Search To Social Search, Danny Sullivan

Slide 1: Search To Social Search Danny Sullivan Editor-In-Chief Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com

Slide 2: 1st Gen: “On The Page”  Search engines “crawl” links to pages  They make copies of pages they find and store in a book-like “index”  They find pages using words you searched for  The location and frequency of words influences which ranks tops

Slide 3: 1st Gen Spamming Want to be tops? “Stuff” a bunch of keywords into your web page

Slide 4: 1st Gen Spamming

Slide 7: 2nd Gen: “Off The Page”  Use factors off the page that webmasters can’t manipulate (so easily)  Clickthrough  Links: “democratic nature of the web”  AKA PageRank though PageRank is importance of links  Other key factor is anchor text, actual words in the links

Slide 8: 2nd Gen Issues People begin overtly manipulating links – thinking about votes, campaigning for votes and even buying votes…

Slide 9: 3rd Gen ???  “Vertical” search  Focus on a particular topic, such as news  Personalized & Social Search  Reshaping results based on…  What you personally do or visit  What others you know do or visit  What people in aggregate do or visit

Slide 10: Google Personalized Search Results are reordered based on what’s deemed to be your personal preferences. Pages move up, down, in or out of top 10

Slide 11: Personalization Influencers  Google Personalized Home Page content  Google Bookmarks  Search History (Clicks)  Web History (Visits)…

Slide 12: Search & Web History

Slide 13: Social Search  Eurekster experimented with friend clicks reshaping results in 2004  Yahoo My Web promised to let us tag and use a network to reshape results…

Slide 14: Yahoo My Web

Slide 15: Yahoo My Web

Slide 16: My Web & Old Search Features

Slide 17: Social Search Reality  Neither really has succeeded  The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The Social Graph With Search Engines  http://searchengineland.com/070827-121805.php  Eurekster says “swickis” much better  Yahoo dropped many features quietly  But what about Facebook?

Slide 18: Facebook & Search  Social graph (ugh) / social network data is potentially useful  Watch what others are searching on  Monitor clicks in a more “trusted” environment  Reshape results based on what you friends seem to like  But who are your friends…

Slide 19: Future Facebook? http://www.dumpfolder.net/?p=193

Slide 20: Facebook & Search  Do you have to filter to “true” friends?  Do you then still need to consider what you’ll share?  Does Facebook instead work on aggregate level?  And what’s the underlying platform? They’ll likely remain dependent on someone else…

Slide 21: Facebook & Search  Go vertical? People search?  Plenty in the space, Spock among them…  http://searchengineland.com/lands/people- search.php  Or events search  Upcoming rival  Others?  Or discovery…

Slide 22: Search Versus Discovery  Search is an on-demand, have particular need to fulfill activity  Discovery is related but less specific in what you want  StumbleUpon, Digg  iGoogle related magic tabs

Slide 23:  Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com)  Stories and news from me and others  SearchCap (http://searchengineland.com/searchcap.php)  Daily email recap of search news from SEL & across the web  Daily SearchCast (http://dailysearchcast.com)  Podcast where I recap the day’s search news  Sphinn (http://sphinn.com)  Social site for search marketers: share news stories, talk in forums, network and view upcoming events  SMX: Search Marketing Expo (http://searchmarketingexpo.com)  My conference series that focuses on search marketing topics, with shows ranging from advanced issues to local, along with country-specific and general events

Slideshare.net (beta)