John Battelle's Searchblog

I'm in the air on the way to the CM Summit, which FM hosts in New York Monday and Tuesday. The conference is sold out, but you can follow it via the #cmsummit search on Twitter. From my opening notes:

- Extraordinary content. Five conversations: A leader thinker in the VC world and investor in Twitter, the man responsible for Microsoft’s advertising strategy, the woman who faced the press on behalf of the White House as the entire media world shifted to digital, a chief marketer at Intel charged with moving billions to digital, and the founder and CEO of one of the largest social networks in the world.

- A focus on case studies, as promised. Cases from some of the biggest brands and most interesting thinkers in media, from GE, P&G, Amex, Microsoft, Google, and many more.

- And a few curveballs, new technologies and companies that will open our minds to new approaches to marketing, media and beyond...

Posting will be light here, as it has been for the past week. I'm heading to LA after three days in NYC to speak at my old high school graduation. It's very hard to believe it's been 26 years since that day for me. Wow.

Read this: Twitter = YouTube. Then read this: Visits to Twitter Search Soar. Discuss.

While the company still is mum on what it's announcing today at the D Conference (update it's now official....), everyone at the event presumes Steve Ballmer will be debuting Microsoft's new take on search, widely rumored to be called Bing. I am not certain there will be wifi coverage in the main ballroom, but it there is, I will be liveblogging his talk starting at 8.30 am PST. If there is not, look for my updates via SMS on Twitter.

Some of my notes:

Steve is being very Steve - emphatic, in selling mode, drinking a massive Starbucks iced coffee. Discussing why Bing, why now he says Microsoft decided search needed a new brand, but: "Building a brand is a step, step, STEP (almost yelling)!" Bing is a brand that consumers can get their mind around. We have to grow significantly relatively to where we are. We have to build brand equity as well as technology equity.

Walt Mossberg asks why "Bing"? Not Bing Crosby?! No, Steve says, it's short, it works globally, they could get the URLs, makes for a good brand.

On to the demo. Yusuf Mehdi joins Steve on the stage.

Live version goes up June 3.

He shows the Bing home page. Steve interrupts: "This is not something that pushes us to 80%" market share. But it's got some good stuff.

New features:

They point out that 25% of clicks on search is on the back button - IE, folks are not getting what they want. So they are focusing on fixing that.

"Best Match" - the one that is most authoritative. Does a search on Cannes film festival and the results are very good, including better answers instead of "following a million links".

The snippet is far more advanced.

A search for UPS shows just what Bing thinks most folks are looking for. Including customer service numbers. Live search for Microsoft shows their customer service number. That gets applause from the crowd.

The focus is on head end and service related answers like for flights, etc. It's going over well.

Another focus is helping with research and tasks.

"Taking a bet that search engines are not designed well to help with research."

The left nav bar is a big change. It uses a lot of key space to do navigation - essentially taking core search and laying an application interface over it. This is an important new approach.

I like this - the idea of seeing search as a core dataset upon which a more sophisticated navigation interface is overlaid. I've been talking about that for a while....

The big difference is that Bing brings most of the web woven into the search interface, instead of the way most of us search now, which is to go back and forth, back and forth.

Universal search and integration of images, videos, verticals is quite good.

Key verticals supported so far are travel, commerce, and I think health...though have to check on that.

Advertising as a business model on the internet is less proven that conventional wisdom, says Steve, talking about new models of making money with search, including doing deals with content providers to integrate into Bing. This raises the spectre of paid inclusion, worth pushing into on that front...

We're not trying to live off other people's work....says Steve, dig at Google.

Yusuf leaves stage, Steve sits down with Walt again. Walt asks will this really change things? Steve says his timeframe is lots of years.

Google is market leader. But Bing has "real differentiators" that will bring new folks to the engine. Walt asks about Ask spending money on marketing but then dropping off after showing some share gain. Steve says they plan to stay in the game long term (in terms of supporting brand with spending), and keep it up. Steve says it was a big budget. He had to gulp when he approved the budget. A gulp at a $60billion company is a big gulp.

Distribution is key (they are buying distro, more on that later - see my post predicting Microsoft would gain share back in january).

Steve called it "the little engine that could." Walt points out it's a pretty big train....

