And that got me thinking about Google’s announcement of AdWords Search Funnels at SES NY. Just like any other sport, the player who scores gets the glory, but the credit goes to the team as a whole. Take that same concept online and you’ll see that campaigns work pretty much the same way. The keyword that converts gets all the glory, but what about all the other keywords that “passed” the conversion along or “assisted” in it?

2 weeks ago at SES, a friend told me a story about a PPC client they had 2 years ago. One of the keywords they had very early in their search funnel was “broadband,” which obviously accounted for zero conversions. So they decided to cut it out and guess what? Their sales dropped by 30% (causation not correlation, it was a pure experiment). But what they didn’t and couldn’t realize 2 years ago, is the impact this zero converting keyword had in guiding the user down the conversion funnel.

Let’s say a user Googles the term “broadband”, lands on your site, you do a decent job building trust and credibility, but then they left. The following day, they search for “internet broadband” and land on your site again. This time, the confidence level is higher and the visit turns into a conversion. Did your efforts go in vain the first time around because the visitor didn’t convert? Clearly they shouldn’t.

In a typical campaign, you would have no way of finding that out, unless you test or experiment like my friend did. But with Google rolling out this feature, it should eliminate a lot of the guesswork and change your perspective when you evaluate your keywords.

Some Considerations

1. You have to have AdWords conversion tracking set up on your account

2. You have to be comfortable letting Google have all that data (some clients aren’t!)

3. Google obviously had this data for a while before making it available. How and when will they use this data to impact Quality Score of your AdWords campaigns?

4. You have to understand the benefits and limitations of the reports that Google is offering. Analytics specialist Justin Cutroni recently published a blog post about his thoughts on Google offering up these sets of reports-

“The Search Funnel reports are a well thought out way to understand how people interact with AdWords ads prior to conversion and thus help us understand the ROI of our AdWords spend.”

“I think this is a good first step by Google. They took reliable set of data that was just sitting around a data center and created some reports that will help marketers understand the real value of different types of keywords. This is all very low risk for Google with very high potential (read: more AdWords revenue).

But these new reports are also a good test of how users, and the overall analytics market, will respond to Google’s version campaign attribution reporting. Real attribution models are very complicated to create. They involve a lot of data about different types of campaigns (banners, cpc, email, etc.).”

To get a sense of the types or reports available, you can watch this video put out by the Google team:

The Future Strategy of Using AdWords

All this is incredibly valuable, especially when you add Google AdWords’ other recent offering of Remarketing.

Let’s imagine a situation where we would help launch a PPC campaign for a local gym. We may start out targeting the keyword “gym Montreal.” It may not have a great conversion rate to becoming a lead for the gym, but it may help people recognize the brand on their first visit to our website from the ad. Using AdWords remarketing, I could target people on the content network who are interested in “beauty and personal care” to encourage them to come back to the site, or to drive search demand for our bootcamp, spinning, or yoga classes. That could lead people to search for “montreal spinning class” or even “by brand name + spinning,” which would eventually convert to a lead. “gym montreal” would get the assist, the content network remarketing would bring them back to search for terms that have a higher likelihood to convert.

To get a better step-by-step understanding of AdWords remarketing, read this fabulous post.

What are your thoughts on these recent releases and how do you think it will affect your strategy in managing your PPC client campaigns?

We, as a species, kinda stumbled into this Internet thing. It’s all an inconceivably vast, unregulated, unhindered, unorganized cornucopia of digitized crap, and in order to deal with the fact that humans defecate in digital, we’ve had to invent stuff like Google to help us sift through all the … you get the point.

The way that we’ve evolved in our mode of seeking information has always been a function of the medium that holds what we’re looking for. Books added indexes, articles added abstracts, and libraries added compilations of indexed abstracts. Categorizable volumes fell prey to the formidable Dewey decimal, the granularity of taxonomy thought un-improvable. But Von Neuman screwd’em, and abstract data types, bubble sorts, relational DBs, non-relational DBs and relevancy algorithms took over the world (rich white men are so passé).

At this point in history we search by guessing at words that might be in the document that we are hoping also contains the actual piece of information we’re trying to determine. When you think outside the search-box a little, this methodology doesn’t necessarily strike you as the ultimate form of human-understandable information retrieval, and in a certain light, it might even seem a bit archaic (okay, with nothing more modern to compare it to, I guess that would be faux-archaic).

Now I’m no futurist (though it seems a cushy job, so if any of my half-assed predictions come true, I’ll be charging $200USD/H from this point forward for any futuristic thinking you may need done), but I know things can’t stay this way forever; if the medium changes, the search will change, and the entire paradigm of what it means to ‘look something up’ could evolve. As Bill Hicks would say, we’re not growing any more thumbs people, it’s time to evolve our ideas.

So, with that rather weighty introduction, which in retrospect seems not so ado, and with no further ado that I can do, here are some futurist (read, made-up) ideas of ways the Internet could change that would make ‘search’ as we know it, obsolete.

1) Personalized Intelligent Information Agents

Do you remember that creepy scene in Minority Report where Mr. Katie Holmes was bombarded with personalized advertisements? Memory treadmill:

The idea of information flowing the other way, from the net to the individual without a search request is certainly nothing new – in its most basic form I think I’d call that a newspaper. A slightly more abstract version of the concept would be the vertical ‘portal’ (if you ever took the word ‘vortal’ seriously, you’ve played this game) – and more recently the personalized home-page version of a portal.

These individualized portals like iGoogle deliver information automatically via user-chosen widgets, topics of interest, subscribed RSS feeds etc, without the user having to perform a traditional ‘search’ for the info. This concept can be extended into what are known as ‘smart agents’, or ‘intelligent information agents’, a fledgling sub-field of Artificial Intelligence, where the equivalent of personalized search robots scour the web, retrieving information based on a fairly sophisticated schema of … you, Mr. Katie Holmes.

Search may change in a couple of different ways if proactive AI retrieval becomes commonplace. Search may simply become something we only consider for a smaller subset of information retrieval quests, because so many every-day things are answered automatically. Or, search may become something we apply to specific data sub-sets of the information that is already being retrieved for us, as opposed to searching ‘the whole f@*%ing Internet’ every time we need to find something.

2) The Valid Person & The Real Recommendation

The current state of the Internet is a precarious balance between anonymity and identification. Anonymity is required for any pureness of freedom, for the realization of a borderless, egalitarian digital world where every IP address and every byte is created equal. Identification adds value, some would argue, because any piece of content published under someone’s own name, to put it bluntly, is infinitely more likely to be a valid contribution to the canon of human knowledge.

There is a perfectly reasonable case to be made for both forms of information offering value: the former searcher wanting to know the low down on what’s happening in Tehran, the latter wanting to know the low down on what sucks about the latest Apple gadget.

