WebProNews » Relevance

Yahoo: Dominate Search Results Like Matt Cutts

Chris Crum — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:43:54 +0000

Yahoo is posting a series of "how-to" articles for social media on the company’s advertising blog. Interestingly enough, the subject of the latest edition is "How to Dominate Search Results Through Social Media Sites," and the example Yahoo’s Laura Lippay points to as how to do it is Matt Cutts, who of course works for Yahoo’s chief rival, Google.

Ironically, Lippay talked to us last summer about "the secret" to outranking your competitors:

She looks at a sample of Yahoo’s search results for the query, "Matt Cutts":

"Not only does Matt’s own blog appear at the top of the page, but he also dominates the results with his likeness on several sites, including Wikipedia, Twitter, Blippy and Facebook.," says Lippay. "Although not everyone can have their own page on Wikipedia, social networks like the ones that Cutts appears on are prime examples of how you can dominate search results for your name or brand."

"As websites gain search engines’ trust and rise in importance over time the way social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and others have been doing, they tend to rank well in search results," adds Laura. "Try creating (and maintaining when possible) profiles on other sites like MySpace, Squidoo, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr or any number of social sites that make public profiles available to search engines. Search engines will often show image or video thumbnails from some of these sites in search results as well, which generally evokes more click-throughs. All of these pages with your name or your brand could end up in front of prospective clients or any searchers looking for you or your company. "

First of all, I’m not criticizing Lippay for pointing to how the employee of a rival is doing things right. Frankly, Cutts does make for a pretty good example of her point (Lippay herself also has a decent amount of profiles showing up in a search for her own name as well), and neither Google nore Yahoo is really in the business of SEO, so the the point is fairly moot.

The post did lead me to compare the Yahoo results with Google’s results for "matt cutts" which may or may not have been intended. While it’s certainly a matter of opinion, I have to say, Yahoo actually provides the more relevant results in this particular example, which is interesting, considering the query is for a Google guy. Personalization features could possibly be involved, but I don’t see why they would keep a Facebook result out of the mix, especially considering I’m Facebook friends with Cutts.

As a matter of fact, I wrote about a relevance issue I found with this exact query not too long ago – I found that when I searched for "matt cutts", Google’s personalized results (the starred results feature in particular) were pushing down the more relevant results.

Looking at the results for the query again, I’m not even seeing Matt’s Facebook profile. To Laura’s point about "trust and rise in importance" with regards to sites like Facebook (it recently surpassed Google as the most-visited site in a week’s time, mind you), it’s interesting that his Facebook profile wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the results. In fact, it’s not even in the first ten pages. On Yahoo it’s in the top 3 or 4.

Granted, on Google, all I would have to do to find him on Facebook would be search for "Matt Cutts, Facebook profile", but without the result in a search for just "matt cutts", Google is telling me that this is more relevant, not to mention the starred results and all the rest.

So, this tells me a few things:

1. A Facebook profile doesn’t necessarily equal relevance in Google

2. Google’s results are not always more relevant than the other search engines (not that this is startling revelation)

3. Lippay’s advice is still good. The results for the Cutts query on Google still do return his blog, his Wikipedia page, his Twitter account, his FriendFeed account, etc. Cutts is still in pretty good shape on Google results for his name, as far as dominating the results.

I’m not sure I have one particular point to all of this, I’m sorry to say. I just thought it was interesting that: a. Yahoo would point to how a Googler does things and b. Yahoo has better results for that Googler (in my opinion). Just observations (it’s probably not going to make me use Google any less). Lippay’s own point about dominating results for your name/brand is worth paying attention to anyway.

By the way, as Lippay notes, just creating your social profiles may not be enough. You probably don’t want to dominate the search results with a bunch of profiles that aren’t up to date or offering something of value to users.

We Can’t Judge Relevance

Jordan McCollum — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:00:43 +0000

Yesterday, I argued that Microsoft’s search engine update, which included highly touted relevance improvements, did not and will not ultimately improve their fortunes.

To state things a bit more strongly: I think that relevance cannot be a selling point for a search engine, and not just because Live’s update was just catching them up to the level of many other popular search engines. In fact, I think that it’s hard for any of us to truly evaluate “relevance” in results.

There are a number of reasons that I think this is so. First and probably foremost, search engines try (as much any computer can “try”) to understand user intent, but they aren’t all that great at it. While they’ve been preprogrammed to return a specific type of results page for queries they recognize (like music pages at Ask, Yahoo and Google), they can’t automatically parse and understand what you’re looking for.

