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I was moved to write this blog post after seeing the Search Engine Watch item by Nathania Johnson entitled 50 Most Memorable Moments in Search for 2008. 

It was one heck of a year for the search industry. The convergence of outside economic forces, a wild presidential election and the 2008 Beijing Olympics were all signs of an industry becoming more and more mainstream and global. Here’s a look at the completely subjective biggest stories in search from 2008.

I am a strong believer in the KISS principle and my favorite quotation is: I am sorry this letter is so long.  I did not have time to write a shorter one.  Some say that Mark Twain was the author, although the more literate suggest that it was originally written in French by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

I presume there must be two groups of people in the world.  There are those who like long lists.  And there are those who like short lists.  I am very much in the second group.  My preferred list has three items in it.  I guess with any less it could hardly be called a list.  However once it goes beyond three, then it is unlikely anyone will really remember all the elements of the list.

For search articles an additional reason for short lists is that with fewer links under the PageRank approach each link receives more authority.  With a list of 50 items each link receives only a miniscule proportion of the PageRank of the original article.  This does of course assume that the links have not been nofollow-ed.

For more general reasons short lists are better.  Long lists are tough to argue with.  Indeed after three days my comment was the first to be added to that article.  With only three items in my list of memorable moments, it is unlikely that everyone will agree.  Since conversations are what the Internet is all about, short lists therefore feed this process better.

From Nathania’s long list I believe the following three items are really the most memorable.  As it happens two of them are not even links, but clearly had to be included since they are very important.

2.  Search Advertising Plays Major Role in Elections  From the primaries to the general presidential election, it appeared that whoever outspent their competitor headed to the next step. Barack Obama, with his arsenal of cash, went on an online advertising shopping spree and will be inaugurated in a mere 21 days.

6.  Twitter Becomes Agent of Search Whether you deem it a micro-blogging tool or a mass chat client, Twitter went mainstream this year and the search industry was smack dab in the mix of things. Many users found Twitter useful for the actual conducting of searches, while others found it useful in networking.

11.  G1, the First Google Android Phone, Released Through T-mobile

Are these the three most memorable moments in search for 2008 for you? Please leave a comment and let us know what you think about all this.

Warning: this post is entirely conjectural and may have no basis in fact.

There is an interesting post by Loren Baker that encourages companies to develop video websites promoting their brands.  Their existence can be flagged by putting them on.TV domains.  He suggests that one should Take Advantage of .TV Domains for SEO and Reputation Management

There is a very large untapped market of creating .TV niche and business oriented online video sites which your business may be overlooking in your online marketing and search engine optimization strategy. If your business has a strong brand, then people are searching for your brand online. 

One way to attract that same user who is searching for your brand, and build the value of your brand in search results, is by launching a .TV site which is an online video representation of your company. By doing so, not only will you have another authority and valued site which should rank highly for your domain name, but you will also be engaging your customers in a form of social media.

He points out that this will ensure that companies are more visible in Google universal searches.  In any such search there will probably be a video within the first half dozen items.  If an image is associated with the brand, this image may also be referenced.  News items may also be included if the company is making news.

Having multiple online files associated with the company or brand clearly makes the company more visible in such searches.  An intriguing question is whether these multiple online properties have any synergistic effect in the regular Google keyword search algorithm.  Google has been very clear on the importance of hyperlinks in confirming the authority of web pages.  Most other facts about the algorithm are carefully kept confidential.

How important are images in the Google search algorithm?

A commonly held view is that images in a web page give zero information to the search robots.  It is emphasized that one should use Alt attributes to provide information on the subject of each image.  Nevertheless Google is trying to extract more information from images.  This can be seen in the Google image search that can now be done to find faces.

Given these developments, it is reasonable to infer that perhaps an image in a web page may be assessed for its contribution to the relevance of the page.  If there is an associated video file, perhaps this could also contribute to the relevance of a given web page.  If this view is correct, then any given web page may pick up contributions to its relevance from other associated video or image files.  This would encourage the creation of such associated picture files to improve the search visibility of a given web page.

It must be emphasized that this is all conjecture.  However nothing has been lost if the conjecture is untrue.  Creating associated images or video files may in any case contribute to the visibility and ranking in Google’s universal search listings.

It is perhaps fitting that the new blog, Viral Conversations, created by Michael Gray  should be part of the viral publishing process that Guy Kawasaki has put in place for his new book Reality Check.

I and many others received a copy for review.  It has taken me until now to wade through the 460 pages in the book.  I can certainly confirm that he delivers what his website promises:

Reality Check is a compilation of Guy’s best wit, wisdom, and contrarian opinions in handy book form. From competition to customer service, innovation to marketing, he shows readers how to ignore fads and foolishness while sticking to commonsense practices.

