One of the many challenges of search marketing is getting answers from the search engines. On December 1, we thought we’d help out.

At Search Marketing Now, we’re going to give SEL readers the opportunity to ask questions, live, of representatives from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. This SMN webcast, “Ask the Search Engines: War Stories from the World Tour” starts at 1 PM Eastern and will run about an hour. It’s free, and registration is open.

The webcast is patterned after live events that were hosted by iProspect this past fall. iProspect and representatives from the search engines traveled to 10 cities around the U.S. hosting events for 15-25 search engine marketers in each city. At these events the iProspect and search engine executives flew totally without a net – no PowerPoint slides, no charts, no graphs, and with no rehearsals held in advance. They simply arrived in each city prepared to answer any and all questions about search engine marketing put to them.

You can submit your questions in advance, when you register. We’ll select some of these questions in advance, to get the conversation going. We’ll also take questions live, during the webcast.

Based on the iProspect live events, we’re bound to discuss some of these themes: the Yahoo!/Bing merger; biggest missed opportunities in today’s economy; has mobile search really arrived—and more.

Speakers on this webcast:

John Shea, Account Executive, National Agency Team, Google Patrick Harris, National Sales Manager, Microsoft Rob Wilk, Director – Search Optimization & Strategy, Yahoo Bill Muller, CMO of iProspect Brian Kaminski, EVP, iProspect

Thanks to iProspect for sponsoring this webcast, and to the search engines for speaking.

The newest addition to Google Labs is a mashup of Google Images, Google Similar Images and the visual query refinement tool, the Google Wonder Wheel. Called Google Image Swirl, the new tool clusters similar images based on characteristics found in both the text surrounding images, as well as using some of the visual analysis techniques that I wrote about in Google Adds Search By Similarity To Image Search back in April.

Image Swirl results look a lot like the thumbnails presented in regular image search results, but you can see that there are many images stacked behind the topmost result.

Click on a thumbnail, and the stack expands to show you a cluster of images, related by visual characteristics. Click on one of those, and you’ll get a further expansion, this time based on textual or conceptual relationships.

Image Swirl currently works for about 200,000 of the most popular queries. You can tell which queries have Image Swirl results when you start typing in the search box, as available searches will auto-complete, similar to Google Suggest. Google said it plans to expand the number of Image Swirl results available in the future.

Search Marketing Now hosts two free webcasts this week, both at 1 PM Eastern. Tomorrow, Tuesday Oct. 20, Adam Scott Riff will deliver a presentation “PPC Bid Managements Rules that Actually Work,” sponsored by Acquisio. He’ll explain how to build rules from the bottom up, when (and when not) to use them, and more.

Thursday, Oct. 22, the topic is “Maximizing Conversions: The Power of Call Tracking & Analytics. Neal Polachek, CEO of The Kelsey Group, will explain what call tracking is and how marketers can use it. Leigh McMillan of Marchex will provide case studies from the automotive, technology, construction, and restaurant businesses to demonstrate how call tracking can improve conversions and boost ROI.

More information and registration for both webcasts is available at Search Marketing Now.

This year, we’ve seen several ambitious new efforts to mine and make searchable the vast part of the web that remains largely hidden to search engines—often referred to as the deep, hidden or invisible web. The latest foray into the reaches of hidden web is actually a hybrid, of sorts: Factual, founded by Gil Elbaz, who previously built the foundational technology that enabled Google’s leap to world domination in search (Elbaz sold his company Applied Semantics to Google in 2003; it was the genesis of what we know as AdSense today).

Factual is a self-described “open data repository.” Like Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that launched earlier this year, Factual seeks to create order from chaos by allowing anyone to share and mash open data on any subject, structuring information in database-like tables.

Unlike Wolfram Alpha, which is a closed system with data “curated” by employees, Factual has adopted a Wikipedia-like model which allows anyone to create, structure or even edit data in Factual tables. Elbaz hopes this open model will encourage community participation, enabling Factual to grow rapidly and enjoy widespread adoption.

