1. High level site previews in search results
2. A multimedia search within a site function
3. A social layer which, among other things, allows Volunia users to share information and connect to one another

My sense is that it is the social layer which will be most appreciated by Volunia users. Let’s look at each.

Volunia Search Result Previews Offer A “Fly-Over” Site View

During his launch presentation, (in Italian, starts at 40 minute mark) Volunia founder Massimo Marchiori described search users as similar to chickens, trapped in cages and incapable of flying.

Users have been forced to choose search results by consulting one of those classic 10 item title, summary and link lists for too long. Wouldn’t it be nice if users were freed from their cages, and not only, were actually able to fly over a site, viewing a visual or a grid map, before committing to visit it?

Volunia, perhaps from volare, to fly, offers two types of high level site map previews, potentially freeing users from commitment tyranny. The first type, a visual map, aims to group areas of a site together in neighborhoods.

Figure 1: Volunia search result site fly-over: visual map

The second site preview map is in the form of a grid, reminiscent of computer folders. The expectation is that this format will be more useful to people searching from devices with small displays, like smartphones.

Figure 2: Volunia search result site fly-over: grid map

Interactive drill-down versions of the maps are also available from a Volunia menu bar which is visible while navigating a site. Site owners can improve the maps using a Volunia provided sitemap editor.

Figure 3: Volunia sitemap editor

Result previews aren’t exactly a new concept – Ask.com introduced their binoculars feature in 2004.

Where Volunia differs is in their choice to show a site map preview instead of a page preview. Many searches are indeed navigational in nature, one reason Google provides their sitelinks for some queries.

Volunia may be on to something.

Volunia Wants To Surface Multimedia Otherwise Hidden In A Site

Initially the primary focus in Web search was on textual documents, particularly the html kind, rich in semantic structure with their glorious title, heading and paragraph tags.

Oh, I didn’t mention the links between documents, did I? Other Web content formats, from PDF files to images and then video posed much greater obstacles to search engine indexing for a number of reasons.

Today, major search engines like Google offer navigation links to enable a user to search just images or video.

Ambitious searchers can usually find an advanced search syntax page which allows them to limit their searches to specific sites and file types, but for the most part major search engines have taken the “don’t make me think” approach, providing searchers with a blend of media types in search results, what Google calls universal search.

Volunia on the other hand wants to make it easy for a user to discover the multimedia richness hidden in sites like NASA by providing a very visible multimedia site search filter.

Figure 4: Volunia's multimedia search filter

The Web Has Come Alive, Says Volunia: Volunia’s Social Layer

It isn’t immediately clear how useful this feature will prove to be: after all, even if we want to follow the “wisdom of the crowd”, there’s no way to know if the site’s current visitors from Volunia are actually happy with their choice, nor would it be clear to what extent one searcher’s expectations for a page align with those already visiting that page.

The same visitor counts are also available as layers on the site navigation maps.

Seek & Meet: Interact With Other Volunia Users

What might arguably be Volunia’s greatest innovation is in letting fellow search travelers to a page interact with each other, what Volunia calls seek and meet, a feature which feels very reminiscent of Google’s now closed Sidewiki, albeit with two key differences. The first is that users can interact in realtime.

Figure 6: Volunia seek and meet interactive site chat

This birds of a feather real time information sharing might prove useful in a number of situations where people are looking for pre- and post- purchase information.

In the pre-purchase phase, a searcher might want to interact with other users to better understand the product or service they’re considering, not to mention to discover what alternatives others are considering.

Sometimes, it’s nice just to have confirmation that we’re making the right choice. In the post-purchase phase, searchers might be able to resolve support issues by consulting with other searchers – potentially reducing a company’s support costs while providing interactive peer to peer support 24 hours a day.

Each Volunia user is able to fill in a personal profile, much like any social network. The matchmaking possibilities are clearly endless, but I suspect it would be best if I don’t go there….

It isn’t rare to see glowing online reviews written by someone with a connection to a product or service, and equally harsh reviews from competitors or ex-employees with an ax to grind. It doesn’t take much to imagine people attempting to scam the system by introducing fake search users to interact with other searchers.

It remains to be seen if “seek and meet” really is something people will take to. Real time search collaboration will well depend on a critical mass of socially oriented searchers congregating on the same sites at the same time, no easy feat for a niche search engine.

Site owners will undoubtedly be pleased with the second apparent difference to Google’s Sidewiki: commenting can be disabled if desired, something Google didn’t allow.

Volunia, The Company, And A Few Volunia Tidbits

According to data published by Italian business paper Il Sole 24 Ore, Volunia was founded in 2008 by Massimo Marchiori and entrepreneur Mariano Pireddu, with Pireddu providing €2 million in funding to date. You might not immediately recognize Massimo Marchiori’s name, yet as an academic Massimo has been working on the theoretical issues of Web search for years.

His seminal 1997 paper, The Quest for Correct Information on the Web: Hyper Search Engines, would serve as one of the sources of inspiration for two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who would acknowledge Marchiori’s contribution to their own work, Google.

During Volunia’s beta phase, over 100,000 people are being invited to become “power user” beta testers. The Volunia user interface is in 12 languages but Marchiori said during the launch presentation that the actual index coverage isn’t limited to those languages.

The Volunia team has ideas for Volunia “extensions”, i.e. new functionality, which will be added to the core, the hard part which has already been done. Advertising will be added to the service.

Marchiori Says Social Needs To Emerge In Search

In an introductory video, Massimo notes that Volunia stems from an idea he’s harbored for several years, an idea for a “different perspective of what the search engine of the future should be”. In the Il Sole 24 Ore report Massimo said “The Web is a living place, there’s information, but there’s also people. The social dimension, already present, just needs to emerge”.