For example, a search for [beach park virginia] returned nothing I saw as relevant. While I knew the intent behind that phrase, Google could only find pages that had all of the same words there. Whose fault is that?

Sometimes search engines have a bit of help in picking up on user intent. That’s the premise behind personalization: gather enough data about a person’s search habits and you’ll be able to understand what it is they want when they type in [oneida].

But even personalized systems aren’t perfect. Yesterday, perhaps I was looking for flatware; today, I might be researching New York Indian tribes. Tomorrow, religious collective movements. This is part of the reason why there is a limit to how personalized Google has made its personalized results.

Like personalized results, our perception of relevance is subjective. As Phillip Lenssen said on a comment on a Google Operating System post last month:

A 51% “success rate” could mean Google is “only” the best 51% of the time, or it could mean Google returns exactly the right result for the tastes of 51% of the people, and that the other people prefer other types of results.

As we know, the brand associated with a SERP (and the image of the brand) has a great affect on how relevant we think the results are—even when the results are, in fact, exactly the same.

Add to this the fact that the snippets on the page aren’t long enough or detailed enough for us to really tell what we’re clicking through to. A site could be totally on-point for my query, but if it requires me to register, forces music upon me, features a horrific amount of ads or is simply completely illegible, I won’t be able to consider it “relevant.” (And I will run far, far away.)

Once we get to a site, design and other “irrelevant” factors affect our perception of a site, making it difficult to isolate ‘relevance’ alone as a cause for someone to hit the ‘back’ button. And who’s to say that hitting the ‘back’ button means a site is irrelevant, anyway? How many times have you gotten the information you needed and were done with a site?

Objective measures of relevance, on the other hand, are made in a vacuum. They are far outside the real world and our realm of experience. In an objective measure of relevance, the tester types in a query, which they probably didn’t choose. [Apple], perhaps.

And then tester judged how relevant the results are. But “relevance” here isn’t determined by what the searcher really wanted when they typed in the query: it’s what the research team decided was the “right” answer when you ask a search engine “[Apple]?” If their definition doesn’t include Braeburns, suddenly the search engine is wrong.

One of my college professors called this problem with research “The Utterly Boring World.” In this world, The man bit the sandwich is a perfectly fine construct, while *The sandwich bit the man is ungrammatical because it is nonsensical. But there is a place for nonsense in the real world—and a place for Braeburns on a SERP, even if that wasn’t what you were looking for. It might be exactly what someone else wanted.

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Relevance…Is it Relevant?

Jordan McCollum — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:12:33 +0000

As we mentioned Friday, Live Search is very proud of itself for finally making its results relevant. Unfortunately, I think their relevance push was obviously too little, too late.

Are users actually concerned with relevance anymore? I’m going to argue that we’re not. We take it for granted. And really, we already know that people don’t judge search engine results on the fifty words below the results—they judge them on the brand. Whatever brand we happen to prefer, I think our default search engine is what we consider the most relevant. And yes, for many people, that is Google. But not everyone.

Google has made relevance so fundamental to search that it’s now a non-issue. There is so little difference among the relevance of search engines that being relevant isn’t a unique selling proposition or the distinguishing factor. Right now, it’s the brand. Google has associated its brand with relevance—and it’s a given that all other search engines will have to be relevant to compete. But MSN’s new relevance (and lack of branding) is not about to set it apart.

I don’t think that even a more relevant MSN—i.e., an MSN that is more relevant than Google—will ultimately be able to win the day. Users take it for granted that search engines return at least somewhat relevant results. Frankly, I think that the vast majority of users (including the millions looking for [ebay.com], [aol.com] and [myspace.com]) are simply not sophisticated enough to discern which search engine is presents the results that best address the query as they’ve typed it.

I’m not arguing that search engines should ignore relevance altogether. Of course they need to make an effort to understand the web pages they index. Even the most ardent acolyte of Googlism would one day have to turn away if Google began returning aphasic results (you type in [puppies] and get information on chrysanthemums). Search engines should constantly work to improve the relevance of their results—behind the scenes.

While touting the relevance of their results may sound impressive to search marketers (and really, I’m sure that that is a large part of the Live Search blog’s audience), it’s a far less convincing argument to the people you really need to convince—users. And so far, it’s not working.

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Live Search Continues Down Relevance Road

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:23:31 +0000

The Live Search team at Microsoft has been working on making their centerpiece product more effective at recognizing equivalences, and knowing when ‘the’ needs to be part of the query.