In the beginning, there was darkness: a wholly anonymous Internet, full of un-credited, unaccredited information. Then there was light: in the most disgusting form you can imagine, Facebook. If the world widely accepts the idea of personally identifying themselves online, the world wide web will change, and along with it, our perceptions of search. A nameless faceless website is no longer adequate for the task of answering my questions, and Google has as much of a clue as a shoe at knowing how legitimate the nature of the information I’m reading is. When this mental shift happens, we’ll revert to searching for answers from trusted, verifiable sources, once again shrinking our world of influence to manageable levels, where we don’t find ourselves ‘learning things’ from anonymous websites that only exist to profit.

3) Specialized Databases & Expert Systems

The Internet is big, in a completely non-literal sense. I often question whether or not I really want to be searching, I’ll say it again, the whole fu**ing Internet, every time I have a query. I also have a brain. I know what *kind* of information I’m looking for, and if given the option, I may even choose a search methodology that takes my previous knowledge into account. This, since Google took over, has only ever manifested in people attempting to change their search methodology by fiddling with their query. However, if options materialize, your brain might actually come back with the suggestion that you try searching a different source of data, maybe one that’s smaller or more specialized.

Youtube, for all intents and purposes, is simply a specialized search engine for videos. It revolves more around its search box than any other feature. Google understands this, and before we were given a chance to think of Youtube as an independent search-spot, Google both bought the company, and began integrating Youtube results right into their current search engine. The universal search concept is, as much as anything, an attempt by Google et al. to try and reform our concept of what search is, keeping us going back to the one-search-box and one-universal-index mentality. I think it’s a move motivated by self-preservation.

Other proprietary, specialized databases exist, such as Lexis Nexis, the subscription based (mostly) legal search engine and data archive. Other, private, super-high-bandwidth globe-spanning networks exist, like Internet2. Perhaps more important are the private, proprietary expert systems (such as those used by large hospitals) using semantic AI. These databases, due to the constrained and relational nature of the data set, are light years ahead in terms of functionality compared to where Google could realistically be (any time soon) when looking at the public Internet as a whole.

Even if Google can try and protect what we think of as ‘search’ by integrating multimedia file-types into its regular old search engine, it can’t monopolize how we think of different information-types. File types are easy. Information types, and semantics, are not.

How much will high quality, privately maintained specialty search engines and expert systems take over our mindset of what it means to find something accurate, quickly? My guess is, as the general level of quality of information published on the net continues to become more and more diluted day by day, the value of maintained or exclusive indexes will grow in accordance.

4) Personalization Gone Mad

Google and the other big boys of search have been pushing the concept of ‘personalization’ of search results for more than a couple of years now, and while we have yet to see (or notice) much of any significant change in the way search engines treat us, the future may not be so friendly.

The issue here is that a great deal of the time, when someone searches they’re not looking for results that are in any way related to their life, hobbies, other websites they visit, or other searches they’ve made. They’re looking for *new* information. If personalization becomes a ‘standard’ feature of our search experience, as opposed to an option available for each query, then it is going to naturally decrease the variety of websites returned in my search results. This, taken to the extreme, is going to change our search experience away from something that can be thought of and acted upon as a shared experience. The notion of telling a friend about something via a search engine query, Googling it, could become antiquated. Right now, this is a pretty valid thing to say to a friend:

Hey I read a great article on n.n. last night, can’t remember the site but just search Google for ‘net neutrality in India’, you’ll find it.

But in a personalized search world, I may have only stumbled across that article because I’d been researching outsourcing companies in Bangalor recently, and Google promoted the same sites I’d visited last week when I included ‘India’ in my net neutrality search this week. Google thinks itself clever, but if I had only been at that site last week for an unrelated reason, then all Google has done in showing it to me again is falsely promote it. In addition to this, I have lost the ability to use Google as the share-point for my information, and telling my friend to search Google may end up in a frustrating wild-goose-chase for them. You might think this a subtle shift, but once we give up search as a shared experience, the nature of if changes. “Google it”, could become meaningless as a command to verify a fact if the results that fill your first page contradict the results that fill mine.

In addition to this, be it fallacy or not, people draw some faith in the validity of a site from rankings – shaking that (false) validity association by serving different results to different people is likely to affect the way the general public thinks about search. Because the concept of associating rankings with validity or trustworthiness is a naive one, this shift may very well be for the best (though I can’t see a loss of association between ‘validity’ and its brand name being a good thing for Google, which may be enough of an impetus for them to not alter results from person to person too much, too quickly).

5) Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is a topic far too expansive to be explained in a simple bullet point of a blog post, but in its essence it revolves around the concept of whether the information currently freely available on the Internet will be provided without regard for who is requesting it or from where.

This means things like bandwidth may or may not be allocated differently for different people in different places, transfer limits, open ports, data-types being transferred. A neutral network would not discriminate with respect to what sites are accessible, what type of equipment is used to access it, etc etc etc.

Yeah, huge topic, and absolutely vital to the future nature of the Internet (hint, people with lots of money don’t want the same Internet we have now. Oh no…no they don’t). The ways that a non-neutral Internet could affect search are varied, and would depend on how neutrality was affected. If content or sites were restricted, as they are in China, then the mentality of the populace of people who are ‘searching’, has to take this into account (if they’re aware of it), and they must realize that they data-set they are scouring is intentionally incomplete, or obfuscated, and hence change they way they search.

6) Ubiquitous Access Provision

The world of Internet service providers has been shrinking since broadband access became commonplace. Cable television companies currently hold a near monopoly because of the fact that they own the best ‘last mile’ cable from grid to house (just as phone companies had previously). This, again, is a paradigm that could shift with technology.

If technology providing broadband Internet access loses the leash, and either WIFI, cell networks or another medium take over, the way we access the Internet may change – and may even boil down to something much more concentrated than Comcast: a single Internet provider present in every major city. If this was the case, the current model of paying for monthly access and/or data transfer rates and quantities may become obsolete.

A single point of access for getting online would not, in-and-of-itself, change the way we search, except, perhaps, if the entity providing that access were (buu buu BUUUM!) a search engine.

There have been reports for years of Google buying up dark fiber across North America (fiber optic cables laid city to city, but never the ‘last-mile’ to each house, as that last-mile infrastructure is the most expensive). Given some modern WIFI broadcast hardware, Google would be in the perfect position to offer ad-coupled Internet access to people for free in these cities. When you’re the ISP you can do a lot to encourage people towards your search engine. If it took off (and admit it, you’d use free Google wireless) it could potentially choke out a large portion of the competition in local search, stifling innovation, and impeding search as a concept from evolving naturally. It would change search by not allowing it to ever change from Google’s vision of what search is supposed to be.

7) The Spammers Win – Destruction of the Databases

Newsflash: Google isn’t stupid. Every other major search technology has, over the course of a few years of consistent growth and expansion, collapsed in on itself in a pile of gelatinous SPAM. They were all public databases, and as an old school SEO I can tell you from personal experience, those who ran the previous competitors to Google did not know on which side their bread was buttered. Google took care of its index, the others did not, and the others failed.