Bing, which started incorporating social signals from Facebook in 2010, and Google, which launched its social search in 2009, would probably both argue that the social dimension to search has already emerged. So would upstart blekko and to a lessor degree, the Russian Yandex.

Armani, Chianti, Ferrari… And Volunia

Volunia is based in Italy, not in Silicon Valley as one might have guessed. Italy actually has a history of search engine excellence. Google may well power most Italian portals today, but the talent behind a now defunct Italian search engine, Arianna, led Ask.com to locate its European R&D headquarters in Pisa.

The Reality Check: Search Isn’t Easy: Volunia Faces Many Challenges

The basic task of a search engine, finding, indexing and retrieving the world’s information, is a complex one. The size of the Web is immense. There’s the problem of searcher intent: we know what we’re looking for when we type a brief search query, but those few words are often open to multiple interpretations.

Google has conditioned searchers to expect lightning speed and mostly fresh and relevant results. Volunia will have to perform well on all these fronts and navigate thorny issues of privacy.

Many start-ups have nonetheless tried to compete with Google and Bing. Some, like Cuil, ran out of funding before gathering significant market share; others like blekko, with far greater funding, are still working hard to win over hearts and minds. Whether Volunia will be able to pull this off remains to be seen.

Kick The Volunia Tires Yourself!

Volunia has a sign-up form for those who want to try it out. Go kick the tires and support the underdog! From messages that I’ve seen on Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook, very few have actually had a chance to actually use Volunia, credentials are only dribbling out, most likely in an attempt to avoid problems similar to what Google faced when they first opened Google Analytics to too many people at once. I based the considerations made (and images) in this article on demo videos released by Volunia in order to give you a preview of what to expect.

I have wasted so much of my time on this planet saying “Do Not Translate Your Keywords” and still every day I see or hear of examples of international SEM or SEO campaigns where doing that has been part of sowing the seeds of failure of that campaign.

A Case Study In “Localizing” Keywords

That word “Localizing” has become especially dangerous since the translation fraternity commandeered it! But for the purposes of this column, we simply mean choosing the keywords a local searcher would have chosen – we do not mean translating them.

To this end, Anders Hjorth of Paris-based BDBL Media presented a fascinating case study at the latest International Search Summit. Anders is a long standing speaker at SMX and is someone I’ve bumped into at numerous conferences around the globe.

He took a project which required the promotion of “Glasses” internationally (in fact, to 5 different countries) and he then compared the outputs of two different teams. Team X was a combination of Google Adwords Editor and Google Translate – in other words, automated translation. Team Y was a group of search marketers each of whom spoke the target language in question natively.

Some Surprising & Some Shocking Findings

You’ll not be surprised to learn that Team X, the results from the automated translation team, were not as good as those from the human Team Y. But nonetheless, there were some rather disturbing findings.

Firstly, Anders expected that the X Team, the automated translation approach, would result in a lower potential daily budget. It didn’t. In fact, it was substantially more than the “human” team.

This required some investigation — the result of which was that the automated approach was including a great many “keywords” which were incorrectly inflating the value or placing them in the wrong categories:

• Incorrect Translation
• Duplicated Keyword Skewing Categorization
• Inappropriate Keywords
• Weird And Wonderful

The Xtreme Consequences Of The X-Team

It’s easy to understand the idea that keywords were added which covered products which were outside the “scope” of the campaign as a result of incorrect translation. This online glasses retailer was not interested in selling “Solar Telescopes” for instance, but the phrase was included in the calculations for the daily budgets.

The carefully categorized seed keywords used for the translation, also no longer matched the categories of the translations — as a result, the X-team mixed up the categories completely which had the effect that keywords in different categories were competing against each other inflating the estimated cost of the campaign.

Further, “Human Eye” can only be described as inappropriate as can “Man Sunglasses”. But for weird and wonderful instances, look no further than “Bezel Child”, “Optician Optician”, “Eye Views” or “Telescope Mounts”.

The Automated Translation X Team Output For The UK Versus The Human Version

You can also see in the above graphic, a considerable difference in the length of the long tail, the development of which really requires human input and knowledge.

This over-inflation of the spends means that if you really went with this approach, you would be setting a larger budget and spending money more rapidly than you should, and you’d be getting much lower conversions. It’s the worst of both worlds.

It’s Worse… There Are Keywords Missing

The situation was actually much worse than just that the estimated spends had been over-inflated. Very important keywords, including examples such as “Spectacles” or “Shades” for the UK, were completely missing — as were many of the staple “Buy” keywords so significant for online retailers.

Ander’s case study was great proof, if proof is still needed, that translating keywords leads to disaster. Spend too high with lower potential conversions AND some key converting keywords not even in the mix.

Just Because It’s Google Doesn’t Make It Right

Google has been offering Google Adwords support within the Google Translator Toolkit to make it easier for advertisers since the end of 2009, but that doesn’t mean you should be using it just because it’s Google.

To be fair, on the Google blogpost they do offer a cautionary note, “Reaching foreign-language customers requires more than campaign localization.To attract international customers your landing pages should also be translated.”

Sorry Google, but this method of translating campaigns does not work the for the campaigns, never mind the landing pages!

The Digital Lotus

Anders also presented a curious marketing model to help understand the prioritization of advertising fields which he calls the “Digital Lotus”. His point is to start with the contents, “If you don’t have contents in the target language, then don’t talk to us,” he said.

The next level is the distribution of information virally, then Adwords and Facebook and then onto remarketing. See below.

The Digital Lotus

Forget The Principles, What’s The Bottom Line?

