AOL Loses $76 million From Search Results Tweaks

Now that we have reached the point that Search is the Portal, we can all be forgiven for thinking that the user experience is no longer critical.

AdViking just read the excellent Dead Man Walking article on FastCompany  on the continuing demise of AOL that proves this is far from the truth and in fact that User Experience is more important than ever.

Or better, let’s rephrase that to knowing what experience user’s want when they use your Search is more important than ever.

In response to a fall in Search traffic at AOL (38.9 million visitors in November 06 vs. 35.2 million in May 07). Ron Grant*, the new COO for AOL, took the executive decision that the fall was due to the fact that AOL returned a rich results set (e.g.: multi-media, pictures), that was reported to have a higher than Google effective return on advertising. And so deciding to buck the movement towards a richer search experience (ASK’s 3D search, Google’s Universal Search), Grant ordered the results set to be more look Google’s.

The results of this change could be considered catastrophic. Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield said, “Management was blindsided by how disruptive the change to search was.” In a period of industry growth, AOL’s Search revenue fell from $232 million in Q1 to $156 million in Q2. To put it bluntly, one could say that the changes made to the AOL’s Search Experience could be blamed for the drop of $76 million in one quarter!

It appears that Users liked the Search Experience on AOL and the fact that is was different was the just the point. That is users were in a different mindset when they came to use AOL Search. Meaning, knowing who your users are and how they use your site is critical.

Finally, on the trend around richer Search experiences, enquiro research wrote an enlightening whitepaper, Search Engine Results: 2010. It’s based on interviews and research on the impact of user interaction with these richer results. The interviewees included: Jakob Nielsen, Marrisa Mayer, Greg Sterling and Danny Sullivan.

* Time-Warner company men, Steve Falco and Ron Grant, have been put in place as the CEO and COO of AOL. Employees and now the wider industry appear to have started to refer to Falco and Grant as Mr. Burns and Smithers.

Google Blames Their Technology

Eric Schmidt is singing a different tune from his troops this week in an attempt to calm down a storm brewing with the World Association of Newspapers, the defacto global organisation for newspaper publishers, about WAN’s attempt to level/organise the playing field around the way content is distributed across the Web.

Last week, at the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit Rob Jonas, Google’s head of media and publishing partnerships in Europe, said in his keynote that the current standard (robots.txt) “provides everything that most publishers need to do”. In response, Gavin O’Reilly, the chairman of the World Association of Newspapers and COO, questioned this stance as from his view Publishers strongly disagree.

This week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt changed the tune and told ITWire actually the problem is not that Google doesn’t want to implement it, it’s just that they are having problems implementing it.

• Current standard, Robots.txt is limited to telling crawlers that you can or can’t crawl the content
• New proposed standard, Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) provides Publisher with much more control, such as putting a time stamp on how long content can be used.

It’s probably too obvious a point to make and maybe AdViking is getting too jaded here. But it seems to be that isn’t in Google’s self-interest to solve the tech issues to implement this new standard that gives Publishers much more control over how their content is used. If I was working at Microsoft Live Search, ASK even Yahoo! in the crawler team, I would be looking to pony up to WAN and the other publisher groups to get ACAP supported and get a quick PR win.

Microsoft and FAST: Bill Gates at the SharePoint Conference

Off the main topic of AdViking, but interesting none the less. As predicted in the post about Getting Religion about Search, some more visibility into Microsoft’s thinking about the importance of Search and how they see FAST helping in this battle was revealed at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008.

In the Bill Gates keynote, he talks about the Microsoft approach to Enterprise Search, which is there are three levels to enterprise search and for each of these they have an offering:

1. Entry Level - Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
2. Infrastructure - MOSS 2007
3. Specialized - This will be covered by FAST

As for FAST, Bill then goes on to say this:

FAST is best in class enterprise search, and it’s got great scale, it handles special data types. In a lot of businesses, this has turned out to be a very, very important tool for them.

Bill then introduces Richard Riley, Senior Technical Product Manager, who does a demo of Search Server Express but more importantly does two demo’s of FAST/SharePoint integration. The first being a great demo of FAST entity extraction to provide navigators mashed up with Silverlight to show the coolest document preview AdViking has seen so far. The second is a demo of zero-term search and how that can applicable to a SharePoint deployment.