“Our aspiration is to build the largest structured data repository,” says Elbaz. “We already have 100,000 tables created but we hope to capture the community’s interest.”

The trouble with the web

Why do we even need these new “non-search engines” like Factual and Wolfram Alpha? What do they offer that Google doesn’t?

Google is very good at two things: helping us navigate to a web site that we can then explore to satisfy a need, and at surfacing basic, relatively simple facts. What Google—and every other traditional search engine, for that matter—has trouble with is finding or manipulating larger collections of data, or responding intelligently to more complex queries.

Why? Largely because the web isn’t like a database—it’s highly unstructured and there are few standards for how information should be organized for optimum efficiency. Google’s huge challenge lies in making sense out of this chaotic disorder. It does this by literally downloading as much of the web as it can, creating a massive index and then trying to find needles in its own haystack.

While this process works well, it also has limitations. For example, there’s a vast amount of information that’s web-accessible, but not directly a part of the web. Much of this information is contained in databases, and databases only divulge their information when queried—when people type words into their forms, tick check boxes or use drop-down menus to limit or filter results. As good as Google is at understanding open web content, it struggles to access this “deep” or “invisible” web content, largely because Google can’t easily interact with the user interfaces of databases. (Google is experimenting with structured data, most notably with Google Squared and Fusion Tables, but these are Google Labs projects and don’t appear to be major initiatives for mainstream search.)

Factual takes a different approach. Like Wolfram Alpha, Factual’s staff works to upload facts from publicly available information sources. Like Google, Factual also mines the web for data, but selectively, rather than comprehensively. Factual also accepts data submissions from users and developers.

And like Wikipedia, Factual allows anyone to edit its data.

Wait! How can “facts” be “editable?”

Wikipedia has evolved, over time, into an authoritative reference that’s on a par with some of the most trustworthy paid sources of information. But since anyone can edit Wikipedia articles, the site has drawn well-deserved criticism when some users altered or distorted facts, used articles to spin reputations or otherwise corrupted the integrity of Wikipedia content.

Factual is allowing registered users to edit data, but rather than adopting Wikipedia’s “edit and replace” model, Factual lets people add information to a table without overwriting or deleting existing data. It then uses a consensus-based model to settle on the most authoritative facts to display. Elbaz says this makes it difficult to impossible for a charlatan to corrupt data with incorrect entries. Elbaz wrote on a blog post today:

“Factual wants to bring true accountability to data. Accountability means anyone can easily contribute their opinion, substantiate the data or disagree with the data. Accountability means full transparency and history in regards to how this data was originated (e.g. citations or explanations).”

Using Factual

Although Elbaz told me “we’re not a search engine—the goal isn’t to be a search engine,” searching is still one of the best ways to get started with Factual. You’ll find a search box at the upper right of every Factual page, and you can use it just like you would Google.

Search results, however, are very different. Because Factual is searching data, you’re presented with the name of data tables, along with the fields in the table. You can sort results by relevance, table name, last updated, author, views, rows or user rating. Once you click through on a result, the table is displayed very much like an Excel spreadsheet.

For example, look at this List of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. Compare it to the Wikipedia article from which the data was extracted to see how Factual has constructed the table and allows you to manipulate it in various ways.

Want to use this table—or a table of your own—on your own website? No problem—Factual makes it easy to embed a table into your own site or blog (here’s a three minute video that shows you how).

And if you have the technical chops, you’ll love Factual’s developer tools that let you create mashups from existing data sources on the web, combining different facts into interesting searchable sites, like this search app that helps you sort through restaurants in Los Angeles based on multiple attributes.

Factual is one of a new breed of search tools that are partially solving the invisible web problem. It isn’t a replacement for Google, but rather a really interesting, useful place to turn when Google just isn’t doing it for you. And I expect as Factual grows and matures, it’s going to become ever more useful.

