The Hitwise blog post reported that Twitter accounted for only 0.14% of “upstream” visits to the “News & Media” sites category last week, far beyond similar stats for Facebook and Google. Here are all of them compared, based on that blog post:

• Facebook: 3.64%, the 3rd biggest source of visits to News & Media sites
• Google News: 1.27%, the 11th biggest source of visits
• Twitter: 0.14%, the 39th source of visits

Google News Versus Google

My first issue with these stats is that Google News — only one small slice of Google — is being compared to all of Facebook. That doesn’t seem a fair comparison. Unless Facebook has a Facebook News area (it doesn’t), it seems like you need to compare “whole” Facebook to “whole” Google when discussing who drives traffic.

As it turns out, traffic from “whole” Google leaves Facebook in the dust, as a driver of traffic to news sites. So doYahoo and MSN. If you count traffic from any Google domain (or any Yahoo domain or MSN domain), the stats work out like this:

• Google sites, 20.16%
• Yahoo sites, 18.92%
• MSN sites: 8.76
• Facebook: 3.64%

Specifically, Hitwise looked at the top 100 sites sending traffic to News & Media sites last week, then added up all those that were run by Google or Yahoo or MSN to give the “whole” figures shown above. Each of the first three was listed as “Google properties” or “Yahoo properties” or “MSN properties” but Facebook was not listed that way. However, as Facebook run virtually everything I know of within Facebook.com, my assumption is that the Facebook figure is for “whole” Facebook as well. It’s not clear if MSN includes all Mircrosoft properties such as Bing or not.

Hitwise also sent figures — and rankings — based on the main domain of each company. These were:

• Google.com, 16.50%, ranked 1st
• Yahoo.com, 9.40%, ranked 2nd
• Facebook.com: 3.64%, ranked 3rd

NOTE: Earlier I had stats of 11.03% and 10.98% for Google and Yahoo respectively. These weren’t for the traffic that Google and Yahoo sent to news sites — which is what I had asked for — but instead either the amount of visits Google and Yahoo themselves receive from all sites or that they send to all sites. That caused me to changed the headline of this article from “Stat Rant: Google Actually Trumps Facebook For News & Can’t We Measure Twitter Correctly?” to “Stat Rant: Does Facebook Trump Google For News & Can’t We Measure Twitter Correctly?” until I could get better clarity from Hitwise. Now that they’ve sent me the correct numbers, Google indeed trumps Facebook even more than I originally thought, as a news driver.

Google News Isn’t Google Reader

If the earlier stats got you thinking that Facebook was the new killer news “app” versus Google, there’s more of that today with another post from Hitwise. This one talks about how Facebook users are more “loyal” to news sites than those coming from Google News. We’re told:

• 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors to the top 5 print media sites for the week ending March 6
• 67% of Google News users were returning visitors
• 77% of Facebook users were returning visitors to the top 5 broadcast media sites
• 64% of Google News users were

The headline — “Facebook Visitors Come Back Again And Again” — is meant to follow up on what author Heather Hopkins encountered in feedback when she posted a few weeks ago about Facebook as potentially being the web’s biggest feed reader (and this despite Facebook actually making it kind of hard to use it as a feed reader). Some said “big deal” if Facebook drives traffic. You want loyal readers, people who will come again and again.

So see — Facebook does have loyal visitors! But then again, you kind of expect that from Facebook versus Google News. In Facebook, you can be a fan of a news organization, effectively subscribing to it for updates. That’s all designed to keep you coming back. Google News has over 20,000 sources, and you can’t subscribe to any of them. If you want to be a subscriber through Google, you have to use Google Reader. So what’s the loyalty rate for that?

No idea. That’s probably because the last time Heather looked, when doing her post about Facebook as a feedreader, Google Reader drove only a tiny amount of visits to News & Media sites: 0.1%. Google News sends more traffic, so it has becomes the comparison choice, even if it’s the wrong one, in my opinion.

Heather did cite in today’s report how Google overall is, in terms of loyalty:

I’ve been encouraged by some readers to include Google.com in this series. In most cases, Google.com is the #1 source of traffic to these sites. Interestingly, visitors from Google are less likely to be returning visitors than average for either Google News or Facebook.

No specific figure, but that’s not surprising. As with Google News, people can’t “subscribe” to a source in regular Google. They discover sources that way. And often when discovering them, they have little need to go back to Google.

Revisiting The Search Gap

This phenomenon is something I called the “search gap” back in 2001. Pick your survey, and you’ll discover that searching is among the top internet activity out there. And yet, look at web site stats, and search engine traffic often is not the top traffic driver. Why is there a big gap between what people do and the traffic search engines send? Because once you’ve found a trusted site (including a news site), you may not need to search for it again. As I wrote:

Let’s say you want to buy a particular book. You do a search at your favorite search engine and find a page from Amazon about the book. You visit the Amazon site, like the price and information you are shown, so purchase the book from them. Thanks to search engines, Amazon has gained a customer.

A month later, you need another book. Remembering your positive experience at Amazon, you go directly to the web site rather than using a search engine to find it. Thus, your second visit isn’t credited to search engines. However, it would have never occurred if you hadn’t found Amazon via search engines the first time AND had a favorable impression of the site.

So, once people find trusted sites, they return to them directly for particular needs …. However, because our needs are wide-ranging, we are constantly searching for new things — which accounts for the overall high usage of search engines that other studies find.

It would be a mistake to interpret the search gap as meaning that search engines are not important. They remain a top way users will locate web sites initially and so cannot be ignored. Instead, the real lesson of the search gap is the age-old adage that first impressions count. Make a good impression when people first come to your site via search engines, and they may come back directly to you in the future.

So the Facebook versus Google loyalty stats? They’re interesting, but they’re not necessarily comparable, given that users in both places may be doing radically different things.

Twitter Is Not Twitter.com

Another big issue I had with the traffic to news sites post was that it tried to compare Twitter as a traffic driver by using stats that measure only Twitter.com. That’s a big flaw to me, because so much Twitter activity happens off the site itself. People interact with Twitter through third party applications, or by seeing tweets in things like Google Real Time result or posted on individual blogs.

If you don’t measure these things, you aren’t properly measuring the Twitter ecosystem as a traffic driver — perhaps grossly undercounting it. The posts below go into more depth about this:

• How Twitter Might Send Far More Traffic Than You Think
• Is Twitter Sending You 500% To 1600% More Traffic Than You Might Think?

I asked Hitwise about this and got back:

We are definitely looking into expanding our data and measuring traffic from apps/mobile.

That’s good, but it doesn’t help a company like Twitter now, which gets painted as some type of weak player compared to Facebook. If the stats don’t allow a fair comparison, then don’t make a comparison. Say that you can’t measure the two.

Note that Hitwise isn’t the only one with this issue. I’ve seen plenty of stats from various places that suggest that Twitter isn’t being measured correctly. It’s not a Hitwise-only problem.

