University. “Both sides need to learn to accommodate each other.”

One thing that westerners often misunderstand about China, says Prof Mitter, is that the relationship between state and society is different from that in western democracies. “It is fair to say that [in China] the broad norm is that the state and society have obligations to each other and that society acquiesces in the state’s project,” he says. “The assumption is that state and society are part of the same enterprise.” In western democracies, by contrast, society tends to have a more oppositional relationship with the governing elite.

This insight may go some way towards explaining the ease with which China’s propaganda authorities are able to channel western criticisms of China into outpourings of anti-western cyber-rage or patriotic fealty. In the case of Google, just hours after the news broke of its change of mind on censorship, party-affiliated newspapers began to play on the widespread sensitivity to a history of humiliations by the west to construct a great wall of patriotic fervour.

The Global Times, a subsidiary of the People’s Daily, asked thousands of its readers if they thought the Chinese government should submit to Google’s conditions. The survey generated an overwhelming response to the effect that Beijing should stand up to Google.

Other official media followed similar lines. In a commentary called “Google, who do you want to scare?” published by Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily, a writer characterised Google’s strategy as a “mixture of typical American naivety and western self-centrism”

For many a policymaker in the west, however, there is a world of difference between trying to understand China’s unique national character and dealing with a projection of Chinese power beyond its borders, especially when that power is tilted against western interests. In this respect, last month’s multilateral negotiations on climate change in Copenhagen were a shrill wake-up call.

“Copenhagen showed us the new normal,” wrote Leslie H. Gelb in the online Daily Beast. “The US has lost influence, China plays spoiler and tiny nations veto anything they don’t like.”

During the Copenhagen negotiations, China allied itself with some 77 developing countries to resist a legally binding treaty on climate change and opposed a mechanism of independent inspections that was intended to confirm emission control targets were being met. Frustration with China’s role was clear both during the summit and in comments by western participants afterwards. As a senior official from one developed country put it: “China cannot be allowed to appropriate the developing world like this again.”

But if the west wants to enter a beauty contest as China’s rival for the affections of the developing world, it may find it tough going. In Africa, for instance, China’s trade volume is likely last year to have overtaken that of the US, while in many African capitals Beijing’s brand of quick, no-nonsense investment assistance has won it a keen following.

But no matter how frustrated the west becomes with China, its interests are so intertwined that “doing a Google” on any large scale may not be an option. The developed world may simply have to resign itself to an adversarial symbiosis with China that grows ever more rancorous with time.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

NY Times: Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet

December 26, 2009

Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet

By STEFANIE OLSEN

When Benjamin Feshbach was 11 years old, he was given a brainteaser: Which day would the vice president’s birthday fall on the next year?

Benjamin, now 13, said he typed the question directly into the Google search box, to no avail. He then tried Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com, also without success. “Later someone told me it was a multistep question,” said Benjamin, a seventh grader from North Potomac, Md.

“Now it seems quite obvious because I’m older,” he said. “But, eventually, I gave up. I didn’t think the answer was important enough to be on Google.” Benjamin is one of 83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11, who participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information.

Like other children, Benjamin was frustrated by his lack of search skills or, depending on your view, the limits of search engines.

When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools.

Search engines are typically developed to be easy for everyone to use. Google, for example, uses the Arial typeface because it considers it more legible than other typefaces. But advocates for children and researchers say that more can be done technologically to make it easier for young people to retrieve information. What is at stake, they say, are the means to succeed in a new digital age.

“We’re giving them a tool that was made for adults,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit research center in New York focused on digital education for children. Allison Druin, director of the human-computer interaction lab at the University of Maryland, suggested expanding the concept of keywords. Instead of typing a word into a search box, children could click on an image or video, which would turn up results.

Ms. Druin said that parents played a big role in helping children search. She proposed that search engines imitate that role by adding technology aids, like prominent suggestions for related content or an automated chat system, to help children when they get stuck.

Children’s choices of search engines differ only slightly from the preferences of adults. Google ranks most popular among children, followed by Yahoo, Google Image search, Microsoft’s Bing and Ask.com, according to the research firm Nielsen. (Among adults, Bing is ahead of Google Image.)

Irene Au, Google’s director of user experience, said that rather than develop a specific product for children, her team used research findings to inform how it could improve search for all ages. “The problems that kids have with search are probably the problems adults experience, just magnified,” Ms. Au said. “It’s helped highlight the areas we need to focus on.”

For example, Google has long known that it can be difficult for users to formulate the right keywords to call up their desired results. But that task can be even more challenging for children, given that they do not always have the right context for thinking about a new subject. One 12-year-old boy searching for information about Costa Rica used the search term “sweaty clothes” because that was what he associated with the jungle.

“If we can solve that for children we can solve that for adults,” Ms. Au said.