I’m sure some people think that I’ve spent the last decade ranting on about how you “Must not translate your keywords!” think that I’m a purist or that I’ve completely lost the plot.

Not so. Here we show that if you’re a client, translating keywords will cost you a considerable money or your job. And if you’re an agency, it can certainly cost you the client.

Even though Google’s rate of growth outside the US and UK exceeds the US by some 20%, it still seems significantly behind both the Chinese performance of Baidu at 85% growth over the same quarter in 2010 or Yandex’s 65% growth over the same period.

Of course, both Baidu and Yandex are helped by their market leading postions in growing economies. The IMF is forecasting 9.4% growth for China in 2011 and 4.2% for Russia. By comparison, the UK’s growth rate is expected to be 1.1% and the US a rattling 1.5%.

Google Baidu and Yandex Compared Financially

The chart above shows the relative revenues of Google versus Baidu and versus Yandex which gives us a great perspective on what we’re talking about. Although Google growth is less than the other two engines in percentage terms, in real dollars, it’s actually a much much bigger number.

Strong Growth Markets Help Baidu & Yandex

Additionally, looking at percentages is a little misleading when we consider that many of the economies where Google is successful, such as in western Europe, have very high penetrations of Google use and the scope for growth is much more limited.

Both Yandex and Baidu have all their operations in countries where Internet penetration is relatively low giving them great scope for advancement.

Google Baidu and Yandex Compared In Revenues As a Percentage Of The Total

This second graphic above seems to suggest that Google is losing market share internationally. There is a grain of truth in drawing that conclusion – but it is a relatively small “grain”.

Firstly, Yandex only become a publicly quoted company this year giving us much more insight into the statistics relating to its performance and enabling us to include its figures on this chart.

However, what it does suggest is that Google is missing out on two key markets where the search engine market is growing rapidly meaning that both Yandex and Baidu are increasing their share of the global market — at least in dollar terms.

Stellar Performance From Baidu With Room To Grow

Baidu CEO Robin Li described the results as “stellar”. He also highlighted the fact that China’s search industry is still in its early stages and that Baidu has “Enormous room for continuing growth as users and online marketing customers become increasingly sophisticated.”

Mr. Li also pointed to three factors which had helped Baidu along in this quarter namely traffic growth, improved monetization from the Pheonix platform which drives the contextual ads and greater uptake of search advertising by large corporate advertisers.

The use of more sophisticated keyword matching for Pheonix Nest through something called “Advanced [quick] match” has been particularly successful at capturing user intent and generating strong click through rates.

Personalized Search Lands On Baidu’s Homepage

Robin Li has expressed particular satisfaction at the launch of the Baidu personalized homepage, which is not personalized search as we know it — but automated changes to the content shown on the initial homepage before the user even begins to search. This is based on search history, of course, and if a user has a history of searching for movies, for instance, then they will likely see a link on the homepage to local cinema times.

Turning to mobile, ironically, Baidu is now also the default search engine on over 80% of branded handsets in China that use the Android system — which just goes to show that Android dominance hasn’t so far been leading to greater search query shares for Google.

Yandex Says Hello To Turkey

For Yandex, this is only the second quarter where we have detailed financial information but CEO Arkady Volozh highlighted the market benefit, “While our markets are fluid and competitive by nature, they are large and are growing rapidly.” Yandex also made the first major investment in a new market with their launch in Turkey which will have had very little impact on the quarter’s figures.

Blekko

Now Blekko has secured $30 million in new funding from a range of earlier investors and new investors. Most notable among the second group is Russian search engine Yandex. The Russian search engine is making a strategic investment in Blekko and Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh will join the blekko board.

Yandex operates in its native Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey and has a presence in Palo Alto, where its Yandex Labs is based.

I spoke earlier this week to Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta who said that Yandex will help his company in a number of ways beyond the funding, including providing some technology infrastructure support. As a result of the new funding and Yandex support Blekko’s index and search results will improve considerably “in the tail.” Skrenta believes that for the most common search queries Blekko has been highly competitive but not done as well for more obscure or longer query strings.

This new funding and association with Yandex is a significant accomplishment for Blekko and ensures that the company has the resources to continue to develop its unique take on search/social search — and remain a thorn in Google’s side — into the foreseeable future.

Resolving indexing or duplication issues are usually top of the list when working with a new domain, but how can you achieve the same level of performance once the obvious SEO wins are in place?

Please step forward, often overlooked rich snippets.

Google’s promotion of semantic data has a long history, and they often prioritise new schemas before they have general uptake on the web.

The Schema.org agreement with Yahoo! & Bing is the most recent example of that, and is firmly in the tradition of the Sitemaps.org agreement from 2006.

What’s The Competitive Advantage Of These Tools?

Well, we know that SERP clickthrough rates for organic results are exponentially weighted towards the top three positions from AOL’s historic blunder which revealed click data for their – Google supplied – search results in August 2006.

Here’s a summary of the top ten CTRs and their share of the total clicks.

In addition to this raw (if now somewhat elderly) data, we can also access many eye tracking studies performed on Google’s SERPs, which tend to corroberate the clickthrough data by showing high searcher attention rates to the top three ranking positions.

Source: Eyetools.com

We also see in other heatmap studies, the disruptive impact of images, or graphical icons to draw that attention away from plain text listings.

So if I, as an SEO, can only increase my organic traffic by 1.67% by improving a ranking from position 10 to position 4, what value would you give to a 2-3% improvement in CTR?

Well, it would be the same as shifting from position #4 to #2 – a not insignificant leap for high value commercial terms, especially when multiplied actross all countries operated in.

And yet we can achieve that improvement simply by drawing attention to our SERP snippet.