As a sidenote, Chitika has new data out that doesn’t have traffic figures but does try to measure the intent of what people from various social networks are after, from when they leave those networks. News is tops to those from Twitter, though exactly what “Twitter” is and how this is measured isn’t said. Nor is it clear whether something like “Tech” might include tech news:

• Twitter: 47% head to news sites
• Facebook: 28% head to news
• Digg: 18% head to news
• MySpace: News not in top five categories

Referrer Vs Upstream Traffic

One proxy might be to look at the amount of traffic that Bit.ly sends to News & Media sites. Bit.ly is the default URL shortener for tweeted URLs. Regardless of where you encounter a link in the Twitter ecosystem — on Twitter.com itself, in a third party app and so on — many of these will route you through Bit.ly. That means measuring Bit.ly as a driver to News & Media sites might give you a better idea of how Twitter is doing.

I asked for those stats, but I didn’t get the right ones from Hitwise. Instead, they sent me a chart showing how many people go to Bit.ly after Twitter. I’ll try again on this. But that also brings up a key difference to how Hitwise measures what drives traffic and what analytics tools do.

NOTE: Since I wrote this, I’ve received the stats. In Feb. 2010, Bit.ly sent 0.0043% of traffic to News & Media sites. I suspect that means it’s not a very good proxy for Twitter’s traffic overall.

Most browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and so on) are configured to tell a web server the last page they viewed before they arrived at a web site. This is called the “referrer,” though often it’s called the referral source as well. Referrer information allows site owners to know the search terms used to reach their web sites. They allow them to tell if Facebook is a big traffic driver, or Google or other sites with a good degree of accuracy in many cases.

Hitwise isn’t reporting referrer information. It doesn’t have this. Instead, it depends primarily on data through deals it has with internet service providers. It can see from this data what people do before and after they go to a particular web site. The before is called “upstream” traffic and the after is called “downstream.”

This isn’t as precise as referrer data. Consider this. You have a browser window that opens automatically to Facebook, when you start. You scan your Facebook feed, don’t click on anything, then decide to do a search for the iPad. You type in Google into your browser’s address bar, do a search from the Google home page when it loads, see a link to Apple and click on that.

Hitwise records things this way:

Facebook –> Google –> Apple

In reality, here’s what happened:

Facebook

Google –> Apple

Facebook drove no traffic to Google. But in Hitwise’s system, since it was the last site someone saw before Google, it would be counted as an “upstream” driver.

By the way, if you want to play with this more yourself, try this site. If you click on that link, you should see that the “referer” box will get filled with the URL of this article you’re reading. If you then copy and past the URL and go to it directly, you’ll get no “referer” shown.

Looking Beyond The Stats

In general, I’ve felt there’s been an increasing push from various places — not just with Hitwise — to punch out stats. These get quickly reported often without much analysis. From this, we end up with facts that often aren’t really true.

For example, we all know from stats earlier this year that 44% of Google News readers simply scan headlines without going to sites, right? Right?

That’s not actually true, as my 44% Of Google News Readers Only Scan Headlines? Maybe Not! article gets into. But despite this, I keep hearing that stat repeated over and over again.

Meanwhile, Facebook is once again reported to be the most visited US web site, beating Google. But then again, that’s not measuring all of Google, such as Gmail — so is Facebook really bigger? (See Hitwise: Facebook (Sort Of) More Visited Than Google On Christmas for more on this).

In addition, Facebook auto-refreshes its pages. If I leave a Facebook page up, I’m probably generating “visits” all day long even though I’m not always looking at that page. Does that skew comparing to sites that don’t auto-refresh?

There’s no easy solution to much of this. Stats have been glossed over, twisted or had comparison issues as long as we’ve had stats. I can be as guilty as anyone of pushing a stat quickly without delving into it more. Maybe the trend is no better or worse than ever. But I’ll be trying to dig even more doing forward, and I hope others will do the same.

For related discussion, see here on Mediagazer.

“The clickthrough rate (CTR) was 2% on Friday, but 3% on Saturday. That’s a 50% increase. 50% is a lot, right?,” they ask. Well, it certainly is for income tax rates, but not necessarily for differences in clickthroughs. What if Friday saw 2 clicks from 100 impressions and Saturday saw 3 clicks from 100 impressions? Doesn’t sound so impressive anymore, does it?

Part of the problem is that it’s simply impossible to tell from that few impressions whether both have an inherent CTR of 2.5% (and you just happened to see 2 clicks for one and 3 clicks for the other) or whether they legitimately have different underlying CTRs.

Imagine a more extreme case: one ad has a CTR of 2% and one has a CTR of 100%. We see four impressions and all get clicks. How likely is this to be the data for the 2%-CTR ad?

Well, if it is the 2%-CTR ad’s data, then there’s a 2% chance that the first impression would generate a click. That’s about the same as the chance of randomly drawing the ace of spades from a well-shuffled deck of cards. And there’s a 2% chance that the next impression will generate a click, which is about the same as reshuffling that deck and then randomly drawing the ace of spades again (without any sleight-of-hand trickery).

So, the chance of seeing 4 clicks from 4 impressions for a 2%-CTR word must be very, very small, but (please take a minute to convince yourself of this, if you need to) it’s not absolutely zero. Even an ad with only a 2% CTR still might possibly generate 4 clicks from 4 impressions. It’s improbable, but not impossible.

That is why statisticians rarely seem to give a straight answer to whether two ad’s CTRs are different or not. “Statistical significance” is not really a Yes or No situation, it’s just the probability of seeing a certain sequence of events (like four ace-of-spades in a row) not happen purely by chance. Every new impression increases the certainty in our answer, but there is no specific amount of information that seals the deal.

By convention, statisticians often set an arbitrary cut-off of “5% chance of being explained purely by randomness” for classifying whether or not a difference is “statistically significant” or not. That’s why when a magician declares that he’ll pull a certain card from a deck, and then actually does so, the average geek in your life will joyously exclaim, “That’s statistically improbable!” We know that there’s less than the 5% cut-off chance that that card appeared purely by luck.

Imagine now that we have two ads, Ad A, for which we have observed a 2% CTR, and Ad B, whose observed CTR is shown on the x-axis of the graph below. The graph shows the number of impressions (per ad) we must see to be 95% certain that the two ads have different CTRs.

If Ad A has seen 2 clicks from 100 impressions (2% CTR) and B has seen 14 clicks from 100 impressions (14% CTR), then we can be more than 95% certain that Ad B’s CTR is higher than A’s. If the observed CTR of Ad B is only 3%, then we actually need nearly 4000 impressions each to be 95% certain that Ad B performs better. That’s why the difference in observed CTRs between the Friday and Saturday ad performance wouldn’t look so impressive if they only had 200 impressions between them.

As the CTR of Ad B approaches 2%, it takes staggeringly more and more data to differentiate the two ads. Trying to tell a 2.00% CTR ad from one with a CTR of 1.95% (or 2.05%) takes more than a million impressions each. And, if the two ads perform identically, with exactly a 2% CTR, obviously even an infinite amount of data couldn’t tell them apart.

Though the concepts I’ve described above are (hopefully) now very clear, unfortunately some of the web-based tools for differentiating CTRs seem to have disregarded them completely.

