What Lies Ahead for Local Search Engine Technology? - Paid Inclusion Services, Advancements, and Desktop Search
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[AB] There's been a lot of discussion recently about paid inclusion services; where do you see advancements coming in this area?
[AF] Search marketing should keep evolving very fast this year. Although pay-per-click platforms have expanded match type flexibility, campaign targeting is growing beyond keyword analysis to include geo-targeting and day-parting. Search engines are leveraging smarter linguistic technology, concept extraction and contextual categorization, to optimize targeting of paid content, improving on relevancy, conversion rates and increase advertisers' ROI. While advertisers might be losing control over guaranteed placement over time, paid search has made budgeting for traffic-generation programs increasingly predictable. Effectiveness metrics are evolving from impression counts, and click-through conversion rates to more sophisticated return on investment (ROI) methodologies. Some engines already provide advertisers with tools to calculate conversion rates from impressions to orders and ROI metrics.
Overture and Google go one step further, suggesting forecasted traffic levels and cost estimates for specific keyword combinations, match types and bid amounts. In a yield-driven context, where content targeting gets more sophisticated and matching more scientific, Paid Inclusion and Paid Listing programs will eventually merge into more automated bid-for-traffic models. Ultimately, advertisers will target impressions by dictating an ROI level acceptable to them such as "8% over advertising spend". To meet these requirements, search engine marketers will increasingly rely on automation tools to target the right content to the right users at the right location at the right time.
[AB] Let's look beyond the next few months -- what advancements do you see in the coming years?
[AF] One of the most significant developments currently underway in web search is the integration of search capabilities within a broad range of other services. Increasingly, this trend in creating a new competitive arena in web Search that is forcing established providers to adopt new strategies and creating new market opportunities.
As the #1 web application, search is becoming more ubiquitous as technology and business models mature. We are seeing more ISPs adding search capability to their portals; we are seeing more newspapers and community-type portals integrating local search and Yellow Page offerings as well, in order to retain users on their properties and leverage what has become a very profitable business model.
InfoSpace has long offered its web search and online directory capabilities on a private-label basis that allows our distribution partners such as Verizon, ABCNews, FoxNews, and Cablevision to deliver these services under their own brand. The increasing level of search activity occurring at popular destination sites like these has been a key component of InfoSpace's growth over the past year. In January, we announced that distribution revenue accounted for over half of InfoSpace's search-related revenue in the fourth quarter of 2003.
[AB] We hear in the news that desktop search is going to be the next "big thing". Who do you see as being the key contributors to this area of search?
[AF] Both Microsoft Longhorn and IBM WebFountain will eventually make search a lot more transparent and integrated to end-users' broader task-centric activities.
The Microsoft Longhorn operating system will have a significant impact on the overall information retrieval discipline and how users search. Microsoft is building centralized storage architecture around the next version of Windows that will make it much easier for end-users to retrieve locally stored information, no matter which application was originally used to author it. The subjective nature of users' intent when formulating queries is complex. A better understanding of the task surrounding a search could make strides into serving more relevant results. The desktop and associated applications add a level of understanding of the user context that a browser cannot match. You could envision a world where users working on a document in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint get presented relevant related content leveraging text analytic technologies extracting concepts and themes of the document being worked on in real time. This is query-less search, relevant, in your face, all the time, without user interaction.
IBM has also been quietly working on the next generation of search technology, focusing more on text analytic solutions, leveraging what some call the "Semantic Web", including natural language processing, statistics, probabilities, machine learning, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. IBM's WebFountain technology goes beyond crawling and indexing the Web for the mere purpose of returning relevant links for a given queries. The technology actually tries to make sense of massive amounts of structured and un-structured content, extracting knowledge from the Web, Intranets, chat rooms, message boards, blogs, to isolate insightful and timely information that is not readily perceptible or available today. Applications could include identifying trends, monitoring brand perception, competitive activities, and monitoring other concept-specific "buzz".
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