He is leaving Google to join the Khan Academy.

Craig helped Google’s co-founders, Larry and Sergey, build the original Google search engine. He did this while in the Stanford University dorm rooms. Now he has been acting as a mentor to other Googlers. His title at Google most recently was director of technology.

The picture on this story is from a picture at Google featuring some of the prominent Googlers on cereal boxes. Craig is “Special Kraig” third box down on the right.

Here is a video Silverstein gave at the University of North Carolina in 2008 about Google’s origins:

Related Stories:

• Google’s #1 Son Silverstein Speaks, Android’s Sung Exits
• Larryos, Raisin Brin, Porn Flakes & Other Google Cereals

The mobile-PC cross-pollination continued yesterday as Foursquare brought some of those enhanced search capabilities back to its iPhone and Android mobile apps. Now you can filter mobile search results by places “I’ve been,” “new to me” or places “my friends have been.”

In addition Foursquare made it easier to set or change your location. You can now drag, pinch, double tap and zoom the map and find places within the desired neighborhood or city more quickly and easily.

The release notes also indicate that the company has introduced “improved handling of duplicate venues” and restaurant “menus and hours.”

Related Entries

• Foursquare Launches “Personalized Search For The Real World”
• Foursquare Redesign Creates Expanded Opportunities For Users, Advertisers
• Foursquare: More Than Fun & Games, A Potent Local Search Tool
• Foursquare Adds ‘Lists’ Functionality For Profiles & Pages
• Foursquare Launches ‘Self-Serve’ Pages For Businesses
• Foursquare & American Express Specials Rolled Out Nationwide
• Foursquare 3.0 Aims To “Redefine Loyalty”

In the past few years, my interest in SEO has accelerated even more, as the SEO industry has expanded to include everything from social media and conversion optimization to reputation management and a myriad of specialized tools that seemingly measure every click ever made on the Internet.

To make things even more fun, we have gone from traditional SEO, which specifically looks at organic traffic, to inbound marketing, which involves driving free traffic from any and all possible sources. People can’t help but get mesmerized by ALL THE FREE TRAFFIC!

While I still wake up every day and get super-duper excited about optimizing my clients’ sites/media/businesses, I often find myself reminiscing about the old days of SEO.

For me, the past 10 years will be remembered as the Golden Age of SEO. It really was an amazing era. Basically, everyone was following a simple, straightforward list of SEO best practices.

For most of my e-commerce clients, the 7 Keys to SEO success were:

1. Write optimized title tags
2. Write optimized meta description tags
3. Write optimized H1 tags (page headers)
4. Optimize internal navigation (main nav, breadcrumbs, sidebar nav, footer links, etc.)
5. Optimize and utilize any content unique to the site (blogs, videos, PDFs, forums, etc.)
6. Grow/buy some links (and be smart about it!)
7. Over-communicate with your client(s)

Don’t get me wrong: there were a lot more than 7 steps in an SEO campaign.

But from 2000-2009ish, if you followed those 7 steps, you were probably very successful at whitehat SEO for e-commerce websites. It worked like a charm.

I reversed negative year-over-year organic search sales trends for several massive brands. I had numerous clients that experienced 100%+ year-over-year growth in organic search traffic during the holidays. I could pretty much take any e-commerce website to higher levels of organic traffic and revenue. In fact, it was not atypical to see ROI in the area of 50:1.

But, alas, these SEO strategies were not unique to me. These methods worked for a lot of SEOs. Back in those days, everyone could win at SEO. It truly was a golden age. And in my opinion, Google was begging for better SEO for all websites.

After all, better SEO makes things easier for Google, and it helps them find and return more relevant results. Even Google was enjoying the growth of marketing directors pumping more and more money in SEO.

During the Golden Age of SEO, you could go to any number of search conferences and listen to some of the world’s best SEOs publicly brag about whitehat and grayhat methods that worked. Bloggers were also posting about whitehat and grayhat SEO methods that worked.

At the same time, everyone was handing out new methods for free, the team at Google Analytics was really pushing hard to make their product competitive with the most popular third-party tracking software, such as Omniture and Coremetrics (both of whom were also taking tracking and analytics to new heights of customization and granularity). It was a time when successful methods were being shared freely, and it was getting progressively easier to provide extremely detailed reporting to clients.

