“Search results for “Gaza” on March 20 began with two Wikipedia links, a March 19 BBC report, two video clips of unclear origin, the CIA World Factbook, a Guardian report and, most strikingly, a link to Gaza-related messages on Twitter.”

The “link” is to Twitter Search and you can still see it in the results today: http://bit.ly/4pssNi

I decided to search for some other keywords specific to time-sensitive events and information and found that Twitter Search is being indexed in a number of instances:

March Madness: http://bit.ly/12z9wB

SXSW: http://bit.ly/CH9Q

If Google doesn’t think Twitter provides any real differentiated or valuable benefit in search and is in fact, “poor man’s e-mail” as their CEO Eric Schmidt put it, they have a funny way of showing it. It’s weird to see them featuring links to another engine’s search results on their own search results page.  The twist here is that Twitter has generally not done much to make their content followable or easily indexed by Google’s spiders. This explains Google’s use of Twitter Search to generate results.

As we’ve pointed out before, Google clearly hasn’t addressed “real-time” search on its own, so this is a way of laying the groundwork to deal with it near term.  Whether that means simply using Twitter as their real time search or studying them to initiate their own rival (perhaps based on FriendFeed, which is stocked with ex-Googlers) Google is showing that they are keenly interested in how to incorporate real time results into their search service.

Keep in mind that it still takes Google over an hour (compared to first mention on Twitter) to get a breaking story like Lance Armstrong’s crash on the front page of Google News (Sports section, even) or on the main SERP’s page in connection with searches for “Lance Armstrong.”

UPDATE: 

TechCrunch alliteratively reports today that Twitter has tweaked it’s title tags (try saying that 5 times fast) for user profiles, allowing them to better rank on Google search results. It’s a step closer to opening up a users influence beyond the number of followers they have, as we predicted:

“To this point, the “Twitterverse” has pretty much been living in a bubble – one where all updates are made and consumed within Twitter and its associated applications alone and where some believe that having 10,000 followers means that you are an authoritative or influential figure.  While I believe that is, in fact, the case for some (and I won’t diminish the value in having a large following), the volume of traffic some individual Twitter updates will receive from organic search will dwarf what they are typically able to generate from Twitter alone.  It also means that Twitter accounts with fewer followers – but with something important and to say on a given topic – will start to see some increased attention as well.  Much like many of the early bloggers did.  And when that happens, the whole question of influence and authority will once again be turned on its head.”

Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.

It started with Danny Sullivan’s Why Don’t Google & Yahoo Offer Twitter Search?  Danny’s point is that people are increasingly turning to Twitter — rather than Google and Yahoo — when looking for information on breaking news.  This is a trend we highlighted in our 2009 predictions post at the end of last year.  For proof of Twitter’s real-time search capabilities all you need to do is look back at last week’s plane crash in the Hudson to see where the news initially broke.  People were talking about the event for several minutes on Twitter before the first mentions of it on Google News or any major media site, for that matter.

With that in mind, I agree with Danny when he suggests it’s important that Google and Yahoo develop ways to search Twitter. Where we (may) disagree is over exactly what that would look like.  Danny seems to be suggesting that the engines develop search services that are dedicated to searching Twitter.  My own take is that while it’s important for Google and Yahoo to consider how Twitter could compliment their broader search services, it would be a mistake to create something solely Twitter-centric.

Why Don’t Major Search Engines Offer Twitter Search?

For starters, that has already been addressed by Summize (acquired by Twitter last year and re-branded Twitter Search).  Its search functionality hasn’t been integrated directly into Twitter yet, but anyone can use the site to search all Twitter updates. There are also third-party tools like Power Twitter for Firefox that integrate Twitter Search into the main Twitter page.

Beyond that, most people generally do not want to use several different search engines when looking for products, services, and information – they want different types of results (images videos, and yes, breaking news headlines) brought directly to them on a single results page.  That’s the whole idea behind Universal Search. When there is breaking news Twitter updates could be treated just like news results which sometimes show up above organic listings.

Regardless of what the “right” implementation would look like, however, Danny’s larger question is why hasn’t this been addressed yet?