Live Search Continues Down Relevance Road

Live Search team, where have you been all of Microsoft’s life? We know it took a few years for Bill Gates and company to recognize that the Internet had some potential. Did search have a similar hangover?

As they continue to break down what they have managed to do to improve their service, the Live Search team blogged about addressing a couple of common needs in search.

First they noted improved recognition of what they like to call equivalencies and what we like to call abbreviations. Live Search should be better at recognizing these, within the context of a query.

Then there are ‘stop words’, the little things like ‘the’, ‘an’, and ‘a’. These could be innocent bystanders to be ignored in a query. Or as the blog post said, they could be more important:

However, if your query was The Office (the title of a popular televisions (sic) show) it would be absolutely ridiculous to drop the word “the” since the query would essentially change meaning – and we received a lot of emails about how we were doing just that. In fact, previously we were routinely dropping all stop words – and knew this needed dramatic improvement.

Improving relevance does more than help searchers. It improves the advertising Microsoft can deliver to those searchers. The company wants a bigger chunk of the search advertising pie, but to get it, they have to make Live Search a better proposition for its users.

Live Search Team Channeling Steve Ballmer

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:19:23 +0000

The excitable folks working on Live Search at Microsoft think they have come a long way in nine months with their work on relevance.

Live Search Team Channeling Steve Ballmer

And boy, is their blog post title excited about it. “Relevance, Relevance, Relevance!” Shades of the famous Dancing Ballmer video, where he chants the word ‘Developers’ over and over for several seconds.

The cheeky people revamping Live Search gave that moment a hat tip as they talked about making relevance an even greater part of their search engine. Their latest update spent over nine months in the works.

They list reduced spam as an improvement in their index:

You might ask how we know spam is down? Experts on our team take a

Relevance in Marketing

Rohit Bhargava — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:25:39 +0000

Good marketing comes in two forms, not one. There is marketing that is relevant, appears at the right time to the right people and is likely to influence actions. This is the kind of marketing that everyone in the industry strives for. It’s what we think is good.

The problem is, it misses the one element that is perhaps the most important … timing. You can reach the exact right customer about the exact right product and have the exact right creative delivery. But if they are not seeking the type of information you provide, or in the midst of some other activity, your efforts fall on deaf ears.

Even keyword marketing, which many would propose could never be irrelevant or badly timed if a customer has to physically click the ad, can be ineffective if the information you drive someone to is not consistent with their point in their own purchase cycle. For example, you will never convert a customer to purchase if they are only at a point of researching options – but they may very well click your keyword ad anyway.

The real question is, assuming you are able to create relevant marketing, how do you ensure that your efforts are most likely to be acted upon? The real secret, I believe, comes from going one step further than relevance. It comes from understanding that point your customer is in their own cycle and timing delivery of the message that is most likely to influence them based on what you can understand from the type of information they may be seeking.

This is Mindset Marketing. It involves knowing what type of information is most likely to influence your target audience and delivering that information at the right moment. If the mantra for real estate is all about the location, the new mantra for marketing should be all about the timing.

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Why Branding Matters in B2B Marketing

Jon Miller — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:40:13 +0000

Strewn around my house are pens, coffee cups, calculators, USB memory sticks, and assorted swag from various companies I’ve met over the years. What is the purpose of all this stuff? Does having a leather portfolio with a vendor’s logo on it make me more likely to buy their products?

Proponents of swag will argue that it builds brand by getting the business’s name in the office of potential influencers and purchasers, where it will stay top of mind. Is this really effective? Put more broadly, does branding even matter at B2B companies? Or is branding a waste of time and budget compared to "hard ROI" activities that can be proven to drive revenue?

In this post, Part One of an occasional series on B2B Branding, I’ll explain why I think branding is important to B2B companies, and why it should be part of your overall B2B marketing strategy. In Part Two, I’ll discuss the subtle differences between brand and reputation. And in Part Three, I’ll give tips for how B2B marketers should think about building their brands and measuring their results. (And guess what? Giving out swag is not one of the tips.)

Some May Disagree

Some experts argue that branding plays no role in B2B marketing. Their arguments typically include:

B2B buyers are rational decision makers (or a committee of rational decision makers) who are not swayed by emotional factors such as brands.

B2B purchases are all about the relationship between the individual sales rep and the buyer; if the B2B brand means anything, it is created by the sales rep.

B2B products do not promise to make you "cool" or "sexy" or any other aspirational attribute. Price is the only thing that matters.

B2B products are too complex to reduce to a tagline or ad.

B2B companies sell to narrow audiences, so advertising to create a brand does not make sense.