Using Semantic Data For Business Profit

Thanks to Google’s championing of modern web standards, we’ve long been able to indicate to Google the products we sell and the stores that stock them.

And so we can gain inclusion to Google Universal results via Google Product search and, for example, outrank eBay in France for ‘buy [product]‘ terms like ‘achat flip flops’, getting into that golden top three position at the same time.

With the product image included in the product feed, we additionally draw the searcher attention down to our snippet, beating the average CTR giving us the equivalent of a position two listing. And indeed, we find this impact reflected in our analytics.

Great news! But if we were can also bring in other visual cues and optimise the snippet text itself, we can further improve our SERP CTR.

With the release of Schema.org protocols, we can encode these snippets to make sure Google triggers enhanced listings for our business.

We can bring in aggregate review ratings, highlighting service quality or, if we are a retailer, the quality of the product offered.

We can trigger onebox results for timely events in the searcher’s location – great for running local outlet offers.

And we can ensure rich media content is included in Google’s video onebox,which is always prominant when triggered.

Many of these elements are triggered more frequently for websites when their Google feed lists the relevant information, in addition to the semantic markup encountered on the HTML page itself.

If you want to gain a visual edge over your competition – in any territory – then ensuring you comply to the protocols, and frequently update your feeds with the same information, will allow you to outperform your SERP ranking in terms of traffic driven to your website.

A final benefit is that having ensured you are tagging up these important elements, the search engine visitor will be confronted by a landing page with review content, rich media videos, images, PDF spec sheets and more, all of which will help better convert that visitor to a sale in any country.

The elephant in the room during our conversation was Google. You can’t discuss Yandex without making comparisons to Google – as a sort of yardstick.

But that doesn’t mean that Yandex copies Google, as Ilya is very keen to point out. The first slides he has lined up to show me, were originally put together as a retort to Robert Scoble who described Yandex as a clone of Google in answer to a question on Quora.

That’s not going to go down well at Yandex towers in Leo Tolstoy street where everything is developed “To answer all the questions of the user” and definitely not because a Californian competitor – who’s also active on Russian turf – happens to come to similar but not identical conclusions.

The Yandex – Google Timeline

In fact, the slides list a range of things which Yandex launched first pointing out firstly that they in fact launched as a search engine in 1997, a year earlier than Google. Yandex also launched maps first in 2004, Google a year later in 2005. Yandex was the first to launch news search in 2000, Google in 2002. Blog search came out of Russia in 2004, but out of California only in 2006. Yandex had already launched an RSS aggregator in 2005, Google followed in 2006.

For the sceptics amongst you, here’s more proof you can check yourselves. According to Whois records, google.com was registered on the 15th September 1997 and yandex.ru just eight days later on the 23rd September 1997.

Meanwhile, yandex.com was registered one year later than its Russian forebear whereas Google took another six and half years to claim google.ru on the 4th March, 2004. So if Yandex copied Google after eight days, well you at least have to credit them with amazing foresight!

The Birth Of Yandex

Ilya also shows me this fascinating picture which was taken in 1981 when, as young men, Arkady Volozh (on the far left) and Ilya (center) were just going up to university and yet already knew each other well. It was to be another 16 years later in 1997 that yandex.ru was finally launched and a great many adventures inbetween.

Ilya’s father was a well known Russian geologist credited with identifying tectonic anomalies in the Urals resulting in the discovery of huge reserves of Chromite. He was awarded a State prize in the days when the Soviet Union did that sort of thing.

Arkady Volozh is also the son of geologists and the two originally met in Almata in Kazakhstan in their formative school years. (Curiously, Arkady Volozh also mentioned to me separately that the families of Sergey Brin and Arkady know each other too).

Ilya left university keen to develop software but in 1989 he thought that “Search was a very stupid idea” – to be fair there was no Internet and no Web at that time.

Computers were barely computers (I can vouch for this – I remember the steam driven machines of that era) and to load the early data and text search software Comptek, for instance, meant loading 9 floppy disks of installation code. Ilya had his own software plans and team.

Finally, in 1990, Arkady had his way and managed to recruit Ilya to the Arcadia team. Ultimately, this led to Ilya having the chance to make his mark on history since a few years later, Russian venture capitalists were looking to invest in anything to do with the Internet.

This brought focus onto a particular Arcadia project which as a result needed a name. In 1993 Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich developed a search engine for “non-structured information with Russian morphology”.

Ilya proposed the name “Yandex”, derived from the idea of “Yet Another inDEX” though in Russian there is an extra play on words as the first letter “я” (pronounced “ya”) also means “I”. It stuck and in 1997 yandex.ru was born, the search engine launched in 1998 and in 2000 Yandex became a company.

Back in 1994, the kind of search Ilya was working on is illustrated by the image below which illustrates the key feature which made Yandex great and which Google didn’t replicate until 2006, some 12 years later — that is Russian morphology text search.

The search term in the search box is a two word search term in one particular grammatical form – the highlighted red “finds” in the text show terms which, though they match the search term, have been changed in spelling by the rules of Russian.

The graphic also illustrates quite clearly the kind of work the Arcadia/Comptek team were working on and which later evolved into web search.

In fact, the parallel paths of development of the Google elephant and Yandex are fascinating and dominate a lot of our conversation. Ilya refers to a statement published on Google explaining its search techniques in 2000 which said that, ” Google does not use “stemming” or support “wildcard” searches. In other words, Google searches for exactly the words that you enter in the search box.”

The wording implied that this would result in more relevant results. Bearing in mind that Yandex’s birth in 1997 had directly followed a solution to conduct “inexact” search using stemming which was the only way relevance could be achieved in Russian, you can understand that there must have been a few wry smiles in Leo Tolstoy Street.

