LookSmart Thought Leadership Series

Traffic Report: LookSmart Puts Priority on Quality Network

By Michael Schoen, VP and General Manager of Advertising Platforms, LookSmart

This week, LookSmart announced a partnership with traffic quality solutions provider Anchor Intelligence. By licensing Anchor Intelligence’s real-time traffic scoring system, ClearMark, LookSmart can further reduce its advertisers’ exposure to illegitimate or fraudulent traffic. This partnership is indicative of ongoing efforts and underlines our priority: providing the best-quality network and supporting services possible to our valued customers.

I’m proud to say that LookSmart has long been a leader in ensuring network quality – years ago we recognized the threat of click fraud and took actions intended to safeguard our network and advertisers. The resulting action has led to significant benefits for our customers: a platform that Search Engine Strategies has recognized as the Best Search Advertising Platform; and network management that strives to meet advertisers’ needs through automated detection tools, rigorous partner screening, and advanced analytics.

In addition to our internal efforts and our partnership with Anchor Intelligence, we support Click Forensics’ FACTr reports to help advertisers identify the best-performing segments of traffic on the LookSmart network for their campaigns. We also support bringing more attention to the issue of click quality through the industry--we are one of the founding members of the IAB Click Measurement Working Group and contributed to the organization’s recent Click Measurement Guidelines, which established industry best practices for buying and selling CPC advertising.

We’re not done. Ensuring the quality of our network is an ongoing process. We’ll continue to develop new processes, enhance our ad serving platform, and partner with best-of-breed analytics providers to maintain and improve the value and quality of our network.

The Local Internet: New Consumer Findings from TMP-comScore

By Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land

Online marketers have been predicting the death of print yellow pages for years. While that will probably never happen, what has recently happened is the displacement of print yellow pages by the internet and search engines as the primary medium for local business information. A parallel development is the emergence of a more fragmented and complex "local search" marketplace.

These shifts were captured by advertising agency TMP Directional Marketing, which commissioned comScore to perform a study in May 2007 about local search user behavior – online and off. The stated purpose was to "understand the use and value of on- and offline local search sources," including Internet yellow pages, print yellow pages and search engines. That study involved behavioral observations and survey responses from 3,000 members of comScore's US consumer panel.

TMP followed up that original study with a second one this year, in July 2008. The results were released late last week. This overview compares the topline findings from the previous study and those just published.

Internet now 'primary' local information source

When asked about their "primary" source for location business information, here's how survey respondents answered:

In the 2007 findings, print yellow pages were the single, leading source for local business information. However the internet, in the aggregate, was used as a primary tool by almost twice as many respondents. In the 2008 survey, search engines (e.g., Google) have pulled ahead of print yellow pages, while internet yellow pages (e.g., Yellowpages.com) saw growth and local search sites (e.g., Google Maps, Yahoo Local) experienced a slight usage decline.

Usage frequency among the various sources was consistent in the two surveys. Print  directory usage is typically less than once a week, while online sources are used at least once a week or more frequently.

Local search market share

The study divides the various competitors into two somewhat artificial categories, one that features "local search sites" and internet yellow pages and the other consisting of general search engines and portals. Here's how the two categories compared in terms of local search market share:

This separation of the categories obscures the fact that there's considerably more local search query volume on the general search/portal sites. Though general search engines see more local reach, volume and usage frequency, that doesn't necessarily translate into usage of their "daughter" local sites. According to the TMP-comScore data, internet yellow pages users are more engaged than those of local search sites, conduct more searches per user and look at more pages than users of local search sites.

Behind these numbers is the persistent question "what percentage of search is local?" The answer depends on how one defines "what is local" to some degree. However, using a fairly conservative methodology, comScore finds that local searches represent about 12% of all search activity. That amounts to almost two billion searches per month according to the firm.

Usage differences among site categories

Among the most interesting data from the survey concern differences in the way consumers approach and use the different categories of sites. Yellow pages websites are used mostly for local service business lookups, while product search tends to be a larger feature of general and local search sites.

What's striking about the slide immediately above is that most of the intended uses are evenly distributed across the site categories. However there are three exceptions: product research, phone number lookups and driving directions.

Local search sites (e.g., Google Maps) are apparently used more heavily for directions than the other two categories, while internet yellow pages sites are more frequently used than the others to find business phone numbers. Product research is much more often done on general search sites. The map-centric nature of many local search sites, typified by Google Maps, could help explain why consumers use them more heavily for directions.

