“I love Jaguars!” When I ask you to understand that sentence, I’m requiring you to take on a pretty significant undertaking, although you do it hundreds of times each day without really thinking about it. The problem comes with the ambiguity of words. “I” is pretty straightforward. I’m referring to me. Not much ambiguity there. […]
In my last Just Behave column, I shared the first half of my conversation with Jacquelyn Krones, a senior product manager from Microsoft that spearheaded a large scale user study that explored how we use search. In that column, we laid the foundation for what should be a significant shift in user behaviors. Krones said […]
I first met Jacquelyn Krones, a Senior Product Manager from Microsoft, at a search show. A mutual friend on the Bing team, Product Manager Stefan Weitz, introduced her to me and said, “You have to meet Jacquelyn. You speak the same language.” Stefan was right. Jacquelyn started talking about the research project she was then […]
In 1997, a computer called Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Headlines triumphed about the victory of machine over man, as we humans were “conquered”, “vanquished” and, as a result of our defeat, “stunned.” Checkmate…Finally! The real question isn’t why we finally were defeated by a chess playing computer, but why it took […]
Every single search engine has, at the heart of it, a dynamic tension that must be respected. It needs to balance user experience with revenue opportunities. Getting this balance right is incredibly difficult, as Ask, Yahoo and other engines that have seen their market shares precipitously fall can attest to. There was a time when […]
Over the past several months, I’ve been trying to crystal ball what the future of search might look like. I’ve had fascinating discussions with several visionaries in the industry, including Stefan Weitz (Microsoft), Shashi Seth (Yahoo), Hampus Jakobsson (RIM) and John Battelle (Federated Media). In my last column, I started to sum up the overarching […]
For the past several months in this column, I’ve been asking a number of people the same question: Where will search go from here? For the next two columns, I wanted to sum up what came out of those conversations and find the common themes. A Shift In Our Expectations Of Success A number of […]
In part one of my interview with Hampus Jakobbson, TAT Co-Founder and now Strategic Alliances EMEA at Research in Motion, we talked about user experiences designed for Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. As we continued to chat, we went into some fascinating territory that is literally right out of science fiction. TAT (short for The […]
For my past several columns, I’ve presented a number of interviews exploring where search might go in the future. Through that process, I ran across an interesting video from a company based in Sweden called TAT*, short for The Astonishing Tribe. The “Tribe” helps create unique user experiences that keep up with the rapidly evolving […]
In part one of my interview with Shashi Seth, the Senior VP of Search Products at Yahoo, we looked at what Yahoo’s current thinking is about search since the Yahoo/Bing integration. But the point of this series of columns is not where search is, but where search is going. And that’s where we’ll jump off […]
I’m continuing my look at what search might look like in the future with this first part of a fascinating interview with Shashi Seth, the Senior VP of Search Products at Yahoo. With the recent Bing arrangement, Yahoo now finds themselves in an interesting position in the search game. Now that Yahoo search results are […]
This week was a pretty momentous one for me. I’ve changed gigs. I’m now an employee again. A big, public company now signs my paycheck. And, up to now, that company, YPG, has made most of their money by publishing phone books. The acquisition of Enquiro is part of a much bigger digital strategy for […]
In my last Just Behave post, I talked to Mark Cramer about his search plug-in, Surf Canyon. The plug in dynamically reorders your results based on the results you click on, taking the click as a signal of intent. This time, I’d like to present the part of the interview where Mark and I explored […]
Some time ago, a gentleman by the name of Mark Cramer emailed me wanting to talk about the future of search. It was probably precipitated by the Search:2010 whitepaper we produced in 2007, where I talked to several search and UX notables, including Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Marissa Mayer, Jakob Nielsen and others. Alas, Mark […]
With this post, I return to the topic I got sidetracked from a few months back: where is search going? I’ve had the chance to talk to Stefan Weitz from Microsoft, The Search author John Battelle and, this time around, I had the chance to pose a few questions to Johanna Wright, Google’s Product Management […]
Our online activity is about to be spread over more and more devices. This opens up some interesting implications for UI design. More and more, we’ll be launching queries from more places that will have different environmental challenges. For example:
We humans have torn down the walls between our online and offline worlds. The web is fully and functionally integrated into our lives. Unfortunately, the same is not true for corporate org charts
In the first part of my interview with John Battelle, we talked about the actual search experience—the act of searching and our expectations of what the results of that act might be. But as we started talking about change, it soon became clear that change in the act of search translates into change throughout the […]
As soon as I decided I wanted to explore the question of where search was going, I knew sooner or later I had to talk to John Battelle. John wrote what I still consider the definitive look at the industry, The Search, in 2005. Since then, in addition to running Federated Media, he has continued […]
In my last column, I had the chance to chat with Bing Director Stefan Weitz about how Microsoft is approaching search as it sits today. But the question I asked that lead to the interview in the first place was “Where does search go from here?” Microsoft’s Bing team certainly has its own ideas of […]