One way Google aims to overcome that problem is by showing related searches. Ms. Au said Google had tried various placements since related searches were introduced in 2007 and had found that it could be helpful to introduce such queries — or other content like video, images or news — at the bottom of the page.

A search on the word dolphins, for example, shows a set of related searches, (sharks, bottlenose dolphins) and two YouTube videos of dolphins at play. Ms. Druin called the bottom of the screen “valuable territory” because children often focus on their hands and the keyboard when they search and see that space first when they glance up.

Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that for certain types of tasks, like finding a list of American presidents, people found answers 28 percent faster with a search of images rather than of text. He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. Microsoft says Bing’s audience of 2- to 17-year-olds has grown 76 percent since May. “My daughter who’s 5, her typing skills aren’t great, but she can browse images of various dog breeds through visual search,” Mr. Weitz said.

In May, Google introduced Wonder Wheel, a graphical search tool aimed at making browsing easier. (To find it, click on “show options” on a page of search results; it appears halfway down the left column.) For a search on “apple,” the wheel shows prongs pointing to “apple fruit” or “apple store locator” in the left panel.

Children also tend to want to ask questions like “Who is the president?” rather than type in a keyword. Scott Kim, chief technology officer at Ask.com, said that because as many as a third of search queries were entered as questions (up to 43 percent on Ask Kids, a variant designed for children), it had enlarged search boxes on both sites by almost 30 percent.

In September, Google also increased the length of its search box and the size of its font for related searches. Google said the change was meant to enhance ease of use for everyone.

Future trends in search may also be helpful to children. The move toward voice-activated search like the Google voice search on iPhones and Android phones and audio and video search will prove beneficial to children with limited abilities, experts say.

Benjamin Feshbach, who’s now considered a power searcher, has his own ideas.

“I think there should be a program where Google asks kids questions about what they’re searching for,” he said, “like a Google robot.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: The Science of Managing Search Ads

December 22, 2009

The Science of Managing Search Ads

By MIGUEL HELFT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Cyber Monday had gone swimmingly for Tiny Prints.

Despite the economic downturn, customers streamed into the Tiny Prints online store on the Monday after Thanksgiving, called Cyber Monday because it is one of the busiest days of the year for Web retailers. They snapped up the company’s custom holiday cards at roughly twice the rate of a year ago.

But in the following days, Ed Han, the chief executive, and his team made a risky bet in search of higher profits. Hoping that traffic and sales would stay up, they pulled back on the Google search ads that had helped drive visitors to Tiny Prints.

The gamble backfired. Just as Tiny Prints pulled back, competitors appeared to spend more aggressively to display their ads when people typed “holiday cards” or “photo cards” into Google. By the middle of the week, sales growth began to taper off and a bright holiday season suddenly appeared a bit less rosy.

“We knew we had made a bad decision,” Mr. Han said. Tiny Prints reversed course, but it took the company, which is privately held, more than a day to recover — a critical amount of time during the heavy shopping season.

For most people, Google and other search engines are essential tools to navigate the Web. But the workings of the text ads, the blurbs that peddle goods and services on the search results pages, are largely hidden from Web users.

For more than one million businesses, Google’s search advertising system is like a hose inundating Web sites with traffic. Managing it effectively, though, is as much art as it is science. It requires a mix of analytics and gamesmanship, a combination of skills that has become vitally important in the Internet age.

“It is critical,” said Ellen Siminoff, the chairwoman of Efficient Frontier, which helps companies manage their search advertising campaigns. “You have to have data and be able to analyze it. It’s a bit like playing chess, but you are blind to what your competitors will do.”

Many industry insiders say search engine marketing, as the practice is known, is one of the most effective forms of advertising ever devised. In just a decade, it has grown into an $11 billion business in the United States. It accounts for the vast majority of Google’s $22 billion in annual global sales.

Google’s service, called AdWords, dominates so thoroughly that some advertisers have felt at the mercy of the company, and complained that they had little control over the complex advertising system. One company, TradeComet, filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing Google of artificially increasing its advertising rates.

But by and large, businesses find search advertising effective and continue to flock to it, albeit at a slower rate than in previous years. As growth has tapered off over the last year, Google has stepped up its outreach efforts to help midsize companies like Tiny Prints use its tools more effectively, hoping that will encourage those companies to spend more.

“It’s good for our business and it’s good for their business,” said Claire Johnson, vice president for online sales and operations at Google.

Like many other businesses, Tiny Prints also buys search ads on Yahoo and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. While results are “very attractive,” the traffic coming from those sites is small compared to referrals from Google, Mr. Han said. As a result, Tiny Prints spends nearly 90 percent of its search marketing budget on Google, he said.

