It's common for people to enter a new year with a resolution, but this year, I thought I'd try something entirely new (and probably overflowing with hubris) and assign New Year's resolutions to the big players in the search market. Thus, without further ado...
Google should resolve to:
- Build more search demand with the money they've amassed. At 70-75% of market share, their focus in engineering should be, jointly, on improving quality (which is already very high) and continuing to experiment with new ideas for the SERPs (and beyond). More importantly, though, is to make search an even more essential part of life - and second nature to more of the human race. I still know plenty of tech savvy folks who don't instantly think "I should search for that" when questions arise. Through marketing, advertising, or other creative outlets, Google should work to capture those minds.
- Clone Matt Cutts and find others like him. Matt does a brilliant job of representing Google to an exceptionally antagonistic community. Google's other products need their own Matt and web search needs another dozen of him. My advice would be to select individuals who are already cut out for the work, rather than hiring public relations experts and sending them through press training - that's not the way Google should want to be perceived, and it could hurt them in the long run to craft their image rather than remain au natural. Oh yeah - and get them to blog and comment as openly and candidly as Matt does.
- End the paid links debate of 2007 by responding to all the issues with a few sentences. Something like
Feel free to link however you like for whatever reasons you like. Use nofollow as you please or ignore it if you'd prefer. Google was built on an open concept of the web and we will not ever tell you how to run your business or your site. For Google's rankings process, we use a lot of different signals to help tell us how to weight links. Links that we perceive to be less valuable, either because of how they were acquired, the relationships between the linking parties, or a lack of relevance may be weighted lower, or possibly discounted altogether. If you use nofollow to show us which links present a potential conflict of interest (paid links, comment spam, etc.), we certainly appreciate it, but we also build algorithmic methods to sniff out and discount links we'd prefer not to count. If you see the PageRank in your toolbar drop, that's just our method of letting potential buyers of links on your site know that they might want to save their money - we're not penalizing you or the sites you link to, just removing links from our graph that we don't think are valuable to the ranking algorithms.
Yahoo! should resolve to:
- Win back searcher's hearts and minds through advertising, branding, guerrilla marketing, and creativity. Their search is nearly as good as Google's for 80%+ of queries and probably better for a fair 10% (the other 10% is considerably worse, but that's for engineering to handle). They need their users to start thinking about them as a search destination again. Create a story and make it resonate - make it compelling. Make it so my grandmother hears about it from her friends, not just her TV.
- Take a bold leap with blended search, possibly along the lines of what Ask 3D has done. Remind us that YouTube isn't the only video site on the web and that Flickr really is the best image search out there.
- Buy Yelp or CitySearch and make Yahoo! local a superior product to what Google has. it's not that much of a challenge, but it will be if you wait too long.
- Buy Technorati and make a Yahoo! blog search that's better than Google's. Once again, it's not hard to do now, but when Google turns their energy towards blog search, it will pay to be a few steps ahead.
Microsoft should resolve to:
- Let Live/MSN Search loose from Microsoft corporate. Build the division the same way you built Xbox - as a completely separate company of innovators and fresh minds. Don't let the Microsoft hierarchy or corporate structure or even the aesthetics overlap. Just let it sink or swim on its own (with lots of funding, of course).
- Spend double the marketing and advertising budget (whatever that may be) on engineering. The product itself is still so far behind that it's not usable. Yes, there have been tremendous leaps, particularly in the last 6 months, but no matter what the user survey satisfaction numbers are saying, the relevance still isn't up to Yahoo!'s and Google's. Advertising and contests earned you a little bit of extra share and plenty of extra searches in 2007, but you're a long-term kinda company, so think long term. Invest in the product quality now and market it later. Or heck, do both - you're sitting on a mountain of cash reserves and it's hard to imagine a project with more potential return.
- Change the name back to MSN. It's one of the most recognized brands on the planet - I love that Live was going to be something completely new, but there's still time to re-brand without losing anything.