For example, if one ad got 1 click with a 25% CTR (that is, 4 impressions) and a second ad got 2 clicks with a 100% CTR (that is, 2 impressions), Splittester.com by Brian Teasley and Perry Marshall says: “You are approximately 99% confident that the ads will have different long term response rates.” 99% confident from just 6 impressions?! No, I’m not. If I flip a coin 4 times and get 1 “heads” and another coin 2 times and get 2 “heads,” I wouldn’t be 99% certain that either one of their per-flip chances deviate from 50% at all.

Supersplittester.com, a similar site by Dr. Glenn Livingston (I presume), has similar deficiencies. For the case of Ad A, with 4 impressions, 1 click (25% CTR) and 1 conversion (100% CR), and Ad B with 2 impressions, 2 clicks (100% CTR) and 1 conversion (50% CR), the site tells me both that “Ad B has a higher CTR than ad A (99% Confidence Level)” and that “Ad A has a higher conversion rate than ad B (80% Confidence Level).”

Frankly, the only thing I have 99% confidence about is that Teasley, Marshall and Livingston should have a second look at their computer code to see what’s going wrong.

In the McKinsey Quarterly, Google’s chief economist Dr. Hal Varian said: “I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?”.

He’s absolutely right. In 1990, only a handful of geeks knew what a “homepage” or an “email” were. Ten years later, few people didn’t know. Likewise for search marketing, even basic concepts like determining a confidence interval to identify statistical significance can still seem esoteric. But the industry is quickly realizing that being able to do these calculations is not just for geeks anymore.

It’s live blogging time again from SXSW. Today, the Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends panel gets underway.On our panel today

Brynn starts off with a presentation (see her slides here). She’s been researching social interactions during search tasks. Think about search as no longer a question in a box but what about how your friends might be able to help you. Say, “How do you interpret a 110 on the GRE?” That might be a better friend question.

Search happens over time. You travel through a path in time and can make use of friends at any time along that path.

There is no one definition of social search but three distinct types:

• Collective (gathering advice from a crowd)
• Friend Filtered (using your friends)
• Collaborative (asking a friend — see also our The Rise Of Help Engines: Twitter & Aardvark article)

How do people want to interact with their friends when they search. Hard to design for this interaction as two types are opposites.

• Ask the network
• Embark alone

Some people in her research studies didn’t even want to ask Google, were kind of afraid. So would ask friends for help. Others would embark alone.

Next is Max from Aardvark, which was recently acquired by Google (see that article above for more about Aardvark).

Web search is great for objective questions, but subjective ones create the majority of queries. These are ones with no correct answer, “What’s a good book to read?”

The process of going to a human and ask is also flawed. Small number of friends, hard to keep up with them all. So Aardvark would ask your friends in real time and get answers.

Enormous opportunity if you can tap inside people’s heads.

After a year, 85% of questions get answered in less than 5 minutes. 70% of answers said to be good vs ok or bad. 45% of answers lead to cross talk among users. More than 50% of users have answered a question. Avg query is oops slide gone think around 13 words.

Social context is different from social graph, person you know in a particular area can help more than just who you know.

Now Ash from OneRiot, which confuses me, since it’s more a real time search engine than a social one. Oh, where the hell is Google? See Google Social Search Goes Live, Adds New Features. Which aside form Aardvark and before it has real social search. Oh, a puppet just popped up from Ash to say hello in French. I’m freaking out.

OK, lots of info about OneRiot and the words real time over and over. So hey, just go over here and read this from us instead: What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players. And he’s done, and said nothing about social so far. Sorry, Ash.

Scott’s going to talk about the money side of social search. Says all this sharing done socially can now be measured through things like Twitter, then by things like OneRiot and kind of saves making OneRiot more relevant.

Shows how they created a viral mannequin making campaign for Old Navy, which gets tweeted, which in turn means if you search for Old Navy on One Riot, you get that campaign coming up, which builds the cycle more, he says.

Best Buy case study now, working with in store experts. “Blue Shirts” there were responding using their own accounts. His agency created a hub for all of this. And I’m sorry, this isn’t social search. Interesting. Viral. Tapping into real time search, but that’s not social search.

Now a video of a guy named John at twitter.com/twelpforce asking an audience of people questions to drive to Best Buy that’s somehow social search but feels like a Super Bowl ad glommed on to the words search.

Mark says OneRiot and Aardvark seem to have gone after social search differently. I’ll say. One’s a social search engine, one is not.

Max says social should make a value add if you direct that question to a group of people. We focus on answering those kind of queries.

Aardvark started with a real human behind the sceens answering questions. Directed them to people, who were thriilled to answer.

Ash: We’re trying to answer one question, what’s going on right now. So they take any social signal they can get their hands on. See, they are social I suppose in that they tap into social networks. But they don’t narrow to a particular social circle, so Google’s a social search engine by tapping into the links that everyone socially shares on pages. Their core effort is to show what people buzzing.

Mark, is Google relevant. Will these take over the Google box.

Ash says 20-40% of search questions can be answered socially. Ba boom, take that Google. Max, if he hadn’t been bought by Google, probably would have said it’ll kill them. Let’s see if he answers!

Brynn says she doesn’t see social search taking over because there are so many different use cases that vary. To her, for a good percent of queries, we go to Google, we get information there but still have a sense of what else. Can I get confirmation, and opinion. Social search is a complement to Google. I like Brynn. She talks sense.

Mark to OneRiot, do you integrate social relevance? Personalized to the user base.

Ash, not yet. But if they see some spammer posting the same link over and over again, they’ll use user authority to block and what to weight more.

Brynn — how do you determine authority?

Ash, use past history, how many followers, though people like Eric Schmidt or Bill Gates who come on, issues at first.

Brynn — do  you index people relationships to each other?

Ash, um, um, it’s a factor. Small groups on Twitter worth looking at. (By the way, that social search thing from Google I mentioned above? They do that).

Brynn tries for clarity. Ash says it’s an inference and more that doesn’t really clarify.

Question, didn’t catch it, but Brynn’s answering. Saying social is very diverse. She got interested, and in studying search in general, found people naturally wanted to ask their friends.

Max, Aardvark was a response to social activity on line. Says not just a tech problem but user interface.

Brynn, but you have a tech problem. You had to come up with something to replace that human behind the scenes.

Max, how’s this relate to Google? Hardest thing is getting people used to the idea they can access a network of friends like they do to Google.

Mark, so how do you get in front of these people?

Ash, we get 90 to 95% of our traffic from our API, so we’re passing the data on. (and, you know, waiting for Googel or Microsoft to buy them). Go to search engine and type killer whale, you won’t get lots of info on ongoing debate on on the video. Um, actually on Google, you get a variety of results, including news. At OneRiot, top link is to buy a toy. Ironic, since Ash mocked that on Google, you’d get ads for things like that.

They’re looking at the wider paradigm of the web. Lady Gaga, they give you the phone interview, pictures, her coming in and out of clubs. (You can’t find this stuff on Google, you know. Impossible!). That’s different paradigm from thinks like where do I go out tonight in Austin. Isn’t that Aardvark he jokes? (No, FourSquare, Gowalla and Plancast).