The following chart shows how consumers interact with the three site segments in terms of content-specific vertical categories:

It's surprising that yellow pages sites fare so poorly in the home improvement category, considering their usage for "home services." In addition, restaurants and pizza in particular are among the most frequent lookups in print yellow pages. So it's somewhat surprising to not see that translate into internet usage on yellow pages sites.

Local search leads to action

A very high percentage of local searchers go on to take some sort of subsequent action. Accordingly, the following chart reflects 2008 responses to the question: " Which of the following activities did you do as a result of this online local business search?"

The finding above that immediately jumps out is the one showing internet yellow pages users' propensity to pick up the phone. That makes sense given that one of the primary uses of yellow pages sites is to obtain a business phone number. Regardless, a large majority of local search users go on to take action (i.e., either an in-store visit or telephone contact):

• General search: 66 percent
• Local search: 72 percent
• Internet yellow pages: 80 percent

While a telephone contact can be tracked, internet-driven in-store visits are harder to measure and remain one of the vexing challenges in local. 

Mobile the next frontier for local

While directory assistance has always been a form of local, mobile search, with the advent of the iPhone and growth in general smartphone adoption, local searching on mobile devices is finally starting to happen. Here are data from the 2008 survey on the question of local business search by phone:

The chart above reflects all cellphone users. The percentage of users that have conducted a local search on their mobile phones shoots up past 50 percent if one looks only at smartphone owners.

The entry of mobile—both an extension of the internet and a unique new medium— offers consumers more choice but also further complicates the landscape by introducing more complexity. Long gone are the days when local advertisers had only to place ads in the print newspaper or yellow pages and be confident that they were reaching most of their intended market.

The Final Question

By: Charles Knight

When Issac Asimov, the great science fiction author, was asked which of his many stories his favorite was, he replied, "The Last Question." In that short story, a couple of scientists are talking, and it occurs to one of them that the Sun, the source of their warmth and energy, will eventually die out.  Having conquered space travel, their plan is to simply move on to another sun.  But then they realize that
sooner or later, they will all burn out, a condition known as entropy. So, they ask their super computer this question, "Can entropy be reversed?" For a humanist, this is the Ultimate Question.  If you want the answer, you'll have to read the story.

In our lifetime, we have a different Ultimate Question, and that is, "Can Google be defeated?"  Hitwise just published their September 2008 results. Microsoft's MSN Live was down (In US market share, compared to September 2007), Yahoo! was down, Ask.com was down, and the Alternative Search
Engines were down. Google simply filled the empty space. Can this trend be halted?

Will Microsoft's "you search, we pay" program work?  Will Powerset turn things around?  And at Yahoo!, will their new BOSS program halt their decline?  Can anything save Ask.com?  And above all, what about the Alternative Search Engines?  If they are so numerous and so superior to old-fashioned Google keyword search, why is their slice of the pie shrinking too?

The answer to this last question is that there are "too many choices."  As noted in my last essay, we have discovered not dozens of alternatives to Google, not hundreds, but thousands.  Users cannot avail themselves of search engines that they have never seen or heard of.  There are too many.  As each one fights for users, users return again and again to that which is familiar to them, and that is Google.

I also argued in my first essay that there is no one "Google-killer."  The alternative search engines are superior to Google mainly in one aspect per project.  Attempts like Cuil's are unlikely to ever succeed.  Imagine the almost unimaginable head start that Google has on it's own turf, the algorithm that they have fine tuned over a decade by the best minds, their near limitless resources, and the mind boggling infrastructure. 

And yet there is hope.

Google's Achilles'heel, as Sramana Mitra and other bloggers have surmised, is the Vertical Search Engines.  The very ones we talked about in the last essay; People Search engines; Job Search; Health Search; Travel, and many, many more.  Each has designed a way to drill for just the best results and to present them in the best possible way (and not as ten blue links!).  And yet Google is used by more people than ever!

Just as the computers in Asimov's story has to ponder for centuries over the question of reversing entropy, we at AltSearchEngines have been pondering day after day, search engine after search engine, about this perceived vulnerability of Google's.  The answer?  The Vertical Search Engines (VSE) must be combined under one homepage.  They must replace their dozens of cryptic names with generic labels ("Job," "Health," "News," etc.), and they must move beyond the Meta Search model to the newer Virtual User Interfaces (VUI).  This is the direction that the Alts must take. A completely new, cooperative homepage paired with a fabulous design.  Regardless of their need, this is where users would learn to come when they had a specific need and wanted, and would be rewarded with, superior results.

Finally, this new homepage would also have easy access to a fast keyword search.  It can incorporate a Google-like option, but Google cannot incorporate every single vertical without alienating their users.  So that's the formula that we have arrived at: FoS = VSE + VUI.  The Future of Search equals the
Vertical Search Engines plus a Virtual User Interface.

