From James Burchill: Designing Your Website For Search Engines - The Basics…
...what still surprises me is after all the education, all the articles, all the proof, people still think, “If you build it (better) they will come!” Sorry to disappoint folks – but that’s a dangerous assumption.
From the BBC on Jakob Nielsen's 2008 Web report: Web users 'getting more selfish'
In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or desination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.
Of course, this is nothing new. Anyone who has a Web site that isn't a blog or social media site already knows this. This is a big change in user behavior in just four years, and the trend is accelerating. Which begs the question: Why build any navigation or menus at all? The only links that people will be following before too long are the direct hyperlinks found within each piece of information.
If every piece of content needs to stand alone-- then why not design that into your architecture from the get-go, and save yourself all kinds of time and money in the process?
Heather Dougherty at Hitwise has this interesting post on search vs social networking driving traffic to video sites: Search & Social Networks neck & neck for video referrals
It's obvious that search is on a trajectory that will soon surpass social. Some of this must be due to improvements in video metadata allowing it to be more easily found? Universal search might be another factor? I have to admit, however, that I'm mostly confused by this graph. A plausible explanation escapes me. Translation: This isn't what I would expect to see. Ideas?
This is what I tweeted about last night when I was at the airport in Chicago and I didn't feel like springing for the wifi or blogging from my iPhone: Japan: URL's Are Totally Out:
Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL's. The replacement?
Search boxes! With recommended search terms!
It makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone. Getting people to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who's going to write down anything after the first slash?). And, most tellingly, I see increasingly more users already inadvertently put complete domain names like "gmail" and "netflix" into the Search box of their browsers out of habit — and it doesn't even register that Google pops up and they have to click to get to their destination.
This is actually a brilliant marketing strategy. If you're doing your stuff right, and you can actually get people to an exact page with a few select keywords. If you're taking people to your site, rather than a specific page, and expecting them to wander around using navigation you're mostly wasting your time.
I get asked on a far-too-frequent basis about "adjusting" URLs so they are easier for people to remember and type-in. Of course, people aren't doing this much anymore. Take a look at any Web site's analytics, and the number of directs, and you'll see what I'm talking about. Nuff said. Yet is amazing to see the amount of time, energy, and money that people spend trying to serve this increasingly shrinking type of visitor-- the browser.
I find it quite interesting to see the number of people (my father included) who don't even have their navigation box viewable in their toolbar anymore. They're doing everything through search. So the URL basically has reached a point where it doesn't much matter from a user behavior perspective.
I suspect that the Japanese are on to something, and that it won't be long before we see this trend to spread beyond Japan. I'm going to be looking for it.
NOTE: I blogged about this topic last year: The end of URLs?
David Armano from Logic+Emotion: 2007 Was The Year of Social Media. 2008 is the Year of Mobile Media.
The hub and spoke model of the Web where all roads lead to Rome.com is becoming obsolete.
Except it's not "becoming" it's been obsolete for a few years now. What I find most interesting is that people are finally starting to understand that the old rules have been thrown out the window.
I asked a question yesterday buried within another post, and didn't receive a bit of feedback. So, I'm elevating this idea to its own post. The question: Is anyone just putting up searchable, but non-browsable wads of content? Considering this as a potential strategy?
It seems to me that this could be a reasonable, simple, and cost effective strategy for a content producer. Just exploit search and syndication, and completely ignore building a navigable or browsable Web site at all. If 90% of your visits are coming through search and referral, and you offer feeds for regular consumers, what's the point of the Web site? How much time and money and energy should you be investing on the 10% coming through the methods of old? Perhaps reaching that 10% isn't worth the expense? I see huge amounts of time and effort being spent on designing sites that are increasingly becoming Internet ghost towns.
Your numbers may be slightly different, but we can see the trend line and we know where it's headed. At what point do you pull-the-plug on the traditional Web site? Seriously, you could have your content producers collaborate to develop content using something like Google Docs, have them publish to a central repository, accomplish pretty much 90% of what you are with your current Web site, and save gobs of money in producing your wad of content. Could it get much easier?
What am I missing?
I was involved in an interesting conversation this week at the Defrag conference on the question of search versus discovery. The conversation wandered into browsing, and the social mediated solutions such as StumbleUpon and Me.dium I commented that browsing was something that I just didn't do anymore.
