Mahalo

I was impressed by the Jason Calacanis keynote at SES NY today. Mr. Calacanis is a serial entreprenuer, current CEO of Mahalo, and has been the center of a fair amount of SEO controversy.

What impressed me most about Mr. Calacanis was his conviction that search needs to evolve and, specifically, algorithmic search is not the right answer for every query. This thinking is the rationale behind Mahalo - a human assisted search engine. Every result page on Mahalo is created by a person, and every request for site inclusion is reviewed by a person. By using people to determine site relevancy for a given search term, Mahalo and Mr. Calacanis have given us a true measure of relevancy and effectively taken away the lion's share of what the average SEO bills her clients for.

Mr. Calacanis also commented that he believed SEOs today are too focused on the near-term win as opposed to a longer term strategy of building value. In defense of SEOs everywhere, they're only partially to blame for this. The link-based page rank algorithms promote a culture of deception. It's either too tempting to try to game the system or there's no choice becuase all your competitors are doing it. How can Mr. White Hat win when all those shades of grey exist and his clients are being promised hundreds (or thousands) of inbound links?

Perhaps this is why te SEO industry has been so defensive when it comes to remarks Mr. Calacanis has made in the past. If SEOs were secure in their craft, why would they care what anybody says? The writing is on the wall and the SEO industry sees the changes that are coming. Universal search, hand edited page rank, human assisted search engines, and even social media threaten to alter the fabric of SEO, and the situation has more than a few people scared.   

Rather than claiming every blog post which questions the current SEO industry is "SEO Hate," it would be better to embrace the fact that search, and thus SEO, are immature industries. Spurred on by advances in technology, the search industry will continue to evolve at a rapid pace and what we consider SEO today will be vastly different just a few years from now - and those that continue to focus on the short term will be left behind rather quickly. 

Universal Search

At SES NY today, the 1:30pm session was focused on Universal Search. The speakers for the discussion were:

• John Battelle, Founder/Chairman/CEO, Federated Media
• James Lamberti, Senior Vice President, Search and Media, comScore, Inc
• Lyndsay Menzies, Managing Director, Big Mouth Media
• Jack Menzel, PM for Universal Search, Google

For those not familiar with the term, Universal Search refers to a blended search results page where Google combines listings from its video, image, local, news (etc.) engines with those it gathers from spidering web pages.

The onstage conversation was the livliest and most engaging I've seen at SES so far. Mr. Battelle was persistent in his attack insistance that the continuing trend toward Universal Search was slowly turning Google (and other search engines) into the destination, rather than the road map. Recently released comScore data supported this theory, showing a 3% lower click-thru rate when Universal Search results are displayed to the searcher.

On the surface, this may seem ideal from a user experience perspective. Getting the searcher to the data they're seeking as quickly as possible is what it's all about, right? And that was the position taken by Mr. Menzel. The situation gets muddy with the realization that Google is also, slowly, becomming a media company. In many Universal Search results, you will find Google Finance for stock quotes and Google Video (YouTube) for funny clips of Chuch Norris. Mr. Battelle pointedly asked Mr. Menzel if Google favored their media properties when presenting Univeral Search results. Naturally, the Google stance is to always show the most relevant results. Of course, "relevancy" is determined by Google's algorithm, which relies on many, many data points of which Google is likely to have the best data for their own properties, so you do the math.

For the thoughtful SEO crowd in the audience, the question is this - What happens when Google becomes the destination? Even if the issue of Google showing more of it's own content on the results pages is put aside, where does it leave the average search marketer if the searcher never leaves the results page? In this scenario, the monetization and ROI of SEO goes right out the window as the user never makes it to the content owner's site.

It's an uncomfortable situation to be in. The entirety of the web allows Google to spider their content with no real guidelines on exactly how much of it can be displayed within a Google property. Would it be going too far for Google to allow a video from Break.com to be played direclty from the search results page? The inclination is to say yes, but wouldn't that also be a better user experience? 

On stage today, Mr. Menzel said several times that Google wanted nothing more than to deliver the searched for information to the user as quickly as possible. Following this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, Google starts to look more and more like a destination. And if that's the case, then we're witnessing the beginnings of a game changer for the SEO world.

Related Posts: Yahoo Semantic Web

SES NY - Day One

The NYC version of the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Conference and Expo kicked off today at the Hilton on 54th Street and 6th Avenue. I missed the morning session due to work commitments, but made it in time for two sessions.

For the 2pm time-slot, I attended Mobile Local Search: Finding the Way. The session description offered "...best practices for answering needs of today's demanding [mobile] searchers," but I found the session to be largely a marketing jaunt for the companies represented by the four panelists. Nothing really to learn, with the exception that ~90% of callers have no idea what they pay for a 411 call.

At 3:45pm, the only option was Orion Panel: Getting Vertical Search Right, which proved to be more interesting. While, again, each of the panelists spent a fair amount of time working the PR angle there was a reasonable amount of substance to the conversation. A few highlights:

Steven Krien from OrganizedWisdom.com believes firmly that the future of vertical search lies in human assisted search, including an available service layer. As an example, Organized Wisdom (which focuses on the Healthcare vertical) delivers Mahalo-esqe human-curated search results. Also available, for $1.99 a minute, a site visitor looking for more specific information can talk (online) to a doctor. Putting aside the question of what type of doctors are willing to work for a start-up web site at a rate far below what they get paid at their day job, using real people to prepare search results for specific search terms is a strong value proposition. The example he gave was the Johns Hopkins Medical Center Forum on Pancreatic Cancer. According to the researchers at OrganizedWisdom, this forum is the best place to find an active and meaningful community of people dealing with this disease. Despite that, this forum ranks poorly from a natural search perspective and without human assisted search it would go largely unnoticed. Of course this gets to the relevancy question when trying to understand why these forums don't rank and it's not surprising that the folks attending Johns Hopkins Pancreatic Cancer forum have more important things to do than run out and create some back links. If you're not familiar with my views on relevancy, give them a read and let me know your thoughts.

Jason Finger from SeamlessWeb and Paul Forster from Indeed.com both mentioned how difficult it is for general search engines to utilize structured or meta data to help rank search results. The obvious reason for this is that the form of the data will vary from one vertical to the next. A common architecture utilizing an entity design pattern might enable a generic search engine to handle this from a purely technical standpoint, but it's simply not scalable / practical for a company to build the expertise in EVERYTHING that would be required to detail the data structure for all verticals.

It's interesting to watch this online search evolution. The failings of the generic engines shines a light on the need for vertical focus. This is clearly a case where "Jack of all trades, master of none" applies.