Personalized search biggest advance in search quality, says Google VP Mayer

Story posted: August 22, 2007 - 2:23 pm EDT

San Jose, Calif.—Personalized search is a red-hot topic in the search marketing space, and the subject of much discussion among attendees and speakers at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo. Personalized search has been “one of the biggest advances we’ve had in search quality over the last few years,” said Marissa Mayer, VP-search products and user experience at Google, in a keynote Q&A with conference co-chairman Danny Sullivan here at conference on Wednesday.

“The past few months have been a big leap forward,” Mayer said, adding, “We’re seeing a bigger part of our user base use personalized search.”

Google ramped up its personalized search product in February, Mayer said. Personalized results will become the default in the future, she added, because of the relevance they provide to the end user.

Mayer also touched on universal search, the concept of pulling multiple kinds of search results into one search experience. Google currently integrates maps, news, images, video and books into search results, but Mayer said in the future, such things as blogs and scholarly works will be integrated as well. She said universal search is “a way to move away from 10 links and give people a richer experience.”

She said that Google is also looking at “changing the presentation” of universal search in order to ensure that it has “the right amount of attention on the right parts of the page,” which addresses the complaint by some advertisers that Google AdWords they have purchased get lost in shuffle on the results page because things like image results can distract the user.

She added that as the search results page evolves, it provides an opportunity for ads to contain images or gadgets that attract users.

Catching the European Mobile Market

AUGUST 22, 2007

European mobile customers may speak many different languages, but marketers everywhere are getting the message.

"The European mobile market starts with two big advantages: a widespread, high-speed infrastructure and handset manufacturers that are among the best in the world," says John du Pre Gauntt, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the new report, Mobile Europe. "So it's no wonder that European mobile consumers are accustomed to switching easily between voice and data services."

A recent receptivity among carriers, regulators and brands is opening up new opportunities for mobile marketing on the Continent.

eMarketer estimates that mobile advertising spending in Western Europe alone will grow from $382 million in 2006 to $3.46 billion in 2011, roughly a ten-fold jump.

According to the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO), the mobile market in Europe will total 850 million subscribers in 2007 and grow to 920 million by 2010.

"These are huge numbers," says Mr. Gauntt. "Of course, when compared to Asian juggernauts such as China, where one operator, China Mobile, alone will serve more than 400 million subscribers in 2007, they seem slightly less overwhelming."

According to an Exane BNP Paribas and Arthur D. Little study, on a per-capita basis, Europeans in 2007 will spend an average of €30 ($41.48) per month on mobile voice and data services, and growth is expected to be slow.

"One of the primary reasons the red carpet is rolling out for marketers is that the mobile industry has exhausted almost all other avenues for monetizing its mobile Internet and 3G investments," says Mr. Gauntt. "Marketing revenues stand out as one of the few new sources of income in this relatively mature market."

US Hispanic Mobile Use, Revenues Up

AUGUST 22, 2007

But one mobile strategy will not reach all users.

Hispanic Americans are the fastest-growing and youngest US mobile segment, with the highest average revenue per user of any demographic group, according to Telephia's "Q2 2007 Mobile Hispanic Report," cited in RCR News.

Telephia also found that US Hispanics were nearly twice as likely as non-Hispanics to access wireless Internet through their phones.

"US Hispanics tend to come from larger families and are less likely to have Internet access at home than the overall population," said Levi Shapiro, Telephia's director of mobile media, in the article. "These factors may explain why so many in this demographic view the handset as their primary multimedia access device."

Mobile data are helping to drive the group's high average revenue per user, but voice usage is high as well.

An M:Metrics study in March 2007 also found heavier mobile content and application usage among Hispanics compared with the total mobile population.

Hispanic Americans are heavy users of various consumer electronics and media, as reported previously.

The rising Hispanic population in the US means that Miami, Los Angeles, New York and Houston are no longer the only geographic targets. Hispanics make up more than 10% of the population in 14 states, making targeting a regional matter, if not a national one.

But Hispanic Americans are not a homogeneous group.

"A one-dimensional content strategy is not going to work," said Nick Montes, president of Viva Vision, a Hispanic-focused, English-language mobile video programmer, in the RCR article. "It is critical to focus on a sub-segment of the Hispanic marketplace."

uLocate's GPS widget platform to launch on Alltel network

US wireless carrier Alltel and uLocate Communications today announced the launch of the WHERE GPS-enabled mobile widget platform on the Alltel network. The application is available for download in Alltel's Axcess Shop for US $2.99 per month. The application will initially launch on five phones: The Wafer™, The Alltel Hue and u520 by Samsung as well as The Wave and AX8600 by LG.

