November 2009 Archive

I’ve been recently writing more and more about the topic of ‘search’ just because it seems to be getting more complex, influential, and interesting by the day.  The latest big development is the potential shutting out of News Corp. content (Rupert Murdock) from Google with only exclusive access to Microsoft’s Bing.  This would eventually raise the possibility of Reuters and AP doing the same thing as was hinted by Mark Cuban and become a battle for ‘news’ content.

What must be realized is that this is becoming bigger than ‘search’ and bigger than revenue drivers.  This is not about Bing and Google Search.   This seems like a long-term competition between two giants battling for position as the preferred technology brand for consumers.  Both will use their core business to expand into other areas and it is important to analyze events and success outside of the ‘revenue’ lens.

This is now truly resembling beginnings of a technological Cold War.  Much like in any long-term conflict, it is important view events with the big picture in mind.  This is now a conflict of pre-emptive moves, territorial encroachments, tricky alliances, posturing, and battles for the ‘hearts and minds’ of consumers.

Let’s analyze the situation through the 3 ‘Cold War’ points mentioned above:

Encroachment
Google: Just announced its own browser based operating system, its office suite has been around for a while now, as well as its own browser.   All areas that have been very important to Microsoft.

Microsoft: Bing is its major search initiative and encroachment into Google’s core area of expertise

Alliances
The potential news content (News Corp., and perhaps AP, Reuters) being available through Bing only is an interesting, yet tricky proposition.  What is a definite outcome of such a deal is a huge loss of traffic for any property that excludes Google.  According to Compete, Google holds 73% of the search market share.  Excluding that traffic would obviously lead to lower page views and that is still the main monetization model of news sites.  It would be interesting to see how much Microsoft is willing to offer news publishers to offset that.

This ‘blockade’ of Google can backfire quite easily because many news providers use AP and Reuters content such as The New York Times.  So it seems that the content would still be accessible, just from a different destination.

Time will better judge this potential alliance/blockade but the initial thinking about its financial success is skeptical in terms of revenue, yet it may not be about that.  This may be a step to deny Google their stated goal of indexing all of the world’s information.

Similarly, speculation of who will acquire Twitter in 2010 is something to watch (no matter what is currently said) and again this will not be about revenue generation much like Google’s purchase of YouTube. Twitter and YouTube’s monetization is far from proven as has been seen.  So these are all big picture, defensive in nature moves and are not necessarily about revenue generation.

It seems that these are just skirmishes for what is ahead, and that is the battle for the ‘Hearts and Minds’ of consumers to become their preferred technology brand.

Although it seems that Google has an advantage because its product development model lets it release a multitude of diverse products that live in the ‘cloud’ (Gmail, Wave, Voice, Maps, Profile, Docs, Calendar, Reader, etc…), the flaw may be precisely in the way how these products are developed – by individual teams that seem to have difficulties integrating their products together.  Few of the products come together in any meaningful away and Google will have to overcome that challenge.

Microsoft’s has the track record in creating integrated user experiences across various services, yet its challenge will remain in moving and monetizing their services and products in the ‘cloud.’

Much like during the Cold War when U.S. and U.S.S.R. battled over distant developing countries, achievements in space, and weapons races, similarly this technology conflict will take both companies into new places. Both will venture far and wide across many aspects of technology,  so watch out mobile, music, GPS, telecoms, display ads, video, RFID, etc… This will be interesting, drawn out, high stakes, difficult to analyze, yet interesting.

Google’s announcements over past several months have gotten me to think very differently of where SEO could be headed. I am thinking of 3 announcements in particular

1. The ‘Search Wiki’ results page where users can rearrange the results they are getting – true personalized results

2. Integration with Twitter search which will deliver more real-time Twitter content into the search results page

3. ‘Social Search’ which puts content from your personal network into the search results page

This is all disrupting one of the primary tenants of SEO: the relatively stable search results page that is arranged by an algorithm that ranks results on their relevancy to the search query.

However, these new products are really shifting the control of the search results page to the user, their personal preferences, live results, and content from their social networks. For SEO purposes, we may not even know what the search results page looks like from user to user. These are additional levels of complexity that simply cannot be overcome by “content optimization” and “link building.”

Even though adoption of these features still needs to increase, SEO specialists will need to expand their worldview and join the other types of marketers that are all converging on Social Media whether they are advertisers, PR, SEO, direct response, and other types of specialists.