Even one of the most respected thinkers in business marketing, Geoffrey Moore, recently wrote that branding has no relevance to complex B2B companies, arguing that:

…while [branding] has extraordinary relevance to B2C volume operations enterprises, it has virtually no relevance to B2B complex systems enterprises… IBM, GE, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, Siemens, Accenture, and Caterpillar are great companies, but it is highly misleading to think of them as great brands… In a complex systems enterprise the mechanisms are completely different. Customer intimacy is achieved by face-to-face interactions between representatives of both companies, and buying decisions are made and reviewed by an array of people. By virtue of these differences the impact of brand is dramatically muted…. In reality it is far better to think of such a brand as a placeholder for a strong corporate reputation and leave it at that.

Business Buyers Have Emotions Too

Despite those arguments, my belief is that branding does matter to B2B marketers, and for one main reason: B2B buyers are still people, and people are emotional. And, as research increasingly indicates, emotions impact economic decision making. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell writes that buyers make most decisions by relying on their two-second first impressions based on stored memories, images and feelings.

Heuristics

More generally, research shows that emotions impact how decisions are framed and are heavily involved in the creation of heuristics. A heuristic is a simple, efficient shorthand that simplifies decision making. They can guide which information and options are considered and which are rejected, and can bypass rational decision making altogether. (Another interesting bit of research found that buyers who had fewer options and considered fewer criteria were more satisfied with their purchase than those with a more complete decision process.) Often, heuristics are useful: if you find yourself in Africa threatened by a lion, you don’t have time to evaluate all your options rationally. But heuristics also bypass rational decision making, which is the source of many biases.

Kevin Randall of Movéo Integrated Branding writes that B2B buyers are overwhelmed with choices, features, benefits, information, data, and metrics. The typical RFP process involves dozens of potential vendors and hundreds of questions – more information than any buyer could evaluate. The fact that B2B buyers have emotions means that no matter how disciplined a buying process is, they will still use heuristics to simplify their decision making. This may be conscious, since the buyer knows she can’t learn everything about every potential vendor, or it may be subconscious. In fact, whether or not the buyer realizes it, the decision is often made long before the buying process is completed. When this happens, even subconsciously, much of the buying process ends up being an effort to justify the initial emotional decision.

B2B marketers can and should tap into this by appealing to the emotional side of their prospects, as well as their rational side. This is where branding comes in, because brands inherently operate on an emotional level by stimulating the amygdala portion of the brain (part of the reptilian limbic system). By building the right brand associations in your prospects mind, you can help to "close the deal" before the selling even starts.

Avoidance of Negative Emotions

Research also shows that emotions impact decision making because we take the anticipation of emotions into our decision making. When looking to buy something, we balance the pleasure of the prospective possession with the pain of acquiring it. When negotiating with others, our desire to avoid guilt, disappointment, and regret can impact our strategies as much as our desire to get a good outcome.

In B2C marketing, marketers often capitalize on the anticipation of positive emotion by appealing to aspirational feelings such as desire. In contrast, the strongest B2B brands capitalize on the avoidance of negative emotions. This is because there is an asymmetry between the upside and downside of B2B purchases: the buyer does not experience the full benefit of the solution directly and may or not be rewarded for making a good purchase, but a bad purchase can destroy the buyer’s reputation and damage job security.

B2B brands can tap into this by building trust in the buyer’s mind. The classic example is "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". One way to achieve trust is by being a dominant leader in your category. Since that is not an option for most companies (yet), the best way to build a brand of trust is to become a trusted advisor via thought leadership early in the buying cycle. (Stay tuned for Part Three for more on this topic.)

Hard ROI Benefits of Building Brands

Because brand-influenced heuristics impact buyer decision making, companies with strong brands often have better financial performance. The heuristics used by potential buyers lead to greater access, lower price sensitivity, better openness, and more forgiveness for mistakes for well-branded companies. The book Business Market Management: Understanding, Creating, and Delivering Value argues that strong brands are reflected in these preferential actions:

Greater willingness to try a product or service

Less time needed to close the sale of an offering

Greater likelihood that the product or service is purchased

Willingness to award a larger share of purchase requirement

Willingness to pay a price premium

Less sensitive in regard to price increases

Less inducement to try a competitive offering

Of course, it can be notoriously difficult for a metrics-driven CMO to prove these effects to their fellow executives, especially since there is no easy "control group" to test against. One approach is to measure brand perceptions from target customers, and then correlate their a priori perceptions to business outcomes. If you can demonstrate a positive relationship between initial brand perception and eventual revenue from that customer, you will be well on your way to being able to proving the ROI on brand building.

