Yearly Archives: 2007

Where Do You Shop – MSN, Yahoo or Google?

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Which Store For You -
MSN, Yahoo or Google?

Back in 2004, Jakob Nielsen expressed concern that Search Engines were becoming Answer Engines. As a Pew Internet Report at the time confirmed, Internet users are very happy with their experiences searching the Internet, but many are naïve about how they search and the results they find. Nielsen was concerned that people would merely use the output from the search engines and not go back to the original sources of information.

Search Engines Or Selling Engines?

As we enter 2008, the world has moved on from the picture that Nielsen was seeing. You might almost feel that Search Engines have evolved to become Selling Engines. No longer does a search engine provide the most relevant information about products. By a series of small and not so small changes, the search engines have almost become like storefronts. The information provided to you will present the products on which they make money first in what they display.

If you doubt that, just check out the results you get if you are looking for say the Nokia 6131 cell phone. A search with MSN (or Live as they sometimes label it) shows the following:

cellphonemsn.jpg

First you have three sponsored ads. Then you see the results from MSN Shopping. Any other results are almost pushed off the bottom of the screen.

Yahoo! and Google have very similar layouts of information, but they are a little more subtle about it. The Yahoo! display looks like this:

cellphoneyahoo.jpg

Apart from the light blue color behind the first two items, you might almost think that all four items are responses to the search query. This effect has been heightened by Yahoo’s recent decision to no longer number the entries in its keyword search reports. As you might expect, the first two entries are sponsored ads. The third entry is a link to Yahoo! shopping. Only when you get to the fourth item are you getting outside of the Yahoo! space.

The Google display adopts a middle position between the MSN and Yahoo! versions.

cellphonegoogle.jpg

In this case Google is showing two sponsored ads, which may or may not include the phone we are searching for. We then have a series of links to products in the Google Products Index. If this isn’t enough to entice you, they even give a link to products listed with Google Checkout. It’s only after you’ve passed through all of this Google (selling) space, that you can get to links from outsiders.

Searching or Shopping

If you were searching for information on the Nokia 6131 cell phone, you might be somewhat put out that these search engines are trying to sell you so hard. However some people like to shop. If you want to shop with Yahoo!, then shopping.yahoo.com shows you all that the Yahoo! store has to offer.

shoppingyahoo.jpg

 

Equally if you want to shop with MSN, then shopping.msn.com brings you into the MSN store.

shoppingmsn.jpg

 

You can go shopping with Google at shopping.google.com, but surprisingly it still looks like a product search engine rather than a store.

shoppinggoogle.jpg

It probably is only a matter of time before Google decides it should have a pleasing store front like the others. After all, if your mission is to sell products then you should do it the best way you can.

The Bottom Line for Suppliers

If you are trying to sell products on the Internet, what does this change mean for you. Search engines are widely used by prospects as they check out what is available. If the search engines are now behaving like storefronts, then you may need to pay their fees to get exposure on their “shelves”. It just means that organic or natural SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is now an even greater challenge than it ever was.

Related:
Google Changes “Products” Link to “Shopping” For Holidays
Google Shopping: Google Tries For Shoppers Once Again
Google launches Froogle/Products/Shopping
Christmas shopping for the Nintendo Wii with Google

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Forget We Ever Mentioned A Supplemental Index – Google

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It shouldn’t really happen to a nice company like Google. You try to do someone a favor and it blows up in your face.

A few years back, they realized that it would be difficult to give a speedy response to a search query if they had a single database of all the web pages they were spidering. So they decided to put web pages that might come up more frequently in search queries in their regular database. Other less popular web pages they would put in a supplementary or secondary index. By this means, they could keep cataloguing all the web pages they could find and still deliver fast results to most key word searches by using the regular index. Technically it was the right solution. The mistake was they told people about it. At the time the approach seemed a positive move.

Move on to 2005, and this two-index system begins to upset a lot of people. With the explosive growth of the Internet, it is impossible to put the majority of all web pages in the primary index. Since the primary index is spidered more frequently and its web pages are more likely to appear in keyword searches, you can understand why people got upset. Of course if Google hadn’t mentioned the supplemental index, then people would never have known of this possible problem.