I ask Ilya when he first became aware of Google? “Danny Sullivan brought it to my attention in an article”. I believe he means a piece called “Counting clicks and looking at links” from August 1998 announcing the new experimental Google still on a Stanford University URL.

Ilya goes on to describe the history of Google’s roll-out to Russia, “In 2000, Google was focusing on distribution deals, 2001 was the year of internationalization where they were focusing on the completeness of the index and had Russian content, but it was not until 2006 that we considered Google a threat. That was the year Google started supporting Russian morphology”.

He observes, “We were lacking resources and didn’t have the right people in the right jobs. We had to make changes and to re-organise. Fortunately, we found some great guys who saved us.”

Intriguingly, Ilya attributes the Yandex versus Google performance in 2008-2009, when Yandex lost market share to their search performance in 2006-2007.

“There seems to be a two year delay before users really notice the difference when you’ve made improvements,” he says. “We introduced MatrixNet machine learning in the beginning of 2009 and only really noticed a significant difference in search shares in 2010.” He adds, “It’s harder to develop a search engine than a space program, five countries have their own search engines, 20 have space programs.” At this point, Head of Search, Anatoly Orlov has joined us and chips in, “Search is rocket science!”

How Yandex Is Different From Other Search Engines

The Yandex search page is quite different from Google’s. Whilst Yandex has a search box only page for those in a hurry on the short URL, Ya.ru, the main page looks rather more portal-esque. Yandex did test using the search box only page for a few weeks, but found that the majority of Russian users prefer their normal busier page.

Ilya points out that people can change which search page is the default, “We even allow users to turn off some of the ads,” he says. One thing is very clear, Yandex is and has always been obsessed with search and with satisfying the needs of the user.

The search home features no entertainment, no dating and Ilya confesses, “I don’t watch television, but I understand people do watch it.” There are apparently a lot of children at home so that’s perhaps understandable. The normal search page may appear like a portal but there’s more to it than that.

Yandex views it (explained below) as the answer to the question, “What’s new? What’s new around me?” So that’s why there’s news, weather, traffic information (crucial to Muscovites), market news, trending money and automotive — Yandex’s top vertical market. This being Russia, the price of oil is included in the list of exchange rates!

Like all search engines, Yandex watches its search quality performance very closely. Ilya shows me a series of graphs from AnalyzeThis.ru – a Russian independent SEO firm which tracks the quality performance of search engines in Russia. Ilya was keen to stress that this is just one of the sources that provides such data — but I found the result interesting and worth sharing.

The first graphic below shows the percentage of missing navigational results across Yandex, Google and Bing in Russia where the lower the score the better the result.

Despite a brief Yandex blip (the reasons for which are unclear), overall Google and Yandex are tracking each other on this metric very closely giving a very similar quality of result to the user – but the Bing results are not so good, although they have shown some improvement since October last year.

The next quality measure relates to the measuring whether original text is ranked higher or lower than content copies – with a higher score giving a better result. This is a major problem for a lot of us who want to allow syndication of our content but don’t want the syndicators to achieve better results than we do.

In Russia, Google is the poorest performer on this measure beaten even by Bing. Yandex scores much better than either Google or Bing with a score of 50% over Google’s 20% and dropping performance. Of course, the Farmer update won’t be counted in these figures but if you were Google looking at these figures – you’d have wanted to target content farms too!

We now turn to a favourite topic of everyone – spammy results. The better results for users are those with a lower percentage of spam – naturally.

Guess who wins? In the AnalyzeThis.ru index since 2009 to the present day, Yandex has never been beaten by either Google or Bing. They have won a reputation for being very tough on spam indeed and these figures seem to confirm that.

Does a search engine provide purely commercial answers to commercial questions? Here, the measure in our chart below is better, the lower the percentage and once again Yandex wins in Russia beating Bing and wacking Google.

Most significantly, Yandex is showing a continuous downward trend, Bing similarly and at points has been in the lead. Google has not been performing well on this measure. Perhaps Google doesn’t target this measure?

Yandex may be perceived to be serving only one country – but that’s not quite true. There are 15 countries which use the Cyrillic alphabet and 77 regions in Russia itself – and Yandex aims to be local everywhere. Culture, standard of living and average income are very different across the wide area Yandex serves – so search results need to vary dramatically too – including autocomplete.

Our final chart looks at the percentage of local results with a higher score the winner. Here, Yandex seriously kicks butt with Google way behind and as far as Bing is concerned, well their local results look like they might be an accident.

Yandex.com, the Latin-alphabet and English version of Yandex is described as “experimental” and, despite creating a stir with bloggers in the west, it is explained that Yandex had been working on indexing sites in other markets for some time and the intention was not to go international, but to enable Russian users to carry out Latin text searches without leaving Yandex.

Roughly 7% of Russians know English, but only 1% know English well- enough to be happy to navigate in English and to English-language sites. Nonetheless, the Russian press got very excited about Yandex heading into international markets.

So I ask Ilya directly if there are any plans to expand Yandex internationally. The answer confirms that there are plans, but of course nothing specific they can share with me.

Then, we get into what you need to succeed with a search engine in local markets. The language and handling the language well is a major factor but, “Having a local database affects some 18% of searches.” There are also market specific things you need to do. Says Ilya, “We’re getting pretty clear to understanding how to do it!”

Of vKontakte there is a feeling that not enough is being done by their parallel in the social network world – in other words, the local player and number one social network. It turns out though, that “vKontakte” is the number one search term on Yandex reflecting the Facebook position in Google’s logs.