It was also a great time to be an SEO account manager at a search agency. I could write an SEO audit, work with the client’s in-house development team or third-party design agency, schedule all my recommendations into their IT calendar, and communicate with clients via highly-detailed reports. Clients knew that SEO took time to deliver results, so it was perfectly fine to make small gains each month and keep my clients satisfied and happy.

Over the course of the campaign, all of those small wins would add up to big results! And as I worked with the various teams, I effectively taught the basics of SEO to everyone I worked with. Sometimes people get bored with their jobs, so learning new stuff was fun for them. And I like to teach, so it worked out really well for both parties.

Sure there were some difficult aspects of being an SEO during this time. For example, it was a pain having to fight for resources from the development teams to get my recommendations implemented. Another tough issue was working with clients who did not have accurate organic search data. But all in all, basic SEO strategies worked, new SEO methods were freely shared, and search data was getting more comprehensive and easier to obtain (and it was getting more granular!).

And Then… The SEO Game Changed

In 2009 (or so), I began to notice SEO going underground. Remember those SEO conference bragging sessions I mentioned earlier, where the experts would share their secret strategies? Well, those started turning into Q&A sessions and site reviews. And remember all those bloggers who were writing about whitehat methods that worked for SEO? Well, those wells dried up…and some of them just started going full-on blackhat.

Also, the market was getting more and more saturated with SEOs. Almost all notable e-commerce websites were now doing SEO. At the same time, Google was changing universal search to include local results, news results, shopping results, video results, image results – all of these results were now taking up prime spots in the SERPs.

Then, social media really hit, and the next thing we knew, we were seeing real-time results in the SERPs. It was complete and total convergence of all things Internet.

Today, we are surfing an Internet where nearly everyone is doing SEO. When I look at the Top 30 results for pretty much any keyword, I see 30 websites that are doing SEO with some level of expertise. I see shopping results, news results, social results, image results, and social results that have all been optimized for that keyword. It’s very competitive out there.

Furthermore, companies that design platforms and content management systems have also embraced SEO. Most modern CMS and platform backends have areas dedicated to SEO settings and features, meaning that most new websites come with standard SEO best practices out of the box. This means that a lot of companies who are not actively “doing SEO” now have websites with basic SEO strategies in place.

Also, e-commerce VPs and marketing directors are more knowledgeable about SEO, as many of them have experience with SEO agencies. It’s not out-of-the-ordinary for new clients to bring up rel-canonical tags, rel-author tags, the open graph, and 301 redirect strategies – during our campaign kickoff calls. The times really have changed!

And how about today’s data? On one hand, we have lost some data. Yahoo shut down OpenSiteExplorer. Google Analytics is now withholding organic search keyword data from logged-in visitors. (see, 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers).

But on the other hand, there are so many great resources for SEO-related data: SEOmoz, SEMrush, MajesticSEO, RavenTools, AHREFs, AuthorityLabs…the list goes on and on. Sure, these are paid tools and services, but so what?

Data-based decision making makes the SEO world go ’round. So we’ve got to have data. Those services are very helpful for competitive analysis, link building, checking rankings in the SERPs, site monitoring, etc. – I would have loved to have all of these tools 10 years ago!

On the social media optimization side of things, there are social media analytics and monitoring services popping up left and right.

So here we are in 2012: Everyone is doing SEO. Every market is competitive. Google and Yahoo are taking data away from us while new SEO tools and softwares are launching every day. And for most SEOs, the role of an SEO has expanded to that of an inbound marketer. It’s not enough to only know about strategies that drive traffic from search engines.

Nowadays, if you want to compete as an SEO expert, you need to stay up-to-date with local SEO, mobile SEO, social SEO, and anything new on the horizon.

Further, the economy of the past 4-5 years has changed the demands of clients. Showing small wins every month is not enough. Cash-strapped clients are cutting marketing budgets, and many of them are all looking at SEO as a way to get the best bang for the buck. And they want awesome results in the first month. As an SEO in 2012, I’ve got to deliver big results – yesterday!

It really is a fascinating time to be in the SEO business. There have never been so many different ways to drive free traffic to your websites. Perhaps I misstated before.

