From the Google blog post announcing the video, Google sums up its approach to improving search: “Our goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek. That means you don’t generally need to know about the latest search feature in order to take advantage of it.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Along with the video, Google created a timeline of search features:

Click here to see a larger version of the timeline.

The company attributed the strong growth to increases in cost-per-click, indicating larger budgets and competition among advertisers for coveted keywords. Consumers’ likelihood to click on ads also increased, the 4Q report indicates. Interestingly, while spend increased, return-on-investment dropped 10%. Advertisers sought volume through their greater spending, but didn’t see as much value in that spend.

The travel category saw the greatest year-over-year growth, of 42%; automotive was next with 33% growth from the previous year. Next came finance, with a 30% year-over-year increase, and retail showed a 18% growth rate over the fourth quarter in 2009.

The bulk of Q4 spend, or 79%, went to Google, while 21% went to Yahoo and Bing. Though Google gained 5% market share from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the same period in 2010, all of the momentum toward Google occurred before the migration of Yahoo ads to Bing. From the third to the fourth quarter of 2010, Bing and Yahoo held onto their existing market share.

The company expects search to continue to grow in 2011 because of continued increases in the cost-per-click paid by advertisers. Search spend will grow by 15% year-over-year in 2011, with Bing’s spend share climbing, according to Efficient Frontier forecasts.

With the Facebook movie’s debut a week away, how about something to keep you entertained while you wait? A book. About that other major internet drama story, Google. The book? “Googled, The End Of The World As We Know It,” by Ken Auletta.

Googled came out at the end of last year, and I’ve been terribly remiss in not writing my review of it until now. It is a masterwork. Required reading for anyone trying to understand how disruptive the internet has been to businesses, and how Google has ridden that disruptive wave, as well as having churned it up.

You want drama? Here’s drama, about how upstart kids started “F…ing with the magic,” as former Viacom CEO Mel Karmazin says in the beginning of the book.

It’s a theme that runs throughout the book and underscores that while this book is about Google, it’s also how the internet has upturned the stability that many business may have assumed they had — and how some still fail to adapt.

I’ve covered Google since the company began, yet even for me, the book had plenty of surprises and revelations. Here are my highlights.

Google Aims To Do Good — And Make Money

Auletta is a veteran magazine journalist for the New Yorker and author who spent nearly three years working on the book, spending ample amounts of time with Googlers of types, including execs at the very top. And in his preface, this was important:

I came away from two and a half years of reporting on Google believing that its leaders genuinely want to make the world a better place. But they are in a business to make money. Making money is not a dirty goal; nor is it a philanthropic activity. Any company with Google’s power needs to be scrutinized.

From my time covering Google, I agree. The company is populated with people who genuinely seem motivated to do good. The company itself has a philosophy that aims to do good. But it is a business, one that makes business decision, plus one that may convince itself so much that it is doing good that it may be blinded to other viewpoints. My Google Hive Mind piece from 2008 touches on this more.

Media Companies: Less Whining About Google, More Innovating

Auletta also talked with executives and others in industries that interact with Google, or which are impacted by it, particularly media companies. Right after the part above, he says:

I also came away impatient with companies that spend too much time whining about Google and too little time devising an offense. Most media companies were inexcusably slow to wake to the digital disruption.

This is the finding of someone who came into the Google landscape to try and make sense of the disruption. It’s a super important observation. If Google is “F’ing with the magic,” as I’ll get into more, it’s not like that magic is getting stuffed back into the bottle.

News aggregators aren’t going to disappear. People aren’t going to cease seeking television shows to watch when they want, where they want. Books are going digital, being made searchable. And parties in all these areas and more aren’t going to reverse the internet. Maybe they’ll stall Google, but the demand that Google feeds, like a river being dammed up, will flow around and seek new channels.

F***ing With The Magic

Perhaps the best illustration of companies unwilling to understand change comes early on in the book. The first chapter opens with former Viacom CEO Mel Karmazin coming to Google in 2003, to meet with Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as Google CEO Eric Schmdit.

Much was discussed about Google’s operations, but Schmidt’s statement about how measurable Google’s ads were, how an advertiser could account for what they did or didn’t do, shocked Karmazin. He told Auletta:

You buy a commercial in the Super Bowl, you’re going to pay two and one-half million dollars for the spot …. I have no idea if it’s going to work. You pay your money, you take your chances.

Anyone born and bred on interactive marketing would largely view that as the talk of a crazy person. Search ads, contextual ads, display ads — you name the interactive marketing type — is highly measurable and held to account far beyond what traditional advertising is ever required to “prove.”  And those digital buyers are moving up in the traditional world, which means in the future, even the Super Bowl will have to be a less chancy proposition.

Karmazin went on explaining how “You don’t want to have people to know what works,”  that you’re selling “mystique,” that “advertisers don’t know what works and what doesn’t. That’s a great model.”

Flip things around. Imagine that Google was taking ad money but not providing metrics, no reporting, no accountability. It would be billed as a scam, one worthy of investigation.

Put it another way, the Wall Street Journal this year has written over 10 articles in its series on internet tracking. Good work, and a subject that deserves attention. But where’s the series on how advertisers are whined and dined by TV networks to spend money blindly, as Karmazin wanted to encourage?

As the discussion progressed, Karmazin said half-jokingly:

You’re f***ing with the magic

Google’s Early Days

The first chapter continues looking it disruption. How Craig Newmark didn’t intend to destroy classified ad revenue for newspapers, but how newspapers themselves failed to react to the internet. How Google’s continued growth has impacted more and more established companies, who look with worry at the company, which itself can send mixed messages.

The second chapter through the fourth follows a tale known to many, Google’s “garage” start-up origins, the focus on ranking by looking at links, including the PageRank algorithm, how other search engines weren’t interested in the company. Yahoo, in particular, worried that better search results would mean fewer page views, the basis of how it was getting paid for ads.

(By the way, for those earlier years — and an outstanding look at the growth of the search space overall — John Battelle’s The Search is another must read).

