Search wars are broader than searching the Internet!

This article discusses plans for tools that search your hard drive and show that the "search wars" that we have been talking about for some months are serious and much bigger than where you go to find things on teh Internet.

"The looming confrontation between Microsoft and Google is coming as Microsoft prepares to introduce its own advanced Web search service, possibly later this year. The company is revising its MSN strategy and backing away from its Internet dial-up service, looking instead to get more revenue from the search advertising market that Google dominates.

Web and PC-based searching is a particularly thorny subject for Microsoft because the company's chairman, Bill Gates, first outlined the idea of "information at your fingertips" in a speech given at a computer industry trade show in 1990. Yet the company did little to innovate in the areas of Internet search or text and file searches on the PC until it discovered how profitable search had become for Google."

Free hard-drive search tool coming!

Here is some news of interest to everyone who has accumulated a large volume of information on the old hard drive that is often practically inaccessible!

"HotBot, owned by Terra Lycos, has fired one of the first shots in the local file search wars. HotBot Desktop is a free browser toolbar that promises to quickly search various types of documents and e-mail files on your hard drive. The tool is still in beta, so my first experience with it was not so positive. Fortunately, consumers should have multiple local search tools to choose from before the end of the year, with most of them expected to be free.

AskJeeves, the 7th most popular property on the Web according to XYZ, announced its acquisition this month of Tukaroo, Inc., a private desktop search company. Reportedly, this was in response to Google's plans to expand into local file search.

Microsoft has made it no secret that it plans to integrate high-speed local text search into the next version of Windows, code named Longhorn, and expected for release in 2006. Consequently, Google has announced that it has been quietly developing its own local search tool over the past year, code named "Puffin." Google even hired a former Microsoft Product Manager to help manage the development of the tool. A pre-cursor of that product may be Google's desktop search tool that can run in the Windows task bar rather than just the user's browser. The tool currently only searches the Web, but expect that to be extended to local file searching in the not so distant future.

Microsoft has announced plans to release a new local file search tool prior to the introduction of Longhorn. According to a recent New York Times Article, this could happen before the end of this year. Microsoft has missing launch dates in the past, so my money is on Google's tool hitting the market first, at least as a beta."

Going beyond web stats

We have talked in many of our clinic sessions about the value of studying and using your web stats to improve your site operation. This article discusses a technique for going beyond the activity stats to try to identify what is going on in the minds of the visitors to the site.

The article is a case study of how one firm used a commercial opinion-gathering tool to collect feedback from users. There is a particularly interesting chart included that illustrates where this information gathering fits into the evaluation scheme. The stats reviews that we have discussed account for about half the elements in the evaluation cycle.

MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR"Avaya execs wanted to know much more than how many visitors a page received. Marketers had questions like:
o How satisfied are visitors with my site section?
o What problems or frustrations do they encounter there?
o Is the content effective -- is it meeting visitor's expectations?
o How could I tweak the site to encourage visitor loyalty?
o Are there design changes we could make to improve marketing campaign results?"

Search Engine User Attitudes

"An important takeaway for search marketers from this survey is that it's increasingly important to think of your target audience not as 'searchers' or 'prospects' but rather as multi-dimensional users with complex needs and desires. An effective search marketing strategy now must go beyond simply optimizing for a particular engine, or bidding for a narrow range of keywords specific to your product or service.
Rather, it's important to build up a profile (or multiple profiles) of the type of people you're interested in attracting to your web site through search marketing. Build optimizing strategies and campaigns around those profiles, and the iProspect survey results suggest you'll be far more effective than using the one size fits all approach that many search marketers still employ today"

A different survey of searcher attitudes phrased things slightly differently, but again, emphasizes the importance of having good content on your site. Simply getting ranked on keywords won't get the job done if you don't have content of interest on the pages that the searchers find.

Inside the Searcher's Mind: It's a Jungle in Here!

"For those doing research, the following items were mentioned and listed in order of importance to the user, in getting them to clickthrough:

The exact query in the title and description
Product information: features, comparisons, reviews, prices
Trusted sources of information, i.e. Consumer Reports
Trusted brand names and vendors
Trusted URLs

For a purchaser, some of the items are the same, but different factors are also introduced. Again, these are listed in order of importance:

The exact query in the title and description
Offer product information: features, comparisons, reviews, prices
Trusted brand names and vendors
Promises of added value: discounts, free shipping, etc
Ability to buy online
Trusted URLs

"

Here is a research article that says that 80% of searchers skip past sponsored results to go straight to "organic" listings. It also emphasizes that searchers go from the "general to the specific" in their searches.

The quote describes the important factors, in order, to searchers in considering how to respond to search results. It says that searchers are primarily looking for information when searching, in other words, researching their interests, and those web sites that provide information to the searchers will get the most click-throughs.

Based on this research, a good site should give the users information about the product or service first, then take steps later to entice them to commit to the product or service. Offering discounts or incentives to purchase too early in the process is a wasted endeavor.

Review: Bloomba Good for Searching E-Mails (TechNews.com)

"For my personal e-mail I use a year-old program called Bloomba that's been called the Google of e-mail. Version 2.0 is out this week and adds calendars, which are also searchable. "

First time I have heard of this program, but it is interesting because it offers a lot of what Google Gmail does, without the entanglements. On the other hand, you have to pay for it! I have started using Gmail myself, primarily for receiving newsletters. It gives me the ability to search them for keywords for research, and it takes away a lot of the clutter from my regular e-mail program. Searching is also way (way, way...) faster than searching my old e-mail (I use Eudora 6.1, have for years, and like it).