One advantage of really reading it at length is that by now there are many other reviews around.  Thus it is possible to compare and contrast what one feels with what others are saying.  Here are some of the others that came onto my radar screen.

• Dan Farber on Cnet
• Duct Tape Marketing
• Brajeshwar Oinam
• Customer Reviews from Amazon

I find myself agreeing with some of the majority views being expressed in these.  The book is long but has some interesting and thought provoking sections.  It is a book to dip into, and rarely will you be disappointed.  If you buy business books or have a friend who likes to receive business books, then it is worth buying this book.

Standing back a little and taking a more critical view, the following picture is perhaps the best overall review of the book I can offer. 

Guy Kawasaki is a very prolific writer.  That perhaps is most clearly confirmed by Robert Scoble’s assertion that Guy would rather give up his cell phone for a week than give up Twitter for a week. 

His ideas pore out like a tumultuous whitewater river.  Although the book attempts to put some structure around the torrent from his blog, it is an almost impossible challenge.  For that reason I think the book’s title is a misnomer.  Reality Check suggests that this volume could be used in some check-listing way to ensure that a business is operating with its feet on the ground.  Such a tool would have required much more streamlining of content and rewriting. 

The book in some way is a paradox.  Print newspapers in general are finding that they must streamline their content to better serve their online audience.  Here we have the reverse process in action.  Online content is packaged uncondensed in a printed form.  For myself the most satisfying way of enjoying the book is to dip in from time to time.  In a way it is just the same way that I enjoy reading the original source material on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. 

Bounce may be a word that you have not used much in the past.  It is likely to become a hot word in 2009.  We are talking here particularly about the way visitors to online web pages eventually move off elsewhere.  The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the website from that web page.

If they move off to another web page in the same website, then that is normally a confirmation that they are finding something of interest.  It is the very best indicator.  It may well be far less open to manipulation than the emphasis on hyperlinks that is at the heart of the Google PageRank approach.  That is why I believe the answer to Eric Enge’s question, Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor, must be in the affirmative.  Google has all the data needed to use this approach and it must only be a matter of time. 

The proportion of visitors who bounce away from any website is a critical measure of performance.  Having sticky websites that hold visitors as they move from page to page gives the best opportunity to achieve whatever objectives the website may have. The one major exception is all those web pages where someone clicks away and the website gains revenues by the move.  Google is a major partner for such web pages since the major part of its revenues comes from AdWords ads.  Provided they move away via the AdWords ad, a high bounce rate here is not a problem.

For all other websites it is best to be considering how to lower that bounce rate.  It is not just a matter of opening links in a new tab as one person suggested. 

Nor is it just a matter of only including links to other web pages within the same website.  As Matthew Ingram pointed out, even the New York Times has now realized that including links to other websites may be the smart thing to do.

There have been hints for a while now that the New York Times was going to start adding links to third-party content on its front page, and now it appears to have finally happened, with the launch of something called Times Extra. The paper has been doing this for some time now on its technology front page, using links aggregated by BlogRunner — the meme-tracker the company acquired a couple of years ago — as well as through content-syndication agreements with blog networks like GigaOm, VentureBeat and Read/Write Web.

The very best way to make a website sticky is to give visitors what they are looking for.  That is what will bring them back again and again.  Even the New York Times is showing the way.

Google Search Suggest is a new assist that many keyword searchers are now seeing when they do Google searches.  If you have questions, then there is even a FAQ page that will answer most of them.  Here is how Google Suggest is described:

What is Google Suggest?
As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google’s "Did you mean?" feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "prog," Google Suggest might offer you refinements like "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse.

One interesting feature of Google Suggest is that items appear with a green number next to them representing the approximate number of results that would return for the suggested query.  So if you like what the rest of the crowd was looking for when they typed your phrase, then you can select one of these popular choices.

The selection shown is clearly determined by some algorithm.  Sometimes the choices shown are not at all obvious.  For example in searching for my user name, bwelford, after typing ‘bwel’ I got the following results:

In this case, the algorithm seems to be assuming that this is a typo.  The choices offered are reasonable, but the order they are presented seems to have no logic.  It is not in order of the number of searches done with that expression.  Does the algorithm throw in a random ordering to spread keyword choices among the possible contenders?  That is a mystery for the moment.

As with any change, there are winners and losers.  One clear winner would seem to be the searcher.  If and only if they choose to do so, they can more quickly get to the item they had in mind provided it is on the list. 

An even bigger winner is probably Google itself.  This mechanism is likely to funnel visitors towards a more restricted set of choices of keyword search pages.  Given that such search pages have Adword ads on them, this funneling could well mean that AdWords advertisers are automatically competing on more restricted options.  This could therefore mean higher Pay Per Click revenues to Google.  If this theory is correct, this could have a significant improvement for Google’s bottom line.