“WHERE is a perfect fit for our on-the-go customers who seek simple directions to everyday locations whether at home or while traveling”, said Wade McGill, senior vice president of wireless product marketing for Alltel.

WHERE allows content providers to easily develop a GPS-enabled application (widget) from a website with geo-localized content; then the user can access to this content through a GPS-enabled mobile phone and the WHERE mobile client. Today WHERE gathers more than 25 widgets on various topics as broad as to help you find the nearest Burger King or Rent A Car or to get local air quality or the biography of the local US representative. uLocate announced a ShopLocal widget two weeks ago.

After Sprint, Alltel is the second wireless operator signed by ULocate. Alltel is the fifth biggest US wireless operator with 12 million customers and 5% market share (Source: Chetan Sharma Consulting).

Adobe wants to push Flash onto wireless devices

Sarah Jane Tribble
August 21, 2007 - 12:11PM

Adobe, the company credited with transforming the web from a dull to a dynamic environment, is pushing to do the same thing for mobile phones.

The San Jose company wants to become a major player in the wireless market by making it easier to use graphics and interactive gadgets, as well as watch internet videos, on the small screen.

"Adobe and our technologies powered the evolution that happened on the web," said Adobe mobile executive Gary Kovacs. "The same thing is going to happen on mobile."

But the task may not be easy, the fast-growing mobile phone market changes quickly with new phones rolling out every 12 to 18 months. And because the phones vary greatly in style, screen size and operating systems, developers have found it difficult to create applications that can go on more than a few phones.

While Adobe's Flash is already offered on some mobile phones, the company wants to overcome these market barriers and make the technology ubiquitous.

This year, Adobe expects 270 million Flash-enabled devices to hit the market, and many of those will be mobile phones. That number is expected to reach 1 billion by 2010, Kovacs said.

Adobe's two biggest products for mobile are Flash Lite and Flash Cast. Flash Lite, which is being updated later this year, makes it easier for phone users to access video, games and wallpaper. Flash Cast enables phones to have separate video channels, like on a television.

Already, the products are gaining popularity in one of the world's most fiercely competitive mobile phone markets: Japan. Telecom giant DoCoMo has generated $US1.8 billion ($A2.23 billion) in revenue from the Flash Lite download service and has 10 million subscribers to the Flash Cast service since launching 18 months ago.

And now, Adobe is stepping up efforts in the US. Verizon sells 13 Flash-enabled handsets and announced it is launching Flash Cast-based service before the end of this year.

Flash, which Adobe inherited as part of its 2005 Macromedia acquisition, first hit the internet in the mid 1990s, making it possible to have dancing graphics and interactive widgets on the screen, said technology analyst Michael Gartenberg.

"It really did transform the web from static to dynamic to a much richer environment," Gartenberg said. "The notion of bringing that same level of richness to mobile devices is important."

One of the biggest complaints about Apple's popular iPhone has been the lack of video technology. While the phone easily accesses web sites and videos specifically designed for its Safari browser, such as YouTube, it doesn't tap into videos using Adobe's Flash or Microsoft Media Player.

For example, if an iPhone owner goes to CNN.com and tries to pull up a video, the picture is grey. It reads: "Plugin Error: Oops! You need the latest version of the Flash Player to view this video."

The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg reported in July that "Apple says it plans to add that plug-in through an early software update, which I am guessing will occur within the next couple of months."

And during the interview, Kovacs first said he couldn't say "when" the iPhone would offer Flash but quickly corrected himself to say "if and when." Apple did not respond.

Richard Monson-Haefel, a senior analyst with research firm the Burton Group, said regardless of what is offered on the iPhone, other manufacturers are working quickly to match the iPhone's ease-of-use. That's where companies like Adobe can play a part.

"People don't see Adobe, Adobe just makes things possible," Monson-Haefel said. "But that's OK and that's a good place to be. They don't have to be a consumer brand, they just have to help other companies be a consumer brand."

But Monson-Haefel said the most exciting thing Adobe could do for the general mobile phone market is the Flash Home application, which is still in development. The application would make a phone's home screen run on Flash. So, instead of a simple clock and name, the home screen could have interactive widgets that consumers can custom design. The product is expected to hit mobile phones next year.