Mark asks Scott about tapping into all this. In the old days, you’d make a microsite for search or use traditional SEO or SEM (he means paid search. or does he? See Does SEM = SEO + CPC Still Add Up?). Most activity now is in the form of a blog, they can see things blowing up there and jump in and have direct conversation with a consumer. Microsite model was safe, but now clients see opportunity to make content that’s part of the social stream.

Mark, are these discrete campaigns for things?

Scott, use to be, but not stuff designed to live in the long term.

Mark, when do you go with an Aardvark model (um, you can’t. you can’t unless you are a friend on Aardvark of other people there, and no one I know is really doing that on a business basis. Possible but not yet).

Scott says maybe you could do this where you route questions to the right person say at Best Buy. But they’re really tapping into OneRiot.

Brynn says she sees this as the reverse of social search. Scott’s targeting consumers who might care about that brand and then reverse delivering social information to them.

Mark, so how are you guys going to implement that monetization? And how does it impact things on quality?

Max, way you make money in search is draw people with clear commercial intent, tell you what they want and give you permission to redirect them to something (well, you make money showing them ads right now, and hoping some of them find your ads more relevant than your editorial results).

Max will route questions to sponsored answered. Woah. Best to ask if people want the sponsored answer. Many people say yes. Create models after AdWords. So less woah if they’re making it clear you’ll get a sponsored answer, as seems to be the case.

Ash, wanted to focus on user intent, wanted to attack a market that hasn’t been able to reach. They can give high quality ads about a buzzing topic within real time streams they are watching. He doesn’t click on ads on Facebook. But if I’m reading something on Twitter and see a related ad, it’s a new ground for publishers (except being the same ground AdSense has been covering for years).

Mark, to Max, do you try to route to traditional resources?

Max, sometimes people will say hey, why didn’t you Google that first. But no. You’ll see convergence to a hybrid model maybe down the line. They only match new users with questions to existing users to help kind of train them.

Brynn says she’s noticed if you want quick tip, pick search failures, and Google has paper coming out in spring. So what questions can benefit from Aardvark model, it’s when you have failures, thrashing, people constantly trying to change their searches to get answers. If at that point, if you could nudge people to use your network, might help. Brynn’s smart.

Mark to the audience for questions.

OK, someone doing social search he says. Max, what’s your vision for Aardvark and solution and what’s left to reach that?

Started with notion that would solve subjective search but users pushed them to solve social. We want to do that across communication channels, so you can find partners to go bike with (or to buy your company, heh). You meet people all the time, and that’s the curve they want to ride.

Next, question on keywords. If I want buzz, seems like I still have to think like from traditional search marketing perspective in terms of keywords.

Scott says works closely with OneRiot and it’s not about keywords but creating content that they index. He’s going on, but I know this and will explain. OneRiot sees if there’s a buzzing trend. If you’re an advertiser, it also indexes your site looking for content that seems to match the topic. Then it will automatically put that content out there with an ad. It all sounds pretty cool and unique.

Max, links have always been more important than keywords (well, almost always). So connections are like the same thing.

Ash, if you make it relevant to people, that’s what helps with the ads.

Question to Scott, how do you deal with social search metric for clients used to traditional ones (damn, traditional folks don’t even get search metrics). Scott says too early, hasn’t done much.

Question, how do you deal with privacy? Don’t want your wife’s friends to know you’re planning a romantic retreat for example.

Max, what are you afraid of, Eric Schmidt said. Ha, no, he didn’t say that. He said you want to give people more control, but it’s far away in the development pipeline. People ask for it all the time and they do allow anonymous questions to got to an anonymous group but it’s a “low res” solution.

Brynn, that’s a really hard problem. People want those privacy settings but don’t want to set that across their home network.

And that’s the session. A few last links. Articles I’ve written mentioned above that may help in understanding some of this:

• The Rise Of Help Engines: Twitter & Aardvark
• Google Social Search Goes Live, Adds New Features
• What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players

Also see:

• How We Search With The Twitter “Help Engine”
• Aardvark “Help Engine” Opens To Wider Use

Also, ParcInc on Twitter pointed me to this research paper from Brynn:

• Towards a model of understanding social search

And to understand social search in general, especially attempts over time, see this article from me:

• Search 4.0: Social Search Engines & Putting Humans Back In Search

The challenge began when SEOmoz filed the first opposition to the trademark in 2008. However, the company never pursued this further due to their legal spat with Ripoff Report. Jonathan Hochman of Hochman Consultants’s complaint with the USPTO was sought through the whole way, but it ultimately did not succeed. ArteWorks.biz also filed oppositions, but did not appear to keep at the case.

It was ultimately 25-year Rhea who kept going to the end. Rhea, who has been part of the SEO industry since 2004 and recently helped found Outspoken Media as its Chief Operating Officer, put two years of her life and nearly $20,000 of her own money, to fight this battle for the industry. On March 11, 2010, the USPTO has officially terminated Gambert’s trademark registration in favor for her opposition.

Here is the statement from the USPTO document:

The Board’s order of October 29, 2009 made clear that applicant was to supplement his responses to opposer’s discovery requests within twenty days of the order. The order further stated, in no uncertain terms, that “opposer’s attorney is to be in receipt of applicant’s responses within twenty days.” Applicant was warned that his failure to comply with the Board’s order “in any way” would be grounds for an entry of judgment against him. Applicant’s failure to comply with the twenty day deadline cannot be overlooked. We agree with opposer that applicant cannot rely on Trademark Rule 2.119 or the Federal Rules in this instance. The record is clear that opposer’s attorney was not in receipt of applicant’s supplemental responses within twenty days of the order or November 18, 2009. Moreover, our review of the untimely supplemental responses of applicant submitted in conjunction with opposer’s reply brief reveal that applicant’s responses remain, on the whole, deficient. Our patience with applicant has worn thin.

In view thereof, opposer’s motion for sanctions is granted.

The opposition is sustained, and registration is refused to applicant.

When Rhea noticed that attention from the various industry bloggers, including myself, did not stop Gambert from moving forward with his SEO trademark application, she decided to take matters into her hands. With the initial help from the companies listed above, and Michael VanDeMar and Jim Hedger, she hired lawyer Cheryl Meide from Meide Law with her own money — $17,004.33 in the end — to block the trademark request.

Rhea explains today she learnt a lot from this process. She says she is “much more business-savvy” now and ultimately has this win to show for it. She told us that she’s never asked for money in the battle nor feels like the industry owes her anything. She doesn’t regret this decision, although it was both emotionally and financially taxing for her. But she is happy that she was able to help an industry that is still relatively new and growing.

Is there a way for people to donate after the fact? We’re hoping Rhea will establish some means that people or companies could contribute. But she said she’s not looked into the right way this could happen, nor is she sure that she will:

If it becomes an issue I’ll try to set something up. Otherwise, I liked one tweet about not having to buy drinks at conferences. Maybe a lifetime supply of diet cokes!

I think we all owe Rhea, and all those involved in this process, a deep sense of gratitude for helping fight the attempt to trademark SEO. Rhea, and people like her, they are what makes the SEO industry so special.

Donation Information: Rhea finally allowed us to post her PayPal address so that we, the industry, can help in our own little way. Her PayPal address is rhea_drysdale@yahoo.com.