But is Google infallible? It is just a database after all. Up until now it has only had to deal with marketers who want a slice of the pie, and are willing to exploit the search engine’s weaknesses in order to get it. This is child’s play. Has there been a concerted effort yet by an anti-Google group (we’ll leave potential motivations aside for now) to dilute the Google database? The only intention behind it now is black-hat attempts to get traffic from Google – but what happens when the right group of smart kids rebel, realizing that Google has been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and decide to destabilize the nature of the index on a larger scale.

Sound like unrealistic conspiracy theorizing? I’ve had this conversation – and trust me, the people who have cause to discuss this don’t do so in jest, or with any hint of the casual, though the idea always seems to spiral so wide (Google is particularly skilled at the upgrade game) as to be walked away from without resolve. But is it so far fetched to think I may not be the most resolute person in the world? (Hey, no laughing just because you happen to know me personally!)

What would happen if we were thrown back to 1999 style search result quality, where everything seems to be spam? We can’t just start over, delving randomly into petabytes of hedonistic data, looking for strings of characters via the distorted prism of a modern, near-meaningless, corrupt link graph… can we?

8) Semantics Start Making Some Sense

Semantics, the study of meaning in language, is the holy grail of search engine relevance. That is, to be able to understand something more of a search query than which words it contains, and to understand more of the documents in your index than simply the sum of its characters.

If you’ve ever queried a relational database with a structured query language (SQL), you have some understanding of how humans have traditionally, proactively created meaningful associations between sets of data. Once these connections are in place and recognized, you can use structured queries to retrieve very specific results or sets of data.

Google’s database is not relational, but vague attempts at drawing some semantic associations between the otherwise free swirling data it contains have been made. Google ‘Squared’ allows you to build sets of information that have meaningful relationships. Try playing with it to get a sense of its limitations and proneness to error.

More constrained data sets such as the information in Wikipedia are being organized and systematized, then placed into a database for structured query options. DBpedia takes the Wikipedia resource description framework dump, and allows for access via a structured query language named SPARQL. I really consider this to be fake semantics however, as it is half-forced structuring of previously existing facts. Semantic interpretation of language is soooo much more than that, and potentially could reign in more meaningful answers to more subtle questions from a global data-set like Google’s.

There are two ways in which the world has to change in order to make the semantic web a reality, each attacking what is missing, from opposite ends:

• Natural language processing and semantic interpretation has to advance for general web content – who knows where the limits may lie. Google squared and Wolfram Alpha are not accessible enough, but a clever way to use relational information to enhance current results could be possible
• Publishers need to start standardizing any information they present which can be standardized (HTML 5 structured markup and equivalents)

The second point speaks to publishers, many of which are simply commercial entities who have products that lend themselves to structured data (such as price, height, weight, color, etc).

I believe searchers would be willing to adopt, and may even appreciate, the option of being able to include some semantic style directives in their search. It would be an evolved query to see something like this being asked of Google’s index of the entire world’s data:

How many average sized Florida Oranges could fit into the flatbed of a Ford F150?

This is the type of query that could be answered accurately (though perhaps not with a high degree of confidence) if semantic associations were to be better identified and indexed. The general searching public may very well shift the way they compose their queries as a result of comprehending that they can request relationship data.

9) The Internet Becomes Self-Aware, Awakens, and Devours Us All.

Resistance is futile.

So it is with a hint of a nostalgic grimace that I wade into the search results of the enemy camp’s engine – charmingly, disarmingly named, Bing. You have to admit it’s a cute domain. Ringing with a clear lack of monolithicism… if that’s a word. It’s also pretty universally meaningless, non-culture-specific, difficult if not impossible to misspell, and four, sweet, golden letters long. This blank-canvas, mega-carrot-gem of the domain world was undoubtedly chosen to be so perfectly open to interpretation, one imagines, in order to give the Bing marketing team more time to try and figure out what the hell to do with it.

What Bing is Vying for

Search engine share is usually thought of as a portion of a pie – the pie being all of the searches going on from any search engine by people in a geographic area, like America. But any Internet novice knows that ending up on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) can happen in more ways than one. You could realize you want to search for something, then:

• Choose to go to a search engine by typing in the search engine’s URL
• Choose to go to a search engine by clicking a Bookmark to get there
• Use the most obvious search box in your browser to perform the search, using the default selected engine
• Use the search feature of whichever application you’re running (if you’re not in a web browser) – and you may end up on a SERP
• Use a site-specific search if your query ought to be answered by the site you’re currently on – this can sometimes direct you to a proprietary search, and sometimes to a branded major search engine SERP (even if the SERP only includes entries from the search-box site)

Or sometimes you might click on a link that points at a SERP. Any other ways to get there… did I miss any? (no, people who search Yahoo for ‘google’ and Google for ‘yahoo’ don’t count, because I could not bear to live in a world where those people count for anything)

These range from brand-active (typing in the search engine URL) to brand-passive (clicking a link), and some in-between options. Other than actively choosing an engine, they are most commonly thrust upon you via default settings of the search-box in a browser, tool or toolbar (set by the developer/marketer/tool owner etc, or sometimes a power user).

All-in-all there are not a great variety of ways to get to a SERP. Other than fighting the software wars of default search engines in browsers – and while MS may have the muscle, once bitten twice antitrusting, so it’s hard to imagine them integrating Bing too heavily into Windows 7 – Microsoft’s real challenge is trying to gain traction on the other factors: what choices people make.

The Real Demographics

What it boils down to is that there are two demographics of decision makers here:

• Younger, computer literate influencers
• Older, computer-confidence-dependent, the influenceable

People my age (earlier thirties people, if you hurry up and read this) began using Google because we saw it emerge as legitimately better in a search world choking on spam. We still use it now because it has held up, and we’ve used it since the beginning.

People younger than me use Google simply because they’ve never known an alternative. People older than me use Google because people younger than them told them to. That’s the world you’re dealing with Microsoft.

How the Young Influence

The young influencers do everything from install Google toolbars for parents to send out Gmail invitations to friends and co-workers and help people find things online when they’re having trouble. They’re Google fans for all the reasons we’re so familiar with, the same reason everyone loves the epic non-brand brand. They don’t advertise for Google, in their minds, by recommending it, because Google isn’t a product that costs or demands anything. It is as close to a noncommercial entity in people’s minds as any hugely profitable multi-national corporation the world has ever seen, with the possible exception of Disney.

Winning the hearts and minds of the young influencers is hindered by Microsoft’s history, but it really only negatively affects Geeks, and Geeks have proven time and time again, if they’re loyal to anything it’s technological superiority – so if MS makes a better product, they will use it, and all of the old default influencing behaviour will come back. The problem is, if Google has anything to say about it, it will never come back the same way again…

When we all told our parents back in 2003 to try Google it was because they were calling us at college, frustrated, basically asking us to look something up for them online because they couldn’t find it themselves. We pushed them to Google, they ate it up, hungry for any advice from their mind-bogglingly-computer-competent children, and as hungry as anyone for a reasonably useful search engine. Do college kids still get those calls? Do people still get those frustrations, in general, or is Google doing the seemingly impossible, and evolving as fast as the Internet?