John Battelle’s take is that it’s all about competition:

“The reason there is not a “Twitter search” from Yahoo or Google is because both companies want to own Twitter, or at least, they want to own the phenomenon of real time search Twitter represents. If they were to create a Twitter search, it would validate Twitter and give the company way too much power. “

Also:

“And Google is likely viewing Twitter as a competitor, and is probably noodling the addition of Twitter-like functionality to Blogger (if it hasn’t already, I’m not following the service too closely). The reason? TweetSense. I am certain Google wants AdSense to be TweetSense, and I am equally certain that the Twitter team will want to build its own version of a scaled ad platform that matches consumer intent, as declared through Tweets and search, to marketers’ paid listings.”

While I don’t disagree with John’s POV, particularly as it relates to the potential advertising opportunity Twitter inventory could represent, I think it would be a mistake for both companies to try to develop Twitter competitors.  Yahoo is moving in the direction of fewer projects and it’s unlikely they would put the adequate amount of resources behind the project.  Google, on the other hand, is well-equipped to issue a challenge in theory, but they have a very questionable record on projects outside of search and it’s reasonable to wonder whether they could be successful.  This is essentially what they’ve tried to do with Knol in response to Wikipedia’s popularity and the results have been mixed at best. Similarly, they haven’t put too many resources behind Blogspot which still attracts most of its users because it’s no charge to use it.

On the other hand, an aggregator of Twitter results similar to Google’s Blog Search or Google News functionality would have potential to be successful, as a way of filtering Twitter posts from universal results. Just as they checkmated Technorati with blog search, they could use the power of their huge number of users to overwhelm Twitter Search. So why haven’t they done something like this yet?

On a Collision Course

My personal view is that Google and Yahoo haven’t come up with Twitter solutions simply because they did not initially understand what Twitter represents from a search perspective. Twitter themselves may have failed to grasp this initially, before Summize came into the mix. It’s unlikely that either Google or Yahoo saw Twitter’s potential as a search engine.  So, it’s only now that they’re probably starting to put adequate resources behind developing a strategy in this area, though I have to believe that it’s become a very high priority, particularly for Google. That’s where this issue gets really interesting – particularly for someone like me who views social media through the lens of search.

There may in fact be a sort of online game of chicken happening between Google and Twitter. As Battelle points out, Google wants to be the one to serve ads on Twitter’s platform if indeed that is the monetization direction Twitter decides to follow. Twitter understands this, but they would like to develop and reap the potential profits from what Battelle calls “TweetSense” themselves. The bet from Twitter is that they will continue to pull the audience for breaking news away from Google quickly enough so that Google will have to capitulate to stay competitive. Google would like to keep this audience but their bet is that Twitter wants the big boost in users that Google search results would bring and would be willing to share some of the ad profit to do so.

This may be what keeps Google from enacting a version of Twitter Search soon. Why build up Twitter’s platform only to see them monetize it without Google’s involvement? Keep in mind the above is all pure speculation.

Open the Fire Hose

Twitter’s growth has already been pretty phenomenal – its recent use on CNN and mentions on ESPN.com and in the New Yorker would seem to indicate that it’s beginning to go mainstream.  Still, relative to the 200 million plus  people currently online in the U.S. , Twitter’s user-base is relatively small – recent estimates suggests there are  around 6 million people currently signed up for the service, with most of them only ever sending out a handful of updates. Most of the “tweets” even active Twitter users send are only viewed by their “followers” (the occasional retweet notwithstanding), so at best, a user’s most popular updates are viewed by tens of thousands of people.  More likely, their updates are viewed by dozens or possibly hundreds of people.

Showing Twitter updates in search results by the major search engines means that users will no longer have to exclusively rely on a large group of followers for distribution of updates – Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will effectively become distribution valves for Twitter conversations (much the same way as Twitter has represented a distribution source for content created in other areas on the web through link dissemination).  It’s at that point that Twitter usage will really begin to tip as people without Twitter accounts discover useful and interesting information in these results.

From a marketer’s perspective, this means that companies who have been successful using Twitter as a standalone social media strategy will need to recognize that those efforts will need to evolve so that they’re part of a more integrated effort – one that likely includes Facebook fan pages, corporate blogs, branded YouTube channels, etc – that ties back to one overarching corporate goal.  Social media properties continue to dominate search results pages – for better or for worse, the amount of presence a marketer has in those results oftentimes represents the aggregation of the company’s social media efforts.  SEO will become a core component of a successful Twitter strategy.

