2009 June 08

SES Toronto 09: Universal & Blended Search - Comprehensive Visibility Challenges

Posted by Eric Amzallag at 5:01 pm

Moderator: Mike Grehan

Speakers: Bill Tighe, Andy Renieris and Jed Schneiderman

This was an interesting presentation about how blended search result pages can affect your marketing strategy and how you can use it towards driving more targeted visits to your website.

Bill Tighe from Google Canada starts things off by presenting the mission at Google is to organize all of the world’s information into one search engine. Blended search was first introduced at Google in 2007 where news, web, video blog and image results were introduced altogether in the search results. In order to take advantage of this he says to be aware of your market and respond! In doing so, make sure that you optimize your content through tags for your results to show up properly in images, maps and video results to deliver better quality to web surfers.

Use Google Analytics to analyze your websites performance and how you can adjust your strategies to better suit your target market. This can be done through holistic marketing by breaking down and analyzing all of the peaks and valleys in Analytics to determine what performed well and what needs to be revised.

He goes onto introducing Universal marketing online which is divided into Marketer and Consumer ROI. Marketer ROI is judged through mediums like Google, Yahoo and Bing, while consumer ROI pertains to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other similar applications. However, wasn’t too sure where he was going with this… As marketers, maybe he means we should keep consumers concept of ROI

Andy Renieris goes on to say that search has been ten blue links in response to a query term. In position #1 it should be the most relevant website for that term. For Example: If you typed a Disney movie into the search field, Disney should be displayed in the first position.

Similar to Google and Bing, Yahoo offers a blend of search results for video, news and images relevant to the term in question.

Yahoo’s Search Monkey tool blends data within a result and allows you to do the following:

Two way conversation with publishers

Structured data in the results

Convey meaning behind the link

Faster task completion

Jed Schneiderman of MSN starts his presentation off by plugging Bing and how revolutionary it is. He goes on to talk about people’s behaviours with the search engines. Usually, surfers use the web to accomplish specific tasks and become more productive. Over the years, users have depended more and more on search and average 5 searches per day. This result sounds encourgaging until he divulges that 3/4 of surfers are still not happy with the search results since they dont find what they were looking for on their first attempt. He goes on to claim that when people make searches, 50% of their time is spent in long sessions while the other 50% don’t find what they were looking for and hit the back button to make a new search.

Searches can be simple like finding a movie time and place to complicated like planning your next vacation. As the task gets more complicated it usually takes 3-4 times longer than the simple task due to poor search results which leads to user dissatisfaction. As we move forward, there is plenty of opportunity to improve relevance and results. Users need help in identifying needs and finding where the information they are looking for is situated.

What you can do to help?