Just as important as any trickledown from young to old, the geekier the young influencers, the higher the chance they will fuel adaptation laterally – by telling their peers. Non-geeks have no cause to send a friend the URL of a ‘better’ search engine until the comparative, original search engine fails in a noteworthy way. Geeks on the other hand don’t need one technology to fail in order to adopt a new one, they have a much better sense for perceiving the inherent advantages of one tool over another. This is actually the heart of it – because if geeks can spread a technology laterally, then the trickledown will cover a lot more geography.

When a Search Fails

The last vestige of hope for the vestigial Microsoft lies in that little gap – that place in time and mental space – that is a failed search attempt. If there are people out there getting frustrated, not being able to find what they want, Microsoft has to have branded Bing well enough that instead of simply reforming their query to the almighty Google, they realize there might be an alternative. This is obviously an absolutely essential goal for Microsoft, regardless of demographic. Most advertising should be able to address this goal pretty directly.

Affecting the Influencable

Older people aren’t going to go to Bing for no reason – it’s not an episode of Corner Gas, they’re not promised a laugh, it’s not a destination at all, it’s a tool. As I’ve said already, I believe the only ways to gain market-share in the unsavvy demographic are:

• Become present enough in people’s lives that when a search attempt fails, Bing as an alternative comes to mind
• Converting the influencers so that when the influencable seek help, they might be recommended Bing

The first point is where the 100 million dollars needs to go, in an awareness and branding campaign. But if Microsoft’s past branding commercials are any indication, they are incapable of actually saying anything other than pure generalities.

How might Microsoft market to this demographic? Straightforward marketing messages that say things like ‘Try Bing – it’s a better search engine’, would be a good start. And in fact, it’s aaaaaalmost what Microsoft decided:

Except, some marketing genius decided that instead of presenting Bing as competitors to Google by calling it a new or better ‘search engine’, they decided to try and coin a term to differentiate Bing as a different type of product, a ‘decision engine’.

Bad Decision, Engine

This, simply put, was a massive, massive mistake. In one fell swoop Microsoft went from showing the world that there was an alternative to Google to making it look as though Bing was something different than Google.

Notice how subtly, yet fundamentally, those two points differ.

“When you need to make a decision, use Bing”, boils down to “But if you want to just, you know, look something up or search the Internet, keep using Google”.

Sigh. Don’t play the nomenclature game Microsoft, it’s dangerous and the truth of the matter is, you just wasted a crap-load of money, and if you continue to call Bing a ‘decision engine’, you may jeopardize all of your other efforts to gain SEARCH market share.

You built Bing to fill an existing need right? Now get it through your skull: the need your product fills is that of a search engine, not that of a decision engine, because there is no existing need for a ‘decision engine’. There is no such thing, as a decision engine. Hell Babbage’s difference engine is more real. Nobody needs one of those either.

Just throw up a nice, sensible commercial with an older Midwestern couple getting frustrated at their computer, then calling their son at college to ask for help because they can’t find anything on the internet anymore, it’s all spam. “ahhh Mom haven’t you tried Bing.com yet? It’s a better search engine.”

“It’s a better search engine.”

Why did you not choose that as your slogan? Tell me. Just give me a ring if you’re too embarrassed to write it in the comments, but I godda know. MS, don’t you get it? The golden opportunity of having a rival who is synonymous with search? You don’t have to say “It’s a better search engine than Google”, because there is no search engine other than Google, so effectively “It’s a better search engine” does the same thing! Do you just think that’s an insignificant opportunity? This is how you get into the brains of the public for that all important failed-search moment. Do you just not get it? Can you tell you’re kind of pissing me off?

Connect with your audience Microsoft – the older, need-internet-hand-holding generation is not going to embrace the idea of a ‘decision engine’, because they can’t relate to it conceptually. None of them have ever even taken the Internet seriously as a tool for contributing significantly to the decision making process, other than which airline tickets to choose. It’s a fact finding tool, I’ll make the decisions myself, once I’ve gathered the facts, thank you very much. Don’t try to be clever, don’t try to give people something they’ve never heard of, and barely understand, and then try to convince them they need it. Just give people a choice, and let them feel like they’re making it for reasons that make sense to them.

And maybe hire a creative firm that understands the real world of the Internet a little bit, hm?

Affecting the Influential

This is more difficult, and it’s hard to know just how much attention Microsoft even wants to pay to the issue. MS are undoubtedly aware of the trickle down effect of tech-user adoption, and while they may have traditionally attacked the pyramid from the other end, IMHO they’ll have to address both sides to give Bing a shot. The young influential crowd is anti-Microsoft, anti-corporate conglomerate, anti-most-everything commercial, and hence, damn difficult to market to… with, you know, commercials.

Google’s real genius lies in their nonchalant approach to communicating with their users (that is, everybody). They always manage to present things as a friendly peer-to-peer offering, asking their users to hey, just have a look at this real quick if you have a second sometime would ya? Kinda cool huh, unlimited free email? Ah go-on you can have one, and some exclusive invites too, but try to keep it on the downlow, we don’t want too many users at once k buddy? Thanks. Kinda nice yeah, that online document sharing? Uhhu, sfree. Kinda funky yeah, the whole Wave thing hm? Ohyeah you can have it. No woooories, you never have to actually buy anything from us Bra, we’re Google.

Case in point:

• MS launches a new search engine – 100 million dollar ad-campaign
• Google launches a new search engine – puts a post up on its ugly-assed blogspot blog, asking if anyone wants to try it out in beta

Google puts its new ‘Caffeine’ engine on a stupid ugly, not repeatable out-loud URL, www2.sandbox.google.com. How commercial does that look?

Which one would a geek be more likely to send laterally – to their friends, the fellow influencers? Google once again succeeds in presenting their products to geeks as something that don’t look or feel like products, but free tools that once again need to be passed along to friends, because they are once again as good as, or better than the current commercial alternative.

This never pay us but we’ll always give you everything for free and treat you like a peer attitude is something you can’t achieve as an established brand – nobody has ever really done it before.

At this point, I believe the relationship Google maintains with the public is well beyond Microsoft’s capabilities. The Bing brand is too young to engender anything resembling Google’s relationship with potential searchers, especially the most influential geeks.

So what can they do instead? How about a straightforward mass-market campaign advertising Bing as a ‘technologically-advanced’ engine? It just might go a long way towards the not-too-geeky younger crowd considering it as an option when faced with a need for a search engine beyond Google, or with an alternative to offer mom when she calls.