Ask should resolve to:
- Get a crawl rate and index size similar to Google's. It's hard to tell how good their algorithms and vertical integration is with such a small slice of the pie. The rumor that Ask hand-approves websites runs rampant in the SEO community - end it by investing in the hardware and the people to make a truly competitive index.
- Make an iPhone-like interface. As the search company with the greatest ability to innovate the results page, go for broke and make something so inspiring to use that every tech geek in the world can't wait to show it off. BTW - A good place to start is by making a gorgeous mobile search interface for the iPhone itself. Capturing those early adopters worked for Google, and it can work for you.
p.s. Credit where credit is due - this post was actually Mystery Guest's idea. Thanks angel, it's really tough getting back on the blog bandwagon after so much time off :)
p.p.s. Happy New Year!
It would be nice to have more input from the SE's on what the actual rules are. Especially when it comes to BL's. It's too much of a guessing game right now and that's dangerous when you're dealing with other people's livelyhoods.
@ rishil: if you want maximum impact, change your avatar weekly so you're licking something different each time lol. We could have a "what's rishil licking this week?" day.
considering my avatar has generated so many comments on this post, I am getting a bit worried that Rand is going to find and thumb down every comment I have on SEOmoz, just to teach me a lesson for hijacking his post.
Rand - I am sorry - please dont! ;-(
Rishil and others - As I was deleting the dup comments, I accidentally killed Patrick's comment, which ended up killing the entire thread about your avatar. Sorry about that!
On the plus side, the comments are now almost all on the topic of the post, so at least there's that :)
"accidentally killed Patrick's comments"
hmmm... really? You not playing big brother are you? ;o
lol - no thats fair enough - they werent contributing to the topic and I guess its good you did.
I was wondering why I'd lost two mozpoints. I was sleuthing for the thumbs down!
That's bad, I have lost my hard earned mozpoint.. !! :'(
I was expecting that :) I knew it wouldn't make sense one the repeats were gone :)
Interesting, but I was just going to post quite an opposite thing (no offence, Crash :) )
I think Google's Guidelines should be way more fuzzy. Consider SEOMoz for example: they don't make it evident that when you have 150 Mozz points, you are going to get a "follow" link from your profile page - no, they say "possibly, if you are good enough"; nor you are guaranteed to be prmomoted to premium members if you hit 150 thumbs up in a month - they say "we will manually review each and every of your comment/post and make our decision", so there is no point in spamming or tricking - you just enjoy your Mozz life and get rewarded unexpectedly. This results in a high quality of the UGC and community (the best in this way I would say). This is what Google and all the others should do, I think...
But thumb up to your idea nonetheless!
"Feel free to link however you like for whatever reasons you like. Use nofollow as you please or ignore it if you'd prefer. Google was built on an open concept of the web and we will not ever tell you how to run your business or your site. For Google's rankings process, we use a lot of different signals to help tell us how to weight links. Links that we perceive to be less valuable, either because of how they were acquired, the relationships between the linking parties or a lack of relevance may be weighted lower, or possibly discounted altogether. If you use nofollow to show us which links present a potential conflict of interest (paid links, comment spam, etc.) we certainly appreciate it, but we also build algorithmic methods to sniff out and discount links we'd prefer not to count. If you see the PageRank in your toolbar drop, that's just our method of letting potential buyers of links on your site know that they might want to save their money - we're not penalizing you or the sites you link to, just removing links from our graph that we don't think are valuable to the ranking algorithms."
Isn't that pretty much already the case? All this paragraph says is: "You do what you wanna do and we'll do what we wanna do".
Google doesn't have to tell you anything in order to get you to change. They just change the rules until they get the desired behavior, which in turn will give them their desired result. Don't like paid links? Devalue them and they'll be used less.
At the end of the day, Google's Pavlov and we're the dog. In fact, I just looked at Google's stock price and I'm drooling again...
We already know that it's frustrating to Live's search team when they know people are using MSN Messenger and Hotmail, and yet they dash up to the top of the screen and type in "google.com" when they want to search for something.