It’s worth noting that this is a development that has significant relevance to recent debates about Twitter and authority.  To this point, the “Twitterverse” has pretty much been living in a bubble – one where all updates are made and consumed within Twitter and its associated applications alone and where some believe that having 10,000 followers means that you are an authoritative or influential figure.  While I believe that is, in fact, the case for some (and I won’t diminish the value in having a large following), the volume of traffic some individual Twitter updates will receive from organic search will dwarf what they are typically able to generate from Twitter alone.  It also means that Twitter accounts with fewer followers – but with something important and to say on a given topic – will start to see some increased attention as well.  Much like many of the early bloggers did.  And when that happens, the whole question of influence and authority will once again be turned on its head.

Now, there are a number of things about this message that I have a problem with, including the feature in the left-hand column that lists three reasons why SearchForce is “different” from other search firms”. None of their claims are actually true (far from it), but we’re used to competing against companies who mislead prospects about their history, capabilities, etc, so I can live with this.

What I’m not willing to overlook is the fact that this email was completely unsolicited – I’ve never signed up for anything through SearchForce and there’s no reason why they should be contacting me. Not only that, but I received three copies of the same message, which means they not only sent it to my personal email address, but a couple of “aliases” that I’m included on as well. I’m pretty certain that the “press” alias at my company, for instance, never registered for anything with SearchForce.

Now, I should be able to definitively say which email addresses SearchForce contacted me at, but the fact that there are no listed recipients in the “To” field makes that an impossibility. As a result, I’m not sure what I need to do to unsubscribe from their mailing list. Yes, I could follow their instructions and put “REMOVE” in the subject line, but that would only take one of the three email addresses they have on file off their mailing list, leaving two others to continuously be spammed by SearchForce.

But what’s most confusing about SearchForce’s ambitious sales effort is the disclaimer at the bottom of the message:

“Disclaimer: This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail.”

Named individual? I wish there was one – or three, for that matter. Hey, SearchForce, feel free to let me know who those named individuals are and then unsubscribe them all from your mailing list.

So, who’s right? Well, actually, they both are. Here’s why:

McIntyre points out that BusinessWeek undoubtedly has the staff to develop unique, fresh content on a daily basis, yet many of its top stories are outdated and its most recent headlines have simply been syndicated from the AP. Needless to say, users are not going to return to a site that doesn’t feature original content with any degree of frequency – particularly in a category like finance, in which news is constantly breaking. A lack of unique content also gives bloggers and webmasters little incentive to link to BW’s pages. This leads to a loss of direct traffic, but more important, it impacts the site’s search engine rankings. Without a significant number of third-party links from authoritative sources, a site cannot count on receiving a meaningful volume of traffic from major search engines. It should be noted that this is where site usability becomes a factor as well: AP articles can be found on so many different websites that webmasters often decide which site they’re going to link to based on the user experience it provides. If BusinessWeek’s usability is poor, it cannot count on being linked.

At the same time, some of BusinessWeek’s strongest competitors are affiliated with other well-trafficked sites. In addition to offering tons of unique content, these competitors are often integrated really well into their parent or partner sites. CNNSI, for instance, drives a huge amount of traffic to CNN.com. And CNN.com drives tons of traffic to Fortune. All of the sites in Time Warner’s portfolio benefit from being part of the family. There’s no doubt that many other finance sites that belong to larger parent companies are benefiting in a similar way. BusinessWeek’s parent McGraw-Hill owns almost no online properties – and none of the ones it does own are very popular. This is where Kafka’s lack of distribution theory really makes sense. Yes, BusinessWeek can strike distribution deals with the major portals, but there is a real advantage to being integrated into a broader network of sites.

It’s worth noting that BusinessWeek.com’s Editor-in-Chief, John A. Byrne, responded in a comment to Kafka’s post by stating that the comScore numbers don’t reflect reality – BW’s internal numbers suggest that they had four times as many page views in August than comScore reported. That may be true, in which case, there’s even more upside for the site if it can address each of the shortcomings McIntyre and Kafka have highlighted.

