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.

SEO, Twitter and the Road to Hell

Why  didn’t I see this one coming?

The moment Twitter content became searchable, the seeds of its ruination were planted, watered and topped with Miracle Gro.

This is due to the unbending truth of the First Law of CyberDynamics: That which is searchable will be optimized for said search.

Regrettable corollary 1: Optimized content becomes visible without regard to its quality.

Regrettable corollary 2: Unworthy content becomes the lowest-hanging fruit in the InfoOrchard, unwittingly gobbled up by hundreds of millions of undiscriminating users daily.

[Note: Ungainly botanical metaphor ends here.]

Which is to say: Add to the current list of lifeforce-draining Twitter phenomena–childish follower-hoarding, strategic lurkery, tactical “messaging” and [this is now literal] prostitution–the Tweet designed to show up high on Google [and presumably other Twitter search tool] search results.

I learned this recently after I read an article on Twitter SEO on the website Mashable. I Tweeted thusly:

And so it has come to this: Writing Tweets for SEO. Mommy, make it stop. http://bit.ly/adRQO4:41 PM Jun 26th from TweetDeck

Within moments my e-mail box showed that two SEO profiles were now following me on Twitter.

Not because I had said anything insightful about the art of search engine optimization, mind you, but just because I’d used the word. The e-mails arrived too fast for them to reflect human cognition.

And so I Tweeted again:

Hoot! My last Tweet included the term “SEO” and I was immediately autofollowed by two SEO trolls. SEO SEO SEO Come on, guys, you wanna *go*?4:55 PM Jun 26th from TweetDeck

And of course my e-mail box was quickly beetling with several new messages telling me that other SEO trolls had emerged from their funkholes to follow me.

It should come as no surprise that SEOers are sniffing for keywords in Tweets. As Twitter becomes a firmly established marketing tool, more companies are monitoring what’s being said there about their products, people and clients. And participating so their wares and ideas will reach the public.

Disclosure: I know this because, among my many professional services is…helping people use Twitter to monitor what’s being said about their products, people and clients. And participating so their wares and ideas will reach the public. Ahem.

It is a common early adopter vanity to declare that what was once pure and authentic has been wrecked by the know-nothing vulgarian masses and their money-grubbing exploiters.

I’ve always tried resisted this facile snobbery. I remember the knuckleheads who whined that the Mosaic browser ruined everything because it made the Internet accessible to people who hadn’t paid their dues with ftp, Gopher and a soldering iron.

When I began writing this entry about 40 minutes ago, I sent out this Tweet:

I need cheap dietary supplements, online gambling and low-cost life insurance [Note: This Tweet is autofollow-bait to expose perpetrators]38 minutes ago from TweetDeck

As I am about to hit “Publish,” I have received no e-mails from autofollowers who’ve lapped up that chum.

A relief? For me, yes. Or a sense of temporary reprieve from the inevitable.

For others: An opportunity.

Have at it, folks.

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

update: 8:33 p.m., first dietary supplements autofollow reports for duty.

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.

A New View for Viewzi

My favorite “alternative” search engine, Viewzi, has debuted a new feature that merits another visit.

By my tastes, Viewzi is the best tool on the market to combine search and data visualization–two of the most important functionalities on the web. When you conduct a search using Viewzi, you can choose among 18 [!] different ways to view your search, from a visual “album gallery” of sites to the surprising, and surprisingly functional, Google Timeline view, shows results lined up in the order Brother Google first discovered them.

Viewzi tends to be more impressive as a technology platform, a sort of innovation farm for dataviz geeks.   But its new view, Power Grid, takes an important step toward usability, if not quite practicality. It lets you choose either to “see” or “read” results, and includes a handy bookmarking feature. Read more

Parlor Game: Web Search & the Election

One of the fun parlor games of Election ‘08 is to look at Internet data and figure out what they mean.

The answer may be “nothing,” of course.

But let’s play along and look at the latest Hitwise data on popular search terms.

HitWise, a company that tracks Internet traffic, tabulated the search words that sent people to John McCain or Barack Obama’s websites. [Here's a press release about the findings on the candidates' top Internet search terms. For more detail, visit the Hitwise blog.]

Let’s look at the arguably vital issue of healthcare.

“Health care” didn’t make Obama’s top 5 search terms in the first quarter of 2008. In the second quarter, health care took the number 4 slot. Q1’s top term was “gay marriage,” Q2’s “abortion.

Meantime, “health care” took the tops spots for John McCain in both Q1 and Q2.

So: Does this mean people already think they know Obama’s healthcare plan and don’t need to search about it on the Internet? Or don’t they have much interest in the issue?

As for McCain, do the searches mean his plan is little-known and people want information on it? Or do those interested in McCain care more about healthcare than Obama’s voters?

You never know.

Q2 Obama top 5 terms, in order: Abortion, Education, Environment/Global Warming, Health Care, Immigration.

Q2 McCain top 5 search terms: Health Care, Environment/Global Warming, Oil Prices, Immigration, Education

Make of this what you will. But it’s worth noting that the economy does not make the top five for either candidate.

One final observation. The search term “Rumors” accounted for 5 percent of searches in Q1. In Q2, that number doubled. “Religion” dropped from 12 percent to 7 percent between Q1 and Q2.

Retreat to the parlor and discuss, please.

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.

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