Trust me.

On Being Ubiquitous

By: Anita Campbell

The question I so often get from small business owners and entrepreneurs is “HOW, exactly, does a small business build a brand online today?”

I think the answer lies in a strategy of becoming Ubiquitous.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines “ubiquitous” as: "existing or being everywhere at the same the same time: constantly encountered.” Translated to the online world of business, this means very simply that you want your business to be constantly encountered. You want people to figuratively bump into your brand – your trade name, your logo, your domain name, your products, your services – every time they turn around online. In other words, you want to be EVERYWHERE online.

At first glance this may sound like an impossible task for a small business on a limited budget. It costs money – lots of it – to be seen everywhere online, doesn’t it?

Well, it CAN cost a lot of money. On the other hand, it is also possible, with some carefully placed effort and a clear understanding of how the Web works today, to get the kind of everywhere visibility I’m talking about, on a limited budget. I know, because I’m building my business’s brand on literally a shoestring budget.

You will have to make some trade-offs, namely trading time for money. It will require putting in some time to develop that everywhere visibility I am talking about. But it can be done.

Your Website is the Beginning, Not the End

The starting point for building your brand online is your website. Think of your website as your home base for your online presence. But in today’s world, you can’t stop there. We live in the world of the Cut and Paste Web, as PR executive Steve Rubel dubbed it. He wrote:

Imagine for a moment that you can take any piece of online content that you care about - a news feed, an image, a box score, multimedia, a stream of updates from your friends - and easily pin it wherever you want. Once clipped, you can drop the content on your desktop, an online start page like Windows Live or Pageflakes, “the deck" of your mobile device or even “a crawl” on your Internet-connected television.

This isn’t some far off vision. It’s the near-term future. It’s the coming era of the Cut and Paste Web.

The Cut and Paste Web means that the public has the power to place content where THEY want to consume it, not just where you place it.

You have two choices:

(1) You can resist, create a walled garden, and try to make it difficult for users to move your content around.

(2) Or you can embrace this phenomenon and make it as easy as possible for your website content to be placed wherever users want to put it.

The first choice seems futile given today’s technology, and is likely to isolate your Web presence. The second choice – the one I strongly recommend – will help you in your strategy for your brand to be “bumped into every time someone turns around.” Think of hundreds, no thousands of places online displaying your content or your logo, or linking back to your website. It’s like having a small army of people doing your brand building for you.

You’re in the Content Business Now

Of course, in order to have content for users to cut and paste as they wish, you need as part of your strategy to have content creation mechanisms in place. John Battelle recently wrote “You’re in the media business now” … you’ve got to become a content producer.

One of the easiest ways to produce large amounts of written content is with a blog. Most blogs automatically generate RSS feeds, which are nothing more than a portable form of your blog posts that users can cut and paste and consume where they wish.

On top of a blog, more and more businesses have a video strategy. They are creating video content which they place on their websites and also share with the public on aggregator sites like YouTube. Video has a number of advantages, not the least of which is that it’s one of the most viral forms of content - 57% of online adults share video with others. Plus, videos are well represented within the major search engine results, in essence giving you an extra shot at being found in the search engines if your brand is properly associated with a video.

You might also want to consider developing Facebook apps, iPhone apps, widgets and gadgets. All are portable chunks of content and functionality which are packaged up so they easily can be embedded elsewhere on the Web and in the converging frontier, mobile devices.

There are numerous other ways to distribute content: article distribution sites; audio podcasts through ground-breaking sites such as BlogTalkRadio.com; press releases that are distributed through one of the online distributions sites like PRWeb.com. Find what suits your business. Each of these content mechanisms encourages your brand to spread.

Search, Advertising and Social Media Amplify Your Brand Presence

All of this content you are creating, if properly tagged/written with relevant keywords, has the potential to get indexed in the search engines, where searchers can find your business. It’s this cumulative effect of creating content, spreading it across many places on the Web, and having it found in the search engines where the real power kicks in. Search is growing in importance -- according to the Pew Internet Project, 89% of online adults use search engines to find things.

In addition to being found in the natural search results, another option for online visibility is search advertising. Search advertising is one of the fastest ways to be found in the search results, as it doesn’t have the long lead times of some of the other techniques. Think of search advertising also as a megaphone that amplifies your brand name alongside the natural search results for terms you want it to be associated with.