… and who are the losers?  If Google is making more money on AdWords, then this means that AdWords advertisers are losers here.  They must pay out more for each click on these more visited web pages, given that they are now competing with more AdWords advertisers wishing to appear for these more attractive keyword phrases.

The other losers may well be owners of web pages that have always ranked well for long tail searches. As others have suggested, Google Suggest may well influence the traffic coming to any given web page.  This funneling of searchers’ choices might sound like a small change but it can have a big effect on traffic.  If most of that traffic was coming through a long-tail search, where someone typed in a fairly long phrase, they may now cease to do that.  Such a searcher may choose the closest concept among the items presented.  Unless the searcher is persistent and insists on typing out their long-tail search query, they will now never come to that particular web page.

Since the winners for this move vastly outnumber the losers, and Google is among the winners, it seems unlikely that this added feature will disappear. We must all learn to live with it.  Search Engine Optimization was already proving to be a challenge with other Google changes and Google Suggest now raises the stakes considerably.

Recently Google has introduced a new feature in search: SearchWiki.  This allows searchers to modify the search results they obtain and even add comments for future reference.  This is how Google describes SearchWiki:

SearchWiki lets you customize your Google Web Search results by ranking, removing, and adding notes to them. You’ll see your changes whenever you do the same searches while signed in to your Google Account, or until you decide to undo them. You can also see how other users have tailored any given search results page with their own notes and changes.

Since as usual this feature is in Beta version, perhaps one should not be too critical.  However I and others find the usability of this approach somewhat lacking, and the comments of other searchers are rarely useful.  Allowing people to vote seems quite often to bring problems.  Whether this is an approach that has a future would seem to be very questionable.

On the other hand an e-book that came out today seems to offer much more potential.  Watching what people do rather than what they say can be much more instructive.  We all leave electronic footprints wherever we go on the Internet.  Google has all of this data from which it can better sense which web pages individuals find more relevant.

That is the basis of the e-book that David Leonhardt has brought out today.  It is called Sticky-SEO and it is free.  It does not take long to read and it is certainly very thought-provoking. 

The book suggests that Google will be incorporating much more intensively the data it has on how people move through websites.   If you immediately use the back button to get back to the search results, that presumably means the web page is not relevant to your needs.  On the other hand if you stayed on that web page for quite a time then moved to other web pages within the website, the web page was probably highly relevant.  The argument is certainly very persuasive.

Google is certainly capable of following this mechanism and it would be much more foolproof than the now discredited PageRank approach.  Creating sticky websites seems to be a laudable aim for us all.  Go read the book if you need more convincing.

The recent US Presidential election was a stunning demonstration of the power of social media as now supported via the Internet.  Indeed social media such as Twitter may now be the principal medium of communication if one measures the ‘bandwidth’, interpreted loosely, that goes into such twittering. 

Now the dreadful incidents in Mumbai provide another far-too shocking example.  That prompts Tim Malbon to ask a fundamental question: Mumbai: flash mob or social media in action?

When news of the ‘terrorist outrage’ broke yesterday evening several people mailed and messaged me with links to the coverage on Twitter. I was awestruck by the live feeds provided at #Mumbai and others (such as Twitter Grid). Having looked around elsewhere, my initial reaction was that the main old-school news agencies like Reuters, CNN and the BBC just weren’t providing the coverage, in contrast to the truly MASSIVE volume of tweeting going on.

However as the evening continued, he become somewhat disillusioned about the chaotic nature of the torrent of information that was being generated

There were no doubt many well-meaning people Twittering. Some on the ground were no doubt using the service to share their personal horror and to connect with the outside world must have been a comfort. But very few were on the ground. Most participants were far away. There needs to be some way of working out who in a situation like this has more authority than someone else. … Last night scared me. We’re like kids playing with things that we still don’t understand. A human tragedy became “something to follow”.

Crowdsourcing is of course an attempt to bring some order to the chaos.  Cloud computing in Africa, for example, can help aid workers to better identify what is really happening in major crises. As one aid worker has noted:

Crowdsourcing means that crisis situations can be explored at comparatively little cost, by making information freely available from an untold numbers of sources. We would basically be liberating information from the vaults of Non Governmental (and governmental) Organizations that have of necessity safeguarded information release for self-preservation.

Another and perhaps better way of marshaling all this data is to consider online surveys.  Of course cell phones can be used merely to indicate who you think should be the next American Idol.  However as we all become more at ease in the digital world, we may well be more inclined to make sure our opinions are known.

The mobile web is growing by leaps and bounds. Jon Thompson points out one reason why this is happening in places like Africa where clouds provide the only way of providing mass computing power.

When providing aid, the need for good communication and measurement is paramount.  Clouds provide an answer although they have nothing to do with those beautiful towering shapes you may see in the sky.

