MetaMuse

Podcasted

Eric Mattson of Jenerous intereviewed me this morning on the use of widgets in marketing. Get the podcast here. In listening to it, I realized a couple additional insights that folks may appreciate:

• If you're going to embark on a widget project, make sure the widget supports your core value proposition and adds value to the blogger and his/her readers. There is only going to be more competition for this space.
• Remember that most bloggers are their biggest audience. They visit their own site more than anyone else does, and often times they will put up a widget just for their own viewing purposes.

Disambiguating Intent in Search

Interesting post at Search Engine Land about the challenge for search engines to understand user intent, with very little to go on. The author talks about UI-based query refinement (pointing to Quintura) and also background disambiguation of intent, which I think is more important.

Ultimately, search has to solve the problem in a more transparent way. While there are some users who feel comfortable with putting the time in to refine their query and help the engine with the task of disambiguating intent, the majority of us don't want to make that big an investment. The tool has to be much simpler and quicker to use. So that brings us back to the question, how do engines disambiguating intent without us giving it any more information to work with at the point of query?

I don't personally see my search history as being important for ranking future search results, not as much as general browsing context and demographic/behavioral information.

I also really liked the heat map he showed of how people look at the SERP.

2006 Online Advertising Market

From yesterdays IAB press release:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues for 2006 are estimated at $16.8 billion, a 34 percent increase over the previous revenue record of $12.5 billion in 2005. The 2006 Q4 revenues totaled just under $4.8 billion, making it the highest quarter reported. Fourth-quarter revenues for 2006 represent a 32 percent increase over the same period in 2005, and a 15 percent increase over Q3 of 2006, estimated at slightly under $4.2 billion.

Next Revolution in Search?

Interesting post and comments about ChaCha. The next generation of search won't come through cheap labor, in my opinion.

I believe the next revolution of search will come through contextual/behavioral "lenses", where I can influence my keyword search by indicating attributes of the people for whom the results were most relevant. An example is searching for "hotels in paris", which today gives you WAY too much info. It'd be better if I could search the web for "hotels in paris" and filter it by behavioral and/or demographic attribute: "party, facebook, female, age 20-26" vs. "retirement, vacation, social security, family, age 50-59".

Today's versions of social search just won't work, because they're requiring active participation (manual votes of some sort) -- the masses are too lazy to vote. The "social search" that will work won't require any user action at all -- users contribute merely by browsing the web and publishing content, just as they normally do.

Actually, ChaCha would get me excited and work extremely well if each chat recipient received an immediate and full profile of each user requesting assistance. That data would provide immense value to the knowledgebase they're trying to accumulate.