There’s the search to find a CEO, who turned out to be Eric Schmidt — and how he wound up sharing an office with an engineer who was just looking for an empty desk to use. How he helped to focus and bring order to the company, without killing its creativity. The creation of Google’s informal motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” coined by then-Googler and creator of Gmail, now Facebooker, Paul Buchheit.

There’s also much discussion of the role of Bill Campbell, known in Silicon Valley as “The Coach.” In 2001, he came in to help advise Google’s management, a key mover and a story I’d not known about before. In particular, he seems to have help solidify the relationship between then newcomer Schmidt and Google’s two cofounders. Said Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz:

You had two founders who were in their twenties and Eric was twenty years older, and you had to make that relationship work … there were bumps at the beginning that Bill helped smooth over.

Bringing In The Money & Winning AOL

Did you know Visa offered $5 million to put its logo on Google’s home page? I didn’t, but it’s a recollection from Google head of web spam fighter Matt Cutts, that’s in the book.

Google didn’t take the cash, but it did develop its own ad platform, AdWords. The book covers the “light bulb” moment of using a system different from the then-Overture, ranking ads not by how much they’ll pay but also with the clickthrough of the ad. Running ads along the side, separated from editorial results, turned out to be an inspiration from entrepreneur Yossi Vardi. AdSense came along to put those ads outside search, onto pages across the web.

The book also covers Google winning the deal to power AOL’s search results, which Sergey Brin describes as “probably the biggest” deal Google ever did. Not biggest in terms of money involved, that is — but rather, apparently, in ensuring that young Google at the time would have a success.

Indeed, how things have changed. Google recently renewed its deal with AOL, news that’s really just a footnote now. The current AOL deal isn’t crucial to Google’s success. AOL, once a giant that helped build Google, now works to convince investors and others that it’s relevant in the face of Google and Facebook.

Generating Anger

In chapter five, the focus shifts to people that upstart Google began to upset. Larry Page decides to scan all the books in the world. It wasn’t part of a master plan to put publishers out of business or infringe copyright. Rather, Page had built a way on his own to scan books quickly, and he basically thought it would be cool to understand all the information in books and make it searchable.

Google didn’t try to consult with publishers much. If they had, Brin reflects, “We might not have done the project.” But by pushing ahead, they set the stage for the still unsettled lawsuit that followed, a mistake the company acknowledges later in the book.

The launch of Gmail didn’t offer an option to delete, because Google thought why bother. There’s so much storage that they didn’t think people would want or need to delete. It also featured ads that, while generated by computer analysis of email, still freaked out some people and privacy advocates. Delete came; ads stayed. More important, Google showed an attitude problem. Said Terry Winograd, a long-time Google advisor and consultant:

Larry and Sergey believe that if you try to get everybody on board, it will prevent things from happening. If you just do it, others will come around to realize they were attached to old ways that were not as good.

It was attitude, that Winograd said:

is a form of arrogance: ‘We know better.’ The idea that somebody at Google could know better than the consumer what’s good for the consumer is not forbidden.

I’d say Google’s getting better at this, but it still crops up. Google will push out interface changes without offering the ability to opt-out (Google Instant is a notable exception) or products like Google Buzz which didn’t get widely field tested, which implies Google thought it knew all it needed to know.

The chapter gets into the launch of Google News, and cites the Associated Press CEO Tom Curley as viewing that move as Google deliberately “taking everyone else’s work.” It also cites former Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz, who was upset that the Wall Street Journal’s story on the Columbia space shuttle disaster dropped off Google News over time, a sign that Google didn’t understand that the Journal had better content than others, leading to a future of news as a “undifferentiated commodity” that panders to popularity.

The AP eventually got a deal, quieted down, got upset as that deal neared expiration, then quieted again as it was renewed. As for the Wall Street Journal, it was purchased by News Corp in 2007. Some would argue that News Corp panders to popularity through Fox News. Meanwhile, News Corp has threatened to pull its content from Google, arguing that Google visitors aren’t valuable. Indeed, News Corp-owned The Times blocks search engines from getting its content. So Crovitz’s worries are, ironically, coming true not just because of Google but due to his former publication’s parent company.

Chapter seven continues with enemies that Google was making. Eric Schmidt say hostility didn’t begin until Google went public and started making money. Actually, there was some of this before, especially when Google gained notoriety over being nominated for a Big Brother award on February 2003, a year before Google went public. It was a stunt. Anyone could submit a nomination, but it generated attention — something that only would have happened if there was pre-IPO hostility out there.

Also touched on is an incident many may have forgotten, how Google put CNET on its own form of double-secret probation, refusing to speak to the news outlet for a year, after it used Google itself to gather information for a privacy story that included information about Eric Schmidt’s residence. The ban was lifted after three months.

Anger and upset continues in chapter eight. NBC/Universal CEO Jeff Zucker complains “they built YouTube on the back of our content, and wouldn’t pay us,” though as Auletta notes, NBC didn’t complain if viral clips helped boost TV ratings.

Meanwhile, Viacom CEO Philippe Daumann complained of it being “frustrating” to negotiate with Google, which seemed to change its mind after points were seemingly agreed. Viacom eventually sued (and the suit was recently won by Google, though it’s being appealed). Ironically, one of Viacom’s hit shows on its Comedy Central channel is Tosh.0 — which features clips from YouTube that Viacom neither pays Google for, nor the actual clip’s owner for, to my knowledge.

Understanding & Interpreting Google

The book continues with Google’s growth and pain points that it brought to other companies as part of that growth, with lots of interesting perspectives from all the parties. New developments like the launch of Android are addressed, and time is spent on Google’s “adolescent” struggles.

Too many products. Too much complexity. The rise of new threats like Facebook, and the lose of executives to Facebook, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s current CEO. Google’s inability to retain her was a jarring wake-up call of how important Facebook was becoming and how Google was no longer the start-up that could as easily attract or retain talent, especially talent looking to win big off a start-up’s IPO.

Further in the book are observations from various media executives who see Google as “naive” (CBS’s Quincy Smith) to a “frenemy” to work with but also to watch, especially as they establish direct relations with your own advertisers (WPP’s CEO Sir Martin Sorrell).