You can get the video here (750 kbps) or you should be able to find it from this page: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/sharepointconference/materials.mspx

• Scroll to 14:25 to see Bill Gates last day at Microsoft (In case you haven’t seen it)
• Scroll to 47:50 to see Bill Gates discuss search and FAST
• Scroll to 54:45 to see the FAST/SharePoint integration

Also, Microsoft has made some interesting announcements about providing SharePoint and Exchange as online services. All of this, mapped up with the proposal to purchase Yahoo! reads to AdViking like Microsoft is starting the year very aggressively and are looking to take the fight to Google.

FASTforward 08 - Getting Religion about Search

I know I work at FAST but FASTforward is much much bigger than what our company does and when you hear so many keynotes that are talking about the importance of the now of search and how it’s become the key to enterprise success, one can’t help and become enthused and in the end Get Religion about Search.

Below I provide some short summaries on the following topics:

• Vertical/Local/Ad Networks
• Keynotes
• Microsoft acquisition of FAST

For further reading, the FASTforward blog has a consolidated and rich number of posts for more thoughts.

The validation of Vertical/Local/indy AdNetworks:

Elaborating on the stats that IDC provided in early 07 that 70% of searches in the US happen outside of GYM, Sue Feldman provided some stats that vertical sites, including those focused on Local, will have almost 3bill search queries in 2012, while Google will only have 250 million and in fact emerging AdNetworks will have more traffic than Google.

This is very exciting news and one that AdViking has been visioning for approximately 2.5 years.

To further validate this, there was a Local Search session where there were four customers of FAST (and more specifically of AdMomentum) who had exciting opportunities for each of their markets. What was exciting what that the customers were globally spread (Arab region, Chile, Germany and Ireland) and more so there were more customers in the audience doing the same thing in their markets.

Keynotes:

There were so many great talks from speakers like:

• Andrew P. McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School
• Bjørn Olstad, Chief Technology Officer, FAST
• Don Tapscott, Chief Executive, New Paradigm, the Business Innovation Company
• John Hagel, Author, Consultant, & Co-Chair, Deloitte & Touche Silicon Valley Research Lab
• Safa Rashtchy, Financial Analyst, Entrepreneur, & Past Managing Director, Global Internet Media, Piper Jaffray and Company
• Susan Feldman, Research Vice President, Content Technologies Group, IDC

From doing a quick straw poll people said that the presentations by Tapscott and Feldman were highlight keynotes.

For me, a personal highlight was a fascinating panel with Olsted, Hagel and Rashtchy. It was so deep that I couldn’t take it in to repeat anything worthwhile at this point. A video should be available soon, so once that is, I’ll be back by more. One that that did stick was in response to the question “What is the last thing you changed you mind about?”; Olsted responded without missing a beat, “Microsoft!”

Microsoft:

Microsoft, through Jared Spataro, gave a measured insight into why MSFT is acquiring FAST. He started the presentation with some anecdotes, including that a couple of days after the news of the offer was made, a NASCAR team approached them asking if they could actually have FAST sponsor their team!

The quick summary can be clustered under:

1. What’s in it for Microsoft?
2. What’s in it for FAST?
3. What’s in it for Customers?

What’s in it for Microsoft?

MSFT has figured it out that the user experience of the future is going to be shaped by search. To that end that had begun their own initiatives and taking Search seriously, but on the back of a visit to Redmond by the CTO and CEO of FAST, they realised that by purchasing FAST they would be able to take an aggressive leap forward.

What’s in it for FAST?

FAST has visionary innovations, passionate people and best-in-class technologies that with the power of Microsoft will be able to bring all of that to bear in the world and therefore the technologies and innovations will be available to all.

What’s in it for Customers?

For this cluster, Spataro, elaborated on their strategy for Search and in particular spent time focusing on the Enterprise and how Sharepoint is appearing to be a wild shooting star (approx $1billion in revenues for 08). The key takeaway is that customers will get all that they are use to from FAST but backed by a trusted infrastructure vendor. I’m sure more details will be forthcoming at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008

Kick off at FASTforward 08 in Orlando

FASTforward is the annual search-innovation conference run by FAST. This year it’s in Orlando and the key theme is User Empowerment, which ties into how through Search the user is in control.

There’s 1500 people here all talking about search, so after spending last week on mobile, I’m going to be pretty brimmed up on what I hear, think and see which I will post about.

Some of the keynotes are:

• Andrew P. McAfee
• Don Tapscott
• Safa Rashtchy