On my way to the D conference today, one of the main events is alleged to be the launch of "Bing," Microsoft's new search engine. I've been playing with it a bit, more on that later. Meanwhile, Microsoft plans a big marketing push, here's the news in Ad Age:

People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges.

TC notes the extraordinary growth Twitter has seen since its initial inflection. This is a growth pattern I have never seen in terms of speed - not in the nearly 25 years I've been watching this industry.

I think this is both Twitter's most important and dangerous phase of its young life. The retention problem must be addressed, and quickly. In my previous post about Twitter adding value to new users, I suggested Twitter incorporate some structure around its suggested users feature.

But with an inflection like this, I think it's time to swallow hard and embrace some serious social media jujitsu. In short, Twitter should integrate Facebook Connect in its signup process, and offer it as a feature for current users.

If it were to do that, then every new user who is also on Facebook (and who is not, at this point?) would be able to instantly follow Facebook friends who are on Twitter. Integrate this with a Groups feature, and you're proving value immediately.   

Talking with Whrrl CEO Jeff Holden yesterday, I mentioned this idea (I have also been bouncing it off a number of folks over the past month or so). He countered that such a move might add too much value to Facebook, but I disagree. Facebook has won the first round of the social graph game. Twitter has far more to gain by leveraging Facebook right now.

And after all, they can always turn the feature off it they want to.

What do you think?

Recall my piece on "from static to real time search," and read this coverage of Eric and Larry's take on Twitter:

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, separately admitted Google needs to learn from Twitter and make its search engine operate at real-time speed.

Speaking at the Zeitgeist event during in a "fireside chat", hosted by Mr Schmidt, Mr Page admitted Google had so far “done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per second basis”.

“People really want to do stuff in real-time and they [Twitter] have done a great job about it... We will do a good job of things now we have these examples,” said Mr Page.

...and I have still not grokked the service. However, many have. Seems the reviews are mixed so far...

Gian Fulgoni, Executive Chair of Comscore, has an interesting analysis of what's happening in paid search lately. It's germane to my earlier posts about paid search share sliding and Google's decision to allow trademark ad bidding.

In his post, Gian notes that overall search queries are up dramatically (68% over two years) but:

if one looks at the number of paid clicks, the growth rate is a lower 18%, which raises the question: why have paid clicks grown 3x slower than the total number of queries?

Gian answers:

The reason appears to be that the ad coverage (i.e. the percent of search results pages with a paid ad) has dropped from 64% to 51% of searches.

Here's where it gets interesting. Why has ad coverage dropped? Gian has two hypotheses. First, search engines are getting better to reduce less relevant advertisers from the mix. But the second reason points to a more important potential breakdown in the AdWords model:

An analysis of comScore data shows that search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query. And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.

In short, our queries are getting closer to real conversation, real natural language, and Google's algorithms are having a harder time keeping up - matching advertiser demand to our increasingly complex queries.

As Gian said, fascinating.

Also worth noting, my pal Chas's analysis of what the decline in paid search means for brand advertising.

...and so will legal challenges, many of which are already underway.

Google's blog post is here.

Details: Google will now allow advertisers to bid on trademark terms, even if they don't own the trademark, so, for example, a local hardware store can bid on "Buy Makita Saws here" or Best Buy could bid on "Best Prices for Sony Plasmas".

Also, Google has opened up bidding on trademarked terms - so that competitors can bid on their rival's terms. It has been allowed in just four countries - US, UK, Canada, Ireland - but now will be allowed in 190.

Both moves mean more revenue for Google. Of course, the company says it's doing this "in an effort to improve ad quality and user experience." Which in fact, is true.

But...it also can be read as a sign that the company is doing what all large companies do: fine tuning its profit machine to yield more revenue.

One analyst, Ben Schacter at Broadpoint, put it this way in an email flash note sent out to press and clients:

The bottom line is that these two changes will be positive revenue drivers when allowed and into 3Q and beyond, however, we believe trademark holders will undoubtedly, and loudly, raise legal challenges.