San Jose Mercury News

Five predictions about the future of the Long Tail in travel

August 14, 2007 | Online Travel


The Long Tail is a positive force, holding great promise for travel, tourism and hospitality. Yet, it also has the potential to become a major market disruptor in travel distribution.

by Bob Offutt, PhoCusWright

The Long Tail is a positive force, holding great promise for travel, tourism and hospitality. Yet, it also has the potential to become a major market disruptor in travel distribution. There are already warning signs that the democratization of travel content is enabling new competitors and value equations at the expense of the Head, the traditional air/car/hotel/cruise channel. With air travel becoming a commodity, metasearch enabling airlines to compete effectively with travel agencies (both brick-and-mortar and online), and the airlines squeezing the distribution channel financially (e.g., with full content deals, surcharge threats, elimination of commissions), the old value equation is at risk. It is time for something new.

Philip Wolf, president and CEO of PhoCusWright, in his article “The Long Tail and Travel”, outlined the following five tenets for realizing the power of the Internet in travel distribution:

- The little guy’s (product, channel, site, business) influence is significant
- The sum of the niches is embraced
- The 80/20 rule is debunked (“law of the vital few”)
- The size of your reputation matters more than the size of your marketing budget
- Distressed, “out of print” or discontinued product now has value

Now, PhoCusWright offers five predictions about the future of the Long Tail in the travel distribution industry:

1) The Long Tail era will drive a new economy.

GLOBAL CONTENT WILL BE EASY TO PUT INTO THE SUPPLY CHAIN.

Historically, the travel distribution channel was the domain of large suppliers. Reservations systems were complex and unwieldy, requiring significant investments in hardware, software and connectivity. It took days or weeks of training to learn to use the green screen suppliers employed 15 years ago to place their information in a GDS. Today, making content available globally is accomplished with a Web site and a simple editor. Large airlines still use intermediaries (the OAG and Airline Tariff Publishing Company) to distribute their fares and rules, but the smaller ones, who rely heavily on the Web for distribution, use their own Web sites and metasearch to attract customers. It is the large airlines’ desire to retain complexity in their pricing, sustaining the complicated and expensive process that they continue to use.

PRACTICAL, LOW COST RESERVATION/CONFIRMATION SYSTEMS WILL EXPAND BOOKABLE CONTENT.

There are low cost and shareware packages that provide the capability for a small travel supplier to accept and confirm reservations online. With the low cost of hardware, it only takes a small investment to put a simple reservation system online. We are seeing a proliferation of these systems from parking reservations to dining, bed and breakfast (B&B) reservations, preshipped luggage, weather, traffic, flight information and event tickets.

MECHANISMS WILL BE IN PLACE FOR THE COLLECTION AND DISBURSEMENT OF FUNDS. In the past, funds collection and credit card clearance were huge barriers for commerce sites, but with players like Paypal and Google Checkout, this is much less an issue.

MEDIA AND “NEW” COMMERCE SITES THAT WILL BOTH HAVE A PLACE IN THE LONG TAIL WORLD.

The travel distribution industry has struggled for years trying to figure out how to monetize non-commerce activity. For commerce, it had always been the booking fee, the incentive, the commission, the override and more recently, the service fee. Other information like flight arrival and departure details or weather at a destination was thrown in for free as a cost of doing business. Now with the advent of media sites that are supported via some form of advertising model, sites with content such as weather, traffic, flight statistics and even seat configurations can be economically sustained. While quality individual sites are in place, the value is in the aggregation.

THE LONG TAIL WILL FOLLOW INTERNET PENETRATION.

The Internet is a global phenomena. Yes, but… the Long Tail can only be sustained where the infrastructure exists to support it. This is different for different types of content. For example, for an individual to take advantage of the Long Tail in the music distribution industry, all that is required is an Internet capable MP3 player and access to a single music aggregation site. A person in India can easily download music from iTunes to his MP3 player. However, if the same person wants to plan a trip in India and to make reservations, each supplier (or intermediary), for example, requires reservations software, Internet presence, the ability to collect payments charged against a credit card. In addition, the traveler needs facilities to print an itinerary. In many developing countries, telecommunications and facilities infrastructure is not capable of supporting this. Thus, the provisioning of the Long Tail in travel will follow the development of the necessary supporting infrastructure.

2) The Long Tail facilitators – content provisioners, software suppliers and ASPs – are in pivotal positions.

The commercialization of the Long Tail presents major opportunities for facilitators. While there are existing software packages, as needs mature, there will be opportunities for more complex capability and custom development.

Many businesses will not want to compete directly on the Internet and instead would prefer to have an intermediary to handle the details. Viator, which has content from over 500 destinations worldwide, has been extremely successful at this, while Gullivers Travel Associates works with over 35,000 ground product suppliers globally. On the reverse side, points of sale may not want to deal with thousands of suppliers and would prefer to deal with an aggregator. Smaller points of sale may not want the overhead of their own technology and would prefer to outsource this to a third party. This strategy appears to be working quite well in the dynamic packaging area. There is also a significant opportunity to target specialty markets such as road trips, the vacation - drive market, still the largest single leisure segment in the U.S.