I conclude that Yandex is watching Google very closely and looking for its weak underbelly before launching a carefully thought out attack. It seems that this will be in markets where Google is number one, but only because there’s no contest and in fact Google doesn’t really have a solid infrastructure and localized approach in that market despite its position – and no local database.

We’ll be dealing with Yandex’s machine learning approach to its algorithms next time and the implications for Russian SEO and SEO in general.

How many other industries do you know where the principal worry is not about the second or third player or even smaller competitors — but about the also ran which only has a two percent share in the market — namely Google?

In September of last year, the CEO from Naver’s parent company NHN Communications, Kin Sang-hun, said that Naver has indeed a long way to go when competing with Google. He added that, Naver is interested in “real-time searches and particularly connecting with social network services, since the popularity of Twitter and me2day has been rising.”

South Korean Search Engine Market Share

In fact, Naver’s market share did apparently take a battering at the beginning of 2010, nothing much to do with Google directly though. According to figures from KoreanClick from May 2010, Naver’s share has dropped to 63% with number two search engine Daum having 21% with Nate in third place at 9%. No huge shift to report in relation to Google.

Third place Nate, which is run by SK Communications, believes it is making inroads into Naver’s market share thanks to its introduction of a semantic search system which uses the network of relationships between terms to help it decide what user were really looking for.

In fact, the bullish President of SK Communications has gone on record as saying that Nate could gain more ground from Naver and Daum and expand its share to even as high as 20 percent or more than doubling its current size.

Meanwhile, closest on Naver’s heals is Daum which has just announced its financial figures for 2010 showing a significantly improved performance overall as a portal with net profit virtually hitting $100 million compared with just $28 million in the previous year. Search advertising grew 44% year on year so growth was only partly as a result of search itself — but this is still not a performance to be sniffed at.

Daum also has some significant partnerships including a recent agreement from January with Twitter to enable Twitter users to sign in directly to Twitter from Daum. Meanwhile, it takes its advertising from Google and has done since 2008 when it switched from Yahoo.

Part of the fallout of the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership was that in November Naver moved away from using Yahoo’s Overture system to run its own home built advertising system.

According to Yahoo Inc regulatory filings at the time, “The Naver search engine brought in less than one percent of its gross profit for the first half of the year (2010).” Regardless of what Yahoo says, the fact is that Naver is now able to keep the revenue from advertising strengthen its financial position.

Naver has already launched its social search system where you’re able to search through information uploaded on social network sites which, according to Kim San-hun, will make searches more “personal”. Daum followed that with its launch of a similar social search system in December of last year. The company is also planning to launch voice search in order to more effectively compete with Google.

Through Shopping.Naver.com, the NHN Corporation is also planning to take on eBay which last year acquired Auction.co.kr and Gmarket.com giving it a stronger foothold in Korea. Shopping.Naver.com operates as a middleman collected commissions for customers buying on partner sites, but they are supposedly launching a new version or approach to this just around about now.

Keeping A Close Eye On Competition In Korea

So should Naver be worrying about Google or its local competition? The flippant amongst you would answer “both”, but I think there is a strong argument that Naver must track Google very closely.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, whilst south Korea could be described as an advanced and sophisticated market, most of the search engine developments there mimic those by Google whether it’s semantic changes or voice search.

Secondly, it only takes Daum or Google to fall into Google’s camp fully as a trojan horse to upset the market entirely, remove a player and put Google rapidly into a much stronger position to change the rules overnight.

Naver has an aspiration to deliver search in some fabulous ways too. Take this statement by NHN CEO, Kim Hun-sang, “In the future, information an services will be provided without the user having to type in requests but rather the search engine realizing the intention of the user first.” Wow. What will it do then — send me an email?

Meanwhile, for advertisers, the market is straightforward and clear. Naver first, followed by Daum and then Nate.

The Digital Divide

I had the opportunity to sit on a roundtable of India’s leading digital experts all giving their opinions of where the market is going and what we as Search and Digital Marketers need to do to advance the online advertising market. The biggest question was how do we close this Digital Divide?

According to the India Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) annual report released last month, online advertising in India is estimated to have reached Rs. 785 billion ($17.3 million) for FY 2009-10. Spend for 2010-2011 is expected to increase by 28% to Rs. 5.34 billion ($21.9 million). Text ads in Search and links on sites make up a little more than half of that spend projected to grow to Rs 459 billion ($10.1 million)

There are over 70 million Internet users and India and the online advertising spend reaches a fraction of those users so the growth potential is significant. The problem is few large companies are leveraging online adverting.

The verticals with the largest spend online are Auto, Financial Services, Online Publishers, Travel and IT & Telecom. CPG companies have not really adapted but seem to be showing interest. This follows a similar pattern to what we have seen in the US, Europe and in Asia.

The key to rapid growth and adoption is education. I am hopeful that with more of the right information, case studies and seminars, as well as publications like Search Engine Land can help educate senior marketers at India-based companies to at least try digital techniques that have shown to be very effective in the rest of the world.

Mobile Broadband Internet Availability

Thanks first go to Vivek Bhargava and his awesome team at Communicate 2 who loaned me one of their 3G broadband cards to use on my trip, which turned out to be a lifesaver. Due to the traffic problems in all the major cities, I spent a lot of time in a car or taxi going from place to place. The WiFi allowed me to stay connected and with the exception of a few locations, I did not miss a beat with getting things done or the occasional Skype call.

For those that don’t have a WiFi card or dongle, MTS a large Indian mobile phone company, just announced they will partner with Meru, the largest taxi company in India, to offer passengers the free use of a  WiFi data card when in the cab. This service is rolling out in Delhi then will expand to many other large cities.