Social media, such as content sharing sites like Stumbleupon and Digg, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, also serve as great places to be seen online. All the while you are making connections and conversing with others and sharing interesting content, your brand is being spread and seen. You’re making an impression.

Summary

The final point to remember is that building a strong, visible, memorable brand online takes time and is a never-ending quest.  You have to stick with it, to maintain your brand recognition.  But once you have a strong brand, it’s worth its weight in gold.

Relying On Print Yellow Pages? Most Local Customers Turn To The Web!

By Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

Online marketers have been predicting the death of print yellow pages for years. While that will never happen, print yellow pages are no longer the primary way that people seek local information. In fact, the internet collectively -- through search engines, local search sites, online yellow pages and other venues -- is the top way consumers look for local information. A new study underscores this change and documents with hard numbers why local advertisers have to take the internet into account when trying to reach customers.

The study

The shift from print to web was captured by advertising agency TMP Directional Marketing, which commissioned comScore to perform a study in May 2007 about local search user behavior – online and off. The stated purpose was to "understand the use and value of on- and offline local search sources," including Internet yellow pages, print yellow pages and search engines. That study involved behavioral observations and survey responses from 3,000 members of comScore's US consumer panel. TMP followed up that original study with a second one this year, in July 2008. The results were released late last week. This overview compares the topline findings from the previous study and those just published.

Internet now 'primary' local information source

When asked about their "primary" source for location business information, here's how survey respondents answered:

In the 2007 findings, print yellow pages were the single, leading source for local business information. However the internet, in the aggregate, was used as a primary tool by almost twice as many respondents. In the 2008 survey, search engines (e.g., Google) have pulled ahead of print yellow pages, while internet yellow pages (e.g., Yellowpages.com) saw growth and local search sites (e.g., Google Maps, Yahoo Local) experienced a slight usage decline. Usage frequency among the various sources was consistent in the two surveys. Print directory usage is typically less than once a week, while online sources are used at least once a week or more frequently.

Local search leads to action

A very high percentage of local searchers go on to take some sort of subsequent action. Accordingly, the following chart reflects 2008 responses to the question: " Which of the following activities did you do as a result of this online local business search?"

The finding above that immediately jumps out is the one showing internet yellow pages users like to pick up the phone, after doing a search. That makes sense given that one of the primary uses of yellow pages sites, that the study also found, is to obtain a business phone number. Another major finding is that a large majority of local search users take some type of action, period -- a phone call, an in-store visit or something else -- local searchers go on to do more. By type of local search site used, here's the breakdown of what percentage of searchers seek further after viewing an initial listing:

• General search: 66 percent
• Local search: 72 percent
• Internet yellow pages: 80 percent

While a telephone contact can be tracked, internet-driven in-store visits are harder to measure and remain one of the vexing challenges in local.

Conclusion

The internet and search engines have grown as competitors, which means long gone are the days when local advertisers had only to place ads in the print newspaper or yellow pages and be confident that they were reaching most of their intended market. The web must be considered.

And when going out onto the web, local business need to ensure they're measuring the web's impact in their real-life activities. When people call by phone or visit a store -- the top two actions after an online local search -- is someone in the store asking about this? Asking about whether particular online sites were used may help local businesses better understand the potentially "invisible" drivers of traffic that they're not aware of.

The Internet is a Cesspool – Branding is How You Rise Above It

By: Anita Campbell

It was none other than Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who, a couple months ago, called the Internet a “cesspool.”  According to AdAge:

The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

Schmidt went on to highlight the power of brand in today’s online world, pointing out how people rely on brands to make choices:

Branding, on the other hand, may be an essential element that helps people navigate the world, he said. "Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."

I don’t know whether brand is a “genetic” component as Schmidt muses.  But I do know that brand is what gives consumers and potential customers the feeling they can trust you.

Have you ever visited a website, thought about making a purchase, but then decided against it because something didn’t look right about the website?  Perhaps the website was run by some company whose name you never heard of.  You suddenly realized you would be giving your credit card information to heaven-only-knows-who.  Didn’t seem wise ….

Consider an alternative, Amazon.com.  Would you have the same level of hesitation about giving up your credit card information to Amazon?  Most likely not. Why?  Amazon is a well known brand. 

Brand.  There’s that word again.

Now, on the one hand all this emphasis on brand may sound like bad news for small businesses, startups and up-and-coming businesses.  Aside from the rare small business enjoying wild grassroots success – like Twitter – your business won’t have the brand recognition of larger companies. That may sound like you are at a disadvantage.

But the good news is that the Web is an amazing platform that makes it possible to develop brand recognition much faster than in the offline world. 