It is important to note that Jonathan Hochman also spent about $10,000 in court trying to battle this case. His opposition did not succeed, but that was not his fault. I do not have his PayPal address but you can contact him at this page.

Postscript #3: Rhea has posted a thank you to the industry and for all the kind words and donations.

Doing math through a search engine isn’t new. One of Google’s earliest parlor tricks was allowing people to enter math problems into its search box and get answers. Indeed, I use it for this more than my pocket calculator, these days.

Want to know 345,567 / 23? Enter that into Google, and you get back the answer: 15,024.6522:

You can do a wide range of functions using the Google Calculator. That “More about calculator” link in the screenshot above unfortunately takes you to this entirely unhelpful page. Instead, read this page buried in the Google help files to discover how the Google Calculator can do trigonometric functions, logarithms and factorials.

Fancy! But how about dealing with lowly fractions? Last night, I was dealing with problems like these:

56 2/3 * 3 1/2

I thought I was explaining how to do them right, as we worked through the homework exercises. But was there a quick way to double check? Well, I tried Google and got back:

For those who can’t see the screenshot above, that was:

(56 2/3) * (3 1/2) = 198.333333

That’s correct in decimal form, but the exercise required the product to be expressed as mixed fractions.  You know, a whole number followed by any fractional amount. C’mon, we all remember that.

I know that Bing also does math, so I tried things over there. I got back:

Again, for the screenshot-challenged, Bing processed my calculation like this:

56*2/3*3*1/2 = 56

Instead of doing fractions, Bing made some odd assumptions that I just wanted to multiple or divide the numbers that were next to each other. So, I tried it another way:

(56 2/3) * (3 1/2)

That just gave me a bigger mess:

And the text version:

(562/3)*(31/2) = 2,903.666667

This time, the space between the whole number and the start of the fraction was removed, completely changing what I entered.

NOTE: From a comment below, entering the calculation as (56 + (2/3)) * (3 + (1/2)) would have worked at Bing!

For those who want to read more about Bing’s calculator, see the Bing help page here. It can do a lot of functions even if it didn’t get mixed fractions multiplication right.

By the way, Bing does do fractions better than Google — that is, if you want a simple fraction expressed. Consider this:

300/35

On Google, that’s expressed as a decimal form only. But on Bing, you get both decimal and fractional forms:

As for the homework assignment, I gave search engines one more shot to help, this time using one that was built by a mathematician, Wolfram Alpha. How’d that go? For the example above, I got back this:

Awesome — multiple forms of the same answer. A decimal form. A fractional form. And what I wanted, the mixed faction answer:

198 1/3

I’m not sure if Stephen Wolfram’s grand ambition with Wolfram Alpha was for it to help me and my son figure out the multiplication of fractions. But it was sure useful!

Below are the sessions. Occasionally there is more than one session happening in a particular time slot. In those cases, I’ve prioritized the sessions I think are most appealing from top to bottom. But that’s my personal opinion. Those “lower down” still might be great for others. It’s sad you have to pick at all!

Friday, March 12

2:00 PM

Social Media Marketing for Your Business: Social media marketing is separate from search marketing but is still extremely useful for search marketers to know about. And this session is led by two long-time search marketers, Tony Adam and Chris Winfield.

Smackdown: Consumers Privacy vs. Advertiser Revenue: Possibly some focus on search ads in this.

3:30 PM

Google in China: Context and Consequences: No, no one from Google speaking here. But it’s led by Beijing-based writer and tech commentator, so there might be some good insights.

5:00 PM

Time + Social + Location. What’s Next In Mobile Experiences? Just seeing Foursquare and MapQuest listed among the presenters caught my attention. Maps, location checkins — they may not seem like search, but they are.

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income: Darren Rowse has been making a living from good content for ages. And good content is one of the key ways to be successful in search marketing, so this session makes the list.

Saturday, March 13

11:00 AM

Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized? Search engines have certainly jumped to add in ways to find real-time content. This panel features reps from three of them talking: Google, Microsoft and Collecta. Plus, you’ve got real-time guru Marshall Kirkpatrick in the mix. It won’t all be search, I’m sure, but it’s going to come up.

How to Create a Viral Video: Video content is integrated into Google’s Universal Search results and often overlooked as a way to make it into the top results. So why not learn how to make a hot video? I saw Margaret Gould Stewart from YouTube speak at TED recently — she was awesome and is on the panel. Lots to learn here.

Are Content Farms Good or Evil? Yes. Personally, I think there’s far more concern that content farms are somehow overrunning Google than is actually happening. But still, there are worries. Session is led by journalist Dan Gillmor, so should be fun.

12:30 PM

Getting Your Game Found In Search Engines: This is the session I’m leading. It’s meant for those involved with games, who are trying to bring more traffic to search. Tony Adam, who I mentioned above, will be taking part in the discussion. It’s not a traditional panel. No presentations. Instead, I’ll be leading the group there to help each other share tips and experiences.

Maps 2010: How iPad Impacts the LBS Market: LBS means location-based services, and that has a tie into search. In this, Mok Oh of EveryScape looks at how street-level and in-store photography.

5:20 PM

RIP Jeff Goldblum: Truth vs. Web BS: I know first hand how search helped spread the rumor that Jeff Goldblum was dead, so there’s an aspect of search that should show up here. The session is led by Techmeme’s — er Mediagazer’s — Megan McCarthy.

Sunday, March 14

9:30 AM

Augmenting Maps with Reality: Bing, Twitter, Foursquare, Navteq and Yahoo all take part in this panel. Google? Google? No.

Google Hackathon: Android TTS/Accessibility, Geo APIs, Chrome Accessibility Extensions: TTS, that’s text-to-speech. And there’s geospatial APIs being covered.

11:00 AM

What If Your Phone Had Five Senses? Google’s been talking a lot about how your phone is like an extension of your senses, especially in terms of the Nexus One. So expect more of this here, given the panel features two Googlers along with others.

12:30 PM

Writing Web Content For A Living: Did I mention the importance of web content in terms of search rankings above? Yes, I did. Here’s another session that might help you sharpen some skills.

3:30 PM

Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web: Put “semantic” or the “semantic web” in a press release, and you pretty much make me zone out. So much hype. So little definition over what that means. Still, speakers from both Factual and Wolfram Alpha are part of this panel. Should have some interesting discussion.

5:00 PM

Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery: Long-time user behavior expert Peter Morville looks at search from a design perspective.

Monday, March15

11:00 AM

Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends: Google recently bought Aardvark, one of the panelists on this session. Should be some interesting discussion. Also see our The Rise Of Help Engines: Twitter & Aardvark article for more background on getting search help from friends.

11:20 AM

Video Search Optimization Strategies To Grow Your Business: I said video was a great way into the top results above, right? Right.

2:00 PM

Evan Williams Keynote Interview: Twitter’s had a huge impact on search, so tune-in to this interview with one of its cofounders.

Did I Miss Something?

I probably have missed some search-related sessions. Well, here are some additional resources:

• All sessions that mention search
• All sessions that mention Google (and some speakers from Google)
• All sessions that mention Bing
• All sessions that mention Yahoo

Enjoy SXSW, those heading out!