For the more hard-core geek crowd though, statistics speak. The type of campaign I would like to see to appeal to this specific and very important demographic should be something scientific, like some controlled double-blind tests of SERP quality. If Microsoft did enough testing on enough sub-demographics, they’ll eventually be able to come away with convincing, audience-specific stat-bytes like “75% of all Physics undergrads tested found better results quicker, with Bing in a blind test”.

This may help to create awareness of Bing as a technologically robust search engine, but geek influencers are not as immune to advertising as they might wish. In preparing to write this article I started an IM conversation with an old friend of mine who does not work in the search industry. He is the quintessential geek influencer – currently working on his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Waterloo, he represents the exact mindset that Microsoft wants to claw its way into. The conversation could stand as pretty solid market research for Bing to consider, and so I’ve posted it in its entirety here – if you’re interested in the evolution of search market share, but like me are too saturated by the industry to gather a clear perspective from outside, it may be worth the read just for the unadulterated non-search-marketer’s viewpoint.

Microsoft, Buy Hire This Man

In the end, my old friend and I agree, well beyond search and Bing, Microsoft only really has one hope:

Hire John Hodgeman – people love him. If you haven’t realized it yet Microsoft, everybody hates the cocky Mac guy, and everybody loves the adorable PC guy.

He’s a stereotype yeah (like you poorly make reference to with your John lookalike in the youtube vid above), but that stereotype is of a humble, intelligent, non-flashy, likely quite helpful if you’ve got a problem, everyday guy.

Make that what the PC is.

Embrace it.

The Bing initiative needs the younger, tech-savvy crowd to accept Bing, embrace it, and most importantly, recommend it via word of mouth, if MS hopes to compete with Google in search. At the end of that post I reference the conversation with the target demographic rep, who we’ll call Non-SE-guy. He’s a PhD candidate in Chemistry at the University of Waterloo, quite web savvy, the kind of guy people go to when they need help using a computer, or finding something online, but has never worked in the search industry, and even though he knows me, has likely never considered it much of an industry at all.

This is that conversation – if you work for Bing you should read this as if your very job depended upon it. If you work anywhere else, what time is it? Stop reading this junk and go back to work! I just thought it was interesting to see some perspective on search related things without the smudge of the industry all over my lens.

(authors note: proper use of language, grammar and punctuation had, prior to this conversation, been sacrificed to the gods of speed, efficiency and apathy, proportionately in that order.)

Naoise says :

Other than choosing to go to a search engine and typing in the URL or clicking a bookmark, or searching from a built-in search box in your browser or toolbar, are there any other ways you ever find your self on a search engine search results page?

Non-SE-guy says :

Just the built in search bar in Firefox… I never actually load google.com to search for anything

Naoise says :

So the chances of you ever switching to Bing are affected by the fact that you never type in a search engine URL anymore?

Non-SE-guy says :

umm ya, the only way I’d switch to Bing is if I decided to install the search plugin in Firefox

Non-SE-guy says :

I mean, it’s kind of redundant to go to the URL box and type www.google.com when I can just type whatever in the browser search box and it’ll go to Google for me… saves a step ya know?

Naoise says :

of course, say you were on a strange computer and there were no search box

Non-SE-guy says :

I do end up typing scholar.google.com a lot to search journals

Non-SE-guy says :

If I was on a strange computer with no search box, I’ve been using Google since it first started, so it’s kinda ingrained in my brain

Naoise says :

How default is Google, and how malleable do you think your searching habits are – and, what kind of things might have to happen to get you to try another engine (assuming only finding good results would keep you there after trying)

Naoise says :

Okay pretty default

Non-SE-guy says :

Yeah real default, basically because everything else is shite

Naoise says :

(remember when it wasn’t and there were real options, from webcrawler to hotbot? it was a different industry)

Non-SE-guy says :

(I’d agree with that.. I forget what I used before Google)

Naoise says :

Have you tried Bing and written it off as shite – or does part of you write it off half-automatically because it’s MS?

Non-SE-guy says :

I know Bing exists, but I haven’t actually tried it… I did try the Wolfram one out for a bit… I didn’t like it… I haven’t tried Bing because I really haven’t thought about sitting down and comparing searches with Google

Naoise says :

Because you feel there is little incentive?

Non-SE-guy says :

Mind you, I’d say most of the time the first link in Google is Wikipedia entries anyway

Naoise says :

(how long have you noticed the strong Wikipedia presence?)

Non-SE-guy says :

(oh, maybe in the past year or so?)

Non-SE-guy says :

Yes, generally I can find what I want with Google so I don’t feel like there’s an incentive to use Bing

Naoise says :

When you said ‘haven’t tried Bing because haven’t thought about sitting down and comparing searches’ – I think that’s the essence of the issue MS has in marketing Bing, it’s not a ‘product’ in people’s minds, and so they don’t default to the behaviour of directly comparing for quality

Non-SE-guy says :

Yeah, like my reason for using a search engine is to find the answer I’m looking for, preferably within the first page of results.

Naoise says :

Right, so is it fair to say that the only time you’d use something other than Google is if you got frustrated right in the midst of the search process?

Non-SE-guy says :

Yes, I’d concur with that statement

Non-SE-guy says :

Mainly because I’m lazy and I’ve been using Google for 10 years

Naoise says :

I’m guessing you didn’t like Wolfram Alpha because it’s a different kind of search engine/process, not a general ‘find this string in the database’ type search, so if you were frustrated in a search process, would you go to WA, or Yahoo, or where would you go?

Or would you just keep refining search after search in Google, and simply not go to another engine?

Non-SE-guy says :

Umm generally I re-type the query in Google to refine the search – ooo Firefox has a Bing vs. Google comparative engine plugin!

Naoise says :

Yeah I’m sure those plug-ins are out there, I wouldn’t mind hearing your preference after a fair test, but at the moment I’m interested in what you’ve got to say because you’re the exact type of audience MS wants to affect with its marketing of Bing, and I’m trying to figure out if there is an intelligent way for them to go about reaching you.

Naoise says :

With their one hundred million dollar marketing budget….

Non-SE-guy says :

Well, as much as I say that advertising doesn’t affect me, advertising that appeals to my certain sense of humour does

Non-SE-guy says :

Like VW and Ikea commercials

Naoise says :

Do you think MS can detach the Bing brand enough to market it with humour?

Non-SE-guy says :

Those Vista commercials with Billy G and Seinfeld? a little tooooooo out there for me

Naoise says :

A lot of search-marketing people think MS shouldn’t try humour, because they’re not perceived that way to begin with, they’re serious

Non-SE-guy says :

See above… those Seinfeld commercials were meant to be funny..

Naoise says :

How about the Apple vs PC commercials?

Non-SE-guy says :

umm Apple vs. PC makes me like the PC more, since I think John Hodgman is hilarious and Justin Long should be shot

Naoise says :

I agree, my main recommendation for MS marketing Bing is to hire John Hodgman

Non-SE-guy says :

Penny Arcade did a cartoon about them.. the Seinfeld ones – http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/9/15/consensus/

Naoise says :

ahyeah? Ah… yeah, that about sums it up.