The whole issue has become a can of worms for Google. A great many people were upset. SEO (search engine optimization) experts worked hard to figure out how to keep web pages out of the supplemental index. Google has tried to lower the temperature on this topic by reducing the differences between the two indexes (the regular index and the supplemental index). In mid-December, Yonatan Zunger of the Google Search Quantity Team reported on progress.

We improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a document was stored in, and once these “supplementalization effects” were gone, the “supplemental result” tag itself-which only served to suggest that otherwise good documents were somehow suspect-was eliminated a few months ago. Now we’re coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we’re now searching the whole index for every query.

From a user perspective, this means that you’ll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.

You might have hoped that would satisfy searchers. However Barry Schwartz of SERoundtable felt that the announcement drove only more confusion.

I’ll call Google out on this one, and I rarely do.

Google, we need you to stop hiding this index from us. We really need an explanation of what this index does, why a page would be placed in the supplemental index. When Google actually searches it? In what examples would a page in the supplemental index rank better than a page in the main index?

The confusion over the supplemental index has gone on too long.

Andy Beard was equally concerned that his method of identifying web pages in the supplemental index no longer seemed to be working. Apparently he really would like to know which web pages are still in the supplemental index.

Google may well be upset that people do not seem to be accepting its explanation of the “closeness” of the two indexes. On this one I agree with Google. People seem to be fixated on the notion of the supplemental index, as if this was an important issue in the keyword search algorithms.

It’s interesting to compare this with another Google invention, which used to be a hot topic and is now a yawn topic for most SEO keyword searchers. That’s the Google Toolbar Page Rank indicator. It may well be broken and is possibly only kept around for marketing reasons. It has almost zero connection now with how web pages are ranked in keyword searches.

So people, let’s get over it. Forget about that supplemental index and work on the more important things that make a web page memorable, authoritative, trust-worthy and ultimately search-engine visible. You’ll get much better rewards for your efforts.

Related:
Supplemental Result in Google – Hell or Help – March 31st, 2007
Google Supplemental Results Index – A Word To The Wise – July 9th, 2006
Google Supplemental Label Out, PageRank Next? – August 1st, 2007

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A Better Slogan For Google

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Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” Could Be Much Improved

For Google, their much-touted slogan of “Don’t Be Evil” seems to do more harm than good. It so easily generates somewhat critical articles, like the Forbes item, More Evil Than Google?, or Joel Hruska‘s article, Google struggles to see no evil, speak no evil. Hruska summarizes it thus:

As Google continues to grow rapidly and absorb more companies operating in a wider variety of areas, its operations and policies become, of necessity, more complex and murky, and the company’s informal motto of “Don’t Be Evil” becomes even harder to uphold in appearance and, perhaps, even in reality.

If the slogan does not do much outside the company and probably not much inside either, perhaps it’s time to look for a new one. Another major US entity was apparently looking for a slogan earlier in the year but abandoned the attempt. Some of the suggestions for a better slogan for NASA might at first glance be worthy of consideration:

  • NASA: Giant steps for humankind.
  • NASA: Above and beyond for humankind
  • NASA: Pushing life further
  • NASA: Forging the Future
  • NASA: To Strive, To Seek, and Not To Yield

Such thoughts particularly come to mind with the latest venture from Google, which they dub Knols. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, believes these knols will encourage people to contribute knowledge. However outsiders have more reservations. Duncan Riley suggests that the Google Knol may be A Step Too Far. Michael Gray suggests that Google Knols give insights on Google’s Philosophy.

According to Google’s mission statement their objective is to organize the worlds information, however what they often leave out is they feel they should be stewards of that information as well. If taking control of your information fits into their mission statement, oh well the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. ..

While not necessarily agreeing with their philosophy, in a later item Gray satirically suggests it is better to take whatever opportunities you can from this initiative.

All this is pretty heady stuff. Google has publicly stated that Knols may never see the light of day and that raises a very important question. Google is a public corporation with stakeholders. That includes shareholders. Perhaps all of these NASA-like possibilities run counter to the clear objectives to improve shareholder values. Focus, Focus, Focus is still a good rule. A good slogan might help to let everyone know what that focus is.

