I just ran across this article from Time titled “What Will the World Do with More Search Engines?“  My first reaction and answer to this question was “it will ignore them,” and for actual search engines, I think that is true.  User habits have already been ingrained, and chiseling away at market share is no small task, as Yahoo! and MSN can attest.

However, CNN (and now Time) have recently run articles regarding new “search engines” that have come to market, no doubt influenced by the recent public launch of highly-publicized (and frankly somewhat disappointing in scope) Wolfram Alpha, which isn’t so much a search engine as much as it is a computational engine.

The Time article isn’t so much about what the world is going to do with more search engines, as much as it identifies how search has become an innovator’s dilemma.  Much in the way Clayton Christensen explained in his seminal book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” how the semiconductor chip industry saw improvements in technology that surpassed the needs of the existing market, the Time article exhibits how the capabilities of search engines have begun to exceed the needs of the existing search market.

Search engines continue to add features, whether it is Google, Yahoo, MSN, or otherwise.  However, for most queries, a user can find the answer they are looking for from any of the major engines.  No single engine holds a meaningful and distinctive feature that places it head and shoulders above it’s competitors when it comes to organic search.  As Time puts it:

“The trouble with the search-engine business is that its future may have almost nothing to do with whether search results get more accurate. Google’s information is already more than adequate for the huge majority of people who want to find information online. At some point, and that point has probably been reached, people cannot tell the difference between flying in an airplane that is at 32,000 feet and one that is flying 1,000 feet higher. The change in perspective means nothing to them. All they know is that they are as high as they have to be to get where they are going.”

In a classic innovator’s dilemma, this would mean that search technology should be able to serve other markets.  I think in many ways, this has already started to manifest.  Google created Gmail to increase the real estate in which it could deliver targeted advertising, but through it’s search technology brought a superior cloud email system to market.  And it is probably no coincidence that Apple brought a superior PC search feature to it’s OS X operating system in Spotlight while Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been on the board of directors.

Meanwhile, competition comes from downstream, not upstream.  Wolfram Alpha, in my opinion, doesn’t compete in quite the same way as Google, and I anticipate this will create problems for Wolfram Alpha when it comes to monetization.  Google is an intermediary, in that users come to Google to find information, and to be taken to that page on the web.  Wolfram Alpha, meanwhile, seeks to aggregate information from various sources on the web, and present them to the user in concert, on the Wolfram Alpha site.  So Wolfram Alpha’s goal is not to be an intermediary, it is to be a destination that pulls information from a backend, in this case the backend is the world wide web.

But if there is a paradigm shift in the way that people seek information, and how they want that information presented to them, then Wolfram Alpha can be a real threat to Google.  Google is pushing forth an agenda of getting webmasters to contextualize the information on their sites in a standardized way through their recent announcement of Rich Snippets.  This will help all search engines, and even non-search-related technologies on the web, not just Google.  If another company is able to capitalize on the proliferation of this added semantic markup, Google could find itself entering a very real competitive battle.

Much has been said about the opportunities that Internet-enabled mobile phones and so-called smart phones bring to advertisers.

While I agree that the next 3-5 years will bring about significant innovation with regard to mobile advertising, current mobile-based advertising has shown a lack of effective execution.  Granted, my view is biased toward advertising on the iPhone, simply because the iPhone is the device that I use on a daily basis.  However, along with the Blackberry, the iPhone is certainly the most sophisticated and advanced cell phone available, and should offer a good case study of advertising execution.

Below, I offer an analysis of various advertising on iPhone apps that I use daily.  I have also given each ad a letter grade.  To determine the grade, I considered the the advertisement itself (i.e. the banner or text ad, whether it had a call to action, placement), the landing page after tapping on the ad (usability on a mobile device, messaging) and whether or not the ad was tracking a conversion, thereby delivering the ability to track a true ROI for the campaign.

Weather Channel

The Weather Channel application places a small advertisement at the top of the screen.  The current advertiser when I pulled my screenshots was Zyrtec.

Zyrtec ad on Weather Channel application.

