Beyond Search: Saying Again – Marketing Blog
April 14, 2009
One of my three or four readers sent me a link to a Tweet that reveals–gasp–the shocking truth that this Web log is a marketing vehicle. Oh, my what an insightful comment. I explain what the purpose of Beyond Search is in my editorial policy which you may read here if you wish.I haven’t changed it much since I started this blog in January 2008. I started the Web log to recycle information. I learned quickly that I am not a news goose and I don’t want to be one. If a company wants to hire me to describe their products and services, I will talk. I also promote aggressively my reports and studies. The reason is that this Web log now reaches more than 35,000 readers per month, so it has become a better marketing vehicle that some of my four publishers possess. I don’t include the for fee content in this Web log. I rather shamelessly point you to Information World Review, KMWorld, and the Smart Business Network where my published columns appear. I even cover search engine optimization. If you read this Web log you know that I am critical of those who are self appointed SEO experts. I am no expert, but I can describe functions that the GOOG explains are important to appearing at a reasonable point in a results list.
Summing up:
- I am not a journalist. I sell my opinion, and I pay people to write articles about companies and products. Some of these outfits pay for my writers’ time. Others dazzle us with their scintillating personalities. Don’t confuse what appears in Beyond Search with “journalism”, which seems to be in a bit of a pickle in my opinion. Whining, going out of business, and losing jobs I think applies in some cases.
- I write about my interests in an often futile attempt to generate inquiries about my patent analysis, expert witness, and management consulting business. The Web log “sort of” works, but it is a marketing vehicle. Let me repeat: marketing vehicle. Do you think? Doh?
- I write about my son’s business even though he is closely aligned with the GOOG, an outfit that wishes my goose were cooked. I take umbrage if someone criticizes my son, so if you get frisky with my progeny, expect to see some sparks from the senior Arnold in the clan.
- I am not interested in whether some of the companies and products survive, are wonderful, or are just me too products in a lousy financial climate.
- I tell PR people that I am not a journalist. I don’t respect their “leaks”. I don’t want to be briefed unless someone pays for my time. One jejune lass almost cried when I told her I wanted money to sit through a Webinar. Sensitive plant, she is.
I think that there are some folks who confuse Web logs (free) with confidential, for fee work. I opine that there are quite a few consulting firms trying to sell advice without having solid technical foundations and trying to create the impression that their Web logs are the equivalent of the Harvard Business Review or the output of second and third tier consulting firms.
Let me set the record straight. There are a handful of blue chip consulting firms and advisory services in the world. I worked for many years at Halliburton Nuclear (get it right or literally die), Booz Allen & Hamilton (before the disastrous break up), and a number of high profile outfits from intelligence agencies to the government of England. I been involved in successes and failures. I have learned from the best (Dr. William P. Sommers) and from the worst (a gambler in LA).
Working at blue chip firms where information is the key to success and writing a Web log are at different ends of the content spectrum. I don’t get confused. Some folks can’t figure out that Beyond Search is a marketing vehicle. Others can’t get the drift that when I argue against SEO, I am generating buzz.
I hope that’s clear. I am 65 years old and getting pretty tired of callow youth who find this Web log somehow offensive to their gentle spirits. Suck it up. Life gets worse and it will for the foreseeable future. When the chips are down, clients don’t want those who learn on the job. Clients want results. An MBA or a bit of work at a third tier firm won’t do the job in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold. April 14, 2009
Google: A Static Filled Channel
April 13, 2009
Mine That Data has an interesting take on Google. Click here to read “Role of a Channel: Google.” The article left me with the impression that Google has not been an ideal channel for some of its partners, users, and customers. You will want to read the original analysis by Kevin Hillstrom and make up your own mind. Mr. Hillstrom raised some interesting questions. When I tried to answer them, I noted that Google seems to have some areas in which to improve. For example, Mr. Hillstrom asked, “Does the channel aid in customer service?” I must admit Google won’t talk with me. He also asked, “Does the channel feed other channels?” I answered, “No.” Mr. Hillstrom said:
And we consistently find that Google customers have lower lifetime value estimates than customers from other channels. Too often, Google is in isolation mode, yielding low value customers.
I found that I began to perceive Google differently after reading this thought provoking article.
