This has been a very busy year for the world’s leading Search Engines and the changes they are making on the Search Landscape will increase global competition, stimulate innovation, and will help shape the Search business for many years to come. As the digital industry relies so heavily on search, it’s important to track these changes and to keep an eye on where they are leading.  

1. Major changes in Search

In 2009 there have been a number of major launches and partnerships made among the major search engines in the United States, that are changing the way Search is done globally, including:

• Wolfram Alpha - on May 15^th, 2009 Wolfram Alpha launched a “computational knowledge engine” which returns specific answers to questions posed in search queries. If one asks “What is the capital of Canada?” Wolfram Alpha would return the result “Ottawa, Ontario, Canada”, followed by the city population (874,433), metro area population (1.153 million people) and location on a map of Canada.

In response to the same request, Google returns an organic search page that starts with “Web definitions for the capital of Canada” and ends, 11 “blue lines” later, with a link to “Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Association”.  The information about Ottawa is there, but buried within the responses.

While Wolfram Alpha may not be as popular as Google, it can in some cases be more accurate and “Semantic”.  (Please keep in mind these are early days for this new search engine. Google has an 11 year head start.)

• Bing - on June 3rd, 2009 Microsoft launched Bing, a successor to Microsoft Live Search. Bing was positioned as a “Decision engine” and licensed some of the specialized scientific and computational content from Wolfram Alpha. That said, Bing is not hugely different from Google or Yahoo!, and appears is positioned to attract more of the Search money that is Google’s lifeblood, and which is being used fuel to grow Google’s other businesses.

• Microsoft and Yahoo! – on July 29^th, 2009 Microsoft reached a Search and Advertising deal with Yahoo! that gives Microsoft access to Yahoo!’s search technology, in return for Yahoo! receiving a large boost in annual revenue – resulting from 88% of the search-related ad revenues from its own sites for the first 5 years of this apparent 10 year deal. This deal comes one year after Microsoft failed to purchase Yahoo! in a US47.6 Billion hostile takeover bid in 2008.

• Twitter and Facebook deals - if the two major changes mentioned above were not enough for Microsoft, on October 21^st, 2009 Bing announced two more non-exclusive deals with Twitter and Facebook, respectively. These deals will allow real-time feeds from the two huge Social Networking Sites to be displayed in Bing, giving it a big – albeit temporary – advantage over Google.  (While it is not expected that these services will be up and running for a few weeks, a beta version appears to be available at BingTweets.com/.)

• Google and Twitter – not to be outdone by its new rival, on October 21^st, Google also announced that it had done a deal with Twitter to feature live public feeds in its Universal search results.  It is expected that this joint project up and running in a couple of months.

• More deals? – while the major US search engines are strengthening their search offerings, there are also a number of smaller search engines being developed to help make search faster, smarter, more personal, and more visually appealing. Most of these new search engines try to do things that the giants do not currently do, and are moving to the next phase of the web – semantic search.  Two examples of this come to mind –  Twine and Hakia  - both of which try to make search more personal.

In the end, these upstarts will find it difficult to compete directly with the majors; however, if they have interesting technology, they can find a place in the market and may end up being acquired by the majors. So these deals in the search arena probably have not stopped.

2. Can Social Media integrate with Search?

Benefits of a combined search

The recent search engine deals are interesting for both businesses and consumers because they blend the results of machine based algorithms with personal recommendations.  To see how these disciplines could work together, consider asking the combined “Bing-Twitter-Facebook” search engine the question “What is the best Thai restaurant in Bangkok?” The results would most likely include organic and paid search, websites, maps, reviews and photographs, as well as personal recommendations ranked by friends.

If after reviewing the initial results the searcher is not satisfied, he/she could send a subsequent Tweet under “What are you doing” and ask for a real time response to favorite food in the Thai capital city.  The responses to that Tweet should then provide real-time feedback, perhaps from someone who is currently in the restaurant the respondent wants to visit.

Will it last?

While there are great potential benefits of combining Search with Social Media, integrating these two practices straddles what some consider the fundamental battle for control of the Internet. While Google, Yahoo! and Bing organize search by way of algorithms, Twitter, and particularly Facebook, display search results based more on human relationships and recommendations.  These are very different things and their differences will likely put stress in these new “Search – Social Media” partnerships. The alliances work now because the social networks now need the money to survive.  But a question arises as to whether they will last over time.