Perhaps *this* is the Golden Age of SEO. We’re smarter as marketers. Our clients are smarter with their budgets. We’ve been around the block a few times. We know what works, and the Internet seems to be changing faster than ever before (Google SPYworld, Twitter Brand Pages, Pinterest, etc..). It’s challenging. It’s always required effort and a smart approach. It’s not easy. But SEO is still SEO. It’s about content. It’s about links. It’s about connectedness. It’s about data and, most importantly, about driving results.

Let’s enjoy this age!

Featured image from istockphoto, used under license.

From Search Engine Land:

• Bing Testing New Search Results Design
  

  Bing is testing a new design for the search results layout. The new design seems a lot cleaner, fresher and more organized compared to the older design. Jason Hart tipped us off listing out the key differences: Vertical tabs removed Top and bottom search boxes widened Search button icon changed Several links removed from header [...]

• How To Make Unstructured Data Actionable In Display
  

  I wrote recently about the new era of display marketing, and how real time bidding and other advances are bringing the precision and performance of search advertising to display. Well…a new era of unstructured data is also upon us. A widely cited 2011 IDC study found that the amount of data in the world is [...]

• Survey: People Largely Negative About Google’s Personalized Search Results
  

  Earlier this month market research tool provider Ask Your Target Market surveyed 400 US adults about their attitudes toward personalized search on Google. The results were reported today in eMarketer’s email newsletter. We went back to the source to check out the survey and discovered that the majority of respondents expressed ambivalence or outright dissatisfaction about [...]

• Why Does Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine Hate Rick Santorum?
  

  US presidential candidate Rick Santorum pulled off a surprise last night, winning caucuses and primaries in three states. So what’s with Bing listing an anti-Santorum web site first in its results in a search for his last name? Does Microsoft have some type of liberal agenda! Wait, you didn’t realize Rick Santorum has a “Bing [...]

• The Neuroscience Of Search & Conversion
  

  The one thing all of your search traffic brings with it is a human brain. It’s easy to think that our search visitors aren’t coming with any brain at all. How can they possibly decide against what we have to offer? If they weren’t going to take action, click on the ad? It turns out [...]

• Apple’s Siri Drives 25 Percent Of Wolfram|Alpha Queries
  

  Yesterday knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha announced an intriguing new paid service Wolfram|Alpha Pro. Gary Price wrote an overview of the new service, which will likely appeal to academics, data geeks and a range of other specialized users. Wolfram|Alpha is by no means a mainstream search engine, yet it has managed to establish something of a beachhead [...]

• 3 Steps To Optimize Your B2B Informational Assets
  

  Does this situation sound familiar? Due to the success of your SEO program, organic traffic to your website is increasing. However, visitors aren’t engaging with specific aspects of the site and aren’t taking the desired actions. Why? Many B2B marketers fail to include informational assets in their overall SEO strategy. Information presented on your website [...]

• adCenter Releases Features Aimed At Improving Advertiser Time-Efficiency
  

  The adCenter team recently released some features aimed at improving Advertiser Time-Efficiency. These features are live right now, though they may not be officially announced at the time this post is published. During a recent trip to adCenter headquarters, Eric Enge was able to get some insight into these new features, and what we can [...]

• Interesting Quotes From Google’s Search Lead, Amit Singhal
  

  Amit Singhal is the man who is responsible for Google web search. All the searches done on Google are technically under his watch. So when an interview was posted named The human search engine, where Mark Prigg from the London Evening Standard interviewed Amit Singhal, I got excited. The interview shares some insights into Amit’s [...]

• Google Screenwise: New Program Pays You To Give Up Privacy & Surf The Web With Chrome
  

  Google is quietly taking requests from web users who want to get paid to surf the web using the Chrome browser while sharing data with Google. The program is called Screenwise and, though we’re not aware of any official announcement, Google has a signup page at www.google.com/landing/screenwisepanel. The page explains that Google wants to create [...]

• Wolfram|Alpha Goes Pro With Powerful Data Analysis & Presentation Tools
  

  Wolfram|Alpha (W|A) is launching a new fee-based service named Wolfram|Alpha Pro. In today’s highly competitive environment, you may wonder why W|A would ask people to pay for what many think should be free. Read on: you may decide to willingly open your wallet when you see what’s available. Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, I’ve often [...]