“Right now when you look at how advertisers are evaluating their campaigns, when a sale appears on their Web site, they credit the last ad or click with the entire credit for that sale. And more often than not that last click came from Google,” said Young-Bean Song, vice president of analytics for Atlas. “So wow-holy-cow, it looks like Google is responsible for the vast majority of sales on the site. The consequence of that is month after month, they buy more Google and cheap advertising space.”

The report, titled “Overlap’s Impact on Reach, Frequency and Conversions“, goes on to critique marketers that depend too heavily on paid search. Atlas claims that advertisers should re-evaluate the effect of overlapping advertising, from TV, Radio, Print, Banner, etc, on paid search performance.

As co-founder of a search marketing firm and long-time search industry advocate, I take issue with the Atlas study (surprise surprise). To be sure, I don’t disagree that overlapping forms of advertising can impact the success (or failure) of a paid search campaign – 80% of online users start at a search engine, but it would be foolish to suggest that they do so by random coincidence. In all likelihood, the searcher saw an ad elsewhere that inspired him to seek out more information – a TV commercial, an online sponsorship, a print ad, a billboard, or perhaps just a conversation with a friend. All forms of advertising drive people to search engines – on that fact, there is little debate.

What I do disagree with, however, is Rob Hof’s interpretation of the Atlas study. Based on Atlas’ finding, Hof beleives that advertisers may be spending “too much on search ads.” He suggests that marketers will soon act on Atlas’ results “by shifting some of their spending from search ads back to banner ads.” Hof points to Google’s recent Doubleclick acquisition as further verification that banner ads are being under-valued.

But Hof is missing a key point: the question provoked by Atlas is not whether advertisers are spending too much on search, it is whether they’re spending enough money everywhere else. If advertisers shift dollars away from search and into other ad formats, they won’t be able to effectively convert the incremental number of users being driven online. To increase “overlapping” ad spend at the expense of search would be like building a skyscraper without a doorway – it might make your brand more visible, but without a key point of entry, it’s effectively useless.

As my colleague, Josh Stylman, noted
in an interview with AdWeek, what’s most important is ensuring that a search marketing campaign compliments other offline and online advertising campaigns. If done properly, we’ll all get the credit we deserve.

What was somewhat surprising, however, was the amount of time spent discussing how the black box impacts the type of support Google provides to its advertisers. And I couldn’t help but walk away from that session feeling that my suspicions had been confirmed – that the account teams at Google either have no better understanding of how their ad ranking system works than the rest of the search marketing world does OR they’ve been advised that, when in doubt, blame the unexplainable on Quality Score.

For example, for the past few weeks we’ve been managing an AdWords campaign for a local advertiser. His keyword list, consequently, is extensively populated with local “tail” terms. Not long after the campaign launched, a high percentage of keywords were deactivated due to low quality scores – which we pretty much expected to happen. To our surprise, however, dynamic keyword insertion wasn’t working for many of the city names that we wanted to feature in the ad creative. The instances when it was working seemed to be completely random.

We reached out to the folks at Google to see if they could help us address the issue. Nearly two weeks after opening a help ticket, we received their formal response:

“You’ll recall that we spoke specifically about keywords like ‘XXXX,’ ‘YYYY,’ and ‘ZZZZ.’ These keywords are not dynamically inserted into your ad text because their corresponding Quality Scores aren’t high enough to qualify for keyword insertion.

Maintaining high-quality ads for both users and advertisers is important to AdWords. Your keyword’s Quality Score reflects your clickthrough rate (CTR), plus your keyword, ad text, and landing page content.

This quality standard can affect your ads and keywords using dynamic keyword insertion. Therefore, if a keyword’s Quality Score is low, the keyword won’t appear in the ad (we’ll insert the default text instead). This ensures that users see relevant keywords in a dynamic keyword insertion ad, so that they continue to see relevant ads overall.

To learn how to improve the quality of your ad text, please visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=27648&hl=en_US.”

Needless to say, I wanted to see how Google suggested we could improve the quality of our ad text, so I visited the url they had provided us with.

Unbelievably enough, Google suggests the following:

“Review your keyword list to choose your ad title. Find keywords with the highest number of clicks or impressions. For example, if the keyword phrase ‘online advertising’ is clearly generating the most clicks and impressions in your account, use this term in the title of your ad. This is an effective way of increasing clickthrough rate because users can see immediately that your ad is relevant to their query. Also, any keywords you include in any part of your ad text are automatically highlighted in bold type on Google, when a user enters the keywords as part of their query. This helps draw the user’s attention to the ad.”