This has to be just as bad, if not worse, if you're Yahoo. They have so many successful products that aren't part of their search engine.
I saw some of this frustration (although not directly related to Search) at Pubcon when I bowled up to a laptop in the exhibit hall to check my email. Not paying attention to anything (head hurt; lights too bright, etc), I type in www.gmail.com. Page loads. A woman behind me says, "Really?" I realise that I'm standing at the Yahoo booth.
Here's a new fun conference game: locate all the companies whose booths feature laptops and browse their competitors' websites in front of them. I'm surprised I wasn't asked to leave!
You had internet access at Pubcon?!? In the actual convention center?
We didn't for the first two days of the conference, but on the last day they provided a wireless key. The "checking Gmail at Yahoo booth" incident happened on Day Two, when I had no Internet on my own laptop :)
@ Jane - Thats the funniest thing I have heard!
Funny thing is, I am a fan of Yahoo mail and love their new outlook type interface - its quite a good programme. ANd I love browsing flickr - some excellent applications are available and far surpass any stock photo site.
I enjoy Yahoo answers - its great for brand building, and actually the community isnt as hostile to marketing efforts as one would have thought.
Yahoo search assist - great feature.
My problem? I just dont believe that the quality of results is anywhere near google. but maybe thats a bias for the industries I work in - but I have a feeling its long tail search is quite unreliable.
Its not been approved yet, but my latest post does a dig at Yahoo https://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dont-use-yahoo-to-search-your-own-site
I remember when I worked for a chain of internet cafés in Oz back in '99. We were sponsored by Excite for a month, which meant that we could give free internet access to all our customers.
Problem is that Excite sent in a mystery shopper who asked to be set-up with a web-mail account, to which the member of staff (not me!) said "No problem; we're meant to say Excite, but Hotmail's much better"...
Ahhh, Excite. Like iGoogle, but without broadband or Ajax.
I love the post - but disagree with Yahoo being "nearly as good as Google's for 80%+ of queries ".
Its too broad and a sweeping statement Rand - one of the reasons I dont think Yahoo measures up is highlighted in my latest post - which is sitting in Youmoz moderation at the moment. If you have the time, please cast an eye.
p.s
- what do we have to do to get mystery_guest to start posting again?
Edit: I apologise for the repeat posts above - I am not sure what happened, nor is it the first time ;-(
Convince everyone to change their avatars to pictures of Dale Midkiff, for at least one day. Such a salute to mediocrity might persuade me to post again.
Who?
Precisely.
Done.
lol. No seriously - your writing was inspiring and a welcome break from reading hundreds of useful but mundane articles daily !
Oh. My. God. I am SO happy right now.
lol you missed seans... he had it on all day too...
Okay boys (Rishi and Vin), I'm back in the game - and this time, I come in character with my lovely bride Priscilla.
AN OPEN LETTER TO MG -
I think I have written on two separate occasions about my hopes that you would resume your posts - first in a poem (my first post), and then in general comments.
So, this is my last and final plea/bribe. If you click on this link, you will find the item of your dreams. Just say the word and it is yours in exchange for your official return to the SEOmoz blog.
Also, since we are gaining momentum in our quest (thanks Rishi and Vin), I implore the rest of the mozzers - ladies too (esp you Lorisa and Ann) - to change your avatar for a day to this "hunk a burnin' love", and you may become part of the second coming of Mystery Guest!
TCB
(Apologies to Ann Smarty for the temporary avatar) ;)
as much as I hate him... this man has a point. change your avatars already!
And to aid you guys to do that - heres the search pre-prepared
Of if you are against google - here Yahoo or Live
Even Ask has something to offer
OK?
Thanks for the kind words Rishi. I hate you too. Having said that, you do look rather handome today, despite the fact that I truly miss the bottle licking Filipino lady who brought back fond memories of Asian business travel.