To me, these observations are some of the most valuable parts of the book. If you’re trying to understand how Google has impacted and is viewed by many stakeholders, the book is full of such material. You might not agree with the views (or perhaps you might), but they remain the landscape that Google tries to navigate.

Similarly, for those external to Google and trying to understand the moves it makes, to decipher the master plan they assume it has, the book provides plenty of insight from the people at Google itself.

And yes, a movie is coming. Groundswell Productions acquired the rights to Auletta’s book earlier this year and is now seeking a writer. Now that Aaron Sorkin has time on his hands after writing the Facebook movie, The Social Network, perhaps he’ll turn his attention next to Google.

Some believe that anything Google touches is golden. Yesterday’s closure of Google Wave is another reminder of how this isn’t so. Below, a summary of important Google products that haven’t made the cut, over time.

For each product, I’ve also pulled a “celebratory failure quote.” I don’t mean for that to be as snarky as it seems. It’s meant to illustrate the difference between how Schmidt’s statement sounds and what his company actually tells the world.

I agree. Google’s a company that’s not afraid to take risks and does seem to embrace the idea that along the way, there will be failures. Maybe that’s “celebrating” those failures. But in its statements to the world, Google rarely sounds like it’s celebrating these missteps. It doesn’t really document anything that was learned. It just seems to say as little as possible to move on.

On to the failures, listed in order of closure date:

Google Wave (May 2009 to August 2010)

Google Wave was perhaps one of the most heavily hyped products that Google’s put out, only to have it fall on its face. The product was launched in a great splash (sorry, Wave opens itself to puns, intentional or not) at the Google I/O conference in 2009 (see Live Blogging Google Wave).

But rather than the revolutionary communications change that Google suggested Wave would be — a step beyond email and instant messaging — Google Wave found little adoption and lots of head scratching about what to do with it. The company announced it would close yesterday (see Google Wave Crashes).

In celebration of Google Wave’s closure, the company said:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects…..

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.

Google SearchWiki (November 2008 to March 2010)

SearchWiki allowed anyone to shape their search results manually. You could delete results you didn’t like and move others to the top of the list.

Launched in November 2008, SearchWiki drew some criticism from those who didn’t like how the feature cluttered the search results pages. In March 2010, Google gave up on the service.

The celebratory quote:

Stars in search replace SearchWiki. In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn’t like changing the order of Google’s organic search results

Google Audio Ads (January 2006 to February 2009)

In January 2006, Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, a radio-based advertising platform, for $102 million in cash along with future performance payments that could have totaled up to $1.1 billion.

Google promised that it would bring to radio the type of measurable, performance-based ads that it was known for in search. A new Google Audio Ads product was introduced (logo above from the Natural Search Blog). Three years later, Google jumped out of broadcast radio ads. It turned out that Google couldn’t measure performance as it hoped.

There were other issues, including how Google worked — or didn’t work well — with radio stations. Radio Tunes Out Google in Rare Miss for Web Titan is a nice story about the failure, from the Wall Street Journal. Our summary of it is here. The New York Times also covered the early departure of dMarc’s founders in 2007: Google Encounters Hurdles in Selling Radio Advertising.

The failure celebration quote:

At Google we’ve never shied away from high-risk, high-reward projects. We believe that making big bets is not only in the best interests of our users and partners, but also important for our long term success. In 2006, we launched Google Audio Ads and Google Radio Automation to create a new revenue stream for broadcast radio, produce more relevant advertising for listeners and streamline the buying and selling of radio ads. While we’ve devoted substantial resources to developing these products and learned a lot along the way, we haven’t had the impact we hoped for.

So we have decided to exit the broadcast radio business and focus our efforts in online streaming audio….

We have always accepted that if you take risks not all of them will pay off. Deciding to close products is never easy, but we will continue to focus on advertising products that provide measurability for advertisers, and are relevant and useful for users, listeners and viewers.

Google Video (January 2005 to January 2009)

Wait, isn’t Google Video still going? You’re thinking of Google Videos — plural — which is what Google Video morphed into. You see, back before Google bought YouTube in 2006, it was already trying to build its own video sharing service. That was Google Video, launched in January 2005.

At first, Google Video ironically had no video at all, much less sharing. Instead, the service recorded TV broadcasts and turned them into searchable transcripts. It was actually pretty cool, though it apparently gave broadcast networks fits. But by the middle of the 2005, Google began allowing video uploads and sharing. You know, like YouTube. By January 2006, it also quietly shuttered the TV search part of the site.

Despite allowing uploads, Google effectively threw in the video sharing towel by purchasing YouTube, in an estimated $1.65 billion stock deal. The purchase was an expensive admission that Google couldn’t build on its own what YouTube had achieved.

But the failure of Google Video wasn’t yet done. In 2006, Google Video also rolled out an online video purchase and rental service. It closed that abruptly in August 2007 and offered $5 in Google Checkout credit to customers. That didn’t please some, so the company quickly offered full refunds.

Also in 2007, Google Video started morphing into Google Videos, a new “meta” search engine that found video content from Google Video, YouTube and video from across the web. Google signaled this would happen early in the year, then as part of its “Universal Search” rollout later that year, the meta search went live, even if it remained being called “Google Video.”

I’m not exactly sure when the “Google Videos” moniker started. Google Video still does exist to host video that was uploaded through January 2009, when uploads were turned off (see Google Ends Google Video Uploads, Shutters Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball & Jaiku) — the effective last nail in Google Video’s coffin.

Any celebratory quote? Google’s press release about buying YouTube didn’t celebrate having to spent over $1 billion because Google Video couldn’t do what the company hoped. It said nothing about Google Video at all. As for the closing of uploads to Google Video, Google said:

At Google, we like to launch early, launch often, and to iterate our products. Occasionally, this means we have to re-evaluate our efforts and make difficult decisions to be sure we focus on products that make the most sense for our users.

In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video….

There are still great options for people who want to upload content to Google, and we invite them to explore YouTube’s dynamic global community or Picasa Web Albums. If you have questions or need more information please read our FAQ page.

We’re confident this decision is the right one for our users, and we’re looking forward to making Google Video an even better place for you to search and find videos from all over the web.