So, the best way for me to increase the quality of my ad is by featuring the keyword that the user searched for in my ad copy? That would be great were it not for the fact that I was just told that my ad’s Quality Score wasn’t high enough to justify using dynamic keyword insertion to feature the keyword in my ad copy. How else can I make sure that user keywords are always featured?

Well, according to Google:

“To help ensure that your ad appears for a specific keyword and includes this keyword in the ad text, please manually create the ad. Such ads that do not use keyword insertion are considered ‘static text ads.’ The static ad you create can appear with your specific keyword when your dynamic ad is not eligible to appear with that keyword. “

Forgetting for a moment that creating tens of thousands of “static ads” is a complete pain in the ass, I’m having a hard time following the logic here. On the one hand, Google is suggesting that the use of dynamic keyword insertion on ads with low Quality Scores may cause users to see “irrelevant” ads. But if I manually create a static version of the *exact* same ad that was previously deemed irrelevant, users will suddenly find it relevant? Right.

Call it a catch-22, call it poor customer service…or just blame it on Quality Score.

“Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.”

Mahalo’s press release features a Q&A section, wherein it outlines the differences between the company’s business model/processes and those of some other “comparable” companies, including About.com, DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, and Wikipedia. Interestingly enough, there’s no mention of the company that, in my mind, most closely resembles Mahalo – Ask Jeeves.

I worked at AJ from 1998-2002, during which time we employed over 100 human editors. Those editors – who, btw, were all well-versed in their assigned vertical categories – were responsible for hand-selecting the best answers to the site’s most frequently asked questions on an ongoing basis. The thought was that 80% of the people asked the same 20% questions all the time. By using humans to direct users to sites that most effectively answered each question, we’d be able to ensure the web’s most relevant search experience.

Needless to say, Jeeves’ original business model failed for a variety of reasons and I suspect that, based on Mahalo’s processes as they exist today, the new engine will likely suffer a similar fate. Here’s why:

• Content is being created at way too fast a place to ensure that the “best” answers today will be the best answers tomorrow. Given the recent explosion in CGM, etc, this is a far bigger issue today than it was seven or eight years ago. It’s unrealistic to expect that Mahalo’s Guides will reassess the search results they’ve created on a regular basis.
• The company is only as scaleable as the number of people it can hire (i.e. there’s little to no technology leverage). The more successful Mahalo becomes (as defined by the number of queries it receives), the more content it will need to create. The more content it needs to create, the more people they’ll need to hire. As Danny Sullivan notes in his post on Mahalo,
  

  “Ask’s problem was scaling. Having so many editors cost money. In contrast, Google’s link-based automated approach provided good relevancy for both popular and unusual (or long-tail) queries. Over time, the machine has reigned supreme when it comes to the major search engines. Yahoo’s human-powered directory has been buried in various ways over the years, while Microsoft once heavy-reliance on human editing of top results was long-abandoned in the technological chase after Google.”

  Granted, Calcanis admits that Mahalo is not intended to be a “google killer”. But even in competition for a single percent of search market share, I think they’ll run into problems competing with algorithmic-based search engines. It’s no coincidence that Ask’s new ad campaign claims, “The Algorithm Killed Jeeves”.

• Yesterday, Calcanis asked, “Why not build a Reuters or AP organization to handle 24 percent of searches.” Why? Because winning – or even competing – in the search game isn’t about finding the best answers to the 20% of most frequently asked questions — the difference lies in each engine’s ability to find the most relevant answers for the remaining 80%. Google recognized that from day one, which is one of the many reasons why they’ve come out on top.

Calcanis understands Mahalo’s scalability issues and has decided to backfill long-tail searches with results from Google. This certainly provides a better overall user experience, but once again history would suggest that it won’t go far enough. Ask Jeeves tried backfilling results from engines including About.com, AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, and Webcrawler, Direct Hit, and finally Teoma. The problem was, backfilled results were always treated secondary to any possible human-edited match, which meant that the most relevant answers were often buried in the back pages of search engine results.