Types Of Listings

To understand where we’re at now, let me start with some core concepts. There are two basic ways to show up in search results:

Editorial / Organic / Natural Listings:  Any good search engine, such as Google or Bing, has “editorial” or “organic” or “natural” listings. These are listings that appear without anyone paying for them. They are provided as a core product of that search engine, in the same way that a newspaper has a core product of writing stories about topics it believes are of interest to its readers, rather than to its advertisers.

Paid Search / CPC / PPC Listings: Search engines also have paid search ads, sometimes referred to as “CPC” or “PPC” listings. Those acronyms come from the way advertisers are charged for these ads, on a Cost-Per-Click or Pay-Per-Click basis. If you pay, you get listed. When you stop paying, your listing goes away. Similar to newspapers, these ads typically appear alongside — but separate from — editorial content. They’re also not supposed to influence the editorial coverage.

Types Of Search Marketing Activities

What do you call the act of obtaining these search listings?

SEO has been the term used for gaining natural listings and also for people or companies who do such work. The letters stands for Search Engine Optimization (and here’s some history on how we got that term). No, SEO is not about spamming the search engines. It’s an acceptable practice that search engines actively encourage. In the search world, SEO is equal to PR in the “real” world. Good SEO can’t guarantee good search engine “coverage,” any more than good PR can guarantee a favorable newspaper article. But it can increase the odds, if done within acceptable boundaries.

SEM: This has been the term I’ve used for gaining both types of listings, and for people or companies who focus on both.

PPC / CPC / Paid Search: How about a term for just getting paid listings? As you can see, there are multiple terms that can be used. Unlike SEO and SEM, none of those terms works to both define the act of getting listings and the people or companies that do it. This awkwardness is why I think SEM has been coopted more and more over the years to cover paid listings.

The Rise & Fall & Rise Of Paid Search

To understand more about how SEM got coopted, you have to understand where SEM came from in the first place. That means a little history lesson about paid listings.

Search engines, as we know them, were largely born in 1994. From the beginning, they had organic listings. But literally years went by before paid listings were a regular option.

In the summer of 1996, paid listings first appeared– then disappeared — for a few weeks. Open Text, one of the leading search engines at that time, allowed people to buy paid search ads that appeared in its search results. This “Preferred Listing” service resulted in a huge backlash, despite the fact that the ads were clearly labeled. The web was still so new, ads and commercialization still so novel, that this seemed too much like selling out to some who were vocal on mailing lists and newsgroups. Open Text quickly dropped the program.

Paid listings came back in a big way with the launch of GoTo, on Feb. 21, 1998. All too often, Google gets the credit for “pioneering” the paid search revolution. That credit primarily belongs to Bill Gross, who founded the search engine – later renamed Overture, then even later acquired by Yahoo. Gross gambled that a model of selling placement would work. He and his team, including CEO Jeffrey Brewer, stuck with the core idea and distributing those listings to all the other major search engines except Google.

My 2000 In Review: AdWords Launches; Yahoo Partners With Google; GoTo Syndicates article covers this more, including how Google launched its own AdWords system. Google’s first paid ad appeared in December 1999, and the company quickly established the AdWords self-serve model the next year. But Google was greatly helped in its success because GoTo’s trailblazing gave it cover for commercializing its own results.

Are SEOs Who Do Paid Search Still SEOs?

As paid listing opportunities grew, some SEOs started doing that work in addition to gaining editorial listings. That caused some to wonder if “search engine optimization” still best described what they were doing. That’s why in 2001, I proposed that “search engine marketing” be used as an umbrella term. As I wrote then:

As the nature of search engine promotion has expanded and matured, the label “search engine optimization” hasn’t seemed to cover what some companies and individuals feel they do. But what should come to replace it, if anything?

The venerable phrase “search engine optimization” originally emerged to cover the optimization that was done for crawler-based search engines. Now directories are a big part of the search engine mix, as are paid listing services. In many cases, you aren’t really “optimizing” for these other venues, but you certainly are doing work that can influence how people are listed.

Personally, my preferred successor term is “search engine marketing” …. I’ve liked the term because I feel it encompasses many things: optimizing for crawlers, managing paid listings, submitting to directories — you name it. All of these activities are marketing on search engines.

2001: SEM, The Umbrella Term

Let me be perfectly clear. I didn’t coin the term “search engine marketing.” I don’t know who did. But I helped popularize it, in part by consciously used it in my writings and when speaking. When the search marketing industry group SEMPO was formed in 2003, I wrote much of the first SEMPO glossary, which at the time described search engine marketing and SEM as:

Search Engine Marketing: The act of marketing a web site via search engines, whether this be improving rank  in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities.

SEM: Acroymn for search engine marketing and may also be used to refer to a person or company that does search engine marketing (i.e.., “They’re an SEM firm)

FYI, the current definition still maintains SEM as an umbrella term:

SEM: Acronym for “Search Engine Marketing.” A form of internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs).  SEM methods include: search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, digital asset optimization, and paid inclusion.  When this term is used to describe an individual, it stands for “Search Engine Marketer” or one who performs SEM.

How Did SEM Morph Into Paid Search?

About two or three years ago, I noticed more and more people saying SEM when they meant, to me, paid search. I’d hear people say things like “We do SEO and SEM,” as if SEO wasn’t a part of SEM. I found that grating. I’d usually chalk it up to people either making an innocent mistake or perhaps still being new to the space.

Recently, it’s only gotten worse. I also hear it from people from large companies that I’d say should know better. But this is where I have that “Am I swimming against the tide?” feeling. Maybe it’s me that just hasn’t adjusted. I’ll come back to that, but first, how did this change come about?

Blame Yahoo

My first thought is that Yahoo deserves some of the blame. Remember GoTo, which later became Overture? After Yahoo bought Overture, it incorporated the company into a division called Yahoo Search Marketing. The rebranding happened in March 2005. I can remember a number of search marketers finding the name odd. Since the products were all fee-based — and only for Yahoo — what was so “search marketing” about it?

Over the years, Yahoo has been in front of thousands of advertisers suggesting that “search marketing” = buying ads. In fact, if you search for search marketing on on Google, Yahoo ranks in the top results (as it does on Yahoo, too) despite the fact that YSM has little to do overall with search marketing and, after the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal is fully implemented, won’t even exist in its current form.

All that anchor text — all those people linking to YSM with the words “search marketing” in their links is a powerful legacy, though one that doesn’t work at Bing.

Blame Wikipedia

Next on my hit list is Wikipedia. The community-created encyclopedia has a page on search engine marketing that says:

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

There’s no mention of SEO in that definition. SEM is made out to be all paid, paid, paid.

I’ve no doubt that many people have turned to Wikipedia to understand what SEM is about, especially since it ranks in the top results at Google for terms like “sem” and “search marketing” and “search engine marketing.” Many of them assume, especially with Google’s effective endorsement of Wikipedia by ranking it so well, that the page must be factually correct.

In reality, a small edit made without supporting documentation transformed an alternative definition of SEM into the current one that Wikipedia promotes. I found this accident so alarming, so indicative of the mess that Wikipedia can make, that I felt it deserved a special detour: How Wikipedia Turned PPC / Paid Search Into SEM.