• Google Clarifies: No, Ads Shouldn’t Help Rankings & No, SEO Isn’t Bad
  

  “SEO isn’t good for users” and “It’s a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug” are two quotes from a Google employee that go directly against things Google’s said before. The real truth emerging? More like a new Google employee who doesn’t seem to [...]

• New: Google Sitelinks With Small Arrows
  

  Google has confirmed that they are rolling out a new look for their one line sitelinks. The new look has a small arrow on the left side of where the sitelinks begin. Here is a picture: A Google spokesperson confirmed that these are indeed new and are “currently rolling out everywhere this week.” Google has [...]

• SEMPO Announces 2012 Board Of Directors Nominees
  

  SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Profession Organization, has posted their 2012 nominees for the Board of Directors. There are currently 38 nominees for the 2012- 2014 Board, with a total of 13 seats to fill. SEMPO members can vote electronically between February 14 through February 22, 2012. Votes must be submitted by Wednesday, February 22 [...]

• Google: 41 Percent Of Super Bowl Ad Searches Were Mobile
  

  A wide range of social and mobile data are being reported by various sources in the wake of last Sunday’s Super Bowl game. For example, ad network inMobi said 39 percent of survey respondents “used their mobile device in response to a TV commercial during the game” (discussing commercials, getting more information or watching TV [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Skimlinks Downplays Pinterest’s Affiliate Link Practice
• Slinging Hash Tags: Community Building In 140 Characters
• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Faster browsing, safer downloading, Google Chrome Blog
• Why Techmeme now lists events, and how to get your event listed, Techmeme News

Business Issues

• Former Google exec: Facebook, Twitter are killing search, ZDNet
• Google Invited These People To A Super-Deluxe Resort Last Week To Talk About The Future (GOOG), San Francisco Chronicle
• Google Said to Plan to Assure That It Will License Motorola Patents Fairly, Bloomberg

Local, Maps & Mobile

• New 45° imagery available for 24 cities, Google LatLong
• AdMob auction enhancements, Google Mobile Ads Blog
• Finding places on the go has never been easier – check out the new Explore for your phone!, Foursquare Blog
• Google Places Thinks Jack In The Box Is A Vegan Restaurant, SEO Igloo Blog
• Long Awaited Google Places Quality Guidelines Changes, OptiLocal
• Many Google Places Search Results Are Showing an Increased Radius For Search Results, Mike Blumenthal

Link Building

• Building Up The Pages That Link To You With Links, Search Engine Roundtable

Paid Search & Contextual

• Top five policy resources to know, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Internal Site Search: How Diagnose Problems & Maximize Conversions Today, internetmarketingninjas.com
• Yandex Direct Geotargeting Options Explained, Russian Search Tips

SEM Industry

• SearchFest 2012 Mini-Interview: Rhea Drysdale, sempdx.org

SEO & SEM

• 10 Ways Paid Marketers Can Leverage Inbound Marketing, SEOmoz
• Increase Your Click Through Rates In Google By Changing Your Google Authorship Profile Image, Search Engine Roundtable
• Invalid Click To Call On Google AdWords, Search Engine Roundtable
• Let’s Stay Together: Merging AdWords & Analytics Reporting, PPC Hero
• The Time For Content Marketing Is Now, distilled

Social Media

• Pinterest is quietly generating revenue by modifying user submitted pins., llsocial.com
• Lady Gaga’s New Social Network Resembles Pinterest, Reddit [PICS], mashable.com
• Q&A: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley on What He’s Learning From Twitter and What’s Next, Read/Write Web

Video, Music & Image Search

• Live Matrix, The “TV Guide For The Web,” Acquired By OVGuide, TechCrunch

Web Analytics

• Google Analytics has learned 9 new languages, Google Analytics Blog
• How To Exclude Brand Search Terms & Keywords In Google Analytics’ Traffic Sources Reports, seoroi.com

Jason Hart tipped us off listing out the key differences:

• Vertical tabs removed
• Top and bottom search boxes widened
• Search button icon changed
• Several links removed from header
• Location information no longer displayed
• Icons used instead of text for rewards and preferences
• My smiling face added to the page instead of just my name
• Related searches moved from left rail to under the search box

Here is a picture of the new design:

Here is a picture of the old design:

A widely cited 2011 IDC study found that the amount of data in the world is now doubling every 2 years. This trend is especially apparent in marketing, as massive amounts of data are being created by ever-increasing numbers of search queries, SKU views, social signals, page visits, and more.