Not long after acquiring Teoma, Ask dropped its “human” element and decided instead to feature only algorithmic search results. If Mahalo continues to lean heavily on the human-powered model, I predict it will eventually come to the same realization that Ask made in 2002. Especially with the emergence of image, video, audio, and user-generated content, Mahalo will have an extremely hard time maintaining relevancy. Though Mahalo might reach a balancing point between ad revenue and operational costs, I predict that it will never generate a loyal user base that extends far beyond Calcanis’ circle of friends.

What I found *almost* as fascinating as watching a dozen giant rats consume low-quality meat off a filthy floor, however, was the way that Yum Brands (owner of KFC/Taco Bell) used search to respond to the crisis. According to Pete Blackshaw, quoted in an AdAge article, neither KFC nor Taco Bell bought ads against “negative terms” on the major search engines the day the story broke. While this oversight was seemingly corrected at some point later in the day, Blackshaw rightly points out that “this is a missed opportunity because the organic search results generally reinforced negative perceptions about food hygiene.” Who knows how many people searched for terms along the lines of “taco bell rats” before Yum Brands realized they had the opportunity to respond to those users with their position (however weak it was) on the issue.

Here’s a screen shot of the Huffington Post’s early coverage of the story:

And the NYT’s coverage shortly thereafter..

AdAge reports, “By midday Friday, more than 1,000 blogs had cited or spread the story and footage… A search on Google News for “rats and KFC” yielded 443 stories and “rats and Tago Bell” some 600 stories posted on websites of publications from Wyoming to the UK.” I bring this up to illustrate something that marketers and P.R. agent often overlook – when responding to negative criticism, start with the publisher pages. Consider the number of major media sites like NYTimes.com and Huffington that use AdSense to monetize their pages. By including contextual ads in a damage control campaign, marketers can feature their side of the story alongside an article that’s likely to be critical of the company. More importantly, this can be done at the same speed at which the story is likely to travel.

Yum Brands eventually caught on:

(from Huffington)

(From the NYT)

Despite the fact that Yum Brands was a little late in responding to the rat crisis, it’s good to see that marketers are finally starting to understand the role of search in the distribution of information online. As for my local KFC/Taco Bell, it may be time to call in…

Though it’s still WAY too early to assess Panama’s long-term effects, the immediate CTR increase has many industry observers hopeful about Yahoo’s overall financial performance. I’m surprised however, that few have mentioned two additional factors that are critical to the effective monetization of those clicks. They are:

1. Geo-Targeting
   
   Both Google and MSN have offered Geo-targeting for years, giving both engines a significant advantage over Yahoo. With Panama, however, Yahoo has arguably surpassed Google and MSN with more sophisticated targeting mechanisms and nifty UI features like interactive maps. It goes without saying that “local” advertisers will find Yahoo a more attractive advertising venue, while national advertisers will have the opportunity to expand campaigns that were previously limited. This should mean an increase in ad dollars spent on Yahoo.
2. Separate Campaigns and Tracking for Contextual Ads
   
   Yahoo has technically been in the “contextual” advertising business for years, but its distribution and tracking capabilities were limited. As a result, significant traffic volume and contextual-specific performance results were difficult to capture. In November 2005, Google implemented separate search and contextual channel management in response to heavy demand from SEMs (Reprise Media included). Yahoo has finally made the same move with Panama by separating contextual and search tracking, thus giving marketers a way to measure the effectiveness of contextual advertising as a separate entity. Again, this should mean an increase in ad dollars being spent with Yahoo, as advertisers begin realizing the benefits of contextual on its own.

Only with the combined effects of better CTR, more sophisticated geo-targeting, and visible contextual results, will Yahoo have “currency” to begin competing for syndication deals that it has historically lost to Google. With better syndication deals, Yahoo can build a portfolio of high-quality inventory, and may finally address one shortcoming that Panama cannot directly fix – conversion rates. Once Yahoo improves its conversion rates to a level that rivals Google, we may actually see a legitimate two horse race.

Now Yahoo needs to take things a few steps further by making the same change here in the U.S. And the lower minimum shouldn’t just apply to some keywords as it appears to in the U.K. For instance, some “finance” keywords allegedly still require £0.10 minimums. That doesn’t make any sense. Google realized that shortly after they launched AdWords and they’re clearly doing something right.