Mr. Han said that Tiny Prints, which specializes in high-end custom-designed greeting cards, had been working at perfecting its search advertising for the last two years. Its three-person team, veterans of Walmart.com and eBay, has become expert at poring over spreadsheets and sifting through the data about visitors and shoppers on the company’s Web site. During the holiday season, they monitor ads and traffic patterns hourly, and meet daily with Mr. Han and other executives to adjust budgets and strategies.

During one of the company’s daily budget meetings in mid-November, Anna Fieler, the vice president for marketing, said, “We are on a trajectory to overspend on search.” She then added, “But we are delivering on revenue.”

Search ads are bought from Google through an auction, and businesses pay Google only when someone clicks on their ad. An ad’s position on Google’s search results pages depends on Google’s secret formula derived from bid prices, the rate at which users previously clicked on the ad and a “quality score” determined by Google.

Since not all clicks turn into purchases, the trick for advertisers is to make sure that the amount they bid, multiplied by the average number of clicks needed to make a sale — the cost of acquiring a customer — does not exceed the profit derived from that sale.

But that can be easier said than done.

Early in the holiday season, for example, most people are window-shopping, so few clicks turn into sales. Tiny Prints is forced to pay more than $50 to acquire each customer, leaving little room for profits on an average order. Relying on spreadsheets of buying patterns from previous years, Tiny Prints search marketers make the case to Mr. Han that their cost of acquiring a customer is on track.

“We are seeing day by day that it is starting to dip,” said Isabelle Steiner, the director for search marketing said at the meeting in mid-November. “I’m projecting that by end of month, we’ll be spending $35.”

Based on those assurances, Mr. Han then gave the team the green light to increase spending on search ads. But Mr. Han brought up another point: competitors could disrupt the plans if they suddenly started bidding aggressively on the same keywords as Tiny Prints.

“What if Hallmark comes in on Saturday?” Mr. Han asked, referring to the Thanksgiving weekend. “Do we have a plan to react to what competitors might do?”

The plan, Ms. Steiner said, was to monitor the site around the clock.

A couple of weeks later, the vigilance paid off.

In a spot check squeezed between a birthday party and her own Christmas shopping, Ms. Fieler was welcomed by a screen of red alerts indicating that the Tiny Prints ads had fallen off the first page of Google search results for important keywords.

“We were then forced to make and implement a new plan to react to the competitive environment real-time,” Ms. Fieler said. “It was very tricky trying to balance not overpaying by participating in the frenzy with getting the impressions and clicks we needed to drive the business.”

By mid-December, with the bulk of the holiday shopping season behind them, Mr. Han and his team were looking haggard. In addition to late-night discussions of bidding strategies over instant messaging, they had pitched in to help wrap and ship orders.

Mr. Han would not disclose the company’s sales. But he said that by and large, the ad campaign on Google, which drove more than 20 percent of revenue, had been a success.

“Of the eight most important days of the year, we got seven exactly right,” Mr. Han said. “On one of the days, by our standards, we fell on our face.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Happy Thanksgiving!

My very first Thanksgiving in Salt Lake City! :)

 
Doodle for Google featuring Snoopy :) Found on www.google.com on Thanksgiving Day.

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November 26, 2009

Editorial

A Thanksgiving Toast

Sitting down with friends and family today, there will be thanks for the steady currents, flowing out of the past, that have brought us to this table. There will be thanks for the present union and reunion of us all. And there will be prayerful thanks for the future. But it’s worth raising a glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who’ve gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning.

What would our lives look like if they held only what we’d planned? Where would our wisdom or patience — or our hope — come from? How could we account for these new faces at the Thanksgiving table or for the faces we’re missing this holiday, missing perhaps now all these years?

It will never cease to surprise how the condition of being human means we cannot foretell with any accuracy what next Thanksgiving will bring. We can hope and imagine, and we can fear. But when next Thanksgiving rolls around, we’ll have to take account again, as we do today, of how the unexpected has shaped our lives. That will mean accounting for how it has enriched us, blessed us, with suffering as much as with joy.

That, perhaps, is what all this plenty is for, as you look down the table, to gather up the past and celebrate the present and open us to the future.

There is the short-term future, when there will be room for seconds. Then there is the longer term, a time for blossoming and ripening, for new friends, new family, new love, new hope. Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company 

Isreal News Agency: SEO, Google and Sex

SEO, Google And Sex

Tel Aviv ---- October 21, 2009 ..... The following parody is a cute tale of SEO, Google and sex which may have it creative origins in India. A magical place where thousands are employed for only a few dollars and whose mission is to attract both reader and search engine using any means they can. These busy Indian optimizers use a variety of legal spam methods, including employing the word sex to attract. Sex is the number one searched word on the Net with over 582,000,000 pages coming up on Google.