Naoise says :

So, your current guess as to Bing’s chances of taking a significant portion of Google’s search share in the next handful of years is?

Non-SE-guy says :

Well, I think they’d have to pull off a this-generation Nintendo

Naoise says :

How do you mean?

Non-SE-guy says :

Go for the soccer mom and retiree crowd and stay away from attempting to convert the computer nerds

Naoise says :

But there’s something to be said for that IT crowd (HA) affecting change by suggesting search engines to friends and family, and changing default search options for people

Naoise says :

That’s kind of how Google built up to dominance

Non-SE-guy says :

Yup

Naoise says :

Have you heard about Google caffeine?

Non-SE-guy says :

Umm vaguely.. I’ve heard of it but I don’t know what it does

Non-SE-guy says :

Is it one of their Google Labs things?

Non-SE-guy says :

or something more insidious?

Naoise says :

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

Non-SE-guy says :

hmm that might cause issues for Bing

Non-SE-guy says :

In the sense that it might be even better than what Bing currently is

Naoise says :

Well you can be sure that’s the impression they’re trying to make – they timed the ‘release’ pretty well in terms of Bing’s acquisition of Yahoo

Naoise says :

And yet, all Google has done is write that blog post on their official blog. No marketing. A URL like www2.sandbox.google.com is purely attempting to get geeks to pass it along to geeks, it’s so blatantly non-commercial – “web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences” appeals to geeks

Non-SE-guy says :

Yup, appealing to the followers – Nintendo has managed to market the Wii in such a way that people who had probably never bought a gaming console before, bought one

Naoise says :

That’s true, but MS isn’t trying to get people to search who don’t, so much as they’re trying to get people who already search to switch, yeah?

Non-SE-guy says :

Yes, so they need to figure out how people like my mom decide to search for things, and target that

Non-SE-guy says :

I think she uses Google because I told her to

Naoise says :

YES, as i mentioned earlier, the geeks are very influential, especially to the older generation (and sorry friend, but you at least used to be a geek, and you always will be to your mom)

Non-SE-guy says :

Now, would my mom care if I suddenly went, hey mom, you should really use Bing instead of Google.. it’s the best?

Naoise says :

Maybe not, but some commercials with frustrated mothers searching, then calling their sons at college, and the sons recommending Bing, cus, you know ‘its got more suggestions and stuff to help you find stuff – it’s easy mom you’ll figure it out, Bing.com’

Non-SE-guy says :

See that could work

Naoise says :

You have to get in on the tiny bit of time – that frustrated in the middle of an unproductive search time – and own the mind share for alternatives

Non-SE-guy says :

I’d think it would be hard to have two separate ad campaigns to target the geeks and the non-geeks alike. The ads that appeal to me appeal to my sense of humour.. I think geeks love in-jokes and self-referential humour that my mom wouldn’t get. Like LOLcats and what have you.. my parent’s would not understand keyboard cat

Naoise says :

You could legitimately argue to geeks that the results are better and that MS has put some serious engineering into Bing (it’s true, and it shows in the results, so they should be proud to say it) – which would only compliment the type of ad I suggested before, directed at mom. You couldn’t have the same campaign target both, but put some commercials on WTV and some on TECHTV and you’re just doing a normal demographic marketing job

Non-SE-guy says :

You’d almost need like a John Hodgman showing amusing slides in a deadpan manner that shows the technical aspects. ooo how about Harold and Kumar, where the one guy thinks they’re going to play ping pong, and the other guy shows up with a laptop and weed because he thought it was Bing Bong?and then it would degenerate into Harold saying with traces of an accent, I said PING PONG, and Kumar goes, right, Bing Bong. Hell I’d probably laugh if I saw that commercial, though it would have to be like a web only one

Naoise says :

Ha, i don’t know if they could pull it off… well actually, yeah they could – so long as nobody puts Bill Gates or Seinfeld in it.

Non-SE-guy dit :

maybe a spoof with Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October saying give me one Bing, instead of ping

Non-SE-guy dit :

ooo Office Space, like PC Load Letter? what the $!@% does that mean!?! oo I’ll check Bing… ahhhh – just pick out famous questions asked in well known movies in geek culture and tie in Bing – Press Any Key? Where the hell is the any key? oooh let’s ask Bing

Back in early 2007 there were so many boatloads full of buzz about Google integrating more ‘personalized’ results into the index, switching on a feature they called ‘Google Search History’ by default for many searchers. The Yoast screenshot shows some basic metric collection that would form the basis of a personal searcher profile.

A little later that year Google’s over-employed product-name-change committee slapped a new label on boring old ‘Google Search History’ and christened it ‘Google Web History’. Then they had the balls to say the name change was to illustrate that yes, they’re spying on us, but for all the right reasons, just to serve us better as individuals, commercially, and besides, if they just stand outside our open window and look in, is it really so bad… you know, if they own the windows?

All of this 2007 personalization speculation was pretty significant in the not-much-is-ever-all-that-significant world of SEO. Some feared the sky was falling, that personalized search would destroy SEO forever, others applauded what seemed like a logical move forward in the evolution of the greatest search engine the world had ever known (wow, so much drama in that sentence I’m on the edge of my laz-e-boy).

But here, in 2009, the impact of personalized search has been subtle, if noticeable at all. Just some barely perceptible differences in SERPs, mostly based on whether you’re logged into your Google account or not. And really, the SERPs kinda just seem like they’re the same but with sites you’ve been to before ranking better, or more often. As late as November 2008 however, industry heavyweight Bruce Clay predicted that personalized search results, search intent based SERPs, would only really start showing up in the wild over the first half of 2009. That’s just about nowish.

The November ’08 article is reminiscent of many, many early 2007 conversations:

“Ranking is dead… going forward you’re going to have to look at analytics, measure traffic, bounce rates, action, etc. SEOs will have to ask themselves questions like:

- Did I get the conversion I was after?
- Did I really deliver on the promise of SEO?” – Bruce Clay

Have the past two years been testing time? Are we about to see personalization hit the mainstream? More importantly, would that be a good thing for the surfing public? Or is that a baseless assumption someone made once and then just got championed through mindless marketing meeting after mindless marketing meeting?

I may not be the first to posit this theory, as personalized search was first launched by Google more than four long Internet years ago, but perhaps the reason they have been so slow to integrate it is simply because it fails to create a better experience for the searcher, or Google Incorporated for that matter.

The conspiracy theorist side of me thinks that in reality, personalized search may weaken Google’s brand as a whole, if it’s implemented too well.

When people go to a search engine it’s because they are looking for a piece of information, and they don’t know where to go to get it. Simple, yeah? The search engine directs them. Give people some credit, they know the search engine is not the keeper of the knowledge, that it’s just the key-holder, the gatekeeper, the stay-puft marshmallow man, and that the actual websites behind the Google curtain are the things that really teach you stuff and entertain you.

Personalized search has the idea built into it that if I’ve used a resource before, and I liked it, I might want to use it again. This is reasonable – but should it mean that that site deserves to show up more often or be given precedence in general when I do a search? If they show up, they are familiar, they are likely to be clicked – but does that mean they were the superior resource? The concept is a bit like how the brain works, with often used memory traces having the easiest to reach neuron activation levels, and so they self reinforce, but sometimes trigger just because they’re so commonly used, resulting in illusions.

In a fictional normal world (Oxymoronica!), if a searcher knows a specific resource is likely to house the information they seek, it is only in the rare and temporary instance that they can’t recall the name or URL of the target resource that they should choose to go to a search engine and use it to aid their memory. But Google has so permeated our minds, ingrained itself as the only solution for any type of searching online, that even if I know the target domain, but I don’t know the exact URI, I just search Google. On-site search engines usually suck anyway, right? That is the current power of Google’s monopoly on every thought that has to do with search – but it’s not impossible that things could change, that powerhouse sites like Facebook may train people to search at the website level itself, though it remains the exception.

If Google continues to adhere to the concept that search personalization is inextricably linked to reinforcement of previously discovered resources (which, of course, they may not, proven capable of changing their minds), then they will be effectively reinforcing the branding of other specific resource sites in their SERPS — some of us searchers have little itsy-bitsy highly influential brains (oh… hi), and repetition is the only thing that a brand needs in order to be remembered. It’s almost inevitable that this will contribute to a portion of users learning to go directly to the branded resource, instead of through a Google proxy each time. Intuitively the effect may appear to be small, but little things matter when you scale like Google.

It may even be safe to say (or completely unsafe) that searchers, the vast majority of the time, want to use search engines to find new resources, and that placing just the opposite in front of them more and more often is going to lead to dissatisfaction. The search engine just will not seem to be serving its most basic purpose. The more intelligent the personalization the better? Google will never know if I feel like a certain slant or opinion, which only humans can really associate with a domain, and so any automated attempts they make at going from a semantic interpretation of my query, to a certain website that has a complimentary style beyond matching text will always be, at best, a not-extremely-well-educated guess. Could they dream up practical and useful ways to use the personalization data? I’d be a fool to put anything past Google, but magic, I do not expect.

In ’07, Danny Sullivan theorized that Google wanted to get up close and cozy with user data in the long run, and search personalization was a part of this parcel, if not an end that the other personal data collection was a means to.

If things resurface in 2009, old controversies will become new again. Contrary to Google’s previous statements that the Google Toolbar would not be used to affect ranking results, they revealed that Toolbar data would be used to gather web history information, which would be used to directly affect personalized search results, and hence rankings. Genuine privacy issues were brought forth… but then Google stopped talking about it, the SERPs barely changed, and SEOs and the rest of the world got back to normal (ok the rest of the world never really noticed).

Beyond privacy issues, will a potentially blind push towards personalization on Google’s part actually harm the searcher experience? Will it reinforce surfer behavior of going directly to their favorite resources instead of Google first? Thanks Google, for reminding me that I like real websites more than you, and if my memory is functioning well, I don’t really need you half the time – but by the same token, shame on you Google, you’ve made my searching experience less diverse, not to mention you’ve become less of an egalitarian for my webmaster friends around the world. Boo.

Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

So everything else in this post is now moot… or… maybe waaay more important. You decide (I’m too tired).

Back to your original post:

Pluto is no longer considered a planet. Microsoft has released a new search engine. A year from now, will either of these facts affect your day to day life? The North American search market has had a pair of hands gripped firmly around its gullet ever since Google rose to prominence in the first half of the shiny new, hard to pronounce dates from, decade.

With its hundred million dollar marketing budget, one of the richest companies in the world backing it, and billions of dollars of revenue at stake, is Bing the start of an industry segmentation, of some actual diversity in the search landscape? Meh prolly not, but what do I know? Not much! That’s why I put together a horrifically flawed survey to get to the bottom of the truth barrel! But don’t worry, I’m here to enrich your life people. I asked some industry experts to take the survey and comment on the whole Bing Shebang (wow, there has to be a better way to spell shebang, a word I swear I’ve only ever encountered in spoken form).

So what did smart people have to say? Let’s go!

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEO site in the KNOW, SEOMoz said:

- “We consult for Bing…”

Which means basically, he can’t comment – which is cool, but sadly no juicy gossip from Rand – he did take the time to fill out the survey though, so the results listed are taking his (obscured by the cloud) opinions into account.

Marc Poirier, yup, that Acquisio PPC guy, said:

- “Bing has a shot and frankly they always did – MS is one of the only companies that can legitimately think about buying its way into people’s heads with a multi-billion dollar brainwashing campaign. IMHO $100M is just a good start. Picking up Yahoo’s search advertisers and search revenue won’t hurt either.”

Gab Goldenberg, of Montreal based SEO consulting services site SEOROI said:

- “Bing needs to get big celebrities who are regarded as smart to endorse them. Eg Oprah, 60 Minutes, 20/20″

So Gab feels there is a chance at market-share being established via popular media marketing. I’m not sure I agree, but then again, how much of an impact did Oprah have on twitter? Loads likely… but is Bing innovative like twitter? Or would it just come off as a shill?

Guillaume Bouchard, CEO of NVI Solutions, marketing and web design firm said:

- “I think Bing remains the same old traditional—errr— digital dream that Microsoft has, but with a blend of whatever is trendy right now. I think it’s about time they merge with Yahoo! and start thinking about how they can compete… for real… against Google.”

Dave Davis of Dublin SEO company Red Fly Marketing said:

- “I think if Microsoft buy Yahoo and integrate the bing algo, they have a shot at taking a significant portion of Google’s search pie…”

Sylvain Carle, CTO of Praized Media the local and social search engine folks said:

- “We are moving more towards discovery than search, or at least a complementary user model where “evergreen” results are mixed with “realtime” search, with an extra social-graph induced relevancy layer… more on this from the Praized perspective“.

ahhh.. I better go read that article.

Khalid Saleh Landing Page Optimization expert said:

- “Bing needs to do few things to gain market share:

• Focus on search and forget about all this other fluff portal stuff – (done!)
• Needs to do an okay job at search: I love Google and they set the standard in relevance but are they really that good? (done!)
• and it needs an amazing marketing campaign that will battle years of non-traditional Google marketing: it is not about throwing money around, it is about smart marketing. (hmm, we will see about this one)

At the end, I think Bing will capture 10% to 20% of the market in the next 10 years. “

Jim Hedger, of WebmasterRadio.FM Fame, said:

- “Me make moneyz from internetz! HUNGY HUNGY!”

Okay Jim didn’t say that, but I’m pretty sure it’s a legitimate quote from him from the last SES party (I keed I keed). If Jim gets back to me with a quote, I’ll come update the post. Yes Jim, I will go on the internet twice in one day to accommodate you.

Agustin Vazquez-Levi, Google Analytics consultant from AOD Marketing and NVI said:

- “<sarcasm>Bing? Its just a search engine. We all know those things are hard to monetize anyway. FAIL<.sarcasm>”

Rebecca Kelley, Social Media Marketing expert at 10e20 said:

- “What’s this ‘Bing’ nonsense? What the hell happened to Infoseek? Get off my lawn!”

There you have it folks, a lot of half to three-quarters baked ideas about the future of the Internet, or something. Curious what survey questions these fine people were asked to … survey, and how they answered them? Here they are, in no particular order, except that they are the same particular order every time:

1. How much longer will Google hold the title of North America’s dominant search engine?

a) 1 year
b) 2 years
c) 3-5 years
d) 5-10 years
e) The fundamental nature of the Internet will change before Google loses its stranglehold

Experts choice: 3 way tie between C, D & E

2. What are the chances of Microsoft buying, cheating or stealing their way to significant market share alongside Google in the next ten years?

a) <1%
b) <10%
c) <50%
d) >50%
e) >75%

Experts choice: D is the clear winner, with B and C tied for second

3. The world has never seen money build a prominent search engine brand, only the other way around (source, me). Advertising search has proven difficult and expensive, ask Ask. Jeeves knows it’s hard to make a search engine seem Cuil. Search engines can’t just collaborate with Timbaland. Bing has been blessed with a $100,000,000 advertising budget. What do you think it will take for Microsoft to properly deal with Google?

a) $100,000,000 should do it, if spent right. Like, give a million people a hundred dollars and ask them to use your search engine out of gratitude.
b) Give a hundred million dollars to starving Africans and ask the western world to use your search engine out of guilt.
c) Build a search engine that doesn’t have results full of spammy crap-content pages (haha, trick option! The only way to actually do this is to destroy the Google Adsense system!)
d) Create a new paradigm, a personal search and research portal customizable to the way you use the Internet, well thought out and designed, created from the ground up to exist in the cloud, open source, independent of desktops, call it Rush, or Tides, or Wav… oh shit.
e) Invest more than $100,000,000 – it’s going to take a lot more. Really.
f) Lose interest in this whole ‘search’ thing, it’s just a fad.

Experts choice: every answer on this question got some of the vote, with option B just squeaking out A and C, who tied for second

4. Yahoo has been around since before people who can now beat me in basketball were even born, but neither Microsoft nor Google have ever bothered to buy them. They have solid search technology that they’ve built over the past few years, and an old strong brand in the search market (yes, the only other old, strong brand in the search market). What should Microsoft do?

a) Nothing, keep building the Bing brand
b) Buy Yahoo’s technology but brand it as Bing or another name
c) Buy Yahoo’s name and put $100,000,000 marketing budget behind it
d) Let Google buy Yahoo instead and concede the only other concentration of market share that exists in the known universe (of North American search engine market share, that is)

Experts choices: B is the winner here, with C coming in second, and A getting a couple of votes.

5. Home is where the heart is, and where you’re likely to start your search from. What browser home-page style is going to win?

a) One search box to rule them all – current Google.com
b) Not too personal search/news portal – a la current Yahoo.com
c) Myspace style- left to my own devices to make a personal cesspool of a homepage
d) iGoogle style – left to some developers’ devices to create my personal Gadget and feed hell
e) A not necessarily search-centric communication style app-in-the-browser like Google Wave

Experts choice: We’ve got a two way tie between A and E.

6. Google has been all you’ve used for search since you were a child (c’mon, mentally you’ve come a long way since 2001), and even though they’ve never really actively pushed their brand on you, you’re a loyal Google searcher (obviously I know you better than you know yourself). How changeable do you think people’s search habits are when it comes to search brands?

a) Young people don’t have the same connection to Google that late-20’s early 30’s people do – they’ll switch as soon as Hanna Montanna gets her search spider crawling
b) Loyalty to search engines has never existed any more than in browsers. Any migrations in search engines will happen slowly as the result of better product alternatives, not as the result of marketing campaigns
c) A sexy marketing campaign directed at the right audience should be able to segment the market a little – if it works for everything else, why not for search? (yes, anything can be done wrong – Ask, the search engine for dumb married women)
d) The Google brand is synonymous with search and has captured a lot of every-day sticky eyeballs on its brand via products like Gmail and iGoogle, so it will be impossible to dethrone as the default mental search option in the foreseeable future

Experts choice: D is the winner here, no huge surprise, but C got a few votes, meaning some people think the nut is crackable via marketing (phhh, they must be marketers)… (oh wait, they’re all marketers).

7. Microsoft seems to have had a difficult time creating a brand to associate with search. A lot of effort has been put into the latest effort, Bing.com. What statement most closely resembles the branding advice you would like to give Billy G’s minions heading into 2010?

a) Keep marketing Bing as an independent branded entity, just pour money into it, it can’t go wrong, eventually people will change their homepage to it.
b) Stop marketing Bing as an independent branded entity, stop pissing money, nobody is changing their homepage. You already have a brand, use it. Make a Microsoft search engine and act like Microsoft: integrate it into every little bit of every piece of software and hardware you make, and force it upon the masses. It’s just a search box, not an app, no antitrust, learn from Google.
c) Just give up already and buy the domain search.com, market the hell out of it as the most advanced and accurate search engine in the world, winner of multiple made-up awards, and stop wasting money on absolutely horrific domain names like bing. Hello?!? Bing?!? Bingo.com would have been better. Actually bingo.com would have been a lot better.
d) Buy and market the domain Bingo.com as a sear… (okay I’ll admit I haven’t thought this one all the way through)
e) Now that you’ve finally caught up to Google in terms of search technology with the engineering behind Bing, you’re just five years behind whatever technology Google has been building for the last five years. Go and buy Wolfram Alpha this afternoon please. Then go and buy absolutely every other search company with a hint of innovative technology. Then hire away every top engineer Google has on staff by offering them millions of dollars in shiny steel briefcases, late at night, on moonlit beaches.

Experts choice: B is the winner here, with E coming in a close second. There’s people rooting for you here Microsoft. Real people, really rooting. Too much Google in your average search marketer’s life.

8. What do you expect North American Search Engine market share to look like in five years (the legendary sweaty summer of 2014)?

a) Goolge 98%, Yahoo 1%, Other 1%
b) Google 80%, Bing 15%, Yahoo 4%, Other 1%
c) Google 75%, Yahoo 20%, Bing 4%, Other 1%
d) Google 80%, Fancy New Player 15%, Other 5%
e) Google 30%, Bing 30%, Yahoo 30%, Other 10%
f) Google 30%, Bing 60%, Yahoo 5%, Other 5%
g) Google 20%, Yabingoo 70%, Wolfgoat Beta 10%

Experts choice: B is the stand-out winner here, with the vast majority of votes.

What do you think? Take the survey yourself and let us know.