Stephen Arnold, April 13, 2009
Search Results a Cesspool
April 13, 2009
The addled goose is at the end of the trail so I don’t pay much attention to link farms, traffic scams, and online advertising. I was shocked when I read Frank Watson’s “Extortion SEO Sanctioned by Google” here. If true, I have been misunderstanding how the Google operated. Mr. Watson wrote:
There’s a much more successful way to play Google these days — just build a site that can rank for companies or individuals and write crap about them. Once the posts start appearing in the search results, these entities will get in touch with you to remove them and you can charge them for it.
Mr. Watson then asserted:
The king of these programs is Ripoff Report — the darling of Google. Matt Cutts has defended them and their right to publish defaming information — and he has two reports in there himself. Inclusion of information like this makes me agree that the search engine results are “cesspools” — though Yahoo, Microsoft, and the other engines seem to be wise to Ed Magedson, the site’s founder.
Take a look at a site called Ripoff Report. You will have to make your own decision about Mr. Watson’s allegations. Post your views.
Stephen Arnold, April 13, 2009
Google and News Irrigation
April 13, 2009
The Washington Post’s Erick Schonfeld asked a question to which I knew the answer. The question here was: “Does Google Really Control the News?” Mr. Schonfeld answers the question by walking down the road, sometimes veering left and sometimes right. He wrote:
The bigger question is whether Google as a search engine is controlling access to news sites. That really seems to be Carr’s main concern, although it is not clear because he uses a Google News search as his main example. Nevertheless, Google’s main search engine is certainly a major source of traffic to information sites of all stripes. At TechCrunch, for instance, it is the single largest source of traffic, accounting for about a third of the total. I have no idea whether this is representative of other news sites, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Google search is a very important middleman indeed.
Mr. Schonfeld’s hook for this story is the Nick Carr posting about Google as middleman here. I want to steer clear of this discussion. My views appear in my forthcoming study Google: The Digital Gutenberg. I do want to ask several questions:
- What if Google embodies creating, intermediating, distributing, and monetizing functions in one system?
- With users clicking on services, are not the users making a decision, which may, of course, be limited by the function of the natural monopoly?
- If one outfit is in charge, is this going to leave much doubt about who steers the automobile?
Stephen Arnold, April 12, 2009
Hakia: Taking on Google
April 12, 2009
I find these stories about search systems that will challenge Google fascinating. One of the more recent ones I saw was an April 6, 2009, article “Is Hakia.com the Search Engine That Is Going to Challenge Google?” which appeared in My Questions, a South African Web log here. The story provides a useful summary of the features of the Hakia semantic system. I ran an interview with one of the Hakia founders, Riza Berkan, in August 2008. You can read that exclusive interview here. The point that jumped out at me in the My Questions’ write up was this comment:
The results are ranked according to the relevant site and the categories that they belong to.
There is a growing interest in the authority of a source. The role that a subject matter expert, a Ph.D. committee, or a reference librarian once played has to make its ways to software. The present financial climate and the inefficiency of finding a reliable way to validate a source make human methods highly variable. Software, with its machine like consistency, seems to offer a solution. Hakia has probed this issue and includes this component in its search results ranking.
Another comment that caught my attention was:
Hakia is a very good search engine but it still has a lot of ground to cover before it can take over much of the market the Google has. We will only have to see with time how the market receives it.
I think Hakia has much to commend it. My recollection is that the company’s processing of health and medical information was quite useful. In my experience, semantic processes often work more quickly and reliably when processing content that is about a specific subject area. But technology continues to improve and some vendors, like Autonomy, emphasize that their systems can adapt to a changing flow of content. I have been around a long time, and I think that “drift” remains a challenge for many search and content processing vendors.
The effort of carpetbaggers and azure chip consultants to sell taxonomy as a silver bullet is pragmatic. With a managed list of terms or categories, the content can be put in a pigeonhole. There may be drift, but the categories act as a red herring for other indexing flaws.
With the deteriorating financial climate, many search vendors will be forced to retrench or exit the business. Each week I hear rumors about companies that are either for sale, seeking investors, or preparing to close their doors. I will have to follow up with Hakia to see if the company still wants to challenge Google.
Stephen Arnold, April 12, 2009
YAGG: Google Japan Scrambled Results
April 12, 2009
Network World reported the Google Blogoscoped story about “Google Japan Bug Showed Gibberish Results” here. For me, the key sentence in the news story was:
According to sources cited by Asiajin.com, the garbled pages sent to Japanese users (and some users of other languages) did not have a correct UTF8 character encoding…
Is this Yet Another Google Glitch? Hard to say but apparently some of the Google users in Japan thought the results were in Turkish.