Even The New York Times has worked to ensure that its site and search results are incredibly Google friendly, so Google friendly in fact that a recent search for “sex” on Google currently serves the NY Times internal archive search results for sex as #2. 

In the story below, notice how often the word sex is used, along with the words Google and SEO. But what really made us smile in writing and editing this story was how organized and creative the writer was. He didn't just throw out some words hoping that some literally trash would stick to the search engines. For it remains the creative balance between good and interesting content and the optimization of that content which makes today's Internet Web and news author relevant.

SEO or search engine optimization is a term widely used in Internet marketing. It is quite useful for any Website in Israel, New York, London, Paris, China or India for increasing traffic, sales and services. It is crucial for any site to achieve its optimum ranking results in Google, Yahoo and numbers of other search engines.

SEO is the process of increasing the volume and traffic to a web site from various search engines by increasing organically the search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Now, what is sex?
I think there is no need for the explanation of this term because it is the most searched term on the Internet. Everyone knows about sex and its importance for stability, sensation and satisfaction in life. So, it is referred to as a basic need. In the same way as SEO is critical for your site.

Why SEO and sex is important? SEO is important for the instant growth of your business. If you are not ranking well in the search engines then it can help you in various ways. It will enhance your site traffic. Traffic will increase your sales and services as you penetrate the market.

If you rank well, you may even establish a brand name in your specific market.

Sex is a sensation which is most important for a healthy, happy and peaceful life. A greater satisfaction may increase your thinking and coolness in life. If you enjoy healthy sex on a daily basis then it can enhance many other aspects of your life.

For ultimate satisfaction, a healthy sex life is important. In the same manner with SEO if you secure more organic traffic results on Google then the greater will be your satisfaction.

With a more natural and open approach as to your involvement in sex, the more powerful the sensation. In the same perspective as when you get a boom in business then naturally powerful results may fill you with sensation.

There are various similarities between SEO and sex.
But there are some differences which makes SEO better than sex. Well friends, I am going through the alphabetical approach to describe how SEO and sex is similar and dissimilar.

Both create sensation. SEO and sex both create intimacy and boundless sensations. SEO is a sensational thing for any Website and sex generates sensation through physical intercourse. As I stated above - SEO brings traffic to a site organically or naturally and sex creates sensation in the orgasm and in the human body by a natural phenomenon.
Both are organic functions - although both can be paid for. But please, do not confuse Google Adwords with prostitution. Although both may be optimized through the use of keywords.

As traffic increases for a site it brings new customers and increases business for the company or organization behind the site. In a similar way, as the climax during sex increases the pleasure increases. So, traffic for a site may be simulated with the orgasmic climax in sex.

Expertise is needed. In both cases an expert may generate wonderful results.
An SEO expert can manage the site for Google and Yahoo rankings well in the SERPs and secure increased traffic to the site. It is the tactics based on extensive professional marketing knowledge, social networking (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs), Web 2.0, viral marketing, PR and the practice of the SEO expert by which he or she can have a site ranked high in a very short time for targeted traffic. A practice which can work quicker and stay stronger than Viagra!

In a similar way, an expert in sex can generate more pleasure than a new member. He or she may know about the right sexual positions, time and the procedure to follow which can increase organic results and pleasurable sensation in the body.

Optimization is critical. Here is where SEO differs from sex because the word sex does not contain the letter “O”. SEO is the process of optimizing search results by using the professional knowledge of an SEO professional.

Professional SEO services will increase the optimum results day by day. But in the case of sex a human having more sex may lessen his or her interest and stamina with time.

Then we have the X - Factor. The “X Factor” refers to the indefinable“something” that makes one thing better than other. SEO is the process of making an “O”rdinary site into an e“X”tra ordinary site so the X letter is silent in SEO in this way. So, here is the difference or X - factor which differs SEO from sex and makes SEO more potent than sex.

Well friends, SEO has an extra silent X which proves that it is better than sex.
Now let's examine excessive linking in SEO and excess of sex.

Excessive means “exceeding a normal, usual, reasonable, or proper limit”. Linking which means “to become connected with or as if with a HTML link”.
Google released their guidelines on Link Scheme and below one can find violations of Google’s Webmaster blackhat practices that can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

One must be wary of links intended to manipulate PageRank. Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web. Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging such as "link to me and I’ll link to you." Buying or selling links that pass PageRank are also forbidden.

Excessive linking may harm your site SEO Google search results and authority. When you link excessively the search engines will stop counting them when evaluating your authority.

Now in the case of sex the result is the same.

Excess sex may be harmful to your health. Some health care providers say that excess of sexual activity can put an extra strain on your heart, especially if your heart is already weak from a heart attack or heart disease. There is an exception to this rule when it comes to prostate cancer where recent research indicates that daily sex and ormasturbation may actually reduce incidence of this cancer by up to one third. And that daily sex for females may actually act as a catalyst for them to perform more domestic chores. Please do not slay the messenger here for these recent news developments.