Dodgeball (May 2005 to January 2009)

January 2009 was a major month of celebration at Google. At the same time it celebrated shuttering Google Video, because it ultimately had to buy success via YouTube, it also announced another failure: Dodgeball.

Dodgeball was purchased in May 2005 (see here on Engadget, where the logo above also comes from). Some feel it could have turned into a Foursquare-like service for Google, and that’s where the irony is rich.

Dodgeball was cofounded by Dennis Crowley, who left Google in April 2007, saying “the whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us.” Crowley went on to start Foursquare, currently the hot location “check-in” service that just received another round of investment.

In fairness, I’ve heard Crowley saw on several occasions that Dodgeball was hard for people to understand and perhaps too early for the mobile devices out there. Then again, if Google had kept going with Dodgeball, perhaps it wouldn’t now have to try and push Google Latitude as its catch-up product.

Google’s quote to celebrate the Dodgeball failure:

Some of you may also be familiar with Dodgeball.com, a mobile social networking service that lets you share your location with friends via text message. We have decided to discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available. We will communicate the exact time-frame shortly.

Postscript: Since I wrote this, TechCrunch has just posted a nice piece where Schmidt talked specifically about Dodgeball and what could have been: Perhaps Not Fondly, Google’s Schmidt Remembers Dodgeball “Quite Well”.

Jaiku (October 2007 to January 2009)

Some think Jaiku could have been Google’s Twitter. Google purchased the microblogging service in October 2007 and did little with it. By January 2009, it was closed along with several other products. The service still exists, but Google doesn’t actively support it.

Somewhat related is how Google lost Ev Williams back in 2004. Williams was one of the founders of Blogger, which Google acquired in February 2003. A year later, Williams left. Unlike with the Dodgeball founders, Williams was extremely conciliatory and in fact said:

I’m honored to have been a part of Google for such a historic period. If I was going to work for anyone, I’d work for Google.

And yet, I’ve always heard rumblings that the Blogger team never felt that well treated at Google. Rumblings aside, Williams got away. Google lost talent that went on to make another major hit: Twitter, which Williams cofounded and currently serves at CEO.

Speaking of Twitter and lost talent, Google also lost the current Twitter COO, Dick Costolo. Google gained Costolo when it acquired the start-up he oversaw, FeedBurner, in June 2007. Costolo left Google and joined Twitter in September 2009.

Again with the rumblings, my understanding is that Costolo wasn’t particularly happy with Google or how it dealt with FeedBurner. And again, rumblings aside, it doesn’t matter. Costolo’s widely acknowledged as a major talent, one that Google couldn’t hold on to.

The Jaiki celebratory failure quote:

Google has long believed that thoughtful iteration is the best way to build useful products for our users. As part of that process, we are always looking for ways to better focus our teams on the products that can have the most impact….

While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers.

Google Notebook (May 2006 – January 2009)

Another January 2009 closure was Google Notebook, a way to clip text, images or search results and save them in online “notebooks” that could be shared with others. Google decided to close that in January 2009. Ironically, one of the alternatives it suggested as “being actively improved” was the aforementioned SearchWiki, which closed the following year.

The closure quote:

At Google, we’re constantly working to innovate and improve our products so people can easily find and manage information. At times though, we have to decide where to focus our efforts and which technologies we expect will yield the most benefit to users in the long run.

Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users.

Google Catalogs (December 2001 to January 2009)

Touted as a way to search through consumer catalogs, Google Catalogs (logo above from Seeklogo) was launched with promise at the end of 2001 and soon virtually forgotten by everyone, including Google, it seemed.  It was updated maybe once or twice, as far as I can recall, soon after it launched. Then it just sat. Google finally put it out of its misery in January 2009.

Google celebrated the failure by saying:

It was a great experiment. Nonetheless, in recent years, Catalog Search hasn’t been as popular as some of our other products. So tomorrow, we’re bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online

Google Print Ads (November 2006 to January 2009)

Just as Google couldn’t transform radio ads, the company also failed to change newspaper advertising. Google Print Ads, launched in November 2006 (and tested as far back as mid-2005) put ads into newspapers. But the product apparently failed to generate much revenue or interest, so it was closed in January 2009. You can still see how they worked in this demo Google has left online, for now.

The celebration of failure quotation:

In the last few months, we’ve been taking a long, hard look at all the things we are doing to ensure we are investing our resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners. While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we — or our partners — wanted. As a result, we will stop offering Print Ads on February 28….

We will continue to devote a team of people to look at how we can help newspaper companies. It is clear that the current Print Ads product is not the right solution, so we are freeing up those resources to try to come up with new and innovative online solutions that will have a meaningful impact for users, advertisers and publishers.

It’s always difficult to say goodbye to products. Lots of people at Google have worked hard on Google Print Ads. Some advertisers have seen good results and our partners have dedicated time and resources to help get it off the ground. But as we grow, it is important that we focus on products that can benefit the most people and solve the most important problems. By moving resources away from projects that aren’t having the impact we want, we can refocus our efforts on those that will delight millions of users.

Google Page Creator (April 2006 to August 2008)

Did the web need yet another way to build web pages? Google thought so and rolled out Google Pages in April 2006, with an official blog post. Two years later, Google decided that its Google Sites product was the way to go. Google Page Creator was closed without fanfare. There was no official blog post about it. For the celebratory failure quote, I have to cite what Google Blogoscoped pulled off the Google Page Creator “About” page and a help thread, at the time:

We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.

And:

Page Creator has always been a Google Labs project (Labs is our “technology playground” where we let users test-drive experimental products and give us feedback so we can innovate more quickly). Since launching Page Creator in Labs, we’ve learned a lot and have incorporated those lessons into Google Sites. We think the Labs program, which allows users to try new things before they’re fully baked, lets us innovate faster and ultimately create the best possible products.

Google Answers (April 2002 to November 2006)

Facebook’s just rolled out Facebook Questions, the latest in a long line of “answer” based search products from companies including Yahoo. But Google Answers, a Q&A service launched in April 2002, was killed off in November 2006. The irony is that year marked a resurgence in Q&A-based services, with the new Yahoo Answers gaining much attention and traffic. Unlike most services, Google Answers relied on paid researchers. But rather than reshape the product, Google axed it.