Unstructured Data Volumes Exploding

Traditional paradigms for managing data are struggling under this tsunami. In addition to the sheer volume of data, the fact that so much of it is “unstructured” creates special challenges.

AdExchanger.com recently quoted John Iwata of IBM as stating that 80% this data is “unstructured”. This means that it doesn’t come pre-packaged in neat segments, fitted into a cascading taxonomy of some sort.

Instead, the data is hugely varied and constantly evolving. As an example consider search, where new terms and groups of terms are continually being formed as new artists, politicians, products, companies, and other evolutions take place.

The Old Way: Creating Static Segments

A traditional way of dealing with large amounts of unstructured data is to…you guessed it…add structure.

This typically involves spending lots of time analyzing data and then grouping various data elements (e.g., search terms, SKUs, pages visited, etc.) into segments that are then used for analysis, targeting, and other marketing activities.

This approach has drawbacks, however. For starters, it is time consuming and often requires the attention of experts in the data type. In addition, creating opaque segments often reduces the effectiveness of the data. This is because once data elements are grouped into a segment, the individual data elements within the segment are treated as if they are the same.

Search Marketers Know Better

Search marketers would not group dozens, hundreds, or thousands of keywords into a segment, and then be content with not knowing the individual impression volumes, click through rates, cost per clicks, and conversion rates on each keyword.

Search marketers know that keeping data at its elemental level (in the case of search, at the keyword level) is necessary to optimize and achieve the best performance.

Search marketers know from experience that some data elements (again, keywords) are far more effective than others, and they want the ability to pay more for the keywords that perform well and less for those that do not.

We also see this in search retargeting, where performance often varies greatly between similar keywords that would seem to belong in the same segment.

Elementary, My Dear Marketers

So how can display marketers take advantage of the rising tide of unstructured data, and leverage what search marketers already know?

The solution is elementary. Targeting at the data element level not only reduces the time and effort required to create and populate segments, it also provides improved performance, and deeper insights.

The improved performance comes from the ability to allocate budget to the best performing data elements. This can be done either manually or automatically.

In fact, the automated algorithms that make decisions on how much to bid on each impression are more effective when they are fed more granular, element-level data.

Element level targeting provides deeper insights by enabling marketers to analyze the performance of each keyword, SKU, page, or other data element targeted. From these insights marketers can develop future creatives, offers, and campaign criteria.

Making Unstructured Data Actionable In Display

Unstructured data is already actionable in search, which provides keyword level bidding, optimization, and reporting.

For marketers looking to take advantage of unstructured data in display, the latest generation of Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) provide several options that enable managing, bidding, and optimizing to data at the element level.  These include:

• Keyword Level Search Retargeting – Keywords are not grouped into segments, but instead targeted at the individual keyword level. Campaigns can target over 100K individual keywords and maintain bidding, reporting, and optimizing at the keyword level.
• Keyword Based Contextual Targeting – Instead of targeting ads to pages about fixed contextual categories, custom contextual categories are defined by a list of keywords. Bidding, reporting, and optimizing is then done at the keyword (element) level based on which pages contain which word.
• Element Level Site Retargeting – Instead of grouping visitors to a site into just a few segments, ads are targeted based on the individual incoming search terms, individual pages visited, individual SKUs viewed, and/or the products that have been put into shopping carts.
• Element Level Behavioral Targeting – Campaigns target a set of behaviors while maintaining transparency into the volume, pricing, and performance of each individual behavior and/or site where the behavior is measured. This enables more spend to be allocated to the best performing behaviors.

This list will surely grow as the display advertising eco-system evolves. In the meantime, online advertisers can look forward to a day when opaque data segments are nothing but memories of a bygone era.

The first question asked was about the primary search engine used by respondents.

Primary search engine:

Source: AYTM, n=400 (1/12)

Then the survey explored respondents’ attitudes toward search personalization and Google+ participation.

Do you like the idea of personalizing search results based on past searches and info from your social networking sites?

Source: AYTM, n=400 (1/12)

A minority said yes (15.5 percent) they liked search personalization. But a clear majority were ambivalent or hostile to the idea (84.5 percent). Within that majority 45 percent said they did not want search results personalized at all. Of the three types of responses the “nos” were the dominant category.