According to HitWise, all is not well in the land of paid search:

Hitwise data indicate that the share of search traffic coming from paid listings is decreasing at the expense of organic traffic. In the four weeks to May 9, 2009, 7.25% of search engine traffic to All Categories of websites was from paid clicks. This compares to 9.84% in the same four week period in 2008 - representing a 26% decline in the share of paid clicks. This trend is apparent across 16 of the 17 Hitwise parent categories (i.e. Automotive, Food and Beverage, Health and Medical, etc). The only category that didn't see a decline in paid traffic was Education, which received 1.45% of search visits from paid clicks compared to 1.39% last year.

....Referrals from search engines continue to climb but the proportion of clicks going to sponsored or paid listings is decreasing. This is no doubt a result of cutbacks in marketing spend due to the recession.

Here is where Google's 2004 IPO claim to not manage the company for quarterly earnings will be tested.

The Google Twitter Facebook goat rodeo is getting more interesting. At its Searchology event this week, (TC/Post coverage), Google unveiled a suite of new offerings that feel reactive to various competitors, including "Google Squared," a Google Labs response to Wolframs' new Alpha (more on that soon).

Reuters bills it this way:

Google also showed off a new feature, available immediately, that lets users view only the most timely search results, narrowing the results for a topic to the past 24 hours or the past week.

Google said it will search blogs and news sites, as well as the general information available online, to provide a fresher picture of certain subjects.

This feature comes amid the rising popularity of so-called real time search products, like the search feature on microblogging site Twitter, which allow users to search up-to-the-minute developments about certain topics online.

There is a lot to digest, will be doing it Friday to Monday, when I have time to write....

In its often overly clever way, Google became a brand television advertiser this month. Here's the ad:

Now, why do I say backed into? Well, this video was created by some Google employees in Japan (so it's not an effort by the main company, see?!), and it was an promotion to show off how cool Chrome was (not designed to be an ad, see?!). It was released on the web first (see, not debuted on silly old school TV!), and when the ad got some pickup, Google decided to run it on its fledgling Google TV Ads service, the sole remaining attempt by the company to do Adsensify old media (see, we're not really doing a traditional media buy!). But none of this really matters. At all. Because at the end of the day, consumers watching TV are going to see this ad, and judge it as that, an ad. That means the company, no matter how cleverly it's thought itself into this execution, has to consider itself a brand advertiser, and act like one as well. Question is, can it do that?

(image) The way some folks' numbers are blowing up on Twitter, it seems to me perhaps we might create two types of Twitterati - those who have purely "earned" audience base, and those whose base has been wildly inflated due to their inclusion in Twitter's suggested users feature, which I wrote about earlier last week.

I'm not usually one to talk about this stuff, but for whatever reason, it's been bugging me. I remember when I started this site, and it started to get noticed by people whose opinion I respected. Then concentric circles of folks found out about it, and it built organically, to the point of being one of the largest blog sites focused on tech and media (that was 04-05, before I abandoned covering news and started pointing folks to Danny and Mike). That felt good - I had earned the respect of an important audience, and my numbers showed it. The same is true of Fred at A/VC, Mike at TC, and many, many others.

But that's not how it's playing out on Twitter lately. I've spoken to a number of folks whose Twitter numbers have recently skyrocketed, and they all have said the same thing - followers may have increased dramatically, but engagement - folks who reply, or click on a link in your tweet, or Direct Message you - increased only marginally. In other words, the system is creating what we used to call, in the magazine business, "junk circulation" - numbers for numbers sake, without a lot of value.

That's a game many have played, and continue to play, in our Comscore obsessed Internet world, but it never ends well. Ever.

And I don't think that is in any way good for the Twitter ecosystem.

Just my two cents.

First two headines from IWantMedia today:

Here are the actual stories:

Google May Add Twitter-Like Features

Twitter to Expand Search Functionality

Yesterday the Senate held hearings about the sorry state of the news biz, and Marissa Mayer from Google, Arianna Huffington from the Huffpo, and various others held forth.

This in context of a building chorus of press voices saying that 1/ Google is stealing what is rightfully ours and 2/consumers must pay for content on the web (Murdoch, Belo). And in the context of a scramble to figure out whether or not the new big screen Kindle is a good thing, or a bad thing for newspapers (Murdoch is not a fan, the NYT is.)

I can't imagine a more interesting time to be in the news business. Note I didn't say "fun." But interesting, yes, very interesting.

More links: Forbes chief Spanfeller says Google is stealing $60million from Forbes.com, Danny of SEL responds, and link to coverage of AP's saber rattling (last month) along the same lines.

I dunno, do you jump the shark when the venue used to deny you're for sale is The View? A couple of years ago, I'd have said yes. But honestly, why not go on The View right when your product is breaking mainstream? And I like what @biz had to say:

"We're just getting started.... The company is two years old, we have so much to do, so much product stuff to fix, and so much growing to do."

Predictable? Sure. Possibly disingenuous if a large cash offer is put on the table? OK. But it rings true to me.

The speculations about a rumored sale of Twitter are getting pretty loud. The funniest one is Apple might buy the company. Newscorp makes a lot more sense to me, as I've said before.

I just don't get the Apple rumors, the companies couldn't be further from each other in culture and approach. Most of the folks I know at Twitter use Macs, but...not sure that makes for a $700mm deal. Newscorp, on the other hand, has a real issue with Myspace, which missed the real time train and needs to get back on track.

And Google, well, we all know why Google (or Microsoft) would be interested. Both, however, are wondering whether the monetization efforts they currently have for HTML search would scale to real time search, and both are surely testing that first, with uncertain results, from what my sources tell me. The build/buy calculators are out in force over at each of these company's corp dev departments.

Then there's dark horse Yahoo. It'd be a real stretch for this company to win the heart of Ev and co, but I wouldn't rule them out.

For now, I think the reality is that Twitter is focused on boiling its own ocean. It's a major task, but why not keep trying? Sure, there's always a price, but so far, it seems that price ain't high enough to keep Twitter's team from focusing on the tasks at hand.

I missed this, but after some detective work with sources inside Facebook, I've confirmed that Facebook now lets third party applications create live links inside Facebook. This has been one of my principal complaints about how Facebook interacts with the "rest of the web" - and now it's resolved.  

For example, I use the Twitter application on Facebook to update my Facebook status. Everything I tweet ends up as a Facebook status update. There's certainly no love lost between these two companies, and I've pointed out in the past that links in my Tweets are not live in Facebook, so my Facebook friends can't click on them and see what I'm talking about.

As of sometime a month or so ago, Facebook now makes those links live. As this populates the service, there's a huge search opportunity (all those links can be crawled, FaceRank can be calculated, etc...)

I think this is huge for the company, and is a major step toward an "off domain" strategy which will let it truly embrace and extend the web. Now, if I could only Tweet from inside Facebook....

...seen as arrogant. Regardless of whether that charge is true, or sticks, or is fair, this is what will end up in our national "paper of record."

The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties between the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to several people briefed on the inquiry.

At the end of my book, and the beginning of a new phase of this site, I suggested that Google's largest issue will be its "failure to fail." I also compared, and continue to compare, the company to Microsoft in the late 90s, when it struggled with anti-trust investigations that ultimately proved hobbling, if not in profits, at least in its quest to be the most innovative and fastest growing company in the technology sector.

If any lesson is to be drawn, perhaps prematurely, from all this, it's that no company - or two companies - can lead a culture for longer than half a generation. After that, the culture starts to distrust the companies' motives, regardless of whether they are pure or well intentioned.

I've spent a bit of time going back in time lately, at least as far as Twitter is concerned. In short, I created a new account, as if I had never used the service before.

Why? Well, as Twitter hits inflection, it struck me that there was something really, really important that had to happen, in terms of how the service works. As millions of new users try the service, it's crucial that they find something useful when they arrive. If they don't, well, they'll leave.

And leaving they are, if this report from Nielsen is to be believed. Widely picked up last week in the Twitterverse, the report does the math and finds that 60 percent of those who try Twitter abandon the service within a month. That means no matter how steep the inflection, Twitter will soon burn through its available fuel (new user attention) and could fail to hit escape velocity (where escape velocity = a scaled platform at the level of Facebook, Google, or Yahoo).

That got me thinking. What do new users do when they first log into a service like, say, Facebook? Why, they search, of course.

For old friends, for the names of their colleges or high schools, for any kind of social connection that might make sense of the very large universe that is Facebook.

So when Twitter integrated search last week, it was, as I said, a very big deal.

But to my mind, it's not enough.