Still, SEO wasn’t completely excluded at Wikipedia from SEM until the middle of last year, so it can’t take the full blame. Plus, as my other piece explains, it did make sense for Wikipedia to offer an alternative view. It probably contributed to the shift, but it also reflected a change that was happening for other reasons.

Blame Acronyms!

Perhaps the biggest reason behind SEM being transformed by some to exclusively mean paid search is that we often love acronyms. Search engine optimization had a clear acronym: SEO. Paid search suffered by having two unclear ones: PPC and CPC. Which were you supposed to use? And neither was actually specific to search. Pay-per-click and cost-per-click ads happen outside of search listings. Also, unlike with SEO, if you specialized in paid search, you couldn’t call yourself a “PPC” or a “CPC.”

Given this, is it any wonder that those who focused on paid search reached for another term. SEM was already out there. Why not seize that?

That’s what I think happened, more than anything else. Consider this chart:

Those are the number of searches recorded since 2004 on Google for SEM vs. PPC vs. CPC. You can see the rise for SEM really kicks-off in early 2006 while PPC goes into a steady decline. I think that marks when SEM started becoming the preferred term for paid search, for some.

The Growth Of SEM Due To …?

Does the chart prove that SEM has transformed to mean paid search? I don’t know.

Some of the rise might indeed be fueled by people who no longer use the term PPC, as they did in the past. But some of it might be also because of more and more people are seeking information about search engine marketing, the umbrella term, in general.

There’s no way to know for certain. It’s also confusing that when I double-checked on the popularity of SEM using Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, exact matches (which are what the chart above are also supposed to show), are much lower:

What Should It Be?

In some ways, I feel like I’m back in 2001, when I was watching SEOs struggle with finding the right term to define themselves as they went beyond doing natural listings work. Does it make sense to agree that SEM should now mean work solely on paid listings and also be a name for people and companies that do such work? Especially when plenty of people already talk this way?

I was curious what the market leader in selling such listings was saying: Google. I checked out the transcript from their last earnings call. It’s “search ads” that gets used twice; SEM ads or SEM listings, not at all.

I used to use the term “search ads” myself, though I shifted in the past two years to saying “paid search.” Both those terms have about equal volume according to Google Trends, but neither approaches CPC or PPC.

How about a new acronym? Should we say SEA, for “search engine advertising?” That also work to define a person or a company: search engine advertiser, an SEA.

The advantage to a new acronym is that it would allow SEM to remain an umbrella term for people who do both types of work. Something is needed. There are search engine marketers who don’t want to be miscategorized as only doing paid search, if they do both things.

Perhaps some qualifications? Maybe there’s “paid SEM” and “unpaid SEM.” Or getting crazy, “paid SEM” and “SEO SEM.” Now my head hurts.

One of the stupid things in all this is that I rarely write or say “search engine marketing” or “search engine marketer” any more. Long ago, I shortened those to “search marketing” and “search marketer.” The trends certainly reflect that “search marketing” is more popular than “search engine marketing.”

Funny, then, all this confusion over the acronym SEM when we’re really talking about SM these days.

Anyway, I’d love to know what others think. Please comment and share your thoughts.

We’re getting more and more reports from readers who are seeing a “new” Google look-and-feel for its search results. This is a three column design that Google’s actually been testing for some time. That testing appears to be accelerating.

Google Tackles Its “UI Jazz” Problem, Tests Streamlining Search Options Feature is our story from last November that takes an in-depth look at the new user interface and the features it offers.

At the time, we wrote:

So who sees the changes? About 1% to 3% of Google users, who will be randomly selected. The test will probably run for about six weeks. If successful, expect to see the changes — altered to take in account test feedback — show up across Google soon after that.

That six week period has long come and passed — but the testing continues. Google tells me a variety of slight variations are live in the wild, still being shown to a randomly selected group of people. There is no expected launch date.

Thanks to my recent computer problems, I’ve ended up in the test group. I got a new Dell laptop two days ago. When I loaded it with Firefox and went to Google, I got the new UI. That means Google placed a cookie in Firefox to make it appear for me. My Internet Explorer and Chrome browsers on the laptop still show the “old” or “normal” look.

Below, a few screenshots showing what I currently see:

Above, I’ve highlighted two changes from the screenshots we displayed in our November article. One is that Google now shows your location. Another is that rather than using a + box to let you open options, Google’s testing a chevron approach.

Here’s a look when I open all the options:

One new option is the Updates tab:

That’s Google Real-Time Search, at least the updates portion of it. This didn’t exist when the new UI was first out for testing in November.

Again, our Google Tackles Its “UI Jazz” Problem, Tests Streamlining Search Options Feature article from November has a detailed tour of the new UI. Aside from what I’ve noted above, there’s very little difference between what I see now and what came out then.

Don’t see the new look yourself? Virtually all the features within it are already available now through the two column or two pane view. You just have to “open” the third column manually like this:

After you do this, a series of options will appear to the left of your search results:

See Up Close With Google Search Options for much more about this. Also see these articles more more about Google Real-Time Search and ways to make use of the Updates option:

• Google Launches Real Time Search Results
• How To Search Google Buzz
• Google Real Time Search Now Shows Updates From Facebook Fan Pages

Also, literally just added today to the options area is a new feature for local search refinement:

See our  Google Adds “Nearby” Local Search To Options Panel post today for more about that.

Personally, I can’t wait for Google to roll out the new look. I find it a pain not to have these options available through the easy access the three column design offers. Bring it on, already.

The Foundem complaint/brief with the FCC argues that Google favors its own products and thus “search neutrality” is required to prevent Google from harming competitors accordingly:

Search engines have become the Internet’s gatekeepers and are arguably as essential a component of its infrastructure as the network itself. Google’s overwhelming dominance of search and search advertising, coupled with its ability to arbitrarily penalize rivals and systematically favor its own services, makes the need for search neutrality particularly pressing.

This is similar to an argument recently made by a consortium of minority media organizations:

The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, representing 16 national organizations, [  ] raises the provocative issue of whether net neutrality requirements should be applied to search engines.

A couple of deeper looks at Foundem’s organic search position argue that the company’s ranking on Google may be based on bad SEO practices rather than any manipulation of results by Google. See for example Tribble and EConsultancy for more.

Foundem is requesting some sort of remedy or remedies plural to prevent Google from allegedly “favoring” its own products and services:

There is an urgent need to constrain Google’s domination—either through competition or through regulation.  Despite the recent US and European approval of the search alliance between Yahoo! and Bing, competition in search is unlikely to be sufficient, at least in the short term. Carefully considered regulation is therefore needed to codify the Network and Search Neutrality principles of non-discrimination and transparency and apply them equally across the entire Internet ecosystem.

Let’s ask, hypothetically, what all this might mean in practice. It might mean, for example, not allowing Google to refer traffic to its own properties (e.g., Maps) or it might mean promoting competitors alongside its properties — or both.

In one sense this is not unlike what the EU required Microsoft to do with giving people “browser choice” on new Windows machines. However it would be difficult to implement as a practical matter because it doesn’t involve a one-time settings choice; it involves billions of SERPs and their configuration. Would Google need to list competitors’ sites side-by-side with its own results on SERPs in every instance where Google has a corresponding property?