The drop-down ad is actually pretty good.  The unopened ad says “The fastest 24-hour OTC allergy relief.”  There is not a call to action, but the ad is simple and easy to read.

When I tap on the banner, the offer drops down.  There is a clear image of the Zyrtec product and a very clear message.  So far, so good.  However, the second screen fails to execute well for a mobile device.

After I tap on the expanded offer, I am redirected to what appears to be an internal page from the regular Zyrtec site.  The page has extremely small type.  While I can zoom in on the text, it would be better to have a landing page that is optimized for a mobile device.

Once I zoom in, I can see that there is a “Download PDF” link to redeem a refund if I was not satisfied with the product.  When I tap on the link, nothing happens.  Why would the advertiser require that the user download a file if they are on a mobile handset?  It just doesn’t make any sense.  It would have made better sense if the user could enter their email address and receive the necessary file in an email that they could print off later on.  While conversion tracking may be implemented on the “Download PDF” link, it is irrelevant because it is not possible to download, let alone print, the form to be sent in.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: D-

New York Times

Similar to the Weather Channel application, the New York Times hase an advertisement on the home page of the app.  While the New York Times has featured various different advertisers in it’s in-app advertising, they also fill those advertising spots with ads for their own content and features.  This was the case when I reviewed their advertising execution.

New York Times mobile advertisement

The NY Times runs ads on the bottom of the screen, as opposed to the Weather Channel which ran its ad on the top.  The landing domain m.nytimes.com is listed in the ad, along with clear messaging “Find movie showtimes.”

New York Times landing page

The landing page is optimized for a mobile device and lists current movies.  From there, the user can view showtimes or reviews from the New York Times.  The user can easily get the information they are looking for on this well optimized mobile page.  The conversion metric here may simply be click-throughs, however it is feasible that the NY Times is tracking clicks through to reviews and/or showtimes.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: A

Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune iPhone-optimized site uses Google AdSense to serve advertising on the site.  The Tribune runs AdSense on the article pages of its iPhone site.  The Trib also runs small banner ads on the homepage of the site.  However, like the NY Times, the Chicago Tribune was advertising its own content, so I opted instead to take a look at the AdSense.

AdSense on Chicago Tribune

The ads on the Tribune’s iPhone site are located below the article.  It seems very likely that many users would finish reading the article and neglect to even look at the ads.  But, as Internet-marketers know, we don’t need many users clicking on the ads.  If we have enough traffic on the site, we just need a small percentage of the traffic clicking on ads, and that makes the system work.

University of Phoenix ad

I tapped on an ad for what appears to be a University of Phoenix affiliate site.  The landing page does not appear to be optimized for a mobile phone, however the page is very simple and actually works quite well as a mobile landing page.  The first page captures information such as citizenship status, prior level of education completed and email address.  Then, after tapping on the continue button, the user can submit additional information such as address, phone number, and whether or not they want a University of Phoenix representative to contect them.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: B+

ESPN

The ESPN iPhone optimized site serves ads on the top of the site, above all of the content.  It is similar to the Weather Channel and the New York Times in that it is analogous to what we think of as a traditional banner ad.

Knight ad on ESPN iPhone site

In this case, the ad includes the company name, a call to action and a landing page domain.  However, there is no indication of what is being advertised.  I am not familiar with Knight, and to be honest I have absolutely no clue what they are advertising.  I’m not sure if it’s software or an ISP or financial services or what.  With all of the other ads, I had at least a decent idea of what the advertisement was trying to push.