Tabs

What is clear is that a mix of Search and Social Media results will be complicated because of the sheer volume of social media results. Social media is growing exponentially.  As such, the Bing-Twitter-Facebook site will almost certainly have tabs for Twitter and Facebook feeds, just the way it currently has for images, video, news, maps and consultation box, to manage the ever increasing volume of data.

3. Where else is Search headed?

Beyond the integration with Social Media, Search appears headed in a number of interesting directions, including:

• Global vs. regional battle for dominance

The big search engines are all pressing to become dominant players in the global search market. However, there are local players in place who will not be easily displaced. For example in China, Baidu has a 64% market share compared to Google’s 24% share. This is due to business issues (Baidu uses an extensive sales force and most of the internet cafes default to it), cultural issues (Baidu has a Chinese name meaning “hundreds of times” and was the first search engine in Chinese), and technical (often poor connectivity) issues.  While Google is trying to increase its share in China, Baidu has also launched in Japan. And while the American players fight it out at home in the United States, the local players also learn quickly and apply their local expertise to keep Search a multi-national game. It’s likely there will be acquisitions by the majors and consolidation in the future, as the large search engines vie for global dominance.

• Voice activated search

While voice recognition technology has been available for a number of years, it is now moving into search. Google started testing free voice-recognition on telephones in 2007, providing local information in a direct challenge to directory assistance companies. In the United States you call 1-800-GOOG-411 to get assistance for buying pizzas etc.. (Some say Google is trying to collect millions of voices to take voice recognition more personal to enhance future searches.)

Bing has also introduced a similar service in the United States for calling 1-800-BING(2464)-411 to get answers for a number of questions including search for a business, directions, traffic levels, cheap fuel, etc..  

Voice recognition will make search easier and faster (no typing required), particularly on mobile devices, and for searching while driving and on-the-go.  

• Mobile search

Search on mobile devices will also likely take a different path from PC search and will capitalize on the nature of mobile being an anytime/anywhere device. Mobile search will likely concentrate on directions, locations, and local content. These searches will almost certainly draw upon location-based technology such as GPS, to help narrow the results.

Mobile search will also link more naturally to video search, where objects can be captured by the cell phone camera and search applied to find specific attributes, benefits and locations where they can be purchased.  Nokia’s “Point and Find” is an example of this emerging technology. 

Finally mobile search will likely also involve social factors such as locating where your friends are in relation to where you happen to be. 

• Augmented reality

Search, and particularly mobile search, can be enhanced by Augmented Reality (AR). As examples, AR browsers such as Layer or Wikitude, mash-up real images with web-generated overlays – such as directions to provide valuable “layers” to enhance the search process. These layers are now being used for commercial and private real estate searches.

• Semantic web

Search will also need to evolve with the way the Web is evolving. The inventor of the World Wide Web – Tim Bernes-Lee – coined the phrase “Semantic web” (others use “Web 3.0”)  because the web’s technology will soon able to glean some of the meaning behind the queries people search for on the web. Search engines need to distinguish whether a person is looking for Paris Hilton the hotel, or Paris Hilton the person, when searching for “Paris Hilton” based on context, personal preferences, and history.

4. Summary and conclusion

Until the bugs get ironed out for integrating traditional Search engine results with Social Media results, different search engines will likely be used for different purposes: Google, Yahoo!, and Baidu will be used for more comprehensive or “universal” results; YouTube (which is a search engine at heart) will be used for video search; Twitter will be used for quick results (because you can only input 140 character at a time) and up-to-date information; Facebook will be used more for individuals to connect with friends and for business to search for prospects, employees, etc..

But as this integration progresses, we may find that a one-stop solution – with tabs for special breaks in search – provides the best way forward. Alternately the sheer amount of data found on the social networks may be too large for the major engines to incorporate to retain speedy, relevant searches.  Time will tell.

Whatever happens, search engine marketing (SEM) – which is both an art and science of drawing web traffic to a particular site – will need to stay on top of these changes in the search engine landscape, because innovation is soon absorbed globally, and search remains a critical step in the purchase decisions of brands.

Tags: Baidu, Future, Google, Search Engines, SEM, Wolfram Alpha

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Digital, Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.