The Truth About Subjective Truths
A few months ago there was an article in New Scientist about Google's research paper on potentially ranking sites based on how factual their content is. The idea is generally and genuinely absurd.
Information is a commodity. Corporations are passing around consumer behavioral profiles like brokers with stocks, and the vast majority of the American public is none the wiser of this market’s scope. Very few people actually check the permissions portion of the Google Play store page before downloading a new app, and who has time to pore over the tedious 48-page monstrosity that is the iTunes terms and conditions contract?
Google recently added highlights at the bottom of various sections of their mobile search results. The highlights appear on ads, organic results, and other various vertical search insertion types. The colors vary arbitrarily by section and are patterned off the colors in the Google logo. Historically such borders have conveyed a meaning, like separating advertisements from organic search results, but now the colors have no meaning other than acting as a visual separator.
Why Is Mobile So Important?
If you look just at your revenue numbers as a publisher, it is easy to believe mobile is of limited importance. In our last post I mentioned an AdAge article highlighting how the New York Times was generating over half their traffic from mobile with it accounting for about 10% of their online ad revenues.
The Facts of Life
When Google introduced the knowledge graph one of their underlying messages behind it was "you can't copyright facts."
Facts are like domain names or links or pictures or anything else in terms of being a layer of information which can be highly valued or devalued through commoditization.
When you search for love quotes, Google pulls one into their site & then provides another "try again" link.
Firefox users conduct over 100 billion searches per year & starting in December Yahoo! will be the default search choice in the US, under a new 5 year agreement.
Search vs Native Ads
Google owns search, but are they a one trick pony?
A couple weeks ago Ben Thompson published an interesting article suggesting Google may follow IBM and Microsoft in peaking, perhaps with native ads becoming more dominant than online search ads.
One wonders how Yahoo Search revenues keep growing even as Yahoo's search marketshare is in perpetual decline.
Then one looks at a Yahoo SERP and quickly understands what is going on.
Here's a Yahoo SERP test I saw this morning
I sometimes play a "spot the difference" game with my wife. She's far better at it than I am, but even to a blind man like me there are about a half-dozen enhancements to the above search results to juice ad clicks. Some of them are hard to notice unless you interact with the page, but here's a few of them I noticed...
When Google acquired DoubleClick Larry Page wanted to keep the Performics division offering SEM & SEO services just to see what would happen. Other Google executives realized the absurd conflict of interest and potential anti trust issues, so they overrode ambitious Larry: "He wanted to see how those things work. He wanted to experiment."
Webmasters have grown tired of Google's duplicity as the search ecosystem shifts to pay to play, or go away.
In the last post, we looked at how SEO has always been changing, but one thing remains constant - the quest for information.
Given people will always be on a quest for information, and given there is no shortage of information, but there is limited time, then there will always be a marketing imperative to get your information seen either ahead of the competition, or in places where the competition haven’t yet targeted.
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