Enabling, supporting and developing the travel Long Tail represents a great opportunity for a new generation of aggregators, software developers and application service providers.

3) Technology and standards will evolve.

The glue that held the traditional travel distribution industry together was standard data formats for intercommunication. To enable the new era of Internet-based distribution, these were updated in XML (extensible markup language) by the Open Travel Alliance. Unfortunately, the bulk of the activity was focused on the Air/Car/Hotel/Cruise industry and the majority of the developed standards (with a few exceptions) focused on sustaining the Head, not enabling the Long Tail. Even the Head suffered because these standards were complex, often required significant technology investment to implement and were often employed inconsistently. This would suggest there is little hope for developing true standards in “the Tail.” Yet key Long Tail players such as Rearden Commerce, are already forging ahead, establishing defacto standards for suppliers. Aggregators such as Viator, Gullivers Travel Associates (now owned by TravelPort) and Rearden mask the complexity and provide an easy-to-use interface to points of sale. As the Long Tail expands, standards will develop, giving it even more momentum. This is critical if the Long Tail benefits are to be fully realized.

4) The democratization of supply will open up new marketing and packaging opportunities.

The lack of data and interconnect standards provides an opportunity for a new breed of market dominators. GDSs have dominated the travel distribution marketplace for the past 25 years. Their major airline-sponsored software and hardware systems have virtually controlled the distribution channel. Now with economic pressures from airlines, legacy technology and loss of air bookings to supplier-direct channels, the GDSs are struggling to sustain their economic position with the Head content. In the meantime, online travel agencies and travel management companies (TMCs) are developing or implementing new platforms that aggregate content from multiple sources, only one of which is the GDS. These companies have the potential to be the new intermediaries, drawing on a rich supply of Long Tail content, either directly or through aggregators such as Viator, Gullivers and Rearden.

This is the next wave of travel distribution but not the last. As Long Tail sales grow, then it will move to the Head and a new Long Tail will emerge.

5) The success of the Long Tail in travel is directly proportional to the quality of search – making metasearch, geographically-oriented search and vertical search key enablers.

To utilize content in the Long Tail, you need to be able to get to it. Search engines are the “railroads” of Long Tail content. You have to be able to find it. Today’s search engines generally provide too much detail to be useful. Searching for “B&B in Napa Valley” yields 270,000 results in Google, while Yahoo! does a little better with only 94,000. There are a few embryonic efforts to provide vertical search, but these are relatively shallow and only seem to hit major destinations. Going forward, effective search will be the greatest opportunity for/impediment to the success of the Long Tail in travel.

Come join us at The PhoCusWright Conference in Orlando (November 12-15) where we will explore search and many other topics that are relevant to the movers and shakers of the Long Tail era.

Bob Offutt is Senior Technology Analyst at PhoCusWright

Is Yahoo! Better than Google?

AUGUST 15, 2007
Search is not the final word for all portal users.

What makes one portal better than another, either for users or for marketers? Or are all portals fundamentally alike, easily exchanged by visitors and advertisers? Further, how does Yahoo! differentiate itself from Google or MSN, for instance?

From the audience point of view, as measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, US consumers now express more satisfaction with Yahoo! than Google, Ask.com, MSN or AOL. The ACSI report on e-business Web sites is sponsored by ForeSee Results.

"Even more important than Yahoo!'s first lead over Google is the trend of their scores moving in opposite directions," Larry Freed, president/CEO of ForeSee, said in a statement. "We may see a real turnaround for Yahoo! in the next year."

Past performance is not an indicator of future results. But the fact remains that Google is not the be-all and end-all for all users. So which portals are best for reaching which type of user?

Within each portal, the most visited subdomains describe the most popular offerings. A December 2006 Quantast study showed that for AOL, the most popular application was instant messaging. For MSN and Yahoo!, it was e-mail. If portals are defined as a gateway to another destination, Google might be more pure portal than the other three large sites. Its most popular subdomain is its specialized images search.

So search, communication and content differentiate the top portals. For marketers, choosing the "best" portal depends on who they want to reach and may mean using more than one in the end.

"For most brand-oriented campaigns, a mix of portal placements and focused ad network buys can offer the greatest reach—with the caveat that a good share of the audience might be duplicated across the portal-network combination," said eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman.