Author: Daniel Tunkelang

Some of you, despite President Obama’s admonition, may have enjoyed FASTForward in Las Vegas last week. Others may be spending $2,295 to attend the Omniture Summit in Utah this week, which includes skiing at Snowbird and a Maroon 5 concert. I certainly hope that those of you who are Endeca customers and partners will be able to attend the more modest Discover ’09 in Boston this June, despite the lack of showgirls, skiing, or “neo-soul” pop bands. I’ll be there, and I promise there will be lots of hands-on sessions, as well as presentations specifically targeting the hot topics in enterprise and site search.

But no one needs to wait that long to get a preview of the upcoming industry search conferences.

As a preview for the Infonortics Search Engine Meeting, which will take place April 27-28 in Boston, Stephen Arnold, known for his Beyond Search blog,  has been publishing interviews with some of the speakers. You can find mine here. I’m partial to this format, since I find text a more efficient medium for this sort of content than audio or video. Of course, the latter makes more sense when there’s more to see than one or two talking heads (e.g., my Reconsidering Relevance video).

But some people prefer podcasts (especially people will long commutes!), and those will be happy to know that the Enterprise Search Summit, which will take place May 12-13 in New York, is offering interviews of some of its speakers to give attendees (and potential attendees) a taste of what to expect. Only a few are up there now, but Michelle Manafy tells me that there will be more coming up over the next days.

I’ve toyed with trying to do something similar for the SIGIR ’09 Industry Track (mark your calendars: July 22 in Boston). If I do, I promise that you will be the first to know.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt just published a post entitled “WSJ Editor Claims Google Devalues Everything” in which he objects to Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson’s claim on the Charlie Rose show that “Google devalues everything it touches.”

His  main objections:

This is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. Google doesn’t devalue things it touches. It increases their value by making them easier to find and access. Google increases your audience as a content creator, which is the most important asset you have. It takes a special kind of cluelessness to claim that something that increases your biggest asset “devalues” your business. Thomson’s mistake seems to be that he’s confusing “price” and “value” which is a bit scary for the managing editor of a business publication. Yes, the widespread availability of news may push down the price (that’s just supply and demand), but it doesn’t decrease the value at all. It opens up more opportunities to capture that value.

In a word, no. And he’s wrong on so many levels that it’s hard for me to know where to begin! But I’ll try.

He’s right that Google makes it easy to find a news article, but only in the limited sense that it’s easy to find if you’re explicitly looking for it. That’s only a marginal improvement on the pre-Google world. Google also makes it easy for readers to find commodity information on a particular subject–and frankly, the real innovation there is Wikipedia. Google has never made serious investments in supporting exploratory search.

Google doesn’t do much to help users appreciate the differentiation among competing sources for news–or for products in general. For users, this may achieve a satisficing outcome–with minimal effort, they obtain the gist of the news from good-enough sources. But for content creators, this is commoditization: because the interface de-emphasizes the differentiation, users perceive a set of undifferentiated choices.

Masnick complains that Thomson is confusing price and value, but in fact Masnick is confusing value with breadth of  distribution. There are numerous examples where controlling distribution increases value: first-class seating, peer-reviewed publication, and even Google’s PageRank measure. In fact, to the extent that Google helps identify the best sources of information, it adds value, But Google destroys far more value by reducing the notion of value to a single, scalar (i.e., one-dimensional) measure.

By analogy, think of what has happened to the retail industry as comparison shoppers started using online aggregators to compare competitors on price, but not much else. Other dimensions of utility started to lose value–most notably, customer service. Retailers have suffered, and consumers suffer too, no longer able to make trade-offs based on the utility they assign to dimensions that they can no longer observe. What shopbots have done for retail, Google has done for everyone, but most of all for media.

One can reasonably ask why publishers don’t simply opt out of Google, using robots.txt to turn away Google’s crawlers. The answer is that they can’t unless they’re competitors opt out too. Google has lowered the value of content by persuading everyone, en masse, to offer packaging that masks the content providers’ differentiation. Like Wal-Mart, they’ve made consumers happy with lower prices, but don’t be surprised that some content providers are concerned about being strong-armed out of business (cf. Vlasic Pickles).

There’s no point in whining about it, and I commend media providers who are struggling to create value under such hostile conditions. I also know the media players have made many of their own mistakes to help get them into this pickle, not least of which was collectively giving Google so much leverage over them. But let’s dispense with the myth that Google’s gale of creative destruction is creating value for media providers. At best, Google is creating value at their expense.

Big news from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft: the three web search leaders announced yesterday that they will jointly support a standard by which a web page can indicate the address of its “canonical” version. By using this standard, a site can avoid the problem of indexing duplicate copies of pages and suffering, from an SEO perspective in terms of how well those pages are indexed.

You can find coverage at:

• CNET News: Search giants join to tidy up Web addresses
• Search Engine Watch: Duplicated Confusion: The Canonical Edict From The Big Three
• SEOmoz: Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

This is a great development for everyone, but especially for anyone building sites that use faceted search (which should be everyone!). One of the problems we identified early on at Endeca is that faceted search, if implemented naively, can lead to massive duplication of URLs. The whole point of a faceted information architecture is that there are many paths that lead to a given product or document page.

For example, consider a page that is associated with values from 10 facets. There may be 10! = 3,628,800 ways to reach it–and that’s assuming that none of the facets are hierarchical. In fairness, it also assumes that none of the paths contract from implicit selection. Regardless, the number of paths is large enough to be a problem for SEO if each path receives its own URL.

Endeca recognized this problem a while ago, and addressed it through what we call “URL beautification”–our own means of canonicalizing URLs that, in addition to deduping the multiple paths, has the side benefit of creating URLs that are SEO-friendly.

Nonetheless, my colleagues and I are delighted to see the major web search engines recognizing this problem and making it easier for everyone to solve it. It’s a rare day to see Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft working together, but it’s nice when it happens. Good thing they got the news out before “Be Evil” day!

Every now and then, I think about ways to subvert the ad-supported model, particularly for web search. It’s my token resistance to the tyranny of free. Some of my thoughts undoubtedly qualify as evil. And today, Friday the 13th,  feels like an appropriate day to let my evil side take over the blog.

A few years ago, when it became clear that Microsoft was losing the search wars to Google–but when they hadn’t lost much browser market share to Firefox–I thought they should have used a scorched earth strategy of including an ad-blocker in Internet Explorer. The ad blocker would be on by default and would block all ads, including sponsored links from search engines. Actually, I can’t bring myself to consider this particular approach evil–from my perspective, the means would justify the end. I can only speculate about how the antitrust courts would have reacted to this browser enhancement.

But, even after Microsoft missed its chance to make ad-blocking an above-board feature, there was still an opportunity to let others do the job. I imagined a virus whose sole function, beyond propagating itself, would be to install ad blockers on the machines of its “victims”. Somehow I doubt there would be much of an outcry from users, and even the eradication of this virus might take long enough that many users would be introduced to ad blocking and find it attractive.  I imagined that, before Google negotiated with them, the Chinese government might have considered this strategy themselves as a preemptive strike. In any case, there is no lack of virus writers around the world who could implement such a scheme, and some of them live in countries with even worse economies than the United States.

Finally, it occurred to me that a more subtle variation of this strategy would be to leave the ads intact, but route clicks directly to the advertised links, bypassing the search engines. In the immediate terms, users would not notice a difference, but search engines would get no clickthrough data, and thus could not charge the advertisers. Unchecked, such an approach could destroy the pay-per-click (PPC) model.

I truly doubt that any of the above will come to pass. But I can still dream my evil dreams. Happy Friday the 13th!

This morning, I was privileged to attend a social media breakfast hosted by Crimson Hexagon at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York. I wasn’t sure what to expect, other than breakfast. Breakfast was excellent, but the real fare came from the speakers.

First up was Brad McCormick from Porter Novelli. He had my attention at the first mention of Duncan Watts. His best take-away: brands vastly overestimate the extent to which consumer pay attention to branding. He knows this because he’s measured consumer response, at least in the context of an unnamed client in the grooming industry.

Then came Shiv Singh from Avenue A | Razorfish. His thesis was that online brand success factors differ from those of offline brands, alluding to a presentation from fellow Razorfisher Joe Crump on “Digital Darwinism“. He then performed some live (if informal) market research to see if the audience shared his concerns about the future of social media in the branding industry. He found consensus on the concern that metrics are major challenge in establishing credibility for the business of social media. The more controversial issue was the relative value of online vs. offline word of mouth marketing. I have my own point of view on this, but I’ll save that for a future post.

The final speaker was Melanie Notkin, founder and CEO of SavvyAuntie.com. I’d never heard of SavvyAuntie before, but perhaps that’s because I’m not in their target demographic: the roughly 50% of American women who don’t have children of their own. Her presentation was phenomenal, and I can’t do justice to it here. But I’ll try to give you a taste of this case study in success through social media.

First off, she established a clear brand: Professional Aunts, No Kids (PANK) and “playful luxury”, targeting non-moms with discretionary income.She then used social media–particularly her blog and Twitter–to rapidly perform field research and build brand recognition. Some gems: “aunt farm”, “auntrepreneur”. And perhaps the best take-away about the hype about “community”: “Community is for those who want it.”

All in all, it was two hours well spent, and I am grateful to Noisy Community member Perry Hewitt for inviting me!

I’ve been following the FASTForward ’09 conference from a distance–somehow I couldn’t justify spending a few thousand dollars to attend just to satisfy my curiosity, not to mention explaining a “business trip” to Vegas. Instead, I read what I could find online. Microsoft invited (I assume, paid) several bloggers to attend the event and write about it at the FASTForward Blog. Independently, a number of folks have been tweeting about the conference using the #ffc09 hashtag. And a few folks have been blogging about the conference independently.

A few observations:

• I’m not persuaded by corporate bloggers, and invited bloggers come across as corporate. Read the posts yourself at the FASTForward Blog, and I think you’ll agree that the fare, while not shrill advertising, is nonetheless a bit bland. Full disclosure: I participated in an effort last year to live-blog the Endeca Discover user conference. I even remember doing research on the fly to add context around the presentations. In retrospect, however, I think it was a misguided effort. No one wants to read a corporate blog.

• It’s cool that attendees get to hear from social media luminaries like Clay Shirky, Charlene Li and Peter Kim. I’d love to have listened to those presentations, though again there’s that price tag. Even remote attendees had to pay $495. What I wonder is why these speakers would be keynotes at a conference about enterprise search. One of the FASTForward bloggers, Sandy Kemsley, noted:
  

  Something that I noticed at last year’s FASTforward is that this is more than just a user conference: it’s also a social media conference. I don’t know how a search company’s user conference ends up like that, but it makes it interesting. What has changed since last year is that it seems that they’re required to inject the word “search” into everything in order to reinforce the overall message of the conference.

  I don’t doubt that “it makes it interesting”. But I do wonder if that’s what attendees signed up for.

• For all that, it sounds like there were some on-topic sessions, including a presentation by IDC analyst Sue Feldman (who is a great advocate for HCIR, even if she prefers the term “conversational systems“) and presentations by FAST executives, customers, and partners. And I imagine that, independent of the formal structure of the conference, much of the value of attending comes from the informal conversations with other attendees.

I’m curious to hear candid impressions from FASTForward ’09 attendees who find their way to this blog. I’d love to share what I learn with my co-workers who are organizing Endeca Discover ’09, as well as with colleagues who are organizing vendor-independent search conferences.

The great thing about public conversation is that everyone can learn from everyone else. Please do your part: educate me and keep me honest.