7.45am I arrived at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster, a new venue for the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Exhibition.
After a well deserved coffee and biscuit I headed to the 4th floor for the Search and Social Media breakfast workshop presented by Brad Kleinman – Director of Education at Online Marketing Connect.

He presented an overview of the Search and Social markets honing in on vital statistics that identified why ‘Social’ was becoming essential to most businesses and what market trends were being predicted. There were many sources used for the insights however the key resources which stood out were eMarketer and Global Web Index.

Some key points to take from the slide share is the shift in social media and how people are using different social platforms and comparing this to businesses opinions or approach to social media. Also the data showing that micro blogging has increased +35% based on research comparing wave3 to wave1, however writing blogs and visiting forums and chat rooms is down. A 35% increase in micro blogging raises the importance of the likes of Twitter as they are being recognised as platforms to share real-time and breaking information to a huge audience. It is now for the advertiser or social media strategist to plan how these social platforms can enhance business goals via these platforms by managing customer service, sales opportunities, product reviews or customer word of mouth selling to mention a few.

This was followed by the SES conference welcome and opening keynote presented by Jeffrey Hayzlette, Celebrity CMO, former Kodak CMO

A very entertaining and energetic presentation about story telling to engage with potential customers and focussing on what hayzlett calls the 118, others may know this as the elevator pitch. As well as this he talked about the 4 E’s – Engage, Educate, Excite and Evangelise and how these play a vital part in talking to your audience and building customer loyalty through your branding and positioning.

We were exposed to a few snippets of social media activity Kodak had run and one of the most facinating statistics came from a twitter campaign which they ran to come up with a name for their new waterproof video camera. They asked people via twitter what they should call the camera, the winners would have the product named after their idea and would be announced the mother/father of that product.
This campaign generated more followers and interest in a few days than they had had in the whole history of the account. This just goes to show how powerful the engagement with your audience can be. I would be interested to know how many of those followers then went on to purchase a Kodak product and within how long after the campaign.

The ExhibitionHall
The Exhibition hall was fairly ‘compact’ as we have seen year on year at London SES and it was interesting to see many SEO link building companies competing. Amongst the rest of the 19 booths was a majority of SEO services and a spread of social media tools and technologies as well as some search marketing software and analytics tools.

Although I did not attend the following days I heard the seminars on everyones radar (other than the cocktail reception and parties) were ‘PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle’, ‘Update on realtime search: I want it now!’ and ‘Killer Facebook Marketing Tactics’.

Did you attend? If so what seminars were of most interest to you? I would love to hear your feedback.

Hosted at Microsoft’s London HQ, presenters included Orla Malone – Sales Associate UK and Ireland for Facebook, Director of Search at Bing – David Coplin and Colm Bracken – Microsoft Advertising’ Group Search Manager. It was a good turn out and some interesting case studies were delivered by Radisson Edwardian’s Amy Clarke, as well as some interesting insights into Microsofts steps to integrate Social and Search.
However throughout each of the presentations the elephant in the room was Google.

In the UK Google still holds 92.27% of the search market with the remaining 7.73% being split across Bing, Yahoo and other search sites according to StatCounter Global Stats data.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

The US tells a different story however with Google only reporting to have 80% on Global stats but as little as 65.6% reported from ComScore for January 2011. However Google search on mobile is by far the dominant force in both UK and US.

The US search and social market leads the way for the UK and often we see the same or similar trends breaking in the US reflected in UK market. This would suggest that Bing’s Search Engine market share is likely to grow and that growth may be to Google’s detriment.

So what does this have to do with Facebook?

Well Microsoft and Facebook seemed very comfortable together and currently Bing provides the search results within Facebook. Facebook is the most used website in UK and with over 500 million global active users and 50% of them logging on every day, with this in mind if Facebook can integrate a search function that delivers the relevance at the quality of Google’s results then this may be a fighting force for Google. Whether they develop this themselves, partner with the likes of Bing to deliver the search results or if they move in this direction at all is something that Google must have on their radar.

The clear problem I see at the moment is Bing’s Search results are just not as relevant as Google’s.
To test this I ran a search for ’what is Quora?’ on Google and Bing and this was the result:

Bing is delivering Sponsored links for totally irrelevant ads to the search query as well as the natural listings being less relevant. The layout of the page even makes it difficult to find what you want and the related searches bear no relevance to Quora only the ‘what is’ part of my search query.
So Bing has a lot of work to do here in my opinion. But back to Facebook, if people are spending such huge amounts of time on Facebook every day, and this includes on their mobiles, tablets, PC’s and laptops, why not facilitate a search into the tool which allows users to stay in the Facebook environment but effectively search.

I then looked on Facebook to see what results were delivered on the same search for ‘What is Quora?’ to my surprise the results (which are powered by Bing) were more relevant than the Bing searches themselves? It displays fewer results but all are highly relevant to Quora.

There is no denying it Google have the Search market sussed at the moment, however in order to stay ahead of the curve and to drive search and social integration I am waiting to see there next move. Google’s search results currently integrate social results and often Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn results will populate the search engine results pages (SERPs) but what are they doing to engage with users on via social platforms?