There were two other survey questions fielded by AYTM about Google+:

• Do you use Google+?
• Would you be more likely to use Google+ if you knew you would get more tailored search results?

To the first question (Do you use it?) 19.3 percent responded “yes,” and another 20.3 percent said they had accounts that were not really used. The other 60.4 percent said they did not have Google+ accounts or said that they didn’t know what it was.

In terms of whether more people would use Google+ if they knew it helped personalize their results, 7.5 percent said “yes” they would be more likely to use it. However 44.4 percent said “no” and 48.1 percent said “maybe.”

It’s important to point out that this is just one survey and it’s not clear how representative the survey population was of the entire US adult population. It’s also important to observe that people often react negatively to change. However these results, if they can be generalized, represent a pretty strong negative reaction to the new direction Google is headed.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: I wanted to add that with a further follow-up, it probably would have been incredibly easy to turn the 45% who said “No, I think everyone should see the same results” into a much smaller number.

For example, if the question had been: “When searching for football, do you think Americans and Europeans should see the exact same results?,” that probably would have given respondents reason to think further about the advantages to personalization.

Of course, the personalization in that case tend to be geographically-based (Americans would be more likely to see NFL information; Europeans about local soccer teams). But there are other examples where past history and social connections can help. That’s one reason why Bing, just like Google, uses both factors.

My experience has been that no one seems positive about any company wanting to personalize things for them when you ask. I always put the blame on this to Amazon, because of that one purchase you make that Amazon assumes means you are completely interested in that product forever going forward.

In addition, I don’t think people like the idea that any company could somehow “figure them out” and somehow assume it could personalize things for them.

But emotion aside, personalization can help (and can hurt), and it’s all about getting the balance right. I’d highly recommend anyone interested in more to read a post from Google last year about why it does personalization, as well as “The Filter Bubble” from Eli Pariser, which takes a critical look at personalization in general. Also see SMX East Keynote: A Conversation With Eli Pariser.

The topic of personalization will also be covered in-depth at our upcoming SMX West search marketing conference in San Jose Feb. 28-March 1, in these sessions:

• Getting Personal, Part 1: How Google & Bing Personalize With Social Connections
• Getting Personal, Part 2: How Google & Bing Personalize With Search History & Geography

Wait, you didn’t realize Rick Santorum has a “Bing problem” that’s exactly the same as his well-documented “Google problem,” where a search for “santorum” lists a web page defining that word as the by-product of anal sex above Santorum’s official web site?

He does. In fact, Santorum’s had his Bing problem for months, if not years. It’s just that everyone fixates on Google. Even Santorum does when he gets asked about it, such as telling Politico last year:

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

He continued: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”

It’s A Search Engine Problem, Not A Google Problem

In the wake of Santorum’s win, and no doubt eventual questions in some quarters about why Google still isn’t “fixing” things for him, I thought it was worthwhile to flip things around and discuss his Bing issue.

It’s worth stressing that this isn’t just some gay-loving-Google-liberal-leaning-hates-Santorum thing and more a general problem Santorum has with the major search engines. In particular, it’s a problem that’s ultimately down to Santorum’s anti-gay views.

Santorum & Bing: Just Like Google

Here’s what Bing currently shows for santorum:

You can see that just after the special news area that Bing inserts above the regular results, the first listing that the arrow points to is for SpreadingSantorum.com, with a description that reads:

Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum

Santorum’s own official site, RickSantorum.com, appears third on the list.

Over at Google, which gets all the attention, the same issue happens:

Google’s news box appears further down on the page, probably because of the special election results box that appears at the top. Spreading Santorum, the anti-Santorum web site, appears as the first regular result. The official Rick Santorum web site appears fourth in the regular listings, one further down than with Bing.

By the way, the same thing also happens at Yahoo. Since Yahoo largely depends on Bing’s results, a search on “santorum” brings up the anti-Santorum site first, as it does with Bing — though after Yahoo’s own news units.

The news is better for searches for Rick Santorum’s full name, rather than just the word “santorum.” In that case, his official site ranks tops. Here’s Bing:

And here’s Google:

Does It Matter?