If only one person takes their iPhone to the field and commits to mapping their tracks while going from health post to health post and then uploading that data via a local network (either while roaming or on a cracked handset) the world might just be a better place.  My guess is that mapping Monrovia, Goma, Juba, etc. now will pay off in the long run.  With the cloud hovering over Africa rapidly growing in size the advantage goes to those folks on the ground who have the power to generate the data and ultimately benefit from it.

Tim O’Reilly provides an explanation on why using your iPhone and working in the clouds is so powerful:

Cloud integration

It’s easy to forget that the speech recognition isn’t happening on your phone. It’s happening on Google’s servers. It’s Google’s vast database of speech data that makes the speech recognition work so well. It would be hard to pack all that into a local device. And that of course is the future of mobile as well. A mobile phone is inherently a connected device with local memory and processing. But it’s time we realized that the local compute power is a fraction of what’s available in the cloud. Web applications take this for granted — for example, when we request a map tile for our phone — but it’s surprising how many native applications settle themselves comfortably in their silos.

The announcement earlier in the year that IBM is Opening Cloud Computing Centers in Africa and  China shows the kind of support that is being put in place:

Cloud computing enables the delivery of personal and business services from remote, centralized servers (the "cloud") that share computing resources and bandwidth — to any device, anywhere. Cloud computing represents a major step up in computing — as it enables governments, businesses and individuals to access super-computing power, analysis of massive amounts of data, and applications five to 10-times more cost effectively.

For example, using IBM’s new centers, a university could access the computational power of a supercomputer to analyze data and determine how diseases might spread in a region or how climate changes will affect natural resources.

This points to new ways of getting the facts more impartially and openly such as Crowdsourcing when reporting on crises.

Crisis reporting usually had to deal with politics, bureaucracy and authenticity mostly because policy making and crisis situations are joined by the hip. It has always been a one-to-many situation with government/corporate dominated (and manipulated) crisis reporting. Basically we have always had to believe what ‘they’ tell us about how it happened, how it is being handled and how it will be prevented in future.

Crowdsourcing means that crisis situations can be explored at comparatively little cost, by making information freely available from an untold numbers of sources. We would basically be liberating information from the vaults of Non Governmental (and governmental) Organizations that have of necessity safeguarded information release for self-preservation.

The Clue-train manifesto pointed in this direction but few could have envisaged how massively the movement would expand.

The Story of Success from a thought-provoking writer like Malcolm Gladwell is always something to watch out for. His previous books, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, both captured important aspects of the online world.  His latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, is a reflection on the more tangible world of human society.  Again he is pointing out what should have been obvious, but what you may have missed.

You can read more about the book’s content on Gladwell’s own website.  In particular he summarizes what you may get from the book:

What do you want people to take away from Outliers?

I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously.

My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It’s because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That’s an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

If you are wondering whether Outliers has something to do with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, then you’re on the wrong track. Anderson was pointing out that we are all different in so many ways.  Gladwell on the other hand is focusing on the really far out extremes.  What can we learn from those who are successful and who seem to be very different from the rest of us.  Think of someone like Bill Gates for example.

If Gladwell’s latest book is not for you, there are two others that seem very popular at the moment.  If you want to drop a hint to your significant other on what might please you, here they are:

• Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

As the Vancouver Sun tells us this morning, Big Fish Games tests B.C. waters. It is a cute headline about a fast-growing U.S. video game company that is opening a studio in Yaletown in Vancouver.

Seattle-based Big Fish Games, one of the fastest-growing video game companies on the continent, has opened a Vancouver studio.  The Yaletown office has just four employees so far, but has room for almost 50.

Big Fish Games reported revenues of $8.6 million in 2005, $24.1 million in 2006 and $50.8 million in 2007, and employee numbers have grown from 35 to 310. .. The company has found a vast audience partly because it markets to groups not generally associated with video-game playing, including women and seniors.

As it happens, Big Fish Games in the clouds is a much more apt title.  Cloud computing is the current big battleground for the majors like Microsoft and Google.  It is all about SaaS, or Software as a Service if the acronym is new to you.  No longer do you need to download programs to your computer.  All you need is the cheapest of laptops or even a netbook to give you access to whatever programs your favorite supplier is willing to offer.

By coincidence another online game service is also making the news today.  That is Prize Room and this one gives you your online games completely free. 

PrizeRoom provides what other methods of Internet marketing are truly missing: a new way for consumers to actually interface with sponsors’ products.  In addition, all the in-game content can be branded, changed as often as desired and is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  PrizeRoom gives users not only chances to play dynamic and entertaining games incentives, but also offers opportunities for them to qualify to win great prizes and earn valuable incentives from some of the top brands in the world!

It is free because the marketers would like you to spend some time in a place where they can send their messages to you.  That is the kind of Free that Chris Anderson promotes.  You are really paying for whatever you receive by giving them your time.  Perhaps that is the most valuable currency you can offer.