The celebratory failure statement:

Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time — and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product. Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers….

Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We’ll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.

Could These Be Next?

Which products might face a failure celebration next. Some thoughts:

Orkut: Back before Facebook, Google was already playing the social networking game with Orkut, launched in January 2004. Over six years later, Orkut is big in Brazil, India and Iran (if I recall correctly). That’s pretty much it. Even in Brazil and India, Facebook may be edging it out.

Google Knol: Google’s semi-challenger to Wikipedia doesn’t appear to have gained much traction since it was formally launched in July 2008.

Google Sidewiki: Google’s tool that allows anyone to add comments to any web site appears to be little used. It was launched in September 2009.

Google Buzz: Google’s supposed challenger to Twitter, Facebook and even Foursquare had a deeply flawed launch in February 2010 and quickly caused the company to come under fire for privacy concerns.

For all that pain, Buzz seems to have had little adoption. Google’s touted no particular growth figures. Publishers across the web have uniformly failed to report any great traffic gains.

There are people on Buzz, but there were people on Wave. The question is, are there enough people for it to keep going. Potentially, Buzz will get rolled into the rumored “Google Me” social product.

From Failure To Success

This post has dwelt on Google’s failures because that’s the talking point of today, in the wake of Google Wave’s closure (honestly, no pun was intended — it just lends itself to puns in all sorts of shiny ways).

Google has had plenty of successes, huge ones, from its original search engine through to products like Google Maps, Gmail and the Android mobile operating system. Who’d have thought two years ago that Google would back an operating system that could threaten Apple’s dominance, much less RIM’s and Microsoft’s, in the smartphone space. Yet today, it does.

Certainly Google’s encouraged a culture of “20% time,” where engineers (at least — ordinary Googlers don’t seem to get this) can spend 20% of their work time on whatever they’d like. It does go off in various directions and clearly isn’t afraid of killing projects that don’t pan out well. That is embracing the possibility of failure, sure.

And sometimes those failures even come back as success. Case in point. Google Voice Search was introduced in 2002  as a way to call Google on phone, say your search and get back results. You can see an archived example of this here.

Google never formally announced the closure of Google Voice Search. At some point, the system’s home page stayed up, but nothing worked. It seemed forgotten. But years later, Google started moving ahead with voice recognition technology. Today, it’s built into a variety of Google services — and it’s a key component of Google’s Android operating system.

Postscript: A couple of people have pointed out some other notable failures. Lively is a good one, Google’s “virtual world” service that was closed in Nov. 2008. The Google Nexus One is another one. Launched in January 2010, with the promise of radically changing how mobile phones were sold, Google canned the effort after five months, closing it in May 2010.

Earlier I wrote about the depature of Yahoo’s Srinija Srinivasan. Yahoo’s lost another person, and another big figure in search, that of Tim Mayer.

Tim just tweeted, as shown above, that he’s enjoying his first “post-Yahoo” day. Tweeted using the Twitter account I personally set up for him ages ago, I might add!

Who Didn’t He Work For?

Where to begin with Tim? How about his LinkedIn profile, which recounts his storied past moving from search engine to search engine:

• RealNames, in the summer of 1999
• Inktomi, as director of product management, from 2000 to 2002
• FAST Search, as VP & GM of web search, from 2002 to 2003
• Overture, as VP of web search products, in 2003
• Yahoo, as VP of search products initially in 2003 through his last job as VP for search market share, until now

To really appreciate the irony of search life that Tim’s experienced, he left Inktomi (and moved from California) to resettle in his new job with rival FAST in Massachusetts.  But a year later, in 2003, Overture bought FAST. And later that year, Yahoo bought Overture. That brought Tim back to California. It also brought him back to Inktomi, in a way, since Yahoo had bought that company in 2003 as well.

Remember also that Inktomi “powered” results for Microsoft for some years, as well as for AOL. Yahoo also later powered results for a variety of search engines. As a result, Tim has had searchual relations with practically every major search player out there, for over a decade, other than Google.

The Conference Scene

Tim was extremely well known to those on the search marketing conference circuit, a vet who could handle almost any question. He was to Yahoo for some years the way Matt Cutts is to Google, someone who knew the inner workings of the search engine and was often seen as a helpful resource.

Tim’s also known for one of the most famous quotes a search rep ever uttered at a conference, saying at a session on white hat versus black hat tactics in SEO:

If you’re being entirely organic and going after ‘Viagra,’ it’s like taking a sword to a gunfight. You just aren’t going to rank.

I think Tim regretted that honesty a bit, even though there were plenty in the SEO space that appreciated it. He later qualified it to say he wasn’t endorsing spamming, emailing me:

Yahoo does not think that spamming is OK. We are aware that spam (or over optimization) is prevalent in highly competitive categories and realize that many webmasters in these high reward categories are willing to take more risks and use spamming techniques even though they know the search engines may label their sites as spam.

I think one of the key things I brought up in the session was when I talked about where the line was between optimization and over optimization (spam). I said this may vary by industry as in very non-competitive industries, where very little optimization takes place, the line will be very conservative and there will be little room for aggressive optimization techniques. In a very competitive industry like ‘texas holdem poker’ where optimization is the norm, heavier optimization may be tolerated.

I would also like your readers to know we are focused on providing great results to our users and we spend a lot of time and effort neutralizing spam techniques.

Beating Google

Perhaps Tim’s greatest claim to fame was causing major panic and disruption at Google, when he stealthily maneuvered Yahoo into having an index larger than Google’s, for a short period.

In August 2005, Yahoo claimed to have indexed 19 billion documents, almost twice what Google was claiming on the figure it then posted on its home page. The jump surprised Google, something that Tim had carefully helped plan.

Google immediately reacted to try and debunk the claim, not wanting to seem inferior to another search engine in any way. Yahoo’s reaction was to largely chuckle.

By September, Google announced that it was again the most comprehensive search engine but that it also was dropping its home page count. And since that time, Google hasn’t publicly reported a size figure, though from time-to-time, it will reassert that it is more comprehensive than any other search engine out there.

