Every once in a while one of us gets to leave the office to attend an industry event. Last Thursday was one such day and I was that lucky guy.
The following are highlights from the “Search Destinations & Technologies” panel that took place at the Piper Jaffray Online Advertising & Search Symposium in NYC.
Panel members included: Tim Armstrong of Google, Tim Cadogan of Yahoo and Arkady Volozh of Yandex.
Moderator: What inning do you think we’re in for search? What is the next step for search?
Armstrong: This is the second inning. We’re in the early stages…We see a small percentage of world’s content being indexed. A big piece of growth is the amount of information you can currently get to. On an advertising scale – advertising needs to be broken into direct marketing and brand. We also see the need on our end to have a platform that can address many needs and many types of companies, from the largest advertiser in the world to the smallest. Google currently serve ads 40 languages across hundreds of countries.
Cadogan: (Cadogan makes an analogy comparing search to cricket, a sport in which games can go on for days). Yahoo’s long term vision is FUSE – Find, Use, Share and Expand knowledge. This can be as simple as saving useful bookmarks and sharing with other people who think they’re relevant. The coupling of technology and participation systems is a compelling future story for Yahoo. We have .5 billion users across our network. Being able to pull all of their different assets together and tie it into the offline market is the challenge. We generate the same amount of data every day as exists in the Library of Congress. That data is not being used as well as it should be to target ads…Where on the page did someone click, where did they come from and where did they go?
Moderator: How have consumer search habits changed over the last few years?
Armstrong: People have become more defined over time. Searches also follow the content – as local content has expanded, people conduct more local searches. Google Earth is an example of different planes of information – “I’m looking for a house in this price range that happens to be near a school.” It’s not just text-based but visual as well. That’s really powerful in terms of user experience.
Cadogan: In general we’re seeing an increase in specificity…In the last two years – multimedia search (video, audio, images, etc) has become more popular. Flickr is more serendipitous than traditional search – users are just following a stream of consciousness through the site. It’s not what people generally think of as search, but it is. There’s also homemade video, blog search – media formats are being created very rapidly.
Moderator: How many of the searches you get that are commercial In nature?
Cadogan:There’s a section of people with queries that have some commercial application. The key is answering these two questions: What do they mean (jaguar the animal or Jaguar the car?) What do they intend? Intent is the Holy Grail. We can do a much better job of delivering the right kind of results.
Volozh: It used to be 20-25% queries were related to goods. Now it’s closer to 30. The average query was 1.5 words a year ago, now it’s 2.6. More information is now available, so you want to use more words. A few years ago, the Internet was for geeks, or those who wanted international content. Now more “normal people” using it. Interest in international content is growing, but share is decreasing. More people are using local Russian content. They’re ooking for goods, local news, blogs, etc.
Moderator: Do you see Increasing monetization on vertical services?
Cadogan: We’re really there to provide whatever the user wants. Sometimes we enable that by giving blog tools and blog search. We want to make the vertical search experience as robust as we can. By having a vertical experience you can add depth that is difficult to fit on a search engine results page. You can include knobs and dials that really add to the experience. The challenge is this: How do you present advertising in a way that satisfies the user’s needs? Search is great because it makes this easier.
Armstrong: Users want to have services that are simple and clean. Keep main interface simple, but give people the ability to go to deep verticals. When you’re immersed in search, it’s easy to lose perspective.
Moderator: Google’s brand has branched out into 20-30 products. Is there a danger of diluting your brand with all this expansion? How keep users focused on Google as the place of search when you’ve got Maps, Book Search, Froogle, etc.?
Armstrong: Google is less about brand extension than it is about user needs in each of those areas. Our singular focus is to be the highest quality result. We’re not focused on the brand, they’re focused on the results. The brand is important to us, but the products are more important.
Moderator: Tim, I’ve got to ask you about the new product: Google Base. What are your hopes against broader inventory?
Armstrong: We’re interested in letting people put content on the web. We constantly trying to expand the ways in which we can expand what’s searchable. In terms of areas of innovation for advertising: The success we’ve had has taught advertisers that if the ads are profitable they can run anywhere. We’ve tested print…our advertisers are interested in finding more inventory.
Cadogan: The culture of creation & culture of remix is one that’s growing on the web. We feel we can provide tools to encourage that and harness it from an advertising perspective.
Audience Q& A:
Question: How much do you hear from advertisers on CPA vs. CPC?
Armstrong: From the advertiser perspective we hear it very often. We would hope that future systems of payment would relate as directly as possible to the revenue that we’re generating. Analytics indicates that we’re aligned with not just advertising, but generating results.
Question: Talk about CTRs, are they increasing? What are you doing to increase them, is CTR tied to relevancy?
Cadogan: Each advertiser drives their campaign based on the way they’re tracking on the back end. CTR is a good proxy for relevance. We need to track more than that.
Question: Are CTRs going up for you?
Armstrong: We don’t make generalized comments about that. Our CTRs are determined by our users. That’s not the measure we look at.
Question: What efforts are being done to lessen digital divide?
Volozh: We launched a free WiFi project in 200 different cities. We need to convince businesses that Internet access is a utility like electricity or plumbing. You don’t charge customers to have the lights on. In Moscow, on every corner there’s a cafe with free Wifi.