Facebook on the other hand have their own challenges, people are there to communicate with friends and family, to share photo’s and updates on their lives, are they there to search? And if so what is the best way to facilitate that and try to take some of Google’s market share?

Has anyone noticed how Bing is pushing hard on TV advertising? How could you miss it! Back to back decision engine adverts filling a whole 3 minute commercial slot. It seems that Microsoft have finally put some money towards trying to push Bing to become a viable competitor to Google.

After Bing had a disappointing launch a year ago, advertisers have been made to struggle with small traffic volumes and a frustrating interface to try to manage our client’s accounts. Not only this but there seemed to be no support or drive from Microsoft to make Bing a compelling platform to use and therefore trying to manage this platform on behalf of clients has been a challenge. The most compelling step was them joining forces with Yahoo to make the 2nd and 3rd search engines in UK a possible threat to Google. However this is going to take time and we won’t expect to see any impact or changes until at least 2011. This will be a long process and I am sure there will be some teething problems as the two platforms merge and ultimately they have less than 10% market share.

However, Bing is becoming more aggressive with their advertising, updates and with their market share. Of course they are no Google at the moment but perhaps part of the reason for that is no one outside of the advertising industry knows what Bing is? I speak to my family and friends and there is a complete lack of awareness of the platform. If Bing can tackle this at least they will be giving themselves a chance and this seems to be something they are working on.

But am I getting my hopes up? Google market share in UK currently sits at over 90% according to statcounter.com, making them by far the dominant leader in the search market. Can Bing actually get to where they need to be? Or will Social platforms become the force to take on Google. (this is another story and debate)

On the other hand there was a clear buzz around Google’s background images yesterday and opinions on how they had flattered Bing by copying their look and feel. Does this mean Google see them a threat? They certainly got a lot of press, even though this was the voiced frustrations of those trying to remove the enraging backgrounds! But compare for yourself? They are not that similar are they?

The time has come where we need to see results from Bing. As advertisers we need efficient ways of managing these accounts, yes there are numerous 3rd party tools out their with API feeds at a cost but if the volumes of traffic and spends are not there both Bing and Yahoo become an ineffective use of account managers time.

I am personally hoping to see Bing driving forward and offering advertisers a compelling platform and over a year I have been waiting in anticipation. However, for now Google is still the clear leader here; maybe Facebook can give them a run for their money!

In essence, the fait accompli was almost inevitable given Google’s dominance in the search space. Alongside the worsening search ad revenues of the respective number 2 and 3 in the market, the Seattle giant really had to push this deal to appease shareholders. With both companies announcing poor results last week, the deal will also help boost moral and regain some bravado with disgruntled Microsoft  staff probably sick an tired of playing 2nd (& 3rd) fiddle to the incumbent leader.

So what does the future hold?

Well, if the recent uptake of Bing and the ongoing rebrand of Yahoo!, with it user generated facility is anything to go by; the folks at Mountain View may want to re examine where their focus lies. Mass investment in Android, Chrome OS, Maps/Street View etc, may be reviewed if the momentum in the tie-up gathers pace. Augmented to all the hoo-ha is the recent news that after 3 years, a $1billion investment made by Google for 5% of AOL was finally bought back by AOL’s parent, Time Warner for a mere $283 million. Do the math.

If I could be anywhere tonight– a fly on the wall with newly weds,  Bartz and Balmer would be my first choice….watch this space.

However, as cute as this is – the key question from a marketing perspective is how is Microsoft is planning to generate traffic volume.

• The current adCenter platform for advertisers is a challenge.
• The volumes are not available and the interface itself a chore to use!
• How can you justify running on any advertising which is clearly costing you more to facilitate than the return achievable.

Due to some of these points, Microsoft Adcenter is often left off the media schedule. The benefits for pushing advertisers onto AdCenter rather than running the budget on Google is often overshadowed by the time and effort it takes to use the archaic functionality.

Bing has a great concept – ‘Help me decide what I am looking for’ and the hype around it so far is promising. However without the volumes it still remains dead in the water. Historically, Microsoft has paid people to use their search engine and this hasn’t worked before. Does it simply come back to the fact that Google’s search results are still more relevant?

Microsoft will have to do a lot more to have Google quaking in their boots – Bing or otherwise…

History of Search Engines – The early days

The World Wide Web
A search engine wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the worldwide web and its websites. The first website was designed was by Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist, who wrote a proposal for information management and how its relevant information could be transferred. His idea was to transfer information over the internet by using hypertext (text on a computer that would lead the user to other, related information on demand). A year later resulted in Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer, joining forces with Berners-Lee to help achieve the goal of connecting personal computers within a network to share information. This was originally designed to aid physicists answer tough questions about the Universe, however today it is widely used by the global community for both business and pleasure.

To ensure that this could be successful a universal piece of software needed to be created as the computers at Berners-Lee’s disposal were more advanced than the everyday computer. 1991 saw the testing of a “universal line mode browser” that would be able to run on any computer or terminal. This required no mouse, no graphics but plain text that allowed anyone with an internet connection access to the information on the web.