My past posts have more background on the size wars and how little they’ve really mattered:

• Google “Three Times Larger” Than Nearest Rival & More Q&A With Google’s Marissa Mayer
• Google “Knows” About 1 Trillion Web Items
• Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?

Still, there’s no doubt that Tim was instrumental in one of the few times that a competitor has really put Google on the defensive.

Not Married To That Other Mayer…

Speaking of Google, Tim shared a last name with Google’s well-known vice president of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer, but they weren’t related. Still, that led to one of the funniest things I’ve read in the search space, when the humor site Gray Hat News (now defunct), conducted a fake interview with Tim. In part:

Mayer: Well, don’t you want to discuss about Yahoo saying they don’t want to be number one in search?

GHN: Not yet. So what was your surname before you married Marissa?

Mayer: My wife’s called Christa. We could talk about the latest Yahoo weather update?

GHN: Yeah in a bit. What’s it like being married to Larry’s ex?

You can still find the whole thing on the Internet Archive, here.

What’s next for Tim? Don’t know yet other than he said he’s exploring new opportunities. I’ll post a more specific update, if I get one.

All the best, Tim. Drop us all an email from Google :)

Srinivasan was Yahoo’s “Ontological Yahoo,” among other titles including being a vice president and editor-in-chief. She was Yahoo’s fifth employee, hired in 1995 to help organize Yahoo’s listing service.

That’s all Yahoo was at the time, a listing service. Human editors — “web surfers” as Yahoo called them — organized web sites by category, into what’s known as a directory. It was something that Yahoo cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo had been doing themselves, with no particular view on how to structure the information. Srinivasan — “Ninj” as she’s known to friends and coworkers — was brought in to provide structure.

Yahoo’s Former Power

Today, as I mentioned, there are some who argue that Google is a giant gatekeeper that can make or break businesses (see The New York Times Algorithm & Why It Needs Government Regulation). But in the latter half of the 1990s, this was the argument made about Yahoo.

In 1998, I wrote an entire special report about Yahoo and the challenges it faced with webmasters complaining that they couldn’t get listed, in which Srinivasan was quoted extensively. It was a hot topic and continued to be so for years. Site owners would get frustrated that submissions sometimes seemed to go into a black hole, never to appear. Or, if they were listed, a Yahoo editor might alter their carefully worded description — which might mean they’d not show up at all, in response to some keyword searches.

Occasionally, there was even talk of regulating Yahoo.

When Humans Edited The Web

Srinivasan oversaw this entire process. Where Google later has its PageRank algorithm and computer “spiders” that automatically crawled billions of pages across the web, Yahoo had Srinivasan and an army of human editors who hand-organized the web.

And it worked. It worked better than any of the other “automated” or “crawler-based” search engines at the time, such as AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos or Excite. That’s because the ranking algorithms for these crawlers simply didn’t keep up with the number of pages they were including. They gathered more and more “hay,” if you will, without a ranking system that pulled all the needles to the tops of their haystacks.

Yahoo, in contrast, wasn’t about the sheer volume of content. It was about listing the best of the web. That helped it stand well above the other players in popularity, in my belief, because it was well above them in relevancy.

In fact, Yahoo sparked a number of human-based imitators. The Open Directory. LookSmart. Snap. In fact, in 1999, I was even quoted as saying that year was the year the human-powered directories had won. And they had. For the first time, more search engines were “powered” by human results than crawler-based ones, as this good News.com piece from the time explains.

Crawler-Based Search Engines Make Comeback

It was a short-lived win, however. Google lead a resurgence in crawler-based listings. Google’s ranking system gave you the best of both worlds.Yahoo was a card-catalog of the web, letting you effectively search for the right “books” based on what they were titled. Google’s system let you search through all the pages of all the books in the entire library. It was far more comprehensive, plus it still managed to get good stuff to the top of the list.

The directories were doomed and began dying. Today, none of the major search engines out there are powered by human results. The Yahoo Directory still exists, but you have to hunt to find it at Yahoo. Do a search, and there’s not even a reference to some of Yahoo’s directory categories, as there once was.

But make no mistake. While Yahoo’s no longer the search powerhouse it was (see A Search Eulogy For Yahoo and Revisionist History: Bartz Claims Yahoo Was Never A Search Engine), Srinivasan played a huge role in the search story that we take for granted today.

Srinivasan announced her departure, her “graduation” as she calls it, on the official Yahoo blog today. She reflects a bit on how things began and that she’ll be spending her time now chairing the board of SFJAZZ. The post also includes this departure video from her:

All the best, Ninj.

Postscript: Also announced today, another big Yahoo departure. See Tim Mayer, Who Worked For Practically Every Search Engine, Leaves Yahoo.

Binging It On Twitter

I came across people saying “Bing It” on Twitter recently. It’s easy to find real-life examples. Here are are some from the past few days, from a search on Bing It:

JustLakey: Someone said Bing it!!! Take that Google!

BrowniesNCream: Some qns shouldn’t be asked on twitter! Google it, bing it even ask jeeves! But don’t ask twitter

ahmed2250: we say “I googled that” or “google it” , hopefully more ppl start using bing so I can say “I binged that” & “bing it”

shwaldman @Tara_Costa – They do! You can find seat belts all over the place. They are harnesses that strap into the car seat belt. Bing It. Google It.

treefroggirl @StuartYoung you know how to use a search engine… Bing it!

More Still Googling It

Of course, many more people say “Google It” Here’s a search from Twitter on that phrase:

The first four tweets, all less than 10 minutes old, have references to people saying “Google It.” In the course of an hour, there were roughly about 80 uses of the phrase. In contrast, someone says “Bing It” maybe once or twice per hour, if even that much.

Still, Bing deserves some credit. Even if only a few people are saying to “Bing It,” that’s a big achievement from what many, including myself, would have believed possible a year ago.