It’s becoming clear that Santorum’s Bing problem, as with his Google problem, isn’t stopping many Republican voters from selecting him over other candidates. So should Google or Bing really worry about trying to somehow fix it, especially when any type of change like that opens them up to accusations about censorship or political favoritism?

Perhaps.

The SafeSearch Solution

The biggest issue to me might be the fact that as interest in Santorum grows, you’ve got more children in schools likely to be searching on his name. Getting a fairly explicit description in their search results talking about “lube and fecal matter” and “anal sex” might not be what a lot of parents want them seeing.

Both Bing and Google have a SafeSearch filter that is set to “Moderate” by default, which means it only filters out explicit images. Setting this to “Strict” will keep the Spreading Santorum site from appearing in text listings. That’s something parents and teachers can use.

It’s Not An Irrelevant “Google Bomb”

How about a manual intervention to solve this problem, which has mistakenly been called a “Google Bomb.” Didn’t Google do something like that for President George W. Bush?

“Liberal leaning” Google did. The Google Bomb fix wasn’t specifically designed just for Bush, who found people were linking to his biography in a way to make it rank tops for “miserable failure.” It was meant to fix any type of case where people tried to make pages rank for odd phrases that they weren’t relevant for. But questions about the prominent Bush listing helped prompt the fix.

The Spreading Santorum site isn’t ranking because of some type of Google Bomb campaign. It ranks because it is entirely relevant for “santorum.” It was created years ago as a protest against Rick Santorum’s anti-homosexual views. Those views are entirely relevant, in fact arguably more relevant the further Santorum advances as a candidate to be president of the United States.

To drop the site, Bing and Google would actually be making the type of political move that Santorum seems to think that Google is already doing (he clearly doesn’t seem to think about or care about Bing).

But How About A Disclaimer?

There is something that Google is long overdue to implement. Consider what it used to show when you’d search for “miserable failure” and got the George W. Bush biography:

See the ad above the listings that the arrow points to, which say:

Why these results? These results may seem politically slanted. Here’s what happened

The ad led to an explanation at the official Google Blog. Google does a similar thing today, for a search on jew, which brings up an anti-Jewish web site:

It’s long past time for Google to do something similar for searches on “santorum.” They are going to confuse some people, who will assume Google’s trying to advance a political agenda with its search results.

I’d say Bing should do the same thing, but Bing’s never even tried to have explanations like this. Maybe it should consider it.

But Spreading Santorum Is Here To Stay

As for Rick Santorum, as I wrote before, the best way to solve his Google and Bing problems would be to change his views on homosexuality or make a donation to a gay marriage-rights group. That’s what Dan Savage, who created the Spreading Santorum site, told Mother Jones in 2010:

Savage has not forgiven Santorum for his seven-year-old comments: “Rick would have prevented me and my partner from being able to adopt my son,” he points out. But Savage does have a deal for the politician. “If Rick Santorum wants to make a $5 million donation to [the gay marriage group] Freedom to Marry, I will take it down. Interest starts accruing now.”

That’s unlikely to happen, so Santorum will have to continue living with the Spreading Santorum site showing up alongside his own.

Related Entries

• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
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Photo courtesy FastCompany

It’s easy to think that our search visitors aren’t coming with any brain at all. How can they possibly decide against what we have to offer? If they weren’t going to take action, why click on the ad?

It turns out that they do have brains, and the people at NeuroFocus know. They use neuroscience to see these brains at work with amazing brainwave measuring devices.

They’ve watched brainy humans as they surf the Web, and we can all learn something from what they see. Their findings can be found in a new report The Premium Experience: Neurological Engagement on Premium Websites.

What They See In Brainwaves

When you’ve studied a whole bunch of brainwaves, you apparently start to see patterns – at least these folks do.

There are three responses that they can recognize when test subjects visit a webpage. When deciding what to put on our landing pages, it may be helpful to consider how well our pages will deliver these responses.

Attention

They can detect sustained focus and shifts in focus when people are looking at a site.

When we design landing pages, we seek to sustain our visitors’ focus and avoid page elements that cause it to shift. This is why we remove things like site navigation, images that move, and make the most important parts of the page the most visible.

Emotional Engagement

This is the intensity of a persons emotional response. These folks apparently can tell if the response is positive (“approach motivation”) or negative (“avoidance motivation”).