I was trying to make some sense of this, and mentioned that I thought browsing was analogous to channel surfing or radio station scanning. Channel surfing was a habit from when we had something less than 100 channels to choose from. Once we started getting hundreds of channels through cable or satellite, surfing came to an immediate end. Same with radio, station scanning works when you're limited to the channels you can receive from local broadcast. As soon as you get hundreds of channels through satellite, scanning is way too inefficient to be of any use. I wonder if the death of browsing isn't the same thing? Once you start following hundreds of Web sites non-mediated browsing is no longer an efficient or effective option for discovery.
So I'm curious, is browsing headed the way of channel surfing? Is your browsing on the decline? Have you adopted a social mediated browsing solution? Which one?
Business Week has an interesting read on the demise of old-media with a focus on the San Jose Mercury News. It's a good read in that it goes back historically and talks about all of the warnings along the way that were ignored:
The collapse of Silicon Valley's daily newspaper is in many ways the story of American newspapers in the 21st century. The industry has reached a near-crisis point. Many dailies are losing circulation at an alarming rate, and local newspaper ad spending fell 3.1% last year, to $24.4 billion, while Internet advertising rose 17.3%, to $9.8 billion, according to Advertising Age.
But the shivers rippling through the Mercury News also serve as a dramatic example of what happens when industry leaders get complacent in the face of fundamental shifts. Andy Grove, who helped sow the Internet revolution when CEO of Intel (INTC ), says that cross-industry disruptions follow a predictable course: Executives ignore the challenges. Then they try to resist. Only when it's too late do they make radical changes.
The article focuses on Carole Leigh Hutton the Executive Editor of the Mercury News, and her efforts to destroy the newspaper and reinvent it as something more relevant to a new-media audience. Here's one of the "big ideas" that have been forwarded to save them:
Some hopeful signs have emerged. At a brainstorming session in September, employees suggested themed versions of the Mercury News online that provide readers with a world view through a lens of their own choosing. There might be a "green" portal for people interested in environmental causes, for instance. The best of the suggestions will be rapidly prototyped and tried out on consumers.
Sigh! They just don't get how their world has changed; the frontpage, the album, the portal, the homepage... They have been disintermediated by search, widgets, and syndication. Every piece of content is its own homepage, and any attempt to aggregate content for "presentation" through a format determined by others is destined for irrelevance. We already have our own personalized views of the Internet. We don't need another created for us by the newspapers or anyone else.
I was reading about the decision by the New York Times to cease their failed Times Select experiment. This was the site where they put their op-ed writers behind a firewall and charged a subscription for access. We all knew this would fail, and that it would marginalize their columnists by removing them from the public discourse. They have lost readership over the past two years, and many of those readers (like me) will not return. We've moved on and are listening to new voices.
What the Times missed when starting their grand experiment was that people's patterns of consumption on the Web were changing? They missed the move to search? I'm going to speculate that there was someone within the Times organization screaming at the top of their lungs about the stupidity of this decision who was summarily ignored. Which brings me to my Whopper Of The Week:
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.
“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.
Right, when the Times made the decision to firewall their op-ed columnists in September of 2005 you had to be living in a cave to miss the surge in search. The trend was well underway in late 2005. So, we're left to speculate what really happened when they made their decision to go forward in spite of all the trend lines.
There's an interesting new study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance
An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate.
This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.
The press release from the College of Charleston announcing the study had this to say with some quotes from the study's lead author Bing Pan: User's mistakenly trust higher positioned results in Google searches
"Despite the popularity of search engines, most users are not aware of how they work and know little about the implications of their algorithms," says study author Bing Pan. "When websites rank highly in a search engine, they might not be authoritative, unbiased or trustworthy."
According to Pan, this has important long term implications for search engine results, as this type of use, in turn, affects future rankings. "The way college students conduct online searches promotes a 'rich-get-richer' phenomenon, where popular sites get more hits regardless of relevance," says Pan. "This further cements the site's high rank, and makes it more difficult for lesser known sites to gain an audience."
It's an interesting study for a number of reasons, and I encourage you to read it. It uses eye-tracking to confirm what has been said about how people use search engines. In this instance they included some deception to see if it changed behavior, which it appears to have done, and it confirms the researchers' hypothesis that people trust Google. This is important stuff to know for anyone who prepares content for online delivery.