“Don’t Be Evil” provides no direction whatsoever. It’s really no better than that Tom Peters‘s slogan “We’re No Worse Than The Other Guy”. A better slogan for Google would simply provide direction both to outsiders and to insiders. That would be very much better than one that leads only to criticism or derision. If you feel you have one that would work better for Google, why not suggest it below.

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URLs – Human-Friendly Or Robot-Friendly?

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To WWW
Or Not
To WWW.

Many websites will find at least half of their traffic comes because someone has done a Google search. Sometimes it’s even higher than that. So if there is a conflict between what human beings prefer and what search engine robots prefer, which should you favour? This puzzle was graphically illustrated by two blog posts that appeared in the last 48 hours.

Today on the side of the humans, we had perhaps naturally Seth Godin. He was discussing URL Hygiene. He believes URLs are for humans. He particularly likes the advice that is given on Aaron Goldman‘s goodURLbadURL website. Here are some key points:

URL Best Practices
Do’s
…
3. Whenever possible, use YourBrandName.com.
…
7. Use subdomains when driving people deeper than your homepage – e.g. Product.YourBrandName.com.

Don’ts
1. Don’t include www. We know to go to the World Wide Web to find you.

The previous day, Matt Cutts of Google had blogged about Subdomains and Subdirectories. In a sense he is speaking for the robots, because Google wants to make sure the robots will see what humans see. His advice yesterday would encourage web designers to use Subdirectories rather than Subdomains. That now goes quite counter to the 7th Do above.

On the much bigger question of whether to WWW or not to WWW, Google does not take a position. The only point they would recommend highly is to be consistent in using one or the other. Using Google Webmaster Tools in fact, you can specify whether you prefer them to index www.mydomain.com or mydomain.com.

The reason why this is important is that if both exist in the Google index, then each will be less visible than if only one of them was indexed. That visibility is created by other websites that have links to the website in question. A summary measure of this is the so-called PageRank. This is a fundamental factor in Google’s algorithm, which ranks Web pages in keyword searches. If both versions (the WWW version and the non-WWW versions) are used indiscriminately, then some links will point to one and other links will point to the other. Standardizing on one ensures the maximum PageRank and thus the maximum visibility in keyword searches for the website.

Which is better, the WWW version or the non-WWW version? If you follow Seth Godin and Aaron Goldman, you’ll go with the human-friendly URL and use the non-WWW version. If you’re trying to be friendly to the robots, that’s a tougher question. It all depends on those webmasters out there who may provide links to your website. The WWW version is much the more popular way of handling URLs so many of those links will point to that version. If you want to make sure that more of them get it right, then you’ll join the WWW camp.

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Customers Speak Out In The Internet Age

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We Know Your Call Should Be Important To Us.

This blog post is a follow-up to a recent article, Customer Service, New Marketing in the Internet Age. The article was addressed to business owners to remind them that the world has changed dramatically. Customers are now in control. The Internet gives customers new information and powers. This post is one place where you can exercise that power. You can add a comment if you found a company particularly poor on customer service. Equally if you found a company particularly good on customer service, then why not proclaim it to the world.

In the past people were sometimes reluctant to complain to a company, since problems were often not resolved by talking to the company. Now there is an alternative: you can talk to everyone out there. People do that in a variety of ways. For example on the recent opening of competition to the Canadian cell phone market both the Globe and Mail article, Cell phone giants lose stranglehold, (now behind a subscription wall) and the CTV article, Ottawa’s wireless auction could cut cell phone rates, each received scores of comments in very little time.

If you do a Google search for poor customer service, you can quickly confirm that customers are speaking out. Sometimes it’s in their own blogs and sometimes it’s via surveys. Here are some of the relevant links. Some of them are now some years old but they still timelessly signal someone’s discontent:

The rapid growth of social media such as Facebook means that the word is passed even faster now. It’s a customer revolution. If you’re not happy, or if you’re elated, then pass it on by adding a comment here.

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