Search’s end – bah-dah-bing!

Michael Hedges June 1, 2009 (follow on Twitter)

The fastest growing slice of worldwide advertising is search advertising. As wireless broadband expands projections for the mobile ad market – search traffic being significant – cause that Pavlovian response from the ad people. One challenge remains; getting eyes to the right place at the right time.

Microsoft has re-cast its search business for the fourth time calling it Bing. The company presentation calls it a “decision engine,” happy words for the terminally anxious. CEO Steve Ballmer said “persistence” would pay off. Still, he’d like to buy the Yahoo! market share. Anything.

Google’s business is search and the ad money it generates. Microsoft’s business is software or mostly software. BMW’s business is automobiles. Intel’s business is chips. “Stick to the knitting,” said Tom Peters and Bob Waterman a generation ago. Stay with the business you know.

Time Warner will, finally, divorced itself from its Web portal AOL by the end of this year. AOL – America Online – was a “walled garden” for early internet users at the height of the dot.com boom. Forcing people to subscribe, then as now, doesn’t work when the marketplace is blooming with free choices. The merger of the media conglomerate then run by Ted Turner and the hot internet property never found the oft praised but rarely found synergies.  AOL will be spun-off as a separate company; now run by hard-chargers exiled from Google.

Time Warner’s CEO Jeff Beweks seems intent on “sticking with the knitting” and being a content producer. In April he said he’d spin-off Time Warner Cable. Now it’s time of AOL to go. Notably Time Warner took a 33% stake in Central European Media Enterprises (CME), a television operator focused in Eastern Europe.

In the US Google’s market share of search traffic is upwards of 60%, Yahoo! about 20% and the rest in single digits. Much more significantly, Google’s worldwide market share is 81%. Google is search. Think: Xerox.

Bing looks nice and it’s reasonably functional. Some of the new functions are quite clever. None of this is particularly difficult, search technologies being well known. All it takes is money. Microsoft has that, plus legions of creative people.

For consumers, web access and search engines are inextricably attached. How else to locate stuff on the Web? To find Web stuff search engines use robots to skim the surface for identifiable characteristics, which are then indexed. The search engine – a big smokin’ computers full of gizzie software – takes a keyword, scours the index, orders what it finds and reports back. All consumers’ want is to find what they’re looking for…even if they’re not quite sure what it is.

The money, obviously, is in advertising related to all that searching. A great many folks use search engines to find out about products and services. Potential buyers are a sub-set of those folks. Placing the right ad in front of their noses at the right time just might ring up a sale. Bingo! Search advertising is a great money-maker. It’s like the Yellow Pages but more fun. In most markets there’s only enough business for one Yellow Pages supplier. So it is with search portals.

But the Web has grown and search results can be daunting. Every search engine uses tricks of the statistical trade attempting to deliver relevance. No algorithm trumps one very basic human – sorry, geeks – trait. We trust our friends more than we trust gizmos. A recommendation from a friend in Paris – on Twitter - gets an instant response from somebody in Washington DC.

The question of the year – and we only give it about 12 months – is how does internet search, and the ad money they generate, meet the instant answer world of Twitter?

Google, they say, is launching Wave, a new application that might make a couple of leaps in that direction. Their forte being aggregation science, the project will merge search and instant messaging. Among other joys it could spell the end of email spam. Google Wave links threaded conversations of the Twitter variety with all sorts of stuff. One interesting, albeit scary, possibility is enabling users to interact with robots. We could be overwhelmed.

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