Also at the roundtable, one of the speakers talked about a very interesting trend in rural India. Most of those who live there are poor farmers, so they will often buy one mobile phone and then the family will gather around as they download the dialogue from popular movies.

They are not able to watch them since they don’t have a TV but they can at least listen to them in either English or the translation of a local language. This is very similar to Western families gathering around the radio listening to dramas and comedies.

Conferences & Events

The trip was capped off by speaking at the ClickAsia Summit in Mumbai. This was  the largest digital marketing event ever in India and did a great job of kick starting a round of events and enthusiasm for large scale broad focused conferences as we are accustomed to in more advanced digital markets. ClickAsia will be quickly followed by Ad:Tech India to be held in New Delhi India at the end of April.

The vibe a the event was amazing and thee was a real hunger for best practices and how they can adapt to the local Indian markets. The people wanted to know about everything and wanted more at the breaks and at lunch crowing around all the speakers trying to get every morsel of information from them. There were many entrepreneurs hawing new products and services for the local market as well as those hoping to get funding to go global

I did see a lot of smaller local events and seminars. In nearly every city I visited, I saw advertisements and or received invites to attend these during social media or via my India network of friends. These were cheap by western standards, but they were well attended.

The seminars I conducted were catering to more established online companies helping them to take digital to the next level. They were most interested in how to make the business case for search, social and quite frankly, any sort of digital advertising as well as best practices for measuring and generating scale.

Opportunities In Online India

I have a lot of hope for India to be a major online opportunity for Western companies in the future. While the Internet connection speeds are good in many places, they are not in others. I had a lot of trouble getting on in offices and in hotels, but with my 3g card I had a better experience.

Not everyone who can buy one even has a card that is global compatible or a way to purchase – although PayPal seems to work well. The delivery infrastructure is not as strong as it could be, but for awareness of products, that is what long range planning is all about.

There are not many markets where there is still 20+ percent growth year over year and we only have scratched the surface of the Internet usage. While it might not be yet ripe for your situation, it is defiantly a market you should keep an eye on – it could surprise us all.

It is certainly true that in most of the rest of the world, Google is the leader — but if you’re already using Google for either SEO or paid search campaigns, are there still opportunities to expand the reach of your campaign using “local” search engines?

I actually like the term “alternate search engines” because it clearly describes that you’re going to have to continue to work with the big “G” but at the same time suggests there might be “alternatives” for your campaign. Here are some examples of the kind of site and search approach which already exist to inspire you to go and find more!

Naver

Naver isn’t actually an “alternate” search engine at all. In fact, Naver is number one in South Korea where Google has a very small share. It used to be powered by Yahoo’s Overture system, but following the Yahoo-Microsoft alliance, the engine decided to build and launch its own keyword advertising system, so Naver has now become a leading search engine with its own advertising system. If you’re targeting Korea, put this one first.

Seznam

In the Czech Republic, Seznam has been in the lead for a long time and still just about competes with Google there. However, Google is rapidly creeping up and knocking at its door. For now, continue considering Seznam as essential in the Czech Republic. Over the border in the the Czech Republic’s sibling state Slovakia (they were once one nation and known as Czechosolvakia), Google has already taken over as a strong lead in first place.

Eniro

Eniro is an interesting example of a search engine in Sweden and for a variety of reasons. Eniro is the orignial publisher of Sweden’s Yellow Pages and, as a result, Eniro still has significant brand traction in the country. However, more recently, Eniro has partnered with Google for some aspects of search and for advertising.

What’s interesting though is that Eniro has developed its own pay per click advertising system and then backfills with Google ads which is a model I think we can expect to see emerge more widely. You don’t have to take much more share of advertising revenues, to justify building such a system and amortizing its costs over a few years.

Onet.pl

A Polish portal with a strong following, Onet.pl has a slightly different version of the Eniro approach with its search coming almost entirely from Google with its advertising including a significant element of its own direct advertising customers.

Orange

The telecoms companies over the years have, in general, gained a larger slice of “eyeballs” and have often overtaken the former search engines for audience. In France, for instance, Orange has a very strong portal which carries a search function. That search function is powered by Voila.fr — probably the number one ,original French search engine. However, the pay per click advertising on Orange.fr comes from Google, so this is an example of the opposite business model to those above.

Bing

Whilst we’re in France, let’s mention Bing has a French language version where AdCenter advertising is possible alongside its Canadian version which is also in French with English. Whilst Bing is an alternate search engine in many countries, through AdCenter, there is still very limited scope to advertise. This has to and must change, but it’s possible to speculate that the Yahoo-Microsoft alliance has delayed this whilst things are sorted out since the Yahoo team will have something to say about it! See next…

Yahoo

Some people think that Yahoo has, in general “gone to sleep”, but it is in fact still offering search advertising solutions with a much bigger global footprint than anyone else other than Google and outside of the US with search offerings in all major continents with the exception of Africa and the Middle East. These are still being fulfilled by Yahoo Search Marketing.

Spiegel.de

Another trend of the moment is of newly prominent search sites that are news portals, generally the online mirrors of offline mega-brands. Der Spiegel (The Mirror) has been the leading and best respected German news magazine since its launch in 1947. Its move to online guaranteed a strong audience and an opportunity for both search and news advertisers.

It has a fascinating approach to search in that any searches query the Spiegel itself plus manager-magazin.de for management issues, merian.de for travel and Wikipedia, clearly giving it a focus on responding to informational queries. Spiegel doesn’t yet have a keyword-specific search facility not yet having discovered the opportunity, but it does enable you to build your own banner ads directly online and is just one step away from a very influential keyword search facility. Watch this space!