Online more people can come in contact with your brand.  If you intelligently leverage the search engines, blogs, social media, and search advertising to get found easily online, in many places, the cumulative impact over time is to build brand awareness.

It becomes a breeder reactor effect, too.  The more brand awareness, the more that people come to your site, the more trust a search engine like Google will place in your business’s website – and the more likely Google may be to separate out your site from the cesspool.

As your brand awareness increases, trust levels among consumers go up. Your business is differentiated in their eyes from the hordes of low quality websites.  Memory kicks in, too, and with brand awareness your business will be top of mind.  People think of your business and your products or services when it’s time to buy. 

Welcome to the cesspool, and the importance of branding to rise above it.

Shifting Search from Static to Real-time

By: John Battelle

I've been mulling something that keeps tugging at my mind as a Big Idea for some time now, and I may as well Think Out Loud about it and see what comes up.

To summarize, I think Search is about to undergo an important evolution. It remains to be seen if this is punctuated equilibrium or a slow, constant process (it sort of feels like both), but the end result strikes me as extremely important: Very soon, we will be able to ask Search a very basic and extraordinarily important question that I can best summarize as this: What are people saying about (my query) right now?

When it first hit critical mass, it seemed Google answered this question. For the first time, you could ask a question in your native tongue, and get an answer. It felt immediate, but save for the speed with which the search results were rendered, it was not. Instead, it was archival - Google was the ultimate interface for stuff that had already been said - a while ago. When you queried Google, you got the popular wisdom - but only after it was uttered, edited into HTML format, published on the web, and then crawled and stored by Google's technology. True, that has sped up - Google indexes a lot of sites more than once a day now - but as it nears the event horizon, this approach to search won't scale.

In short, Google represents a remarkable achievement: the ability to query the static web. But it remains to be seen if it can shift into a new phase: querying the realtime web.

It's inarguable that the web is shifting into a new time axis. Blogging was the first real indication of this, but blogging, while much faster than the traditional HTML-driven web, is, in the end, still the HTML-driven web. To its credit, Technorati saw blogging as the vanguard of a shift to real time, and tried to become the first search engine for "the live web". It failed to gain critical mass, but I think the main reason was that the web was not yet "alive".

That is changing, rapidly. Yes, I'm thinking about Twitter, of course, which is quickly gaining critical mass as a conversation hub answering the question "what are you doing?" But I'm also thinking about ambient data more broadly, in particular as described by John Markoff's article (posted here). All of us are creating fountains of ambient data, from our phones, our web surfing, our offline purchasing, our interactions with tollbooths, you name it. Combine that ambient data (the imprint we leave on the digital world from our actions) with declarative data (what we proactively say we are doing right now) and you've got a major, delicious, wonderful, massive search problem, er, opportunity.

And with that search challenge comes an equally exciting monetization opportunity.

Imagine AdSense, Live. Here's my scenario:

Let's say you are in the market to buy something - anything. Just to keep things simple, I'll use the age old digital camera example. Say you are considering a Canon EOS. Before the shift to the live web (for most mortals, that'd be now), chances are good you'd start by Googling it.

Given the way we humans work, the results are far from helpful, to my mind. You get a list of top pages for "Canon EOS", and you are off on a major research project, trying to make sense of what folks have written about Canon, or what Canon has to say about its products, comparison shopping engines on price...it's not a very good experience. Wouldn't you feel better if you could just start by asking a trusted friend? But one that has the scale of Google?

So imagine a service that feels just like Google, but instead of gathering static web results, it gathers liveweb results - what people are saying, right now (or some approximation of now - say the past few hours or so), about the Canon EOS? And/or, you could post your query to that engine, and you could get realtime results that were created - by other humans - directly in response to you? Well, you can get a taste of what such an engine might look like on search.twitter.com, but that's just a taste. Add in your social graph (what your friends, and your friend's friends are saying), far more sophisticated algorithms and - most importantly - a critical mass of real time data - and those results could be truly game changing.

Now, imagine what AdSense might look like next to those results? Of course Canon will want to be there, pitching why its EOS line is the best, and of course, so will all of its competitors. Just like AdSense now. But instead of static text ads, these ads would be the beginning of true conversations between those brands and yourself.

And that's what's got me so excited. It's coming, quickly, and the game is truly afoot.

The Central Question - How are the Alt Search Engines doing?

By: Charles Knight

In the first essay, we established that for the purpose of these essays the term "alternative search engine” refers to a search engine that is superior to Google in at least one feature, but is not a "new Google."  This essay lays out the types of alternative search engines, and estimates their numbers.

The alternative search engines that are the most prominent are the Vertical Search engines, those that specialize in one particular area such that they produce far superior results compared to a standard, keyword-based, search on a general search engine such as Google.  The largest vertical categories are Health search engines, Semantic Search, People Search, Music/Video Search, and now Image Search.  Within each Vertical are several alternative search engines wrestling for supremacy within that slice of the search pie.  In Health, for example, would be search engines OrganizedWisdom, RightHealth, Healia, ZocDoc, and many more.  In People Search there is PeekYou, Wink, Spock, and more.  In Semantic Search; Hakia, Cognition, TrueKnowledge, Eeggi, and more. 

Remember, alternative search engines are a niche part of the total search market pie, roughly 2% in the US.  The Verticals are only part of that, and each Vertical is a slice of that slice!  But then *within* that tiny sliver, let's say of Image Search, is EyeAlike, SearchMe, Viewzi, Viewdle, Mugr, Picitup, Picollater, et al, each one slightly different from the others. But the verticals can get ever smaller such as Snooth for wine searches, QueryCat which searches only FAQs, and Twing or Omgili which search forums and conversations.

Beyond Vertical search are categories such as Visualization, where the results may be similar, but displayed very differently.  Quintura uses a tag cloud, Taggalaxy.de, a solar system, SearchCube a 3-D Rubik's cube, Yoowalk, a virtual mall, and still more such as KartOO and KoolTorch.  All of these must be seen to be appreciated, and while some deride them as "eye-candy," they are in fact often superior ways of seeing information.

Note that we haven't even explored P2P or Peer-to-peer search (FAROO), shopping or job search verticals, MetaSearch or search tools such as SurfCanyon.  There are so many!

So how many?  Well, as one yardstick, Phil Bradley has made a list of global search engines, those tied to a specific country or area, and it has 4,000 engines!  I stared AltSearchEngines with 1,000 search engines, and for 15 months we have posted new search engines daily and globally, and we can barely keep up with the pace of new projects!  Staring with the goal of one new search engines per day, this past month we added 100 new search engines, or three a day, and still they come! Each month we distill these huge numbers down to "The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines" a job that is increasingly difficult, and even so, with a mere 100 out of thousands, if you looked at each one for only 10 minutes, it would take you 16 hours to do it!

Finally, you might think that with so many individual search engines that their aggregate market share must add up to, well, something, but the sad truth is that they make up less than 2% of the US search market, as noted above.  It's a sad number that has not changed since AltSearchEngines started in June 2007.
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In my third and final essay, I will tackle this dilemma while at the same time trying to answer the Last and Greatest Question: Can Google be defeated?

   

What We Lose As Search Gets Personal

By: John Battelle

Of all the jobs I've had in the past twenty odd years, I'm pretty sure the one that pleased my parents the most was my brief stint as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, my family's local paper of record. My mother in particular seemed quite proud to see her son's work land on her breakfast table each morning (well, not exactly, I worked at a local edition in Ventura, and my mother lived in Pasadena. Every every once in a while, one of my pieces did make the national edition...).

In any case, when I delivered the news I was leaving the Times to help start a magazine focused on technology, Mom wasn't entirely convinced. "The newspaper," she declared, "is our social glue. It's what keeps us all on the same page. Technology is going to destroy that, everyone will end up reading whatever suits their fancy."

That was back in 1992 (the magazine was Wired), and given what's happened with the newspaper industry in the past 16 or so years, it's hard to argue with either my decision to leave the Times, or my mother's assertion that our culture was on the brink of losing an important component of its "social glue."

Fast forward to two nights ago, when I was talking with my own son about technology. Earlier in the day, he had emailed me from his room downstairs, asking me - for the fourth time - for the link to his Boy Scout troop web page. Mildly irritated, I turned to my browser's toolbar and entered "CA Troop 43" or some such, but the results did not give me the page I wanted. In fact, they gave me a bunch of other Troops - Troop 9, Troop 777 - that happened to have the numbers 4 or 3 on their site for other reasons.

I recalled that my son's troop used an old community application that was difficult for search engines to find, putting it in what search experts call "the deep web" - websites that are easily accessible if you know the exact URL, but near impossible to find using Google.

If I had enabled Google Desktop Search, I could have found that scout website - desktop search scans my entire hard drive and integrates it with my web search, and it turns out, I had the URL in an email folder on my local computer. But desktop search, like Web History, kind of creeps me out. I remembered that I had the URL in an email, searched my mail, and found it that way. Instead of sending it - yet again - to my son, I thought I'd talk to him at dinner and perhaps teach him the value of bookmarks.

This story is getting a bit convoluted, but stay with me. What happened next was interesting. At dinner I gently chided my son for lazy information gathering habits. "I'm not your personal Google," I told him. "Why couldn't you find the URL yourself? Did you even try?"

"Actually dad, I did, and it gave me all sorts of wrong answers - Troop 43 in Texas, and Iowa, but nothing for mine!"

"What did you search for, son?"

"Troop 43, of course!"

"Well that's your first problem. There's a Troop 43 in nearly every state, sometimes in every county, and the one here in Marin is really hard to find because no one links to it. Also, it's on a community domain, one that probably protects its content from search engine crawlers. You should have narrowed your search - like I did, but to be honest, even that wouldn't have helped. You have to search elsewhere - did you think to search your mail?"

As my son contemplated the idea that Google might not be omniscient, something struck me. Faced with the same question - "what is Troop 43's website address" - my son and I both did the exact same thing - we asked Google. I asked the question a little bit differently than did my son, but we both got poor results. Yet due to years of conditioning, we instinctively assumed Google would give us the One Right Answer. That assumption - in particular my son's, who has never used a computer without a browser and Google services - united us.

In ten short years, Google has become our social glue - we all presume that two people, asking roughly the same question, will get pretty much the same answer, and that answer will be correct. For most of the past decade, that was a pretty fair assumption. Google has become a universal search resource, reliable, accurate, and ... consistent.

But for a variety of reasons, that assumption is no longer true. The ongoing goal of all search providers has been to personalize search - to tailor answers to the individual who is doing the searching. Search no longer takes one signal - your query - and finds results against the entire web. Instead it takes many signals - your search history, your geographic location, things you've clicked on in the past, files on your hard drive (if you allow it), and many others - and processes those signals against probable sub sets of data that have a higher chance of providing *you* the best answer. And that answer, increasingly, will be quite different from someone else's, even if that other person asks exactly the same question.

Along the way, I think, something has been lost. It's the same thing my mother lamented as she watched my generation abandon the newspaper - common ground, common spaces - a common set of facts around which we as humans can gather, debate, and connect. And therein lies an opportunity, I sense, to create a new kind of search that is in fact *not* personalized, but rather socialized - shared and common to all.

The Trilogy

By: Charles Knight

• The first question - What is an alternative search engine?
• The central question - How are the Alt Search Engines doing?
• The last question - Can Google be defeated?

The First Question - What is an Alternative Search Engine?

Before we can talk about an alternative search engine, it's necessary to address the question of what a search engine is. As simple as that seems, we at AltSearchEngines.com have discovered that there is no consensus on a definition. That being said, everyone knows what Google is, and that Google is a search engine. How so? Because it crawls the Internet, uses that information to build an index, and then retrieves information from that index when a user asks a question, or query.

Less clear is the situation where the index is not a result of fetching information from the Web, but rather is a closed system, a database of some kind. In these situations there is no crawler, just the query and the resulting matches (if any). For example, one "search engine" is Abbreviations.com.

Abbreviations.com is not sending out a bot to crawl the WWW looking for and picking up new abbreviations and their meanings, its index has been compiled; it is a database. When I ask it what "WYSIWYG" means, does it search for an answer and return it for me? Yes. Is it a "search engine?" Not in the fullest sense of the term, perhaps, but in effect, yes.

Having made that distinction, we must now put it aside. When I use the phrase "Alternative Search Engine" at AltSearchEngines.com, I specifically mean an alternative to Google. What then? Are we saying that Google is the only major search engine out there? Yes. Perhaps not statistically, or globally, but practically speaking it is.

Finally we arrive at our destination, or rather, definition. An "Alternative Search Engine," when used in my essays means that the search engine, broadly defined, exhibits at least one feature that is superior to a similar search on Google. "Alternative" in this case does not mean "replacement." Another way to look at it is this: if Google lets you down, there is almost assuredly an alternative search engine that would delight you.

This has important implications. More than anything else, it means that we do not consider any one alternative search engine to be a match for Google. In the incessant drumbeat of the mainstream media, this refers to the elusive "Google Killer." A search engine that on its own will reduce Google's market share as it takes the search world by storm, welcoming millions of former Googlers who have now jumped ship to this new champion. The unthinkable becomes thinkable - a better search engine than Google! Hasta la vista, Google.

Let me be clear, the defining characteristic of the Alternative Search Engines is that they do one facet of a search better than Google, just one. For example, if you wanted to search for the specific salary of a specific position at a specific company, you should go to GlassDoor.com because it is designed to do just that. I doubt that Google could match it.

Many searchers have begun to notice that Google does not perform equally well for all types of inquiries. In fact, for some it does quite poorly, returning page after page of links without providing any value or satisfying the user. Those who keep plugging away like a gambler at a slot machine often complain of "search fatigue." That is, they just give up on using Google for finding what they need.

In my next essay we are going to pick things up right here. How many of the Alternative Search Engines are there? What exactly do they do? And how come you've never heard of them?

By: John Battelle

Of all the jobs I've had in the past twenty odd years, I'm pretty sure the one that pleased my parents the most was my brief stint as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, my family's local paper of record. My mother in particular seemed quite proud to see her son's work land on her breakfast table each morning (well, not exactly, I worked at a local edition in Ventura, and my mother lived in Pasadena. Every every once in a while, one of my pieces did make the national edition...).

In any case, when I delivered the news I was leaving the Times to help start a magazine focused on technology, Mom wasn't entirely convinced. "The newspaper," she declared, "is our social glue. It's what keeps us all on the same page. Technology is going to destroy that, everyone will end up reading whatever suits their fancy."

That was back in 1992 (the magazine was Wired), and given what's happened with the newspaper industry in the past 16 or so years, it's hard to argue with either my decision to leave the Times, or my mother's assertion that our culture was on the brink of losing an important component of its "social glue."

Fast forward to two nights ago, when I was talking with my own son about technology. Earlier in the day, he had emailed me from his room downstairs, asking me - for the fourth time - for the link to his Boy Scout troop web page. Mildly irritated, I turned to my browser's toolbar and entered "CA Troop 43" or some such, but the results did not give me the page I wanted. In fact, they gave me a bunch of other Troops - Troop 9, Troop 777 - that happened to have the numbers 4 or 3 on their site for other reasons.

I recalled that my son's troop used an old community application that was difficult for search engines to find, putting it in what search experts call "the deep web" - websites that are easily accessible if you know the exact URL, but near impossible to find using Google.

If I had enabled Google Desktop Search, I could have found that scout website - desktop search scans my entire hard drive and integrates it with my web search, and it turns out, I had the URL in an email folder on my local computer. But desktop search, like Web History, kind of creeps me out. I remembered that I had the URL in an email, searched my mail, and found it that way. Instead of sending it - yet again - to my son, I thought I'd talk to him at dinner and perhaps teach him the value of bookmarks.

This story is getting a bit convoluted, but stay with me. What happened next was interesting. At dinner I gently chided my son for lazy information gathering habits. "I'm not your personal Google," I told him. "Why couldn't you find the URL yourself? Did you even try?"

"Actually dad, I did, and it gave me all sorts of wrong answers - Troop 43 in Texas, and Iowa, but nothing for mine!"

"What did you search for, son?"

"Troop 43, of course!"

"Well that's your first problem. There's a Troop 43 in nearly every state, sometimes in every county, and the one here in Marin is really hard to find because no one links to it. Also, it's on a community domain, one that probably protects its content from search engine crawlers. You should have narrowed your search - like I did, but to be honest, even that wouldn't have helped. You have to search elsewhere - did you think to search your mail?"

As my son contemplated the idea that Google might not be omniscient, something struck me. Faced with the same question - "what is Troop 43's website address" - my son and I both did the exact same thing - we asked Google. I asked the question a little bit differently than did my son, but we both got poor results. Yet due to years of conditioning, we instinctively assumed Google would give us the One Right Answer. That assumption - in particular my son's, who has never used a computer without a browser and Google services - united us.

In ten short years, Google has become our social glue - we all presume that two people, asking roughly the same question, will get pretty much the same answer, and that answer will be correct. For most of the past decade, that was a pretty fair assumption. Google has become a universal search resource, reliable, accurate, and ... consistent.

But for a variety of reasons, that assumption is no longer true. The ongoing goal of all search providers has been to personalize search - to tailor answers to the individual who is doing the searching. Search no longer takes one signal - your query - and finds results against the entire web. Instead it takes many signals - your search history, your geographic location, things you've clicked on in the past, files on your hard drive (if you allow it), and many others - and processes those signals against probable sub sets of data that have a higher chance of providing *you* the best answer. And that answer, increasingly, will be quite different from someone else's, even if that other person asks exactly the same question.

Along the way, I think, something has been lost. It's the same thing my mother lamented as she watched my generation abandon the newspaper - common ground, common spaces - a common set of facts around which we as humans can gather, debate, and connect. And therein lies an opportunity, I sense, to create a new kind of search that is in fact *not* personalized, but rather socialized - shared and common to all.