Speaking of Asian business travel, has anyone seen my favorite troll lately?
he was on a few posts ago - but havent seen him in 2 or 3 days I think....
Ah, screw it. Three's enough. I'll do something for this damn blog again, but only because of this warped salute to Dale Midkiff (do you think we rank for his name? Because that would totally rule).
lol... good to hear that!
I dont think we can rank for his name as yet... but there are ways around that....
Woohoo!!! You'll make the Mozzers happy MG.
As for ranking - at least you are forever linked with Dale Midkiff with "Dale Midkiff and Mystery Guest", currently ranked #8 on Google. See here.
Working on it.
I didn't even know who he was, and it turns out we went to the same college (although he was about a decade before me).
I saw a made for TV movie about Elvis starring him (as Elvis!) and it was awful, yet I haven't been able to shake it from memory (and it was almost 20 years ago).
So you saw it when you were what... 2?
No. I was 7. SHEESH.
Adding Technorati to the fold, along with MyBlogLog and Flickr would be a killer combination. Yahoo would essentially own the "blogosphere".
(I cannot stand that word.
New Year's Resolution: Find a word to replace "blogosphere" before the general election gets underway.)
The way in which Yahoo! is pushing Answers and the social side of its search platform (yes, I know, it is not a portal!) suggests that this is clearly Yahoo!'s aim though. .
I think that, technologically, Yahoo! is not currently in a position to compete with Google's algorithm for dealing with implicit data and it does not have such an extensive pool of user information to work from.
Explicit data from social networking and the dreaded Web2.0 is not as effective, but Yahoo! can excell at building a explicit algorithm model and they will benefit massively from the loyalty of a user base which enjoys being an overt part of sculpting search results.
Personally I do not think it is a good long-term model and that the collective knowledge and search results will lose accuracy, but it does seem to be the way in which the engine is leaning.
It's not really any better, but I've been trying out "the live web".
No, still sounds awful..
They should also think about buying wordpress[.com] to compete with blogspot :)
I'm not so sure about your 'rename to MSN' suggestion. That might float in the US, but in Europe MSN is almost universally used to refer to MSN Messenger. It would probably just result in brand dilution here.
I love Yahoo for some reason, maybe I have been using them the longest or they're the underdogs...but at Pubcon their booth staff didn't seem to know anything about search. I was really disappointed. Why send people to a conference that know nothing about search?
Matt Cutts is just like Maxwell Smart - you like him, he's friendly and kinda funny, but you end up forgeting he's a spy, and if you let down your guard he'll get you if you're the bad guy, and you won't know exactly how he did it...
"Feel free to link however you like for whatever reasons you like. Use nofollow as you please or ignore it if you'd prefer. Google was built on an open concept of the web and we will not ever tell you how to run your business or your site. For Google's rankings process, we use a lot of different signals to help tell us how to weight links. Links that we perceive to be less valuable, either because of how they were acquired, the relationships between the linking parties or a lack of relevance may be weighted lower, or possibly discounted altogether. If you use nofollow to show us which links present a potential conflict of interest (paid links, comment spam, etc.) we certainly appreciate it, but we also build algorithmic methods to sniff out and discount links we'd prefer not to count. If you see the PageRank in your toolbar drop, that's just our method of letting potential buyers of links on your site know that they might want to save their money - we're not penalizing you or the sites you link to, just removing links from our graph that we don't think are valuable to the ranking algorithms."
Amen to that! How about fix your algo instead of telling every webmaster in the world to fix their site to suit you. Personally, I'm kind of tired of it all being about the links. I think content should be #1.
Call me the devil's advocate, but can you suggest a better way (other than Mahalo-style editors) of judging the value of content?
I agree with you, Rand, when you said, that Google should "clone Matt Cutts and find others like him. " We need more representatives from Google to communicate more openly with the search engine community.
It would be dually beneficial to both SEOs and themselves. Google would be able to tweak their algorithms and deliver even greater quality results.
