2006: The Year In SearchDanny Sullivan

Editor-In-Chief Search Engine Land

http://searchengineland.com

January Was A Good Month Many things that happened last

January just grew and grew or evolved…

Search Convergence Larry Page, Terry Semel keynote CES

Google Video, Google Pack Yahoo Go for phones, TV & PCs

Search anywhere for anything, not just web search in browser Search marketers will succeed by understanding where

people search, where the results come from and how to show up best…

Microsoft at CES? Gates complains about Google’s “honeymoon period”

and impression can do anything, including "robot that will cook hamburgers."

Search Wars 2006 Microsoft’s mixed messages: beating

Google fast or search is at “the beginning”

Yahoo’s Susan Decker’s realistic guidance "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet

search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share”

Troops were later pumped up, but “just” maintaining is a lot to be proud of…

Where Are We At?

How’s It Going, Google?

How’s It Going, Yahoo?

How’s It Going, Microsoft?

The Microsoft Challenge Building from scratch is hard

“Not yet better, but no longer laughable,” Erik Selberg -- and that’s a victory

AdCenter even bigger victory Changing brands from MSN to Live in mid-stream is hard

Will IE7 help produce gain? I think not, but Google and Yahoo are worried. We’ll see

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061019-101630 Will verticals help?

Maybe: Live Local is hot!; Image search scratchpad innovative

Video Killed The Search Star? Search is boring, hard work, pennies

on the dollar There’s (suspected) money in them

thar videos Google Video launched in January YouTube popularity explodes,

leading to Google’s $1.6 billion purchase last month

Video Search = Video On Demand Video search not to spidering or reading

“inside” of video Instead, it’s about video on demand That Colbert Report you missed, I want to find it

now That viral video I heard about, where is it?

Making bandwidth available Encourages new content people can’t afford to

host Makes it easier to watch the content

Sharing created the FBS network Friends Broadcast System (you gotta see this)

Video Ads Not Search Ads I looked for the video – not the message you

shoved in front, in the middle or at the end of it Maybe video online will command top dollar

because as with offline, some shows have limited spots

But it is fundamentally different than search… As are Google Audio Ads, evolving out of Google’s

purchase of dMarc broadcasting in January As are ads in print As is everyone jumping in…

Get On The Googletrain!We can start doing what Google does -- auctioning off spots. --Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Glenn Britt, April 2006

Reuters example: “Car manufacturers or dealerships could bid to put their ads on the television screens of viewers who favor the Speed Channel.”Analyst: "You can pair that data with whether they watch home improvement shows, and if they're interested [in an ad] from something like Home Depot"

Cho Cho (Goo Goo)!We don't want to miss this one the way we did when we said Google AdWords has nothing to do with us. -- Steve Hayden, vice chairman of WPP's Ogilvy & Mather, Oct. 2006

WPP, CBS & others put $40 million into Spot Runner. Started in January, the company offers canned TV ads and self-service way to place airtime mostly on cable.

AdWords Versus AuctionWords It’s search marketing, not auction

marketing, that’s a success IE, the type of marketing -- not the

pricing model -- is key Who else doesn’t get it?…

Magazine Editor Fears Future

MediaPost on Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carterhttp://blog.sewatch.com/blog/051003-150301

Carter said that while he uses Google, he can't remember a single ad he's ever seen on the search engine. The crowd, while it didn't applaud this revelation, rumbled approvingly as it mulled Carter's comments…

Saving Pvt. Search Marketing Remembering! They don’t need to

remember you want them to buy something they probably don’t need at that moment!

Time for a reminder of what search marketing is all about…

What Is Search Marketing? Putting messages in front of people who overtly

and explicitly express a desire – usually via keywords – for a particular product, service or information

Search engine optimization is the act of doing this by trying to influence unpaid listings, usually crawler-based ones

Search advertising is the act of doing this through direct paid methods

Search engine marketing – search marketing – is the combination of them both

Reverse Broadcasting Search is a reverse broadcast medium Broadcast advertising (TV, radio, print,

contextual) is all about trying to broadcast and build desire among millions of people, most of whom aren’t interested It’s wasteful, but the lunches are nice

Reverse broadcasting (desire marketing?) is about listening to the millions broadcasting their immediate desires on search engines It’s supremely efficient There’s nothing like it, short of yellow pages (they are

essentially pure commercial offline search engines

What Search Marketers Do Identify key desire broadcasting

stations (IE, the major search engines and important niche players)

Understand how to feed and optimize messages shown on these stations

Scout the location, write the dialog & deliver a customized commercial

A unique job; be proud!

What Search Is Not Having an auction doesn’t equal having

search’s reverse broadcast impact Nor does PPC pricing mean it is search Nor is putting ads in print via an

auction search Nor is putting ads on radio, video Nor is contextual the same as search…

Going Beyond Search Search players are looking beyond

search Contextual moves Google doing print, radio, video

They want to drag you (and your money) along with them Google’s $1 billion demand it couldn’t meet

Do you go? Are you still a search marketer if so?...

Metrics Marketing “Are you a performance marketer or a search

marketer?” –my keynote, Aug. 2004 Today, better term may be metrics marketing ALL marketing mediums will continue to shift

toward accountability through solid metrics Many search marketers already have mastered

metrics marketing by necessity, so you might jump

to expand, outsource the creative. OK to be both Or not – don’t feel you must! But there’s likely new

opportunities there

Contextual Pollution Google & Yahoo just reported earnings but

didn’t break out contextual/display from search

Lumping the two together pollutes the data What’s growing? What’s not? This hurt Yahoo now and may potentially hurt

Google But Google’s not hurting so far…

Google Growth Remember January?

“Shares of Google Suffer Largest One Day Percentage Drop Ever; Legal Issues Could Prove Costly; Many Still Bullish on Google” $475 to $399 in about two weeks

Maybe there is a bubble that will pop But it’s probably not search,

not that we’ll be able to tell And those legal issues?

Tired - Wired - Expired 2005

Click fraud will kill Google and paid search Google settles for $90 million in US Yahoo settling for $5 million in legal fees plus pay-outs to

be determined Problem not gone, but it wasn’t a category killer

2006 Copyright issues will kill Google “If Google gets nailed one single time for copyright

violation, there are going to be more shareholder lawsuits than doans has pills to go with the pile on copyright suits that follow.”

:)

Video Disputes Money set aside from YouTube in case

settlements needed, $200 million Realistically, content owners figuring out

very fast there’s a new channel here that they’d better join and earn from

Copyright over video will get solved DMCA irony: studios don’t like it, since it’s

so easy to copy and time-consuming to file Welcome to the life of a search marketer!

Crawling Disputes AFP sues over news content (March 2005)

AP gets an agreement (Aug. 2006) Belgians sue over news content

Could have stayed out, but the point is to be paid to be included

Two groups get an agreement Smaller markets, where content is more

controlled, we’ll likely see more deals cut Main concern is over allowing opt-out to remain

where automatic indexing permission works

My Indexing Wishlist Search Engines, Permissions &

Moving Forward In Copyright Battles http://daggle.com/061113-045255.html

Allow indexing without permission if you can automatically ask (opt-out) And robots.txt does allow

Make caching opt-in Because it weakens support for indexing

Stop scanning books that are in copyright You can’t automatically ask for permission, and it hurts the overall

principle of indexing opt-out Work to extend the systems

ACAP? No, something broader

Amazing Changes Google Sitemaps grew and grew in features and

became Google Webmaster Central Spam checking, robots.txt checking, top keyword reporting,

preferred domain tool, throttling all this year Yahoo Site Explorer grew and added new features Search engines have united around a common format

Robots.txt will likely be next Weather reports keep coming Bot identification and authentication from Google and

Microsoft An entire new era – all from site owners speaking up

January’s Privacy Surprise Bush Administration makes wide-

ranging request for search records Google says no, even though they

wouldn’t have “personal info” I make ABC’s Nightline :) It can’t get any bigger than this…

Poster Child For Privacy

Privacy Challenge AOL’s release of “anonymous” search data

quickly illustrated how personally we confide with search engines

Still, nothing really has changed Talk of control and export of our data all

this week, but months now, and still no control panels

Still, long, long look needed at how we handle things here, because another problem feels almost inevitable.

So Much More! Censoring in China Martin Luther King Jr. link bomb

Miserable Failure changed by White House BMW banned for cloaking Stanford does paid links, as does Washington Post,

as do many other “reputable” sites Issues with ranking ads by “quality” Search trends via Google Trends Yahoo Answers grows while Google Answers closes

Let’s Talk More! Search Engine Watch has new editor-in-chief Search Engine Land

Stories and news from me and others, by feed or email

http://searchengineland.com Daily SearchCast

Podcast where I recap the news http://dailysearchcast.com

Search Engine Strategies I’m chairing New York, co-chairing San Jose and

participating in Chicago next year And we’re open forum right now!