For more, stay tuned for Parts Two and Three of my B2B Branding series, in which I’ll discuss the differences between brand and reputation, and share ideas for how B2B marketers can build their brands and measure the results.

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Blog Search Engine Sphere Launches

Nathan Weinberg — Tue, 02 May 2006 16:40:21 +0000

Hyped-up blog search engine Sphere launched a number of minutes ago, and already there is some discussion on it.

I’ll point to Jason Schramm, who has more experience with using the site, but I will give my first impressions.

Blog search is a tough one, since no one seems to know what people are looking for when they use it. If I search for “Google”, so I want the latest news on Google? The best blogs on Google? The most linked articles on Google? Hopefully, Sphere has some unique ideas on managing differing expectations, something we’ll learn as we get more experience using it.

I do like the way they have different pages with different ways of looking at a query. They’ve got:

Standard search, ordered by relevance over a recent period of time or by date

Major blogs on the topic

Related items on the query, like mainstream media news, photos, books and podcasts

The coolest thing has to be the custom range slider. When viewing results by relevance, you can choose a date range (so they are relevant, but not ancient), and you can choose predetermined ranges, or use a slider to make your own on the fly. This is very reminiscint of Google Finances stock chart/news slider.

There’s also a bookmarklet that will take you to a search for items related to whatever you are reading and a TypePad widget. All in all, it looks like they’ve got their stuff together, and I hope the obvious hard work pays off.

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As an aside, here’s a quote from Jason:

It’s a shame that people posted about the launch before the small team behind Sphere could be awake to solve any problems that may occur. It was more of a common courtesy thing, which no longer matters since the cat is out of the bag and doesn’t want to go back in.

From what I’ve heard, Sphere emailed their beta testers and asked them not to post on this till 7 am in the morning, hours from now. Considering Michael Arrington and Om Malik posted on this first near-simultaneously (and TechCrunch with a well-prepared in-depth review), I have to wonder if Mike A. and Om just got the news a tad earlier from tipsters and posted it, or if Sphere sent out the email to testers, knowing full well that it would be on TechCrunch hours earlier. Ah, the story behind the story; always equally fascinating.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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Search Relevance is Dead!

Andy Beal — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:35:42 +0000

I’ve been saying for a long time that the race for “relevance” among search engines is over.

If you take the top 5 search engines, you’ll see that they all do about the same job of providing accurate search results. Instead, the race has moved on to who can launch the most features and products.

Anyway, a new study out of France confirms that Yahoo and Google are pretty much the same. The most interesting data is that, while true that most search engines are equal in relevance, they still all do a pretty poor job in satisfaction.

Google and Yahoo tied for first place, with a rating of 2.3, but the most striking result is undoubtedly the extremely low level of user satisfaction. None of the search engines even passed (2.5 out of 5)

Via Battelle.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Yahoo Ending Competitor Trademark Bids

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 19:28:54 +0000

As of March 1st, Yahoo Search Marketing will change its policy regarding bids for trademarks by competitive advertisers.

After watching Mazda hijack the “Google Pontiac” campaign by purchasing Pontiac as a keyword in Google AdWords, Yahoo has taken steps to end the practice of bidding on trademarks by the competition. An email sent to such advertisers with Yahoo Search Marketing emerged at Search Engine Watch.

The email read as follows:

On March 1, 2006, Yahoo! Search Marketing will modify its editorial guidelines regarding the use of keywords containing trademarks. Previously, we allowed competitive advertising by allowing advertisers to bid on third-party trademarks if those advertisers offered detailed comparative information about the trademark owner’s products or services in comparison to the competitive products and services that were offered or promoted on the advertiser’s site.

In order to more easily deliver quality user experiences when users search on terms that are trademarks, Yahoo! Search Marketing has determined that we will no longer allow bidding on keywords containing competitor trademarks.

The SEW article pointed out how such bidding was already prohibited in Europe. In the US, Google allows that bidding to take place, but the trademark cannot be part of the ad copy.

When Yahoo released its fourth quarter earnings, CEO Terry Semel noted how the company’s efforts to improve its search advertising relevance would take hold as new search algorithms debut later in 2006.

The move delivers Yahoo a neatly packaged sales pitch its Overture team can deliver to current and potential advertising customers, particularly the powerful brand name owners in the marketplace. At Yahoo, Mazda won’t drive away with your ad campaign as they did with Google’s clients, Yahoo could easily say with a smile.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.