At Applied Semantics, Elbaz and team built the world’s largest database of words and meanings, which was subsequently folded into Google. With Factual, the goals are much bigger and more ambitious. Elbaz: “Why should I limit myself to words and meanings? Why not go for all human knowledge?”

A Citibank/GFK Roper survey of 500 U.S. businesses with fewer than 100 employees has found very few small businesses in the U.S. have adopted social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter for business uses. The findings include:

• Three-quarters of the small business owners surveyed say they have not found sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn helpful for generating business leads or expanding business in the past year
• 86% said they have not used social networking sites for information or business advice
• 25% said they’re using more online advertising to generate business leads and sales
• 10% said they have sought business advice and information on expert blogs

Here’s a link to the full press release for more info.

Search Marketing Now is hosting two dynamic webcasts next week. On Tuesday, September 29 at 1 PM EDT, tune in for “Web Analytics: Easy or Hard?” from Jim Sterne, Chairman of the Web Analytics Association and widely regarded as one of the major thought leaders in the analytics field. Jim will talk about which analytics are most important, how to maximize your resources, and how to gauge the success of your web analysts vs. your web analytics tools.

Then on Thursday, October 1, at 1 PM EDT, Adam Goldberg of ClearSaleing and Purush Papetla of Vetra Analytics will introduce the American Attribution Index. This brand new index measures the relative effectiveness of each online advertising source and influence factor on consumer purchases and conversions. They’ll discuss how advertisers can use the index to better measure the success of their media mix allocation to improve advertising ROI.

Both of these free SMN webcasts lasts approximately 45-50 minutes. To register and get more info on the webcasts visit our sister site, Search Marketing Now.

Our newest Search Engine Land column, Analyze This, launches today. Analyze This focuses on analytics and measurement, two crucial aspects of search marketing that are often overlooked or underused. Columnists write about measurement techniques, compare analytics software programs, discuss strategies for using data to improve results and more. The Analyze This column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

In today’s debut post, Brian Klais explores some of the reasons the work you’re doing may be underappreciated, and what you can do to shift negative perceptions into a more avorable light. Read on in Why Your SEO Is Underperforming – And You Are Underpaid.

Next Tuesday, September 22 at 1 PM Eastern, Alissa Ruehl will be the featured speaker on the Search Marketing Now webcast “PPC: Not Just About the Numbers.” Alissa will talk about the qualitative side of PPC campaign optimization—why human insights are every bit as important as the algorithms and machine-driven processes that are part of any paid search advertising campaign. She’ll talk about how to organize a PPC campaign for simplicity, how to weed out irrelevant traffic, and more. Register now or head over to Search Marketing Now for more information. Thanks to Clickable for sponsoring this webcast.

Search Marketing Now will host two free webcasts next week. On Tuesday, September 15 at 1 PM EDT, tune in for “How to Succeed Online this Holiday Shopping Season:5 Things You Can Do Today.” Shopping industry analyst Brian Smith will look at 5 actionable tactics that online merchants can do to maximize sales and improve success during the 2009 holiday retail season.

Thursday, September 17 at 1 PM EDT, search expert Mike Moran will present “ Boost ROI with Coordinated Online and Search Marketing Teams.” He’ll show how to build consensus and cooperation among key members of your marketing team and how to get each digital channel to share the same attitude and goals.

More info on these and other webcasts at our sister site, Search Marketing Now.

If you’re thinking about hiring a PPC agency or SEO firm, or looking to outsource all your search engine marketing, there are many factors to consider. This Thursday at 1 PM EDT, I’ll go over the pros and cons of hiring an outside firm in a webcast “When to Outsource Your Search Engine Marketing: Making the Decision.” I’ll cover the basic elements of a successful search marketing strategy, and talk about how to find a search marketing partner that’s best qualified for your needs. Register directly here, or get more information at Search Marketing Now.