Now for our professional assessment of the effect of no SEO and no sex.
If a site owner has no SEO then he may loose an opportunity to increase his or her business. And the site and owner may worry about other tactics which may be far more expensive for him or her. And he or she may go for paid or sponsored referrals such as Google Adwords - or sponsored links. And he or she may loose the opportunity to secure customers naturally.

These men are optimized but not for the Internet. The INA cautions all males athletes from taking part in sex before participating in sports. This is due to endorphins being released from the male's brain during sex. Research does indicate that endorphins have little or no affect on SEO, social networking, Web 2.0 or Internet marketing practices.

In the same way in the case of no sex the life of a human being may become random and full of dissatisfaction. We only recommend no sex activity in sports for male athletes about to set Olympic records in track and field, basketball, football, soccer, tennis, skiing, baseball, cricket, swimming, hockey and shooting. Sex is a basic need so its fulfillment is necessary for a healthy and peaceful life.

The concept for the above news story was found on the Web from SEO experts in India. We from the Israel News Agency spent hours correcting grammatical mistakes but must give credit to our busy friends in India for their unending, relentless enthusiasm and non-verbal Web creativity. 

If you care for more information on SEO or sex, you may check out the following websites: Israel Pr.com (English), Israel SEO Pr.com (Hebrew) or New York SEO Pr. Or you can take a relaxing and sensual trip with us to India in the near future!

The above news content was edited and SEO optimized in London and Israel for the Internet by the Leyden Communications Internet Marketing PR SEO Group London SEO Pr New York SEO Pr Israel SEO Pr Israel, London, New York.

Woo hoo......... :) :)

I pass my Google Advertising Professional (GAP) test!!! :)

Search Insider: Everything I Need to Know About Business I Learned From Google

Everything I Need to Know About Business I Learned From Google by Aaron Goldman , Wednesday, October 21, 2009 And the beat goes on. What started off as 10 simple marketing lessons learned from Google blossomed into 15 and then 20before seeding a full-fledged book (in-progress). From there, I dove into lessons from Google about product development.Today, I'd like to bring it up a level to what Google can teach us about general business practices. For my next topic, I think I'll lighten the mood with we can learn from Google about dating -- so start tweeting your suggestions now! 1.     Innovate or die. Google fosters a culture of innovation by allowing employees to spend 20% of their time working on non-core projects. And, for core projects, it puts a relentless focus on continuous improvement. Heck, in the past year alone, Google made 359 changes to its Web search product. I guess when it's as easy as a click to switch from Google's bread-and-butter product to a competitor, it had better keep innovating. Netflix is a great example of a company devoted to innovation. It runs a contest awarding $1 million to anyone that can improve its recommendation algorithm by 10%. 2.     Automate or die. Despite ballooning to over 20,000 employees, Google is still a very lean operation. It's long held the belief that most problems can be solved by machines, not people. For example, when it first developed its search engine, rather than manually classify the Web into a directory of helpful links -- as some other companies had -- it created a technology to crawl the Web and assign value to  Web sites based on the number of inbound-links. Search marketers know better than anyone the power of automation -- whether that means bid management or multivariate testing. One that I'm particularly fond of is Kenshoo for its ability to automate not just the bidding process, but many parts of the campaign management process, including keyword generation and copywriting. 3.     Tap the long tail. This, of course, is another Chris Anderson theory -- in my last column, I riffed on " FREE" -- that draws from Google or, rather, helps explain its success. Google has made a living on the tail, from allowing people to access obscure Web assets to activating small mom and pop advertisers. Anderson's book has plenty of examples showing companies exploiting and profiting from the long tail, so I won't rehash them all here. Clearly, though, the Internet has moved the market for many products from mass to niche. When it comes to drawing up a business plan, size simply doesn't matter as it used to. Scale, on the other hand, matters very much. Just don't confuse the two. One example worth highlighting here is crowdSPRING, a start-up in Chicago. CrowdSPRING has unleashed the power of the long tail for sourcing creative services. Anyone can post a project and a bounty and get submissions from around the world before choosing the one they like best.  4.     Keep your head in the cloud. Google has made no secret of the fact that it believes cloud computing is, to quote Howard Hughes, "The way of the future." Google's product suite -- from Search to Gmail to Docs -- fully harnesses the power of the cloud and makes it one of the world's biggest metaphorical squatters on the other Big G's real estate. I've been on a bit of a sustainability kick lately. Scott Kier, a friend and colleague, has opened my eyes to the power of the triple bottom line -- people, planet, and profit. Not only is cloud computing environmentally friendly due to improved resource utilization, but it can be people- and profit-friendly as well by eliminating data-loss and fostering virtual-collaboration. The concept of tethering employees to offices in knowledge-work industries is quickly being proven ineffective. Let your people work from anywhere and reap the benefits of increased productivity -- no more death-by-meeting, not to mention, lower rent and overhead. Salesforce.com is a terrific application of cloud computing, allowing customers to manage CRM effectively and collaboratively. And HP is a company that's long embraced the "work from anywhere" model to much success. 5.     Don't scare users. Google practices this principle in a number of different ways, and it was part of its early rallying cry when introducing advertising. From its clean, inviting homepage to its overt lobbying, er... I meandisclosure around data collection and privacy protection -- Google goes to great lengths to avoid scaring consumers. Google also works hard to keep from frightening its other core constituents -- media publishers, advertisers, and agencies -- with varying degrees of success. Ain't that right, Frenemy? There are plenty of organizations that have put this lesson to good use. One recent example is the Corn Refiners Association running a campaign to dispel myths about high-fructose corn syrup. I'll close this thread in my next column with... 6.     Respect the law of supply and demand. 7.     Focus on your hard-core users first. (Submitted by Dave Chu of Eton Corporation.) 8.     Keep your customers close and your competitors closer. 9.     Follow the law of averages. (Via David Gould of Resolution Media.) 10.  Find your golden goose, then give away the farm. 11.  Make yourself very profitable for other businesses. (Another Chu-ism.) Aaron Goldman is founder and managing partner of Connectual, a rep firm dedicated to connecting the digital marketing ecosystem. Contact him here.

