Bing’s $4.47 Investment in Google AdWords

As you may have heard, our very good friends at Microsoft are spending $100 million to promote Bing.com, a new search engine.

The search engine is designed not to much to “compete with Google,” Microsoft officials swear, but to build a business around a search experience that enables consumer decisions in travel, shopping, health and local stuff.

Yeah, whatever.

In any case, it turns out that some of that $100 million promotional spend by Microsoft is going directly to… Brother Google.

Do a Google Search on “search engine.” Now, take a look at the right-hand column!

See the third item down?

Search Engine

Get More Info With Less Digging. A
Decision Engine Makes Search Easy!
www.Bing.com

Yes, it’s true. Microsoft’s advertising department has determined that the way to build traffic to Bing.com is to advertise on Google. Hey, fish where the fish are, as they say.

Using Google’s handy AdWords Keyword tool, I was able to determine that Microsoft’s “cost per click” for the phrase “search engine” is $4.47.

Which is to say, any time someone does a Google search using the phrase “search engine” and clicks on the Bing ad, our friends in Redmond pay our friends in Mountain View enough to cover a Google mid-level project manager’s Venti Mocha Cappuccino.  

[I will leave it to your conscience to determine what you want to do with this piece of information. The part about how Microsoft has to pay Google $4.47 every time some web surfer clicks into Bing. com, I mean. That piece of information. Do what you want with it.]

Meantime, I did click on that Bing.com Google ad, purely in the name of research. It took me directly to a Bing search engine results page for the same search.

Here’s what I saw at the Bing results for the “search engine” search.

Well, the “organic” search result at the top is a video all about. . .Bing, a better way to search! Well, what are the chances?

Meantime, you’ll notice that in the right hand sidebar, there is no ad from our very good friends at Google.

They are probably at the Starbucks on 580 N Rengstorff Ave. in Mountain View, enjoying that Venti Mocha Cappuccino.

I do not see sweat on their brows.

“Make Google Pay” and Other Hallucinations

The news industry has generated much sympathetic publicity lately about the woes of the news industry.

First, let’s say this: It’s easy to get positive coverage for an issue when you control so many ways to getting the message out. Pity the poor clowns who need to grovel to get major media attention for groundwater pesticide contamination.

Anyway, as the news industry continues to fight the inevitable, one phrase keeps coming up again and again:

Make Google Pay

The idea is that Google’s search results pages link to news content that costs a great deal of money to produce. Google makes money by placing ads around those search results. The content producers should get some of that money, the content producers argue.

I am bewildered–and a bit ashamed–that anyone who has achieved even middling professional status in a line of work that attracts a lot of really smart people can even say the words “Make Google Pay” and believe they have validity.

“Make Google Pay” is not a strategy, it’s a consensual hallucination of desperate minds. It is cognitive spatter that results from overwhelming stress. It is HAL’s final, dirge-like notes of “Daisy.”

I don’t want to get into a full-blown discussion about changing news ecology, user behavior, content abundance, link journalism, anti-trust law, etc.

I will make just three points. They seem so obvious to me that they don’t even need to be said. But as demonstrated at last week’s Congressional hearings about the future of journalism, people in the news industry, their lackeys and retainers appear not to have heard them. So:

1. Google is linking to content, not publishing it. I am amazed at how often Google is said to be “publishing” others’ news. Google points people to content that its algorithms determine to be high-value. Linking is not republishing. It is not a copyright violation. It is a way to direct people to high-value content that appears on the creators’ sites. The fact that Google is shrewd enough to extract value from its sift-and-direct service does not constitute unfair trade or thievery.

2. Publishers can block Google any time they want. If they think Google is extracting value from their content unfairly, they may choose to make their results invisible immediately. Any junior member of a news site’s web team can do this by 2 p.m. today.

3. Publishers instead are trying to make Google function as their utility. This is an astonishing act of delusional bravado. To wit: “Our content is so valuable that you must direct people to us and pay for the privilege.” Plus: “We need an anti-trust exemption to make this work, but our work is so important we deserve it.” This is not a business proposition, it is confiscatory collusion. I am stunned that various personages at the recent hearings entertained this proposal as if it were a serious idea worth consideration.

For god’s sake: “Make Google Pay” is a dead-end, an intellectually bankrupt proposition from a group of businesses that blew their big chance and continue to blow it every time they gather.

Trying to re-shape Google’s business to the demands of a failing method of distribution is a fool’s errand. If not precisely evil, it is at least destructively self-interested.

Every intercranial electrical firing, every synaptic twitch that news leaders devote to Make Google Pay represents a withdrawal from the central challenge they face: Creating bankable value that will fund the portion of  their journalistic work that truly matters to democracy.

===================

nb: Do a Google search using the words

Congressional hearings on future of newspapers

The pages that appear include no advertising. I mean, what are the chances?

Google Blog Search, Re-Booted but Good

Not long after I proclaim a cool new tool to search for blog content–Nielsen’s BlogPulse–Google comes along and turbocharges its blog search. It’s a big improvement in a space Google has not, so far, been dominant.

For those of us who continue to rail quixotically against Mountain View hegemony, the upgrade is not good news.

Here’s a search I did using BlogPulse for the Honda Fit, a bitchin’ hot, fuel-efficient, high-style economy car. [If that sounds like an uncharacteristic rave, I should reveal I just happened to have purchased one--revealing myself as either the last confident consumer in America or a damn fool.]

BlogPulse

BlogPulse’s output: 8,600 results, with the top one gibberish, the next one off-point, the next two non-English. Argh.

Google Blog Search

Brother Google’s output: 70,306 results, much better than BlogPulse’s. Note the top box. The first two listings are for an excellent Fit blog and a Fit forum. [While there's non-English stuff in that top box, it's in Japanese, which is at least logical and potentially useful.] And note how the individual results are more on-point–more relevant–than BlogPulse’s.

