Posts Tagged ‘Search’

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Google accesses consumer surfing behaviour and stakes a claim for a bigger share of marketing dollars

March 13th, 2009 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Social media, Technology

I am a great fan of the World Advertising Research Council  (WARC) - its provides great content and the daily news alert is succinct yet highly relevant. Today’s issue picked up on the announcement by Google of a behavioural advertising system. The system will target ads at user based on analysis of their browsing history. This is an optout scheme that will exclude online behaviour relating to health, race, religion and finance.

In the same edition WARC reported on a 15% reduction in global advertising revenue – across the board i.e. digital and traditional media.  

The ‘measurability’ of digital marketing remains one of the key drivers for investment in the Web by marketers and this will continue to be the case while the industry matures and develops a method for measuring and tracking engagement and influence (i.e. qualitiative metrics).

The traditional media sector is obviously already suffering at the hands of digital. To the digital advertising sector – and particularly the massively dominant Google - the measurability of digitial advertising is a major strategic advantage. 

As competition for marketing budgets increase, I think we can expect to see companies like Google and others making more and more user data available in order to maximise their share of the total overall investment. At no cost and at the touch of a button, these organisations can enhance their strategic advantage over traditional media.  

There is a strong lobby arguing that this strategic advantage comes at the expense of consumer privacy but Google has been commended in parts for its approach.  

Could the launch of Google Voice be a strategy designed to overshadow media interest in targetted advertising.

The New York times provides a guide to Google’s privacy controls here. Industry standard story < there and an interesting counter view for Gawker here.

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Content Application Integation: Adding Search to Office Applications

September 13th, 2008 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Technology

Google have introduced some new features to their Google Docs office-style applications, including the ability to more easily insert images from the Web into working documents.

I think of this as a type of Content Application Integration and thikn that we are likely to see many more examples of this.

New media is driving increases in the usage of audio, video and imagery (rich media) and so it makes a lot of sense to build features into creative applications that offer search functionality, access to the Web and easy one-click insertion. See my earlier post on a related topic.

CAI (CAI) offers many potential applications… imagine, for example, being able to click on any word in a working document (a Word doc say, or PowerPoint) and going straight to the Wikipedia page for that word or opting to open a search in a Web browser on that term. This would be a variation on the linking strategy that underpins Web collaboration and sharing.

These functional capabilities are available today but CAI would make the integration between the productivity applications and content engines much tighter – furthering enabling the development and creation of multi-media content.

It would seem that Google has a much stronger position in this space as it is suited more to Web based applications as opposed to on-premise apps.

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Google launches browser called Chrome

September 2nd, 2008 by Daniel Young | 1 Comment | Filed in Technology

I downloaded the brand new web browser from Google today. It is a beta version and is called Chrome.

chrome1Chrome’s stripped down interface maximises the viewing space on the screen. It looks like Fisher Price had a hand in the design – big rounded buttons and basic icons, which is very pleasing to the eye and fresh.

mobile

It 0ffers the ability to search in the address bar – which is cool. I think Firefox does this too. Chrome will provide prompts for Web pages and search terms, these are quite slow to pop up I found.Users are presented with a graphical list of the most recently visited Web pages when the application starts up – an innovative and cute design feature.

Tests conducted by others have found that it does well against IE but is not as quick as Firefox or Safari.You can do some cool stuff with the tabs – change the order, pull them out of the window so that they are stand alone instances of the browser and put them back in. Tabs operate independently which prevents one page bringing down the whole browser – a problem I often encounter with IE.

Google explains why they got into this space here.

This is clearly a competitive play with regard to Microsoft IE, which still accounts for 75% of the browser market. It will allow Google to maintain the integrity of its search engine – Microsoft could for example make changes to IE which favoured its search engine over Google. Google retains control with Chrome.It also enables Google to get closer to users and will provide them access to a different type of user information, which provides the basis to their advertising business.Chrome offers an incognito mode – users can surf and withold their usage data from Google.

It will be interesting to see how Google will promote Chrome to the mass market. To most consumers IE is THE web browser – these users haven’t thought about why they use IE, they just do. It comes pre-loaded on their new machines – it does what’s required. It’s familiar and easy.  Google have added a download link for Chrome to their famously minimalist home page.

Chrome is only available for XP and Vista at the moment, Linux and Mac to follow.

There are a few things missing from the application, such as a progress bar. Google will obviously be developing this further – this is an open source app which is based on some of the other open source browsers but which according to Google represents the next generation of browsers and an up to date platform for Web applications.

A quick scan of blogs and media shows that Chrome has had a generally positive reception.Interestingly, Google pre-announced Chrome using an online comic, which you can see here. The comic features the RL Google design team.

Google Chrome Screenshot

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Microsoft bids US$44.6 Billion for Yahoo!

February 1st, 2008 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Technology

Microsoft has made an approach for Yahoo!.

It’s not the first time that Microsoft has tried to find ways to work with Yahoo!

There are obvious synergies and opportunities for Microsoft. The deal would give Microsoft’s advertising sales division – which has been recently bolstered by the acquisition of aQuantive and other small online ad sales players – a vast amount of well trafficed Web property to sell. Online advertising sales are expected to double in the next three years to US$80bn.

Steve Ballmer CEO MS

The deal would provide an established channel for a Web based version of Office to compete with Google Docs and there would be value – potentially – in combining the Hotmail and Yahoo! email constituencies.

The following section is from Yahoo! Finance:

Yahoo would give Microsoft dominance in Web banner ads used by corporate brand advertisers. It also attracts more than 500 million people monthly to sites devoted to news, finance and sports, and Yahoo Mail is the No. 1 consumer e-mail service.

On the topic of email, I must say that I wasn’t impressed by the new Yahoo! mail service and have reverted to the ‘Classic’ product.

On the down side, you’d have to wonder how easy it would be to align the diverse cultures of these two companies and how keen the Yahoo! employees would be to work for the dark empire Microsoft (Will the talent leave? Hello Google!). Also, Microsoft’s cultural leaning towards software release cycles wouldn’t represent a good fit with the dotcom ethos where innovation and development is a part of every working day.

Search is clearly a massive lead generator for an Internet company and Microsoft pursues this market aggressively and keenly. One wonders if two companies that have struggled in search, or at least have failed to take the lead, would represent an effective competitor to Google anytime soon.

If the bid is successful, both companies will take their eye off of the ball while they deal with the integration of the two companies, providing Google with an opportunity to extend its lead. Google already has a 75% market share in search advertising compared to Yahoo!’s 9%.

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