Continuing the series of live blogging from the Search Engine Strategies - San Jose 2007 conference…

Having covered the topic of Universal Search on this blog, this session is going to be interesting, as there should be a lot of insight from many different people (it looks like there are 6 different speakers for this session). Conference co-chair Chris Sherman is the moderator.

Greg Jarboe is up first. 70% of what he used to know is obsolete. He’s demonstrating Universal Search by the use of a search for iPhone on Google, which displays news, video & images. A search for Rupert Murdoch shows News results in first, a news archive at the bottom of the page, and images. Make sure to manage your images for senior staff, you don’t want a reputation management issue with images… Blog results now showing up, this can impact investor relations… Searching for Hillary Clinton showed news and images, youtube, blog results, and 3 unflattering photos.

Universal search now changes what appears in the “golden triangle” (eye tracking studies done by Enquiro).

Search remains the #1 way journalists obtain additional story information.

Media relations should be focused on the top Google News Sources (Newsknife and Google News report show the top optimizing news sources).

Journalists say visuals are important, and 41% say it dictates content. 90% say that visuals are somewhat or very important to them.

Video could soon make its way to Google news, to give their users access to all the perspectives on a news story.

Use social mapping tools to identify the most influential bloggers.

You cannot ignore Universal Search.

The next speaker up was Sherwood Stanieri.

Firm with multimedia assets or a PR/news presence have a leg up on the competition.

Video has been a viral experience in the past, but now that it’s in the search mix, the ranking factors for videos need to be explored. Are they view based or comment based, or are they ranked based on standard factors such as links, etc.

Case study: A&E television. Many high ranking videos in Google Universal Search. Why were they ranking, and how did they have that ranking? Data was collected for page 1 videos, and listings for page 1 & 2. Looking at “Criss Angel” Youtube videos 3rd & 4th, metacafe in 8th & 9th. PR & link counts were all over the map. All videos were more or less labeled with the target keyphrase. Looking at the views, it corresponded fairly well to the positioning, same for the comments. Pulling the page rank and view & comments data shows that all 3 seem to be the ranking factors for the videos, when you blend them together. It looks like videos with PR of 0 will slip in between listings with PR of 2.5 to 2 provided they have enough views & comments.

Google must also be including timing as a factor in the ranking for video, otherwise the listings would be filled with old viral listings that would be hard to dislodge.

Google custom tunes its indexing process for each and every portal. Which explains why only a few portals are in Google Universal Search. This makes it very likely that the video factors above are being read into the equation.

Next up, Bill Slawski. He started by talking about the similarity and differences in the display of te results across the engines. Bill talked about a patent filed by Google in 2003, which showed a Google SERP with different sections dedicated to types of results. This is now similar to how ASK shows their results with the Ask 3D interface. Google also inherited some patents from Inforseek, such as their 1995 Blended Search patent. Vertical Creep led to the OneBox, which led to Universal search.

Universal Search rankings may depend on previous search behavior.

How is data normalized? The format of the HTML matters, the search engines look at key/value pairs. Google Janitors clean up by normalizing data.

Next up were representatives of the search engines - David Bailey of Google (the technical lead of the Google Universal Search team) spoke first. Google’s aim is to make the search box the search box of first resort, rather than forcing them to a bunch of different vertical search engines. An example he used was a search for “origami crane”. He talked about the challenges being that of ranking apples against oranges, and of keeping the UI simple and scannable. He said that for SEO it’s still business as usual. Web results will still dominate the page, so the usual strategies still apply, and expect similar SEO guidelines to apply to these other forms of media now showing up in the SERPs.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo was up next. He talked about the transition from the static experience. Yahoo has 3 phases. Phase 1 was to optimize the content selection, on ranking, comprehensiveness, freshness, and presentation. Phase 2, was the understanding of user intent and context. Phase 3 is the blending of content, similar to Google Universal Search, understanding the verticals that the users are seeking based on their query, and how those results should display.

Yahoo has launched a Music Artist Shortcut, which shows lyrics, video, websites, etc for a musical artist. Similarly they’ve launched Movie shortcuts. They’ve also launched inline shortcuts (i.e. Wynn Vegas for the Wynn Las Vegas hotel), these results show up in the middle of search results with an arrow to expand. Consumer Electronics shortcut gives narrowing / filtering options for all different phases of the buying cycle.

Erik Collier of Ask was the last presenter. He talked about the launch of Ask3D and the reason for blending the search results, which was the same reason given earlier by David of Google - to improve the user experience, and to get them to make that search box their default location. 3D has shown a large jump in user satisfaction. 30% drop in users clicking to the second page. 15% drop in user sessions with more than one query. Shows that blended search is giving people more of what they want. An Ask eye tracking study shows an extended golden triangle. He says that he expects to see more blended results in the SERPs, with fewer web results and User location playing a larger role. Blogs, Images and videos will take online reputation into account when ranking.

Filed under: Education and Training, Reputation Management, SEO on Monday, August 20th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.