These days internet search engines refer to the World Wide Web however, before the web became the most visible part of the Internet, there were already search engines in place to help people find information on the net. These would be typically used to locate information. Today there are upwards of 80 million websites, with many more computers connected to the Internet, and hundreds of millions of users. If households nowadays want a computer, it is not to compute, but to go on the Web.

The historic NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, on display in the Microcosm exhibition at CERN. It was the first web server, hypermedia browser and web editor

Early Search Engines
Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe 1000-2000 enquiries per day. Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

There are three basic types of search engines: crawler-based, human-powered, and a combination of both. Search Engines act as a way of connecting their users with relevant results when typing in a search query. This is where the web’s first robot (also called spiders or Web crawlers because they ‘crawl’ over the Web) based engine came into play. In June 1993 Matthew Gray introduced the World Wide Web Wanderer. The spider was created initially to measure the growth of the web and to count active web servers. He soon upgraded the spider to capture actual URL’s. This database became knows as the Wandex. The Wanderer was as much of a problem as it was a solution because it caused system lag by accessing the same page hundreds of times a day. It did not take long for him to fix this software, but people started to question the value of it.

The first META tag crawler was called ALIWEB and allowed users to submit their pages they wanted indexed with their own page description. This meant it needed no spider to collect data and was not using excessive bandwidth. The downside of ALIWEB is that many people did not know how to submit their site. One problem was that the engines would only update themselves every 6 or so months. Before PPC was introduced the only way of getting your site noticed was to ensure that it was correctly designed and would be picked up by a spider.

Search engine optimisation first came along in the mid 1990s when the first search engines began cataloguing the contents of the Internet. Initially the entire procedure was fairly honest and a fair reflection of what content there was on the web. Sites were submitted to the search engines where a spider crawled the content and then stored the collected data in a database that could be accessed by individuals performing a search (please see diagram below).

When a search engine spider detects new content on the Internet it downloads a page where it is stored on the engine’s own server. Once on the server a second program (known as an indexer) extracts information about the page as well as all of the links it contains. This page is then placed into a depository of pages to be crawled at a later date. When Google is running at peak performance using four spiders, their system can crawl over 100 pages per second, generating around 600 kilobytes of data each second. When the Google spider looked at an HTML page, it took note of two things: The words within the page and where the words were found.

Words occurring in the title, subtitles, META tags and other positions of relative importance were noted for special consideration during a subsequent user search. The Google spider was built to index every significant word on a page, leaving out the articles “a,” “an” and “the.” Other spiders take different approaches. Some spiders will keep track of the words in the title, sub-headings and links, along with the 100 most frequently used words on the page and each word in the first 20 lines of text. Lycos is said to have used this approach to “spidering” the Web. Other systems, such as AltaVista, go in the other direction, indexing every single word on a page, including “a,” “an,” “the” and other “insignificant” words. The push to completeness in this approach is matched by other systems in the attention given to the unseen portion of the Web page, the META tags.

META tags allow the owner of a page to specify key words and concepts under which the page will be indexed. This can be helpful, especially in cases in which the words on the page might have double or triple meanings — the META tags can guide the search engine in choosing which of the several possible meanings for these words is correct. There is, however, a danger in over-reliance on them, because a careless or unscrupulous page owner might add META tags that fit very popular topics but have nothing to do with the actual contents of the page – an example of this is included within the marketing section below. To protect against this, spiders will correlate META tags with page content, rejecting the META tags that don’t match the words on the page.

An example of how META tags get picked up naturally by Search Engines

That’s it for part one, I hope it’s been of interest to you. In part two we’ll look at how companies went about marketing online in the early days and how the landscape has changed through the years.

The news and media category and online video category have both experienced monthly decreases in share of UK visits, down 3% and 18% respectively.

The majority of people searching for ‘redundancy’ (63.8%), ‘job seekers allowance’ (56.7%) and ‘unemployment benefit’ (55.1%) currently visit the government site Directgov.

However, year on year both categories recorded significant growth, with news and media up 22.7% and online video growing by 48% since November 2007.

It was only a few months ago that Google removed the restriction of bidding on brand term keywords. This created huge controversy and prompted the reaction from the major brands in the market to join sides and avoid bidding on each others brands. Some kept their word and others didn’t as expected.

However, the fact remains that Google is now generating higher volumes of revenue from this simple move. The advertisers pay more to appear on competitors keywords, Google makes more money.

The next step in this process has now been to remove the minimum bid requirements. These were previously in place to give Google the right to stop irrelevant listings from appearing if their Quality Score was too low. This now means that you can bid on any keyword you want as long as you pay the right price.

Google suggest that the ‘Quality’ Score will still be in place to reward and promote the more relevant advertisers and suppress the irrelevant ones. But how much impact will this now have?

Are Google taking a step backward when it comes to providing relevancy? If users are searching on a keyword they want to find a relevant website not an advertiser who has paid top whack to appear at the top.

We also welcome any feedback that you feel you may want included in the blog.