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SEARCH

DIGITAL

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide |Ged Carroll |November 18, 2008

2SEARCH:

• A bit of background

• Links

• How search works

• Page Rank

• The trouble with search

• Scenarios for search

• Looking forward

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3 A BIT OF BACKGROUND ON SEARCH

Search as the gateway to the web7 out of 10 web journeys start on the

webA reputation engineStakeholders:

– General public– Shareholders– Peers– Prospective clients– Prospective employees– Regulators– Pressure groups and NGOs

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04/12/23

4LINKS

•Links = Whuffie– "Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the

old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented - your personal capital with your friends and neighbors - you more accurately gauged your success". Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

•As you give so shall you receive– Comment on other people’s blogs– Link to interesting postings elsewhere in your text, if you

found a site via someone else’s blog credit the source

•Make it easy on yourself– Include links to social bookmark services: Digg, del.icio.us

5HOW ALGORITHMIC SEARCH WORKS

1. Content acquisition– Visits webpage, reads it, and crawls

links to other pages up to 4 layers deep within the website

– Consumes RSS feeds that highlight new content and links

– Crawls a site map (sitemap.xml)– Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo!

Directory)

2. Index web pages– Everything the spider finds is saved

in the search engine’s index

3. Algorithmic categorisation: sorts through the Index and returns results based on mathematical calculations – Spam scoring– Relevance– freshness– Topological relationship to other

sites – Appropriate for vertical search?

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PAGE RANK

7SEARCHING THE LONG TAIL

Google, Live.com, Yahoo! and Ask algorithmic search

Social SearchBookmarking

ServicesQ&A servicesTrusted web

Local searchMaps

Yellow PagesMobile searchComparison

shopping

Mainstream Esoteric

Vertical search(Google Scholar, Krugle, Scirus etc)

Recommendations(Last.fm, Yahoo! Music)

8THE TROUBLE WITH SEARCH

• Tyranny of the minority: only a very small amount of people (those who maintain websites) have a vote in what sites are important

• Google has a stranglehold over online reputation and is more dominant in Europe than US. Only Asia still has everything to play for

• There is a lot of spam content out there in addition to competitor noise - you may have your clients content stolen and reused on an automated site

• Search still struggles with context: Randy the name, randy the British English word, randy: a mistyped version of brandy the liquor. All very different

• Search generally doesn’t understand user intent: are you looking for information – for a college project or to make a purchase?

• If you’re not first, you’re last: consumers seldom look beyond the first five search results – Search Engine Journal

• Anywhere between 7 and 10 per cent of clicks due to SEM-funded adverts are fraudulent

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TRANSACTIONAL

SEM/SEO

•Traditional direct-response online marketing work•Direct response•Highly measurable•Very quantitative•Specialist field

•Content: relevance, freshness and quality•Provision for trusted web services• (digg, del.icio.us)•SEO for corporate and product •websites through collection of inlinks

BRAND

CONTENT CREATION /BOOKMARKINGSEO

REPUTATION

TRUSTED ADVISOR

SEMCONTENT CREATION

SEO•Purchase ad spots to drive consumers to company site to communicate clients’ side of the story•Create content to flush ‘bad coverage’ off the first search page•SEO to maintain position

SEARCH – THREE SCENARIOS

10BRAND COMMUNICATIONS

• Be cognisant of the impact of your campaign on search and leverage it!

• Submit microsites and blogs to search engines and directories

• Specify microsites to:

– have a sitemap.xml format site description

– Be no more than four layers deep

– Have HTML version as well as flash since web crawlers read plain text

– Include good descriptors around video and audio files for better indexing

• Make it easy to index content on trusted websites (magnolia, delicious)

• Encourage in-links to content with easy to use bookmarks

• Consider using the SHIFT-style social media release template wherever possible

• Consider a limited amount of SEM to promote a microsite or promotion

11LOOKING FORWARD

• Move from pure algorithmic to ‘trusted web’ and folksonomy augmented search:

• Influence context through making content easy to bookmark

• Tag content carefully• Crowdsourced classification• Rally enthusiast groups and communities to bookmark

materials• Development of quality relevant regularly refreshed content:

whitepapers, blogs, photo streams, podcasts• Drive cross company guidelines on writing search engine

friendly copy• Stay current with emerging search technologies (Powerset,

Mahalo etc)

12BIBLIOGRAPHY

• The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle

• Google’s PageRank and Beyond by Langville & Meyer• Search Engine Journal

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© Waggener Edstrom Worldwide 2008