To explain my point, let me go back to the experience I recently had of creating a new account - going back in time, so to speak, and pretending to be a newbie to Twitter. The service is very easy to sign up for (see the screen shot at left). Once you pass this screen, you can check to see if

your friends are on the service. This is a pretty standard email database lookup, and I have no idea how many folks go through it. I don't have email at any of those services (at least, none with any real contacts), so I passed. (I'd be interested in how many folks do use this service, and how many hit the button to skip this step. If it's a high percentage that use this step, I'd also be interested in what

the experience is like in terms of making Twitter more useful, but I'll have to be blind to it for

this post. I think my conclusions will be valid in any case....).

Next comes the step that I find most interesting, and in its current iteration, most frustrating. This is where the new user gets a

list of folks that Twitter suggests he or she might follow. It's a pretty random list of interesting folks, including (as I write this) John McCain, Fred Durst, Chris Anderson, Oprah, John Legend, and so on. It changes from day to day, but anyone who's ever made it onto the list reports that their followers skyrocket - sometimes by an order of magnitude.

Why? Well, turns out most newbies to Twitter simply hit "follow all" and end up with the list of twenty or so suggested Tweeters as their first set of folks they are following.

Therein lies the problem. Ah, the dinner bell is ringing, when I come back, I'll explain why, and suggest a better way. I'm sure many have already thought about this, but I never claimed to be original, just persistent. And...I really want Twitter to get

escape velocity...because every time a rocket makes it out of the Valley and into the Rest of The World, it feels like the work we all do is worth it.

(Back from Dinner). So why is following twenty or so interesting people a problem? Well, while I am sure these folks are chosen for their general interest and lively tweets (for more, see Twitter's blog post on suggested users), it turns out that it's simply not very

compelling, in the main, to watch these guys tweet. It's certainly not as addictive as finding an old friend on Facebook, for example. It's neat, but it's not going to get folks to come back, over and over again.

What *is* interesting, or could be, is watching folks tweet who you care about. Perhaps they are friends, or family, or leaders in your line of work, or entertainers you love. For whatever reason, they are *your* leaders, and finding them, at least during the sign up process, is entirely too hard.

But it doesn't have to be that way. It strikes me that a few more structured steps in the sign up process could really pay significant dividends for Twitter. Perhaps a "follow wizard" that asks a few questions, and makes suggestions based on input

from the new user. Let us drill down by category: Business:Technology:Internet, or Health:Diseases:Cancer. The ontology isn't very complicated - mapping users to it is a bit more complex, but not impossible.

And encourage folks to put in the names of their friends via search - that's magic when you find a friend who's already on Twitter, and might act as a sherpa of sorts.

There are already a lot of third party services that help users find folks worth following, but new users are never going to find them in their initial interaction with Twitter. incorporating this kind of a service into a newbie's initial experience - even if it's very, very simple - could pay huge benefits in turning around that 60% abandonment number, and soon.

In short, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and right now, Twitter's initial impression does not add enough value. But with a few tweaks, it most certainly could.

Just wrote a long-ish post on FM over at the FM blog....from it:

One of the greatest challenges we face here at FM is answering a very simple question: What kind of a business are you?

When a reporter, partner, or colleague asks me this question, it's usually followed by a deep intake of breath on my part, because my answer often runs for quite some time. Federated Media wasn't built to answer easy questions, and our business isn't easy to define. Quite purposefully, we have built our business in the center of some swiftly changing currents at the nexus of media, marketing, and technology.

But if you don't take the time to define your brand publicly, others will. Over the past few months FM has been called a social media network, a blog network, a vertical ad network, an advertising rep firm, a media services firm, and even a new kind of advertising agency.

The truth is, FM incorporates aspects of all these businesses. What we are not, however, is any one of them alone.

Hence, our problem (I prefer opportunity, being eternally an optimist...)

So for the record, let me state what we believe FM *is*: FM is a media company, founded on an evolving definition of the word "media."

Yesterday Twitter rolled out integrated real time search to its entire user base, no small feat, given how fast that base has grown. It's pretty elegant, with Trending Topics searched for on the right, and onoing, constantly updated searches integrated into the same interface as normal Twitter.

This is a big deal for the company. I'd love to see how search volume grows. Also important is that the interface now mixes search queries and tweets interchangably, a key step toward the monetization platform I've called TweetSense. It's getting darn interesting, eh?