I am wondering, however, if Pan is jumping to the wrong conclusions in thinking this is such a bad thing? He seriously over represents the importance of "sites" in what a Google search returns. I think he may be waxing poetic to a time before Google (BG). Maybe the subjects were correct in trusting Google? What are the things that contribute to Google discoverability:
If these are the major items that make an individual piece of content discoverable by the Google algorithm, where are the negatives in trusting it? These seem to be things that are all positive, and things that were not available BG. These seem to me, if anything, to be disintermediating the idea of a popular site preventing an important piece of content from being discovered. Good content has now been freed from the tyranny of the site, and it can now stand on its own merits.
The study seemed to overemphasis the importance of a click-through from a search result page. For the next generation of Web users a click-through in this instance is a next to effortless act. What is the price of a click? A fraction of a second? That the subjects didn't read the abstracts carefully is not such a surprise. Actually, this is a positive as well. They aren't really abstracts anyway. That the content wasn't always as relevant seems a trivial point. It tells me that the subjects were perhaps demonstrating more advanced information retrieval skills. What does looking at a page tell a person that the Google abstract does not? Lots! People have become very fast at evaluating the quality of a source, which accounts for the rapid use of the back button, and the short amount of time spent on most pieces of content. Why might they click through to do their evaluation? Perhaps because the site contains all sorts of artifacts (metadata) which allows us to evaluate it more thoroughly and quickly? I would suggest that perhaps Pan was observing an emergent form of information literacy that should not be so quickly dismissed as wrong or unsophisticated.
Let me conclude with what is a seemingly minor point, but one that I see too often when researchers discuss their findings. No where in the study did I see any assessment of the subjects' actual knowledge (or lack there-of) concerning how the Google algorithm works. If it was a part of the study it certainly isn't discussed in the research article. It is, however, a prominent part of the university's press release. Maybe this is seemingly insignificant, but I don't think we should be making these types of off-topic assumptions when discussing our research findings. Just the facts -- or perhaps highlight an area needing further investigation.
You need look no further than Google's own numbers to know why they made the radical change to universal search. This table from Hitwise Intelligence: Google Universal Search tells the whole story:
Basically, other than image searching people aren't using any of Google's vertical search capabilities. Take Google News as an example--it's total usage is .94%. You can be sure that people searching Google News is but a small fraction of those users.
It was numbers like these which led me to say last month: The semantic Web is dead?
If you look at user behavior you can see the future, and it is one of compromised and scaled-down functionality rather than more. Less scales. You see this being played-out in the discussion of Google's new universal search. The question is being asked, "Google Universal Search - is Vertical Search Space Finished?" The answer to that question is a resounding yes!
As big as Google is, and as large as its user base, long tail thinking does not extend to the service industry. The long tail works just fine with something like iTunes where providing access to niche content costs next to nothing. Services on the other hand don't scale so well. Services require care, and feeding, and costly human attention. Google may be rolling in cash, but no service business can afford to ignore their core customers.
There's little to be gained by focusing on 1% of your user base unless you have good reason to believe that they are the early adopters. If you think those 1% are ahead of the masses then you are justified in trying to cater to them. This is not what is happening with search -- it's going the other direction -- and that is exactly why you saw Google unveil their universal strategy.
The Read/WriteWeb has a great guest post by Dr. Riza C. Berkan on Semantic Search technologies: Semantic Search: An Antidote for Poor Relevancy
The "Semantic Web" approach has been around for a long time now. Unfortunately, it is based on an unrealistic assumption that every Web author will abide by the complex rules of semantics - not to mention the education it requires - and place content in the correct buckets of mysteriously unified standards. Another form of this approach may be to design Web factories that crank out refined Web pages once fed by ordinary Web pages. Of course if there is more than one factory, you have the standards issue again. In this day and age of fast content production, the Semantic Web seems to be more idealism than realism.
I get asked weekly about localization and personalization of content. My standard answer is, "It's doable but no one will do what it takes to make it happen. It's too complex." Add to this the issue of discovery. People use a search engine to discover things. It's quickly becoming the only method they use to discover things. What's the point of embedding logic in content if the search engine isn't capable of understanding that logic?
Dr. Berkan does a nice job of describing why this is such a tough nut. People are wanting solutions right now that quite honestly are outside the capabilities of current technologies. This is still very much a research problem that is years away from a prime-time solution.
I found this howto: Ten Tips for Smarter Google Searches, and it got me to thinking about people's search skills. I like to think that I'm a pretty good searcher. So it was with interest that I clicked through and read this entire list of strategies:
I have to admit that I only use 1, 2, 3 and 8 regularly. Tip 4 was completely new to me, and of all of these is the one I am most likely to remember and use going forward. I only use the "site" restriction from tip 7. I didn't know about the other search restrictions. The only vertical search engine I use (#10) is Google Blog Search, and I only use this one through YubNub.
I know just about everyone could benefit from using Google better. I'm curious how many of these tips you use? Also, do you ever use the advanced search page? If you were going to do a training to help people improve their search skills which of these tips would you include in your training?
The Semantic Web is not dead; but the grand vision of “A Semantic Web” will not be achieved, despite Tim’s noble efforts. Instead, we will see the Emerging-Semantics Web, derived from how people/developers use lightweight formats and tags on popular platforms such as Flickr and YouTube.
Where he mentioned a bunch of reasons for why this is going to happen it mostly comes down to this:
There is no way that we can engage the masses in annotating media with “semantic” labels. At best, we can get the people to annotate content (such as Flickr images or YouTube videos) with short text descriptions or tags.
I've been following this stuff for a long time, and semantic Web technologies are years away (if ever) from providing "average" people with something they will actually use. Things aren't going to stand still waiting on the research community to catch-up. The Web is already moving further away from the vision of a semantic Web. We are seeing some walled-gardens (islands) of semantic content emerge, but these are not efforts that will touch the masses.
If you look at user behavior you can see the future, and it is one of compromised and scaled-down functionality rather than more. Less scales. You see this being played-out in the discussion of Google's new universal search. The question is being asked, "Google Universal Search - is Vertical Search Space Finished?" The answer to that question is a resounding yes! Is vertical search better? Yes! Does it matter if it's better? No! We've always been able to build better search of our own unique databases using SQL queries. So what? People won't come to your site to use them. Just like they won't use advanced search options when they are just one click away on Google's homepage.
In the end, all that matters is what people are willing to do. So, I'm with Mor, in declaring the semantic Web as it has been envisioned, dead. All of these so-called "advanced" functions are dead except in very controlled user environments, and no one would ever be foolish enough to describe the Web as controlled.
UPDATE: You might like taking this poll on universal vs vertical search. Not to bias you, but I lean more towards "dead meat" than "goneburger".
The interesting part is that now with RSS, you no longer have to be at the “website of the provider” but read and access that content within Google reader or My Yahoo or Newsgator. So, then the obvious point is the only thing that a subscriber sees is your content - NOT your BRAND.
See Google Juice:
Yes, content at the top matters more.
It blows my mind how many sites get thrown into duplicate content hell just because the top 30 lines of content on every page are a nav bar, a company name, slogan, and login form. It is ridiculous. Nevertheless, on one of our major properties we moved the “tags” for the article to the top of the content of the page, rather than the bottom. Rankings skyrocketed.
It seems like just yesterday that I was announcing the Google Mac blog. Since then, we've been working hard to deliver great products for Google users on Mac, including MacFUSE and Google Earth. Today, I'm really excited to let you know that Google Desktop is now available on the Mac! A lot of your most important data doesn't live on the web -- it lives on your Mac and in web services. And since Google is a search company, we're committed to helping you find all of that information.
One of the primary reasons I left Thunderbird a few years back was that Spotlight wouldn't search it. Now it looks like I can move back. I'd been thinking of moving completely to Gmail so now I have a decision to make. I'm going to start with Google Desktop and see where that leads.
Anyway, this is such a great search engine. So why should you have to actually go to YubNub.com in order for you to use it? The answer is, of course, you don't. That little search bar in the upper right-hand corner of your Firefox browser is about to get a whole lot better. Just head on over to this site here and click on YubNub and start searching any site from your one search bar. In fact, you can just do what I did and delete all of the other search engines from your search bar, because YubNub in the first and last search engine you need.It just doesn't get any better than this.
Finally, I think my most obscure plugin is probably YubNub which offers you a command-line interface to search. Every time I use it I realize it is the only search plugin I need. It does it all. So why don‘t I clean house and remove all the others and force myself to use it? Dang, that‘s a good question. Done.Well, it's only been a week but I have to say this was a most excellent decision. I love YubNub! The transition was painless. The only thing I needed to know was the command to show me the commands for a particular search engine. For example ls technorati gives you the various commands available for searching Technorati.
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