Alibaba.com

It is a search engine and it’s not. It is a Yellow Pages and it’s not. Strongest in China and India, Alibaba is difficult to describe apart from saying that in size, it dwarfs some of the better known search engines. Some describe Alibaba.com as a dating site matchmaking manufacturers and their various types of distributors, which is actually pretty fair. And it has its own keyword matching advertising facility as well.

Marktplaats.nl

In the Netherlands, Marktplaats is a prominent Yellow Pages style directory and is in this column to represent the myriad of Yellow Pages style advertising portals which have migrated to the web and offer keyword-based advertising tools.

Still More Alternatives

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a strong alternative to Google keyword search to boost your results, then there are three other options you should also consider.

Firstly, YouTube.com, which may be from the Google stable, but is also the second most important search site in most global markets. The next natural alternate to Google is Facebook which is not directly a keyword-matched advertising solution, but is the most prominent alternate site where people go to “discover” things.

And finally, you may find the best way to boost your search campaign internationally is to expand its reach to the many thousands of sites which boast banner advertising opportunities which can promote the success of your “pure” search campaign.

In summary, there are “alternates” but more importantly, I predict we have turned the corner and more will emerge in the future from the news world, telecoms and former Yellow Pages stables — and they’ll be mixing and matching Google, not aiming to go up directly against it!

In these countries, Google isn’t the most dominant force in search. Instead, local search engines take the leading positions there.

The shift in dominance from Seznam to Google was disputed by Seznam, and it seems they have a valid point in their criticism. The numbers provided by web measurement service Toplist are based on traffic coming to Toplist sites, which is not the ‘regular’ way of calculating market share.

But the smartly placed post and press release, which gave Toplist some nice attention (and links for that matter) did raise another interesting question: what makes Seznam and Yandex amongst the few who are capable of challenging Google in their regions?

Let’s take a look at both search engines.

Seznam

First let’s look at the Czech giant. What makes them so special?

The reasons for the position of Seznam in Czech are several. The first and very important one is that Seznam is a local search engine and many Czechs are really fond of their local products compared to foreign products. It’s not just that they prefer Seznam over Google, but that they would rather drink the local Kofola cola instead of Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

This kind of behavior mainly consists within the older generations. The youngsters are slowly switching to more foreign products, which partly explains the growth Google is seeing.

Another reason why Seznam has outrun Google for a long time is that Google was kind of ‘sloppy’ when it came to their efforts to gain more market share in Czech. The US giant didn’t have an office in Prague and with the Czechs being fond of their local stuff, that was a mistake.

To really get a grip on the market you have to be there, connect with the local industries and get known. Google didn’t do that.

The third major reason for Seznam’s dominance is the fact that the Czech language is a specific language, one which Google hasn’t quite been able to get a grip on. The data which Google provided simply wasn’t good enough. That is a problem which Google has in other countries, and which has partly led to Yandex’s dominance too.

Yandex

The Russian search engine Yandex is the other search engine in Europe which is capable of competing with Google. As with Seznam, there are many different ways in which market share is calculated. Yandex itself looks at FOM’s (Public opinion foundation) data. According to FOM, 40% of the Russian Internet users are using Yandex. This means an overall daily audience of 32 million users.

One of the issues with the calculation of numbers regarding Seznam and Google in Czech, is due to the fact there were also many searches conducted in other languages from inhabitants within the Czech Republic who have a different native language; Yandex acknowledges the difficulties with detecting a language that used in a search query.

With Yandex, you’ll have to look at the difference between alphabetical text, which “we” use and Cyrillic, which is used in the Russian language. That last part is 73% of all queries, so you could safely say that the majority using Yandex comes from within Russia.

But Yandex is in one way very different from our example of Seznam. Even though Russia is their native country, users are also in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. That makes that the reasons for popularity are different than from Seznam.

Yandex itself believes their popularity in these countries comes from taking local specifics seriously. This is a hint again towards Google, which in many cases simply ‘drops’ their US way of working in the specific countries. That might sometimes work in Western European countries, but in the Eastern European countries it is a lot less successful.

Yandex believes therein lies their big advantage over Google. They how to adapt techs to local markets. This means they also think they can adapt in new countries quickly, which might be an indication that Yandex is not stopping at where they are, but that they are thinking of expanding even more.

Yandex chief editor Elena Kolmanovskaya told a Finnish publication last year:

“We believe that the borders for each service are defined by the language. We used to believe that we were making yandex.ru for the Russians and the Russian-speaking users worldwide, whose numbers tally up quite considerably, especially across the former Soviet Union bloc. But then, we launched yandex.ua, yandex.kz and yandex.by, that is, we learned how to use languages other than Russian and, what is much more difficult, learned how to build different ranking algorithms (relevancy) not only for specific countries, but also for specific regions and even cities. And we’ll keep developing our skills.”

The capability to adapt to a “new” country is what made Yandex successful against Google in the East of Europe. It’s the same conclusion we can pull from looking at Seznam: the local powers can adapt better to what the local audience wants.

But at the same time, that can be the danger for the local search engines. Google is going local more and more, and if they really put their minds to it, the Silicon Valley residents might “get” that Eastern European feeling and get closer to what Yandex and Seznam can do in Europe.

Alexander Amzin, Media relations manager at Yandex, acknowledges that:

“Local search engines do have the same challenge as global ones: to find good answers to difficult questions. As time passes level of expertise needed for successful development of search engine increases. “Global” results are losing their importance because a user awaits personalized, localized search results. To provide each user with such results – is a great challenge for any search engine.”

So with the local search engines, the battle is also about local results.

What can we learn from this? We can first learn that local search engines still matter. But more importantly, we can learn from these engines that it’s very important to look into the local aspects. Get close to the locals and learn what they want if you want to be successful in Europe. Go the European way.