Once again, it appears Brother Google’s maddeningly dominating knack for the algorithm pays off.

To be fair, BlogPulse offers analytical tools well beyond the good Brother’s range.

As a product of Nielsen, the blog search function is just part of a suite of products designed to help people monitor all kinds of consumer-generated content on the social web. If you’re serious about monitoring the social web on behalf of your company or a particular topic or niche, BlogPulse is far more powerful.

For instance, check out this graphic that illustrates levels of blog activity about the Fit.

Still, if you’re a regular old web user looking for chatter about the Honda Fit. . .Google scores again.

I hate it when that happens.

DataViz[zes] of the Week: Google Election Map Gallery

I’ve long argued that journalists use too many words. Or, more precisely, they try to use them for everything.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is a Microsoft Word and a deadline, everything looks like a 25-inch story.

Google’s just launched Elections ‘08 Map Gallery illustrates the limitations of this approach.

Want to know how John McCain got to where he is today? You can read this four-screen, tiny-type piece at biography.com. It’s well-researched and full of important information and fair-minded observations. Or you can click around John McCain’s Journey, one of several maps in the gallery.

You will find a biography organized by geography (a geo-bio!), starting in the Panama Canal Zone (where he was born) to. . .1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (?). You won’t get much intellectually satisfying detail from the map–no Keating Five, no material about his days at the Naval Academy, nothing about his role as a “maverick.” If real journalism were poured into the framework, you’d have a great product that could reach a lot more people than the highly literate biography.com version.

Google, of course, knows from search. And so one of the more successful Election 08 maps is a geography of search queries by candidate name. [Earth to Mountain View: Hillary Clinton is out. You may remove her from the election maps now.]

Others have reported this search query data in print–it’s a fun [if dangerous] parlor game to use search volume as a marker of public sentiment. But once again, a visual, geography-based presentation that offers real-time search data offers a completely different view of election dynamics.

And finally, a video-based map, which essentially does away with both words and numbers. Obama Videos is a map showing where Obama delivered key speeches, with each location linked to a video of that speech.

This is great stuff. With Google’s mashup tools being wide open for use, the gallery is likely to grow and get weirder [A Map of Lies! The Flip Flop Highway!].

I, for one, think it’s going to be a much more entertaining election season thanks to these visualizations. Will it produce a better informed, more engaged public? We’ll see. There’s promise that some of these maps will capture different kinds of citizen participation–the “wisdom” of the crowds writ large. The Election Search map is an example.

One map shows real-time election-based Twitter items geographically. It’s about as exciting as watching gum being chewed. But it’s a start.

Viewzi’s Visual Search: I’ll Know It When I See It

Let me be unambiguous: It’s Google’s world, we just live in it. There is no “search war,” no “game-changers” in the world of search. When the End of Days finally arrives, some bony finger will type “eschatology” in the search box, hit “I’m Feeling Lucky,” and the world will end. Google’s victory will be complete.

Happily, none of this is preventing people from doing some wily, aspirational things with search. The most compelling (if maddeningly flawed) example I’ve seen is called Viewzi, which has just opened itself to the public after a buzzy closed beta.

Short version: It’s a visual search tool that offers 15 [!] different ways to view search results. It’s a dazzler, a hum-dinger, a Halloween bagful of eye candy. If you’re a flash developer, a dataviz geek or a distractable noodler, you’ll find it irresistible. Viewzi makes Google’s results look like Braille.

Put a query in the search box, and a ribbon of blurry choices spreads across the screen: Basic Photo View, VideoX3 View, 4 Sources View, and more. [Note: Since this is an application built in flash, I can't provide specific URLs to any of these features. If you click on the images below they'll take you to a new search box. You'll need to conduct a search yourself to see the features I'm discussing.]

Below is the 4 Sources view, which presents screen shots of results harvested from Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask. I can’t understate the goofy pleasure I get rearranging and digging among these results. Bonus: You can see immediately which results the engines share, value differently, bury, etc. SEOers will dig it.

But the most powerful–and potentially disruptive–feature is something called 3-D Photo Cloud view. It has a creepy, responsive intelligence that I find affecting in ways I can’t explain. It somehow creates the unsettling impression of knowledge accumulating in real time, of neural pathways proliferating as you watch, of an infobeing gathering power as it grows. [I have not been drinking anything stronger than coffee while writing this, I swear. This thing is freaky.]

The Viewzi project has the feel of an open-source playground, a platform where search geeks and datavizualists can create new ways of organizing information visually. This may turn out to be the real value of Viewzi–a kind of Challenge X for visual search that inspires some serious bug-eyed innovation. [Or not: There's already evidence of creativity being stretched thin over commercial ambitions: There are Celebrity Photo, Weather, Recipe, Shopping and TechCrunch (?) views. Can a FaceBookNewsFeedView (sm) be far away?]

Meantime, I tried Viewzi for some “real” searches I’d recently done on health, a recent political poll, an old friend from college, some tax stuff, a vintage car. Here’s what I realized: Most searchers are harshly pragmatic, unforgiving of excessive keystrokes and distractions. Google is perfect for the drive-by infosnag.

Viewzi offers some simple search views for mundane topics, the most servicable of which is the Web Screenshot View, which allows you to scroll through images of results pages. It’s slower and more annoying than Google, but it allows you to preview a source before you click into it.

Google rules the everyday search. But if you have the need or leisure to dig into a topic and explore it from a bunch of different sides, Viewzi has plenty to offer. Block out two hours on Outlook and close your door. You’ll be awhile.

But if anything funny crawls out of that 3-D  Photo Cloud and attaches itself to your forehead like a tick, don’t blame me. I warned you.