Stephen Arnold, April 12, 2009
Appearances Are Deceiving
April 11, 2009
Peter Kafka has a wonderful post here. The title tells the tale: “‘AP Exec: “To the Untrained Eye It Looks Like We’re Stupid’” Do you think? In my opinion, the most interesting comment in the article was this paragraph:
On the confusing message that the AP presented to the world this week: Guilty as charged, says Kennedy [an Associated Press senior manager]. But he argues that his group has indeed given some thought to what it’s doing, even if it hasn’t communicated that clearly to date.
Wow. No, I don’t think appearances are deceiving in this case. What you see is what you get.
Stephen Arnold, April 11, 2009
Wired Explains Why the Children of Publishers Are a Problem
April 11, 2009
Now the remaining hands at the downsized Wired did not say that. I wrote a headline that expresses why the dead tree crowd is paddling against the current at Niagara Falls. First, click to this Wired story here: “Teens Love Aggregation and ‘Free’, Newspaper Study Finds”. Second, consider this snippet from the article:
“Not only are teens not rushing to pay for content, but they also struggle to envision in what realm they would need to pay for content,” said the study, conducted for the NAA by Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. They are less interested in news brands than a site’s usability and depth of content. “Ask teens where they find news, and they typically say Yahoo!, Google, AOL or MSN,” the study said. “Sometimes, they mean Yahoo! and other times they mean Yahoo! News; sometimes they mean Google, the search bar, and other times they mean Google News or iGoogle. And sometimes they say MSN but mean MSNBC.com.”
The problems seems to be what I call demographic. The children of the traditional media giants are the termites in the old media’s business model. Wonder how the media companies will deal with that. Ground them and cut off online access. I heard a rumor that William Gates banned Apple iPhones and iPods from his house. I suppose that works too.
Stephen Arnold, April 11, 2009
Search Costs: Clouds Come Lower
April 10, 2009
IT-Analysis published Laurie McCabe’s “Will CPAs Bring the Cloud to Earth for SMBs?” You can read the story here. The hook for the story was CPA chatter. I would imaging that “chatter” to a CPA is fairly tame stuff, but I may be wrong. MBAs were once considered harmless but since the financial meltdown, MBAs are downright lethal. The write up is about two accounting groups’ decision to support Intacct for their customers. I never heard of Intacct, but I assume QuickBooks has. Ms. McCabe wrote:
Not only does this alliance pose a strong threat to Intuit QuickBooks’ dominance in the small business accounting market, it has the potential to pull SMBs into cloud computing in vast numbers. Intacct, AICPA and CPA2Biz did a lot of homework beforehand, including research that showed online accounting solutions boost productivity by as much as 50%. By dramatically reducing the need for travel, and the necessity of exchanging paper and email files, CPAs have more time to spend providing guidance to clients to help them improve financial performance and decision-making.
Too bad for QuickBooks, but the green eyeshade set believes that cloud-based applications like accounting make financial sense. Do you think? When the bean counters figure out how to save money, it makes little difference what the info tech folks say. Blossom.com, one of the most successful cloud search vendors, is probably quite happy with the CPAs’ new found ability to see the clouds.
Stephen Arnold, April 10, 2009
Google Apps: Googzilla’s Fangs
April 10, 2009
ComputerWorld has an important story here. The url is a Dusie so click quick. I sense a 404 in your future if you delay. The title “Google Working to Add Every Last Service to Apps” is a categorical affirmative. If you recall your college logic class, categorical affirmatives are tough to make stick, particularly when these are applied to the GOOG. The subtitle is the ballpeen hammer: “Exec Offers Up Plans in Colorful Tweet.” Google reveals that it will attack the enterprise with the muscular App Engine, not the kick-sand-in-its-face Google Search Appliance. Instead of a news conference in New York, the GOOG sends out a Twitter message. I think it is safe to say that the GOOG is banking on the demographics of the Twitter generation to get the message. ComputerWorld’s writers quoted various gurus as allegedly saying:
“While this strategy creates a certain ‘shock and awe’ factor in the developer and geek world, this still leaves certain large enterprise requirements unanswered, such as role-based administration and records management capabilities,” he said. “I think this strategy strengthens Google Apps within its core constituency — the [small and midsize business] market. SMBs will love the increasingly Swiss Army knife capabilities of Google Apps.
My thought is that Google’s enterprise search group knew exactly what it was doing. Furthermore, Google’s demographic card is a component of the surround and seep strategy. Traditional marketers are not Googley. In my opinion, Google is content to blaze its own trail to the enterprise and the crown jewels of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, April 10, 2009
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