NY Times: Real-Life Lesson in Using Google Adwords

The pressure is on... one week left before taking the Google Advertising Professional (GAP) exam!

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October 15, 2009

Small-Business Guide

Real-Life Lessons in Using Google AdWords

By DARREN DAHL

Quick Tips:

• Set a budget, a daily or monthly amount you’re willing to spend.

• Begin by casting a narrow net, advertising in your local market and then expanding to additional markets like Google’s AdSense network.

• Try to choose keyword terms that your competition has overlooked to keep per-word costs low.

• Remember that good campaigns require constant adjustment.

Suggested Readings and Resources:

• Google’s step-by-step guide to getting started.

• Google’s blog about AdWords.

• AdWords for Dummies

It used to be that business owners often struggled to afford advertising for their products or services. Google AdWords has changed that by offering an inexpensive way to spread the word. But if you don’t do some careful planning, you can easily find yourself spending thousands of dollars with little to show for it.

Here are the basics: Google AdWords are keyword-driven ads that show up along the right-hand side of a Google search page under the rubric “sponsored links.” People who search for terms related to those you select — say, “widgets for sale” — will see your ad alongside the results of their search. How high up your ad appears on the list of sponsored links will depend on how much you’re willing to spend on your campaign. The more you spend, the higher your ad will rank. Because AdWords is a pay-per-click service, you pay Google only when someone clicks on your ad.

When you begin your campaign, you create a text-only ad that includes a link to your Web site. Then you select the keywords that will determine which searchers see your ad. You can — and should — specify how much you want to spend, what language(s) your ad will appear in and even the geographical reach of your ad. Google also gives you the opportunity to post ads through its content network, AdSense, which will place your ad on Web sites that offer content that relates to your keywords.

Googling the term AdWords will return dozens of pages of links to experts of all kinds promising to help you construct and optimize an AdWords campaign of your own. What follows are lessons learned the hard way by business owners who’ve actually taken the plunge:

Be Sure AdWords Is the Right Choice

Brent Hollowell and Jesse Travis, co-founders of a travel accessory retailer in Baltimore called Zen Class, had high hopes when they began using AdWords to promote their Nirvana Seat Back Organizer, which slips over an airplane’s seatback tray. While they knew they might get clicks if they paid for words like “travel accessories,” they feared the cost of close to $1.50 a click would be prohibitive because not every visitor would be looking for their product. They decided to be more specific and set up an AdWords campaign using the keywords “airline seat back organizer,” which cost about 5 cents a click; anyone who searched on that phrase would see their ad along the right-hand side of their screen. The problem was that the campaign, after running for several weeks, produced very few clicks on their site. They realized that most people were unaware that seatback organizers existed and thus were unlikely to search for one.

“Given the challenge of having a product that hasn’t existed before, AdWords may not be the best tool for generating interest and sales,” Mr. Hollowell said. He and Mr. Travis have found they get better results advertising through more traditional product-placement ads and using search engine optimization (S.E.O.) techniques to improve their site’s performance on organic Google searches.