Way back when, in the dying weeks of 2009, I asked the question, “Where does search go from here?” It seems that everyone agrees we’ve barely scratched the potential that is web search, but what might that scratch reveal? What will our searching look like in two years? In five years, or even in ten […]
If there’s one thing that both Google and Microsoft agree on, it’s that search isn’t solved yet. Google’s vice president of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer has said: We’re all familiar with 80-20 problems, where the last 20% of the solution is 80% of the work. Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we […]
In this column, I’ll follow up on my conversation with Dr. Jim Jansen from Penn State and his recent investigation into behavior patterns that lie within a large data set of visitor and search advertising campaign data from a high traffic ecommerce site. In part one, Jim and I explored whether a search funnel actually […]
Jim Jansen is one of the few academics I know that is fascinated with Internet search. He has spent a good part of the last decade looking at patterns in search query and website logs, dissecting them and continually looking for significant trends. Jim and I crossed paths a number of years ago and have […]
This past week, I was fortunate to be able to interview Penn State professor Jim Jansen about some of the work he’s been doing. I had hoped to get the interview transcript back in time for this column, but unfortunately the timing didn’t work with the deadlines (that will be the next column). My conversation […]
The deal is done. Microsoft has swallowed Yahoo search whole and we can all be put out of our long, lingering misery. Yahoo has given up on search and thrown in the towel. But, outside this industry and our incestuous little gossip circle, what does it really mean for average folks? Does it make a […]
In my last Just Behave, I talked about how the vast majority of search engine users never go beyond the vanilla functionality of a search engine. They skip along the surface of search, never diving deep into advanced queries, filters or clicking on the tabs and links behind which lies some truly impressive capabilities. This […]
Do you regularly use Google’s Wonder Wheel? How about SearchWiki, Yahoo Correlator or Search Monkey? I’m guessing about 95% of you said no. And you’re no ordinary group of searchers . In terms of search literacy, you’d be ranking in the top 0.1% of the population. In a randomly assembled group of 1000 people, you’d […]
My daughters are different than I am. And not in just the obvious ways: like age and gender. They’re different in the way they use technology. The reason why lies in the way the brain is formed. In today’s Just Behave, I’d like to explore what might be happening to our children’s brains. Several months […]
Some time ago, I wrote an article called “Are Our Brains Becoming Googlized?” It became my most read Search Engine Land post ever. Apparently I wasn’t the only one fascinated by the prospect of wholesale rewiring of our brains through exposure to technology. UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior is one of the […]
Despite the economic meltdown of the past several months, search still seems to be cruising along with barely a hiccup. To be honest, it’s a little surreal. For those of us in the industry, it seems like we’re in a protective bubble while the world falls down around us. To be sure, the impact has […]
In new numbers just coming out from AdGooroo, it looks like Microsoft is closing the gap on Yahoo in terms of advertiser share for the last quarter of the year, moving to a narrow three point difference (19.4% vs 16.4%) from a 17.6% gap in the third quarter. Also, in the report, it seems that […]
We have a recurring argument with clients. See if this sounds familiar: Us: You have no search visibility for “keyword” Client: We don’t want visibility for “keyword” Us: Why? Client: Because that’s not us. We don’t use “keyword” to describe ourselves. That’s not what we’re about. Us: Yes, but that’s what the searcher is looking […]
Are our brains being rewired by using the Internet? The evidence tends to be pointing that way. As somebody interested in how the mind works, I read with interest the results of a recent study at UCLA that used the sexiest research tool around today, fMRI scanning. fMRI allows researchers to see which parts of […]
I recently did an opening keynote down in Silicon Valley and before my audience got well into their first cup of coffee, I started ranting at them. Now, being Canadian, my rants are rather mild and non- threatening (although I apparently scared a lot of Aussies at SMX in Sydney) but consider it a kinder, […]
In the last column, I looked at how Pirolli and Card theorized that we humans adapted our ancestral foraging strategies to retrieve information in a hypertext environment. The theory was first proposed in 1994, in a pre-Google era (although search engines were beginning to make their presence felt). If we look at the basic tenets […]
When looking to predict how MBA students and analysts would find information in a digital environment, Peter Pirolli found his answer in an unlikely place: animal’s foraging patterns. Pirolli, working at the Palo Alto Research Center, was trying to predict with some mathematical accuracy the behavior of humans when searching for information but was having […]
In the last column, we explored how navigation can become a habit. Ann Graybiel’s work shows how regular paths become etched in our basal ganglia, limiting the need for conscious interaction. When we do something enough and the situation seems familiar, we can cruise through on autopilot, saving our prefrontal cortex for more urgent demands. […]
I’m currently in Europe on a family vacation. We’ve been here 3 days now and in that time I’ve driven almost 1000 kilometers (about 600 miles) on the highways and byways of France. We’re in the Rhone Alpes section of France, living in a 200 year old converted barn literally in the shadow of Mont […]
In one week I’ll be heading off to Europe with my family for a long vacation. During the vacation, we’ll be driving over much of France and Northern Italy, as well as parts of Switzerland, so naturally, I’m beginning to think about how we’ll navigate from destination to destination. Being top of mind, I thought […]