Live from Ad:Tech San Francisco: Talking Search’s Future

With Yahoo! and Google reporting strong financial results last week, with Ask.com gaining U.S. market share and Microsoft responding by poaching its CEO, search has been much in the news lately. One of the first panels at Ad:Tech San Francisco featured four search marketing leaders and thinkers opining on a host of questions relating to “The Future of Search”.

Dana Todd, executive vice president of search marketing firm SiteLab International and president of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, said she fears that the move toward greater targeting ultimately undercuts the strengths of search marketing. Microsoft’s adCenter, expected to have a full U.S. launch later this year, allows marketers to pay more to target specific demographic groups with keywords, and some observers expect that will lead other engines to offer targeting capabilities.

“We in search always thought that we were doing something unique in advertising by bypassing the loose metrics and going right for performance,” she said. And I wonder if [targeting in search] is a step forward, backward or just a parallel step, not just for MSN but for any of the other search engines going down this road.” She added that users may not be easily segmented into demographic profiles. “I’m not sure that the online space really works with these metrics in an ongoing fashion.”

Moderator Bambi Francisco noted that Yahoo! reported last week that its revenue per page view had gone up 10% in the quarter and asked why the engine was so successful in monetizing search. Fredrick Marckini, founder and CEO of search marketing firm iProspect, pointed out that Yahoo! is the only major engine that can monetize its organic search results because of paid inclusion. Web operators can submit their sites to Yahoo! to be indexed for a fee.

“Paid inclusion is the most underreported killer app for marketers in our experience,” he said. Where Google might take three to six months to spider a 100,000-page site, paid inclusion can get the entire site into Yahoo!’s index almost overnight. “That’s like having 100,000 lottery tickets rather than 20,000,” he said. “When we feed clients into the paid-inclusion program, they get better control over the listings and can usually improve their showing in the rankings a little bit.

On the question of what to expect when former Ask.com CEO Steve Berkowitz moves into his new job as senior vice president of Microsoft’s online business group, search industry expert John Battelle said the hire was “a big win for Microsoft and probably a big blow to Ask.” But he expressed reservations about the move because Berkowitz, who was a driving force in revamping and re-launching Ask.com with new tools, a new interface and a new name, will not have responsibility for product development at MSN. “If you’re going to run a big chunk of business and you don’t control how products are developed, that’s something I would watch out for at MSN.”

A number of search companies have arisen that offer “social search”, the ability to deliver restructured search results based on what other like-minded people have found valuable. Kevin Ryan, managing partner with interactive marketing firm Kinetic Results, said this might be a step in the right direction to offering users more relevant information.

“What we’re doing here is trying to get away from the simple Page Rank methodology and use other people’s ideas of relevance as a base line for determining relevance,” he said. “I thin any new technology applied to indexing that connects the user to information is a positive move.”

From the advertiser’s standpoint, Todd said the broad move toward personalized search results will create search campaign difficulties for marketers. “That’s part of the complexity of managing a campaign when ‘rank’ is an irrelevant word because one person’s results are different from another’s,” she said. “As an advertiser, you’re going to have to get used to having no control. It’s a problem that you can’t do anything about, so just do the best you can. Just write the check, change your ads frequently, and measure your return on investment.”