Set a Budget

About a year ago, Georgette Blau, who runs On Location Tours in New York City, set up an AdWords campaign to promote tours that were timed for the release of the “Sex in the City” movie. In doing so, she says she made a mistake: She ran the ad on the Google AdSense network but failed to set a budget. An ad placed on the Google network can quickly appear on hundreds of Web sites and generate thousands of clicks. While this can be a good thing, it can also run up quite a tab. “Our ads were showing up everywhere, and we spent $600 before I could shut it off,” she said. Ms. Blau now sets monthly or even daily budgets for her campaigns to promote a “Sopranos” or “Gossip Girl” tour.

Focus on Local Markets

When Apple first introduced the iPhone, Matt McCormick, who runs a phone-repair business called Jet City Devices, saw an opportunity. Knowing that the iPhone’s screen was prone to damage, Mr. McCormick began bidding on keywords like “iphone repairs” and waited for business to flood in. A problem soon became apparent: while his site was swamped with traffic, very few people were actually mailing in their phones to get them repaired. But, after changing his campaign to run only on searches initiated within 50 miles of Chicago and Seattle — cities where he had physical shops where customers could drop their phones off in person — Mr. McCormick says his conversion rate jumped to 10 percent: “If you’re in business in only one or two cities, then Google’s localization feature can save you a ton of money, reduce AdWords competition, and bring great traffic.”

Narrow Your Keyword Net

Just as you might use quotation marks to limit the scope of a Google search, you can use brackets and quotes to focus your AdWords campaign. In fact, this is critical. If, for example, you select “widgets for sale” in quotes, your ad will show up anytime people search for those words — even if they search for, say, “blue or red widgets for sale.” If you use brackets to select [widgets for sale], on the other hand, only those people who search on the exact phrase will see the ad.

Catherine Wood, who runs an online designer clothing site called LaGrandeDame.com, suggests being selective about the keywords you place within those brackets or quotes. Ms. Wood said she followed Google’s guidelines when she set up her first campaigns this past April. “They tell you to try to choose the terms that will collect the most clicks,” she said. Ms. Wood began with 20 or so keywords such as “plus sized dresses” and “designer plus sized clothing” — somewhat general terms that she put in quotes. The result was that she received lots of traffic and quite a few customers. But, for the first four months she ran the campaign, she spent more than $5,000 a month, which meant she was spending more than $200 a new customer.

After learning her expensive lesson, Ms. Wood narrowed her keywords and used brackets to focus tightly on product names like [David Meister black dress] and [Anna Scholz Peacock Neru jacket] to drive very specific traffic to her site. She also learned the value of negative keywords — words you can specify (at no cost) so that people who search for them are blocked from seeing your ad. Ms. Wood, for example, stopped paying for clicks for anyone who searched for Halloween costumes.

Create Landing Pages

Ed Scanlan credits AdWords with helping build his company, Total Attorneys, a firm based in Chicago that provides outsource support to small legal practices. He suggests creating specific landing pages tied directly to the ad you’re running to maximize your chances of turning visitors into customers. Sending a visitor to your all-purpose home page can leave them feeling lost or aggravated. By contrast, if Mr. Scanlan runs a campaign based on a term like “legal case support,” people who click on the ad attached to those words land on a specific page designed just for them. These pages should ask users to take an action, like signing up for a mailing list or filling out a survey, to capture the visitor’s contact information.

Stay on Top of Your Campaign ...

David Metcalfe has used AdWords to promote XNet, a data center in Chicago. About a year ago, he noticed something strange was happening — his click-through rates were going through the roof. That sounds promising, but he was getting traffic steered to his site from a Web site in Spain — even though he had set his campaign for the Chicago area only. Mr. Metcalfe eventually got his money back from Google, but it took him six months of daily contact to do so. While this was clearly a fluke — and possibly criminal on the part of the offending site — it demonstrates two things: Pay-per-click campaigns carry risks, and the burden of monitoring them falls upon the owner of the campaign. “When you’re an entrepreneur dealing with a major corporation like Google, it can be hard to get someone to have a conversation with you,” Mr. Metcalfe said. “I was grateful I caught it when I did.”

... or Consider Outsourcing It

Monitoring an AdWords campaign requires a lot of effort. That’s why some entrepreneurs, like Rick Smith, prefer to outsource the management of their campaigns. Mr. Smith, who sells kitchen supplies online at chefsresource.com, says he originally set his AdWords campaign on autopilot. But he realized that while he was spending a good chunk of money each month, he didn’t know what kind of a return on investment he was getting. After attending an S.E.O. trade show near his home in Laguna Hills, Calif., about two years ago, Mr. Smith hired a firm to run his campaigns for him. The firm now tries new keyword combinations or ad text based on Smith’s latest inventory of cookware or knives. They update or change the ads on pretty much a weekly basis, adding in seasonal or holiday hooks when appropriate, and they monitor the results. In return for a percentage of his monthly budget, the firm sends him a weekly spreadsheet showing how much he has spent and how much revenue has been generated. “I’m spending less than I did when I did it myself,” said Mr. Smith, “and I’m getting more sales as a result.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

BusinessWeek: The Dubbing of 'Bing'

BTW June 4, 2009, 5:00PM EST text size: TT

BTW

The Dubbing of 'Bing'

The new name for Microsoft (MSFT)'s search engine is meant to capture the sound effect of a lightbulb moment. But coming up with "Bing" was hardly spontaneous for the software giant. It took six months and dozens of experts to settle on the name.