Gossip Girl & Bing

How’s it happening? In part, some product placement is probably helping. One recent example is Bing’s deal with Gossip Girl that has characters making references to Bing. That’s getting the phrase out, even if some viewers aren’t buying it:

Those are tweets over time, found using Google’s Twitter Archive Search, that mention “bing it” and Gossip Girl. Some of my favorites from that search (or by looking for “Bing It” with the hashtag #gossipgirl or the account name @gossipgirl) include:

damanlamba‎: I like how Gossip Girl is trying to make the Bing search engine a thing. They even throw in phrases like “Bing it!” GOOGLE 4EVA.

YESDemi What’s with all this Bing? It’s like #gossipgirl doesn’t believe in google.

luciebartlett Oh god, someone just said ‘Bing it’ in @gossipgirl. As in Google it. Except no one says Bing it. Apart from in gratuitous product placement.

I’m Too Old Fashioned To “Bing It”

There are also some who just don’t seem to like the phrase “Bing it” for various reasons:

kateedwards34 I hate BING. I don’t want to BING it. I like google. I want to google it. If that makes me old then so be it.

ahmed2250 Yeah but bing it sounds dirty, “I binged it last night” “OMG u did what?” “binged it” “WOW how would one go about doing that” @MrMoNous see

jmroskell Sorry Microsoft. It just sounds *wrong*. Id far rather “Google” something than “Bing” it.

C’mon, Try It!

Still, there were also some interesting conversations I found where Bing supporters on Twitter where trying to get friends to try it. For instance:

There someone jokes with a friend that “nowadays I ‘bing’ it.” The friend remarks about being “intrigued” and as the conversation continues, says he might try it instead of Yahoo.

(See, I told you Bing was stealing people from Yahoo! — When Losers Are Winners: How Google Can “Lose” Search Share & Yet Still Stomp Yahoo).

Here’s another conversation:

In this one, someone tells her friend to “Bing it!” To her friend’s disbelief, she explains further that she tried Bing for a week and liked it — getting her friend to say she’ll give Bing a try.

(FYI, one of the two parties in that conversation has protected their tweets, but they’re viewable through search on both Twitter Search and Google. This is probably due to her having recently changed her settings. Tweets made before shifting to protected status remain public).

Gotchas

A couple of last points, for those who may want to do their own searches of people saying “Bing it” or “Google it” in Twitter.

One issue is that there are plenty of examples I found where people said “bing it” when they meant to tell someone to “bring it.” That will skew things for anyone who tries to reference count.

Google’s Twitter Archive maddeningly also considers the word “it’s” to be the same as “it.” Look here:

In that case, I did a search for +”google it” — which is supposed to cause Google to return only content that has the exact phrase “google it” within that content. Instead, I got matches for things like:

• #google, it
• [Google]: It’s
• Google — it
• Google! It’s

Punctuation isn’t being counted, which I can understand, even if it is annoying. But matching “it” to be “it’s” makes no sense.

When Did “Google It” First Emerge?

Finally, when did people first start talking about how they were going to “Google It?” That’s really tough. Using Google News Archive Search, I tried to find the earliest news article with a mention. Unfortunately, some of the same punctuation issues mentioned above also produced some false positives — among other issues. But by the mid-2000s, there are plenty of solid references.

My favorite article remains Don’t Be Shy, Ladies-Google Him! Check Out His Search Engine First from January 14, 2001. That was an article from the New York Observer on “Googling” men before a date. It’s the first time I recall Google being used by the mainstream media in such a generic manner.

Perhaps someday, enough people will have used Bing to talk about “Binging” people. Bing still has a long, long way to go — but at least it has moved onto the radar screen of popular culture.

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.

June 2005: Wikipedia Starts Out Wrong

The first Wikipedia page for search engine marketing was made on June 25, 2005. It said:

Search Engine Marketing is a marketing method to promote a website in search engine results pages. It is similar to Search engine optimization

It went on to list SEM “products” as being Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, so it was wrong out-of-the box, to me.

December 2005: Wikipedia Gets It Right

By December 2005, the definition had grown to be more inclusive and specific:

In Internet marketing, search engine marketing, or SEM, is a set of marketing methods to promote a website  in search engine results pages. The three main methods are:

* Search engine optimization, or improving rankings for relevant keywords in search results by adjusting the website structure and content.

* Search engine advertising, or paying the search engine company for a guaranteed high ranking or an ad displayed aside the results.

* Paid inclusion, or paying the search engine company for a guarantee that the website is included in the search.

June 2007: Alternative Definition Introduced

That was pretty on target. Then further edits happened, but the idea that SEM was an umbrella term remained strong until June 7, 2007 when the part bolded below was added to the definition:

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites  by increasing their visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization, paid placement, and paid inclusion.[1]  Other sources, including the New York Times define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings, different from SEO which seeks to obtain better free search listings.[2][3]

That was added by Jonathan Hochman, who is a contributor here, a nice guy and a knowledgeable search marketer — not to mention a senior Wikipedia editor. So Jonathan screwed-up?

But Sources Say…

I’m fairly certainly Jonathan will come along to comment here, but I think he was actually trying to ensure the article was accurate. At this point, clearly some people were defining SEM to mean paid search. One of the sources to cite this was a New York Times article from 2006 that wrote:

Search marketing is epitomized by the text ads that appear next to results from online searches; marketers buy the rights for their ads to appear on-screen when computer users type in key words. There is also search engine optimization, which tries to determine how to elevate a client’s Web site in the listings when computer users look for a subject or topic.

But this is also a flaw with Wikipedia. It seems to prefer sources such as the mainstream media to “prove” the “facts” it records even if the media gets it wrong. And many search marketers reading that New York Times article in 2006 would have been scratching their heads over that definition. Despite this, an alternative definition of SEM gained coequal weight to a different definition that many in the industry had long used.

The other source cited to support the alternative definition was written by two long time search marketers, Bill Wise and Dave Pasternack. It was an article they wrote in 2005, which said:

Search engine marketing involves click costs. Search engine optimization works through free traffic. Those two facts are the basis of a popular myth: that it’s easier to get good ROI through SEO than it is to get the same ROI through SEM.

On the one hand, that’s more proof that the industry itself was conflicted. But then again, it was “proof” written by two people who worked for an exclusively paid search agency. And proof that, if you read the comments, still gets many disagreements today:

I disagree with both the comment above and the way many people refer to paid search as “SEM”.