I read plenty of blogs daily and always see Matt commenting here and there [he is always there before me btw], so taking these facts into consideration I assume they have already cloned Matt multiple times :)
Great post Rand - it's my 1st day back in the office so I'm going to commit the capital crime of responding without reading all the other comments.
The only thing that I really have to add is regarding the paid links thing (sorry, I know).
I like the statement you prepared for them but it doesn't answer the only point that has really resonated with me and that's the one which has been so well espoused by Michael, which is regarding commercial websites:
I'm as bored of the whole thing as anyone (as my comments here in the past have shown) but these questions do deserve some sort of answer, at least if Google wants to kill of all the conspiracy merchants.
I think I can answer the first one - I have a blog post in the queue on that precise subject. However, with your second question, I don't have a solid answer other than Google is a big company. If you've ever tried to have one department at a big company influence another, completely independent department at a big company, you've probably run up against the same issue. No matter how much Matt Cutts and the search quality team might hate those ads, until a journalistic publication with a lot more clout starts making Google's execs squirm, you're probably not going to see anything bu trivial action. That doesn't make it right, but it certainly should meet the expectations we'd all have.
I'd be very interested to see that Rand; I'm pretty sure that I could come up with the explanation that Google would use, but I'd be very interested to see anything that actually explains it in a way that I buy.
SO would I - of late I am building up too many clients that are doctors with small budgets and big ambitions.
Saying that, some of them are pretty good at pushing limits - but its still like working with Moms and Pops...
At our Company we have found that even though Google sends much more traffic to our sites, the traffic we get from Yahoo converts better. We are looking into that and trying to find out the reasons why this is happening.
Thanks Rand is good to see your insights on the big 4 for this year.
1) don't check work email at midnight
2) go out and get some exercise in 08!
My NY resolutions!
But, being British, we have to work at midnight if we want to talk to our American clients.
To be honest though, I find I think much more clearly at night. There is something about knowing that I shouldn't be working that makes me more productive.
As for exercise - I might think about finally doing a marathon before I am too old.
Samething here in Japan. Often get calls at midnight...hard on the family.
The family just all go to bed without me.
Actually, now I come to think of it, that might be the answer to why I am so productive at night, right there.
US clients wouldn't be so bad.
British clients (so 8 am in the office) and friends in the US (on the Crackberry till all hours) is the worst possible mix...
Clients both sides of the pond, but I do love my work!
RE: Google's recent drop in page rank awards and crackdown on paid links as you do in you 3rd paragraph that starts with "Feel free to link however you... “ Maybe, Randfish, if you weren’t such a “purveyor of falsehoods”* that "It's all about the links baby"*, you wouldn’t be whining about Google’s crackdown on paid and illegitimate links as you do. Remember:The purpose of the search engines is to find and present information or “content ” to the world; not to find and present links to the world. Heaven help your link addicted clients. * To quote your own words slamming a competitor with whom you could not hope to compete in your inconsequential little SEO garage. https://www.seomoz.org/blog/infosearch-media-contentlogic-purveyors-of-falsehoods
Mate - take a breath.
You almost make some valid points in amongst the bile.
New year, new life? Time will tell... In the meantime, I invite you to read my latest post on my blog about a new definition of Web 2.0 and the proposal for an exciting Web 2.0 world-wide project: World 2.0. That article is in English language, even if the rest of blog is in Italian language. I would really appreciate your opinion. You may leave your comments in English, of course.
One comment for you... probably not a good first post on here asking people to go to your site and read something. Possibly good content, but if you have something to share, share it here. And as a matter of principle, I can't visit your site because a request like that seems quite spammy (and links for new posters are no-followed, FYI).
If only Google played so nice....
Well, the point is that my article is quite long and it has to be long since I am speaking of a complicated matter. I thought it was not convenient nor polite to post here a long text. I use my blog just for that. In the past I wrote long comments in various blogs, but it was a redundant approach. So, now I write an article and I reference it wherever I like to share my opinion. Up to readers to decide to read the article or not. You also save bandwidth and storage.