Brand naming is serious business in an age when goods must have global appeal and when an unfortunate choice can turn a promising product into a punch line. Web surfers looking for Fling, a low-calorie Mars candy bar launched in California in January, found that www.fling.com is a site specializing not in chocolate but in sex. Mattel's latest American Girl Doll, which just hit the stores, turns out to share her name, Rebecca Rubin, with an alleged arsonist wanted by the FBI.

Microsoft was determined to get it right when, in early 2007, it decided to rename its "Live Search" service. Interbrand, the firm that won the job of developing a list, assigned eight people to brainstorm names around such themes as "speed" and "relevance." Over roughly six weeks they came up with more than 2,000 choices, winnowing as they went along, says Paola Norambuena, who ran the project. First to go were names that weren't catchy or were hard to type. As two trademark lawyers and 20 linguists pored over the 600 remaining choices, the team also eliminated any used by other companies—or profane in any language.

That left 50 to 60 to show to Microsoft, which picked eight, submitting those to focus groups and more trademark screening. On that short list: Kumo (Japanese for "spider," and also the project's code name) and Hook. Bing won out, says Microsoft's Danielle Tiedt, who manages the search engine's marketing, partly because it was close to the "aha!" sound in many languages. "It's short, appealing, memorable, active," says Jeremy Faro, a senior director at branding agency Landor Associates. Still, despite all the hard work, bloggers are taking potshots. One popular quip: Bing is an acronym for "But It's Not Google."

Copyright 2000-2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

Washington Post: Google Economist Sees Good Signs in Searches

Google Economist Sees Good Signs in Searches
Jobless Queries Down, Real Estate Up

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 12, 2009

Google chief economist Hal Varian is pretty confident the national economy is recovering, and he's not just basing that on government data.

He says he can tell from Americans' search habits.

In March, the number of Google users searching for information about unemployment benefits or employment centers began to drop, Varian said. Overall unemployment has continued to climb, of course, but new jobless claims have declined since peaking earlier this year.

"As a contemporaneous predictor, predicting the present through search queries has been a pretty good predictor of initial (jobless) claims," said Varian, who was visiting Washington this week to make the case that government agencies should use Google tools to better draw current snapshots of consumer sentiment, corporate health and social interests.

There also has been an increase in searches for homes and real estate agents, he said, possibly foreshadowing new strength for the housing market. Google Trends, a tool that aggregates search terms, also showed an early spike in interest in the government's "Cash for Clunkers" auto purchase incentive program this summer. Perhaps the government could have avoided that whole kerfuffle over the program initially running out of cash, Varian said, if officials had been watching search trends.

A former economist and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Varian has an optimistic take on the economy that befits someone from a company whose stock price has nearly doubled in the past year, even as much of Wall Street tanked. But Varian says government data back up the impressions he gets both from Google's search metrics and from the continued strength of the overall technology sector.

While companies are slow to rehire, they aren't laying off employees as aggressively as many economist thought they would at this point in the year, Varian said in an interview at Google's Washington offices.

"Firms are very cautious, though, but there is some optimism returning," Varian said, adding that gross domestic product, the main measure of economic output, will probably increase first as demand for services and products increases. He said temporary employment is ticking higher, a measure that Varian says typically precedes a rebound in full-time hiring.

But companies will be slow to begin hiring again until it is clear the economy is back on track. And it's too soon to tell when the economy will turn around in earnest, he said.

"Employment is going to take a longer time, unfortunately, to recover," he said.

Varian began working with Google seven years ago to help design its ad business, in which millions of auctions are conducted every minute for advertisers to market everything from dance classes and fruit juicers to local car dealerships near the results of search queries. That business made $21 billion for the Mountain View, Calif., company last year.

He said the government's economic stimulus plan has already shown signs of success, with more jobs in fields such as education because of federal funds. By spring, more jobs growth will come from infrastructure projects such as expansion of high-speed Internet service. The administration is scheduled to hand out over $4 billion in funds for broadband projects this November.

With more stability in the economy, Varian said more help for private companies, such as tax incentives, could help spur an earnest recovery.

"On the other hand, I would hesitate to say we need any more major initiatives at this point," he said. "The die is cast and things seem to be moving in the right direction. Let's stay the course."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company