Knight ESPN iPhone ad landing page

After tapping on the banner ad, I found that the landing page was actually on the ESPN.com mobile site and not on an external site.  The landing page simply has a small amount of text from the advertiser and a URL.  However, the URL for www.knight.com is not clickable.  Despite trying to touch the URL to go to Knight.com, I was not able to be taken anywhere on the Knight website.  While the advertiser may be able to track click-throughs, they are not capturing visitor information to record any type of conversion.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: D

Conclusion

Based on the four mobile advertisements reviewed, it appears that the biggest area of improvement for mobile advertisers is in the area of mobile usability.  Two of the four ads sent users to non-mobile  optimized landing pages, and another sent users to a page with the advertiser URL that couldn’t be clicked on.  Many of the advertisers were able to strike a good balance between short messaging and clear phrasing letting the user know what is being advertised.  Surprisingly, but thankfully, conversion tracking seems to be something that most of the advertisers had the capability of tracking.  While mobile advertising is certainly progressing, advertisers need to consider and account for the mobile medium when creating ads, as opposed to retro-fitting existing assets that are better suited for a user on a fully functional computer.

I have been following the Dow today.

After many days of the Dow Jones Industrial Average being in the crapper, I wonder if it’s time for Google to change their Google Finance favicon.

There, that’s more like it!

I’ve recently been hearing some stuff on the blogs about SEO and Flash. I got curious and wanted to find some actionable information to raise my game, and I found some stuff I figured would be worth sharing.

First is a seminal article from Jonathan Hochman regarding SEO and Flash (PDF for those who want to save it). I’d consider this a “must read” if you’re doing SEO. If the first few paragraphs seem a bit technical, don’t get discouraged, I think the last section of the articles has some really great info that you can put to use right away. Eric Enge provides additional insight into sIFR and SWFObject, and how each works with regard to SEO.

Recently, we heard about Google working with Adobe to do a better job of indexing Flash.

However, more technical insight indicates that this technology would appear to be problematic (article has good insight into why indexing Flash is problematic, however I do not endorse the author’s suggestion for better crawlability).

In the end, Rand brings us home by breaking down the technicalities into layman’s terms.

I hope this helps anyone who is looking for a collection of articles to help conceptualize the issues that come with optimizing Flash for SEO.

Earlier this week, I noticed a Google advertisement on the Red Line.  The ad featured the iconic Google Maps pin, and said that Google now has public transportation directions in Google Maps.

For anyone who uses the iGoogle homepage, here is a cool gadget that allows you to put in your NCAA tournament teams and then compare your picks to your friends.

I’m venturing to guess this is one of the least productive weeks of the year for the American economy, as everyone spends all week filling out their brackets while at work. Even the boss.

The Wall Street Journal today ran an interesting article about Google’s IT structure. The interesting part to me is when Douglass Merrill, Google’s CIO, discusses how the company’s security structure works. Instead of focusing on the endpoints such as a computer or a smartphone, the concentration is on making the infrastructure itself more secure. This is especially noteworthy when you think about the migration of common computing applications to the cloud, which in essence deemphasizes the need for security at the level of the computer and shifts that need to the internet based application. This shift of making information accessible in a centrally located place is nothing new, and might even be surprising when you take the blogging example into account. Blogging was supposed to move the locale of information away from the centralized new sources to decentralized, loosely connected individuals. But maybe what it really does is shift the information away from news sources that existed as the spokes and moved it toward the hub, in this case being the cloud. In the end though, the hub-and-spoke model is probably not the best example, but rather a more diversified network where connections exist across various levels but all tend toward a centralized nucleus.

This is how I characterized my feelings of Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter to my coworker:

• Google is successful because it is highly functional and makes everything easy to work with. I can easily make bulk up
• Yahoo! is marginal because while it is highly functional, it is much more complicated to do a mass upload.
• MSN is at the bottom of the barrel because I can’t even do a mass upload on my own. I need to contact my MSN rep for a mass upload, and if that person is out of town, I pretty much need to do the upload manually.

I think this speaks not only to the ease of doing a mass upload, but to why these companies perform as they do on a broader level. Something as small as a mass upload is representative of the other issues that seem to come up.

When I started at Rise Interactive, one of the goals that I wanted to accomplish was to become Google AdWords and Yahoo! Ambassador qualified. I am happy to say that I took both tests this week, and I am now qualified in both Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.
This was one of those goals that I really didn’t know how long it was going to take me to achieve, two weeks, two months, six months. But I’ve been at Rise for just about a month and I’m really excited to have these certifications under my belt.