This is something that good copywriters can accomplish with headlines and text. It is also why we try to avoid stock photography, as it generally offers little emotional juice.

Memory Retention

Detects when visitors find something that is personally relevant. It is “activated automatically for experiences that are personally meaningful and provide an opportunity for learning.”

It is important that your landing pages carry on the message that made the searcher click on your ad or organic listing. This response bears out the importance of teaching the visitor something along the way.

Sizing Up Sites

The NeuroFocus people wanted to know how these three response metrics – Attention, Emotional Engagement, and Memory Retention – changed when people visited different kinds of sites.

They chose three sites: The New York Times home page, the generic (non-personalized) Yahoo! home page, and the test subjects’ Facebook news feed.

NOTE: Facebook was a cosponsor of the study.

The Relationship Between Attention & Emotional Engagement

All three sites garnered high attention scores. However, their emotional engagement scores were significantly lower. The study authors point out that in general, there is an inverse relationship between attention and emotional engagement.

This is interesting.

All of the pages required a significant amount of attention due to the number of choices and items on the page – including ads. The amount of energy it takes to process all of this detracts from the emotional engagement.

This reinforces a truism of landing pages: if you want to engage a visitor emotionally, keep it simple and help them digest your page visually.

The Facebook page had the highest level of emotional engagement of the three.

The Relationship Between Relevance & Memory Retention

Of the three sites, the generic, non-personalized Yahoo! home page scored lowest on the memory retention scale. The study concludes that Facebook and the New York Times score high for different reasons.

The Facebook page scores high on memory retention because of the personal significance of the content. The  New York Times page, on the other hand, scores well because of the new information it offers and opportunities for learning.

In other words, brains find relevance in personal content as well as new, informative content.

This may not be a great surprise, but it’s reassuring to hear it directly from some real brains.

Priming Visitors

The NeuroFocus people also wanted to know how these sites primed visitors, making different messages resonate with them. They exposed test subjects to three “messaging words” before and after viewing the sites and measured how much these words resonated with their brains.

Connecting

This would indicate a predisposition toward socially-oriented messages.

For-Me

Did the site make visitors more likely to resonate with the word “FOR-ME?” This would indicate the visitor is open to messages that are personalized.

Advice

This would indicate a predisposition toward informational messages.

It is probably no surprise that Facebook visitors resonated more with the connecting message after viewing the site, but had the smallest response increase to advice. The New York Times had the smallest increase in visitors’ response to connecting. Yahoo! showed an average increase in all three areas.

They were all seen as “For-Me” sites by the test subjects.

The study goes on to expand these metrics for men vs. women. It also compares online advertising to TV-based commercials. I’ll let you explore these on your own.

Lessons Learned

You don’t have to study neuroscience to understand some important relationships between our search ads and the sites to which they lead.

1. Our ads will prime our visitors for a certain kind of message on our landing pages. Ads that ask visitors to “join” might do well to include social proof on their landing pages, for example. Ads that offer something educational for the searcher should avoid talking about the product or company on the landing page, and keep it to For-Me benefits.

2. If we want our message to have an emotional impact on the visitor, we should keep things simple. This may be why home pages perform so poorly as landing pages. It takes too much attention to process these pages to gain an emotional connection.

3. Relevance is the key to memory retention. If we are remarketing to those who abandon, we want our ads and landing pages to have personal relevance or opportunities to learn something new.

NeuroFocus: The Premium Experience: Neurological Engagement on Premium Websites

Wolfram|Alpha is by no means a mainstream search engine, yet it has managed to establish something of a beachhead and has a growing fan base. It owes some of that to Apple’s Siri, which chose Wolfram|Alpha as one of two structured data providers that tie directly into the personal assistant. The other is Yelp.

Wolfram|Alpha gets about 3.7 million daily page views and 17.3 visits per month in the US, according to Alexa data the site itself provides when you ask it about its own traffic.

According to an article in the New York Times tied to the Wolfram|Alpha Pro launch, “Siri accounts for about a quarter of the queries fielded by Wolfram Alpha.” However the company receives no branding on those results. Here are some examples of how Siri presents Wolfram|Alpha content:

Apple and Siri’s relationship with Yelp and Wolfram|Alpha are a kind of template for how the personal assistant will likely work with other third party data providers in the future.