Before write about anything, check concepts first.  Check the SEMPO glossary and learn. Don’t try to recreate things.

SEM Search engine marketing.. Right? SEO and PPC fall under SEM Right? You either pay for placement or get the placement organically..

In the end, the change caused SEM to have two different definitions — one that SEM was inclusive of SEO, the long-time definition that was sourced to the industry’s oldest and largest group — and one that excluded SEO, based on a mainstream media article and a column by two people who worked solely within paid search.

May 2009: SEM Changed To Exclude SEO

Again, mentioning an alternative definition is fair enough. But that’s not what stuck. In May 2009, we got this change:

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.[1]. The Pay Per Click (PPC) lead Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, also includes search engine optimization within its remit, but SEO is accepted by the industry as being a separate discipline with most sources, including the New York Times defining SEM as ‘the practice of buying paid search listings’.[2][3]

Woah. That’s a dramatic change, and one made anonymously, by an author known only by their IP address, 82.46.45.203.

Single-handedly, this person tossed aside the primary definition that had long been used for SEM. Without any new documentation, it now was asserted that SEO was accepted as exclusive from SEM by “most sources.”

Today: SEM Still Excludes SEO; Inclusive Definition An “Alternative”

Some of the damage was reversed in July 2009, when we got this revision:

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.[1]. The industry peak body Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), includes search engine optimization (SEO) within its reporting, and SEO is also included the industry definitions of SEM by Forrester Research, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, and industry expert Danny Sullivan.[2]. The New York Times defines SEM as ‘the practice of buying paid search listings’.[3][4]

The undocumented “most sources” part was removed. A ton of support was given to the idea that SEM includes SEO, with organizations, publications and even yours truly being cited. And yet, the primary definition remained as changed in May 2009: SEM was paid search only. The definition remains that way to the time of this article.

Google Powers AOL Search

The deal for Google to provide search results for AOL Search was the big story of 2002. It showed the necessity of being a “single solution” provider to portals and others without their own search technology. It also tipped Google’s share of the search marketplace over 50%, when you factored in all of its partners.

Both Overture and Inktomi previously had deals with AOL. Overture provided paid listings. Inktomi provided editorial results. As divided solutions, they were less compelling. Indeed, both companies eventually got purchased by Yahoo, giving it a single solution. But by that point, the days of being a big search player by “powering” others were ending. The big search players were becoming synonymous with those who owned their own technology.

AdWords Goes Cost-Per-Click

Google rolling out CPC-based AdWords was another major story this year. Overture had built a de facto standard of buying paid listings on a cost-per-click basis. AdWords sold on a cost-per-impression basis. By shifting to CPC, AdWords tapped into that standard and became more compelling to many advertisers.

Google’s Too Powerful

Yes, years and years ago, people were already screaming that Google was too big, too powerful, too scary. And it didn’t even have its own browser, web applications and mobile phone then! This was a big story in 2002 mainly because it popped within selected technology and search circles. It took longer to emerge in a more general publications. Even today, it still hasn’t become a major issue to most people in general, I’d say.

What things tipped Google into being seen as too powerful? For one, the company pulled pages that the Church Of Scientology said violated its copyrights. Google later restored those pages and also became the only major search engine to disclose when content is removed due to legal issues. Still, the action raised concerns.

Google also got censored by China. The company didn’t cooperate with that, but it raised issues about whether it would in the future. Google eventually did, sparking a huge outcry. Last month, Google declared that cooperation on censorship would end.

Google also got sued for deliberately reducing the PageRank scores of sites involved in a network designed to buy and sell links. It was the first shot against paid links in a war that has continued ever since — and a war that has caused Google to be seen in some quarters as trying to dictate what publishers can and can’t do with their own web sites.

Even more issues got raised. Body Shop founder Anita Roddick had her ads pulled because of a comment on her web site that was deemed anti-John Malkovich, in violation of Google’s guidelines then that barred advertising any site that was anti-anything. Also, Google Watch was born, a site rallying that Google had too much power, that it needed to be stopped.

In a round-up article that year, I wrote:

Google’s biggest challenge may be that so many people now see it as the only search engine that “matters,” a marketplace dominance in search that seems akin to that which Microsoft has with operating systems, office software and web browsers.

Microsoft’s supremacy as a company has caused it to be widely loathed. Does search dominance by Google mean that the company is destined to face general hatred, as well? Such a fate is not preordained, as we shall see.

Articles of a similar nature appear today, showing that things haven’t changed much. Similarly, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told me this at that time:

We have very poor lock in. Microsoft has very high lock in … The switchover cost for you to move to one of our competitors is none. As long as the switchover costs are so low, we run scared. Everyday I wonder if there are very smart people at Berkeley coming up with a new algorithm.

Google makes similar statements today to explain why they aren’t a monopoly, aren’t a company that should be feared but which don’t acknowledge the habit Google has become, a habit that’s tough to break.

Search Marketing Meets The Law

Another big story this year was that search marketing matured further with legal rulings and actions. Mark Nutritional filed the first major lawsuit over ads linked to trademarked terms, a $440 million suit against AltaVista, FindWhat, Kanoodle and Overture. It was never settled due to the later closure of the company by the Federal Trade Commission.

Over at LookSmart, it unilaterally decided that a one-time fee to be listed could be changed to mean that LookSmart could charge you over-and-over again. Search marketers objected; a class action lawsuit resulted, which was later settled.

A legal ruling was also handed down giving relief to those who used trademarked terms in meta tags, though that didn’t end those types of suits. The ruling involved Playboy suing former Playboy Playmate Terri Welles. It was found she had every right to use the words “playboy” and “playmate” in her meta keywords tag and on her web site. Trivia item: I was her expert witness in the case.

The biggest legal story of this year was the FTC declaring that all those search ads on search engines needed to clearly provide disclosures that they WERE ads. It was landmark guidance that shaped the paid search space greatly, even though I fear today, those guidelines are being forgotten.

Google Bombs Get A Name!

Finally, want to rank a page tops for some unusual term? Get your friends to “bomb” it to the top of Google. The tactic wasn’t new, but this was the year the formal name Google Bomb was born.