Google does do this today in a few instances:

But who would get these coveted links? Would only the largest sites in a category be “entitled” to this sort of SERP presentation? Would there need to be a rotation of companies in segment? That would create another round of fighting;  you can imagine the problems.

The Foundem brief cites the example of Google’s removal of links to Yahoo Maps and MapQuest as evidence of what happens when Google “favors” its own properties:

The preferential placement of Google Maps at the top of Google’s search results, which began in May 2007, played a significant role in unseating MapQuest from its position as the US’s leading online mapping service.

For those who don’t recall, Google removed those links to competitive mapping sites in January of 2007. Foundem anticipates the “superior functionality” of Google Maps argument as the explanation for MapQuest’s decline:

Some will suggest that the rapid rise of Google Maps can be attributed to superior functionality.  But an analysis by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise found that many more users were still actively searching for MapQuest than for Google Maps at the time when Google Maps’ traffic was surpassing MapQuest’s; she concluded that Google Maps’ rising traffic was the direct result of its preferential placement in Google’s search results . . .

There’s no question that Google’s ability to refer traffic to its own mapping site has helped Google Maps overtake MapQuest. The truth, however, is much more complicated than Foundem’s contention.

MapQuest failed to add new functionality and invest in the property for more than two years at a time of intensifying competition and feature innovation at Google and Microsoft. Similarly Yahoo didn’t invest in its mapping property either and has similarly suffered. MapQuest brand strength has sustained traffic to some degree and more recently MapQuest has upgraded its functionality. But the truth is that MapQuest was and is generally inferior to Google Maps in most respects.

The MapQuest “case” illustrates the problem at hand. Yes, Google has referred traffic to itself but it also offered a more compelling experience than MapQuest. YouTube is another difficult example; it gets traffic directly from Google but is also the category leader by far. Is Google perpetuating that leadership via Universal Search?

Beyond listing competitors’ sites a potential remedy, as mentioned, would be to prevent Google from referring traffic via Universal Search to any of its own properties. OK. Would that principle then equally be extended to Bing and Yahoo or would it just apply to Google? If it were only applied to Google that would represent a problem of fairness at the very least. Indeed, if the no self-referring rule were to be imposed across the board — no search engine can refer traffic to a property owned and operated by its corporate parent — the search experience would arguably be compromised and innovation might slow down.

Furthermore a 2003 federal court decision (interpreting Oklahoma law) may make all of this “search neutrality” or proposed algorithm regulation moot. According to an opinion in Search King, Inc. v. Google Technology, Inc. Page Rank and search algorithms more broadly are “subjective opinions” entitled to First Amendment protection:

The Court must, therefore, determine whether Google’s manual decrease of Search King’s PageRank was malicious and wrongful, and was not justified, privileged, or excusable. Google asserts that its actions cannot be considered wrongful because PageRanks constitute opinions protected by the First Amendment . . .

Other search engines express different opinions, as each search engine’s method of determining relative significance is unique. The Court simply finds there is no conceivable way to prove that the relative significance assigned to a given web site is false. Accordingly, the Court concludes that Google’s PageRanks are entitled to “full constitutional protection.”  . . .

Having determined that PageRanks are constitutionally protected opinions, the Court must now consider whether, under Oklahoma law, Google is immune from tort liability arising out of the intentional manipulation of PageRanks. In Jefferson County, the Tenth Circuit concluded that under Colorado law, protected speech cannot constitute improper interference in the context of a claim for tortious interference with contractual relations . . . The Court finds that Oklahoma law compels the same conclusion in this case.

Google is dominant in search, but it does have competition and many functions formerly taking place in search (e.g., content discovery) may shift to social media and Facebook in particular. So the idea that Google is the only doorway into content is myopic and incorrect as a practical matter. 

Behind many of the complaints filed is a sense of profound frustration. In addition, there’s also a subtext of entitlement to some sort of position in search results. That argument has even been explicitly made by newspaper publishers who similarly complain of Google’s too-central role in content discovery online. Unable to compete effectively some of these companies are now turning to courts and regulators for relief, alleging that Google is doing improper things or proposing novel theories such as “search neutrality.”

Yet by its very nature “search neutrality” is something of an oxymoron.

There is a problem when one company is too powerful in any industry. But when that comes about not as the result of market manipulation but rather consumer preference it raises a philosophical question about what to do and how to “restore” or promote competition. However the potential remedies, implied by the Foundem brief, are problematic.

I’m no free-markets zealout but I do believe that if courts and regulators start dictating how search algorithms should operate it starts to destroy search and its utility.

See our detailed guide, Google Launches Real Time Search Results to understand how Google Real Time Search works, where it appears and how to use it. Facebook fan page updates now appear within those results, which include all of these sources:

• Twitter tweets
• Google News links
• Google Blog Search links
• Newly created web pages
• Freshly updated web pages
• FriendFeed updates
• Jaiku updates
• Identi.ca updates
• TwitArmy updates
• Google Buzz posts
• MySpace updates
• Facebook fan page updates

All but the last three were part of Google Real Time Search when it launched in December. MySpace material was added this month. So were Google Buzz posts. Our How To Search Google Buzz post provides detailed instructions on how to search on Google Real Time Search for just Buzz or Twitter information.

With Facebook, it’s important to note that it is only Facebook fan page updates that are included. Things that are shared on fan pages by fan page owners — such as links, status updates, photos and vidoes — can now be found in Google Real Time Search. However, comments made by non-owners on fan pages will not be included. Nor will updates that are made on personal pages. Our Google & Bing’s Unequal Facebook Status Update Deals article explains more about this. And while Bing is getting more data than Google, as covered in that article, it has yet to make any of it findable.

Want to see some of the Facebook content. Try this link. That configures Google Real Time Search to show only updates from Facebook, as you’ll see here:

From that link, you can add more words to narrow your search to particular topics that appear in Facebook fan page updates. For example, here’s a search for updates about the Olympics that come from Facebook fan pages:

You can see that the first update is from the Global Laugher Network fan page, as I’ve pointed at below:

This is also a good time for search marketers and marketers in general to think again about Facebook, if you haven’t already. More and more Facebook content has been made visible to search engines over the years. Also in that time, fan pages were added but still aren’t used by some. Google’s move makes having Facebook fan pages even more essential. Without one, you’re missing out on a chance to be found within yet another area, Google’s real time results.

And hey, speaking of fan pages, a reminder. You can follow Search Engine Land on its own Facebook fan page. I also maintain my own page here.

Postscript (4:45pm PT): I’ve been watching Google Real Time Search results closely since the launch. So far, I don’t see any Facebook fan page updates making it into Google’s real time box in its regular results. I’m sure they’ll come, however. They do show when you drill-down into real time results.

For example, consider this search for public schools:

After monitoring for a good 10 minutes, no Facebook updates appeared in the real time box. But if you click on the link above the box, the full results did have a Facebook update:

As I said, I’m sure Facebook visibility will improve as the launch matures. Ironically, despite us having posted this article to our our Facebook Fan Page:

You still can’t find that update in Google Real Time Search: