Unlocking the Potential of Search: James Murray
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Unlocking the Potential of Search: James Murray
- 1. 1 Unlocking the Potential of Search
- 4. We've finished the designs, but that's just one step on the journey of making a product. Check back for updates on manufacturing. Non-slip step aerobics equipment “step slide toy” Great kids garden slide sets “indoor slide for stairs” Whee! Clever fold-up mat turns stairs into slide “SlideRider Amazon” “step slide” “SlideRider” Slip ‘N’ Slide SurfRider
- 6. Source: Bing Ads Intelligence tool. Top 50 UK search queries starting with the word ‘why’ ranked by volume of searches May 2014. Word cloud created in Tagxedo.
- 7. Context is king, not content Emotional Social Environmental External
- 11. Do you want go and see War on Drugs at the KOKO next week? My friend has pulled out and I have a spare ticket.
- 12. Facebook – 1.28 billion active users Email – 300 billion sent a day Twitter– 177 million tweets a day whatsapp – 64 billion messages a day All figures are global and correct as at June 2014. Sources: http://www.socialmediadd.com/Articles.asp?ID=248 http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-17-amazing-facebook-stats/#.U43TTqxOWpo http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2595271/Pride-fall-WhatsApp-boasts-record-breaking-message-numbers-24-hours-service-goes-down.html http://email.about.com/od/emailtrivia/f/emails_per_day.htm
- 20. Here’s some things we need to think about Resolve intent where it first occurs Understand the context of our intentions Domesticate the knowledge supply Connect value providers with value customers
Editor's Notes
- Hello my name’s James Murray and today I want to talk to you about the future, because frankly – the present kind of pisses me off. There are two things you need to know about me, I am an optimist and I’m an analyst. First let’s talk optimism. I think we’re in store for some great things in the very near future with technology and in particular I think search is in a very exciting place right now which is why I’m here to talk to you lovely people about how we can unlock the potential of search to be something phenomenal. Secondly the analyst. This is a very unusual presentation for me as there is not a single bar chart or graph contained in the next 30 minutes or so. But my goal here today is not to bamboozle you with facts and figures. Instead I want to share a vision Microsoft has of what search could be – and it’s a very different vision from what we currently think of as search. Because search has huge potential which is currently not being realised. Our vision is a world without search boxes, without SERPS, without dedicated landing pages. A world without Google.com or Bing.com. Now I can see some of you are getting nervous already. Before you reach for Twitter I’m not saying there will be no more search engines, far from it. The potential of search reaches far beyond the box we currently paint it into. Instead we see search as a connector, a golden thread which stitches together the various parts of our digital lives and surfaces the information that we need in order for us to flourish. We’ll be revisiting these ideas later but first let’s talk a little bit about the future.
- Because it’s a funny thing the future – we’re always waiting for it to come to us without stopping to think how we might be able to exert some influence and drag ourselves towards it. We’re at a very exciting time in our history, and this has happened perhaps only two or three times in the last 600 years, we’ve reached a place where we are bound only by the limitations of our imaginations. Just think about that for a second. For most of the last six centuries technology has always been the limiting factor of what we can achieve. We have always lived in a world where what you imagined extended beyond what you could actually produce with the technology available. Now we’re in the situation where the capability of technology extends beyond what we can currently imagine. We are on the brink of something incredibly exciting – we have the opportunity to take some huge leaps forward with technology as an enabler for mankind – but we have to lift our heads up and start thinking how things could be better – and that’s what Microsoft is doing with search. We want to get out of the rut we are in and unlock the potential of what search could achieve.
- This is search as we think of it today – a box and 10 blue links – and let’s be honest our expectations of search are pretty low. Now before any of the rapier witted among you make a quip about the fact our expectations might be low is because we are using Bing – I just want to take two seconds to point out that this is not a search engine problem. This is not a Bing problem or a Google problem it’s a fundamental problem with search. This is the search results page for Bing and Google for the term “flights to Australia” and you can see that the results look very similar. Hands up how many of you think the left hand results are Google, how many think the right hand results are Google? How many can’t decide? Out of interest the right hand results are the Bing results, the left hand side are Google, but the point is that neither search engine is delivering a great experience here, and that’s because our expectations of what search can achieve haven’t progressed that much in the last decade. And you know this to be true, because we’ve been forced to adapt to search engines rather than the other way around. We have reduced ourselves to cro-magnon English to access the information we want. Because we know that if we asked a search engine to “find me a reasonably priced flight to Australia that meets my budget requirements and within a two week window in June” the results we will get will be terrible. Instead we are reduced to grunting commands “flights to Australia”. Search can deliver so much more, we have the capability today to do that, but we as humans are still doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
- Let me give you a real life example of how search is currently failing us. I saw this photo on Facebook a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine vigorously hinting that this would make an awesome birthday present. I should probably point out this friend is 28, has no children, this was not a gift for her child this was for her. And the kid in me totally understands the attraction. Anyway I had no idea what this thing was called – all I had to go on was this image. So I started my search query with what I thought was an obvious description of the item… Search shouldn’t be this hard. All I really want to do is be able to search from the picture – “where can I buy this?” and for the engine to retrieve the answer for me “this product is only a prototype”.
- So part of what I want from search is for it to be able to answer my questions wherever I happen to be. I don’t want to be tied to a search engine entering multiple queries in order to find the information I need. If we are going to unlock the potential of search we are going to have to start thinking beyond the search bar. Because search shouldn’t be limited to a destination be it Bing or Google or Yahoo, search should just be this thread, this connector that brings together people and information. We’re going to explore this a bit more in a few slides time but before we do I need to introduce you to a few concepts that are going to help define what we are talking about here. And those concepts are intent, context and information hunter gathering.
- Let’s start with intent because search reveals so much about who we are, what we are interested in, where the gaps in our knowledge are – it’s a real barometer of the mood of the nation. If you want to know what the UK is really interested in, look at what they’re searching for and particularly what questions they’re asking. And this is exactly what I’ve done here. This is a word cloud of the most searched for “why” questions in the UK in May and there are some fascinating insights here into what the nation is thinking about – from their health “why am I always tired” to their relationships “why did I get married?” But behind each of these searches is an intent. In some cases its an intent purely for knowledge such as “why is the sky blue”, in others its for advice which could prompt an action “why is my computer so slow?” is likely to be someone looking for advice how to improve their machine. And if we look outside this example when I am searching for flights to Australia I am expressing an intent to buy a ticket. Now something to bear in mind – search is a fantastic way of deriving intent but it’s not the only way, and we’ll see a bit later why it’s so important to not confine search to the search bar as it means we can start to resolve intentions in the place they are happening. Just like I don’t want leave Facebook to find the out about the SlideRider, I want to be able to get that information wherever I happen to be spending time. Hold that thought we’ll be coming back to it later.
- The next thing I want to talk to you about is context, because it’s vital to make sense of all these intentions that we have and be able to prioritise and order information depending on the context of a situation. Now there are four broad types of context. The first is emotional, for example if I want to search for some music I am likely to want very different types of songs depending on whether I am happy or sad. The second is social – I am a very different person when I am with my wife than when I am with my mates and so if I am searching for a film to go and see at the cinema with my wife we might go and see something very different than if we are with my mates. Third is environmental what’s going on around me. The information that I need will be different depending on the environment I am in. Now I’m a big coffee drinker and I happen to prefer certain coffee houses of a particular brand to the extent that if I am searching for a coffee I will be prepared to go further for the brand I like. But if the environment changes and it happens to be raining, then I will want the closest place where I can avoid getting wet and get my caffeine fix. Lastly is External and these are other wider things that can shape the context of what I’m doing, things like global warming or the recession will have an influence on what I am searching for and what’s relevant to me at different times. Now again the technology exists for us to make use of context, but we’re not currently doing it. If I ask my phone for a recommendation for a place to eat I want it to be able to make certain assumptions on my behalf about my social and environmental context. If it’s midday on a Monday and I’m by myself at work then I want it to be able to give me something quick and cheap for lunch. If I ask the same question on a Saturday evening with my wife I want it to understand the context and offer me a different set of recommendations, namely not Pret or Eat.
- The third concept I want to introduce to you is that of information hunter gathering. We are still living in an age of being hunter gathers of information. In our evolution hunter gatherers were the guys that were easy to kill, they weren’t top of the food chain. It wasn’t until we domesticated the food chain that hunter gatherers were able to develop, to get stronger muscles, to increase their brain size and capacity. When we want information – what do you do? You go to a search bar and you hunt for it, as I did with my step slide example. If I want to find information I have to actively seek it out. This is what our ancestors did – and we should be able to move beyond this. What we need is to get to the stage where we are domesticated consumers of information.
- Now I want to tell you a story which illustrates the chief problem we have as information hunter gatherers. I like my movies and I’m a bit of a comic book geek so I’ve picked X-Men as my example. A couple of weeks ago my wife and I went to the cinema to see the latest X-Men film. Now my wife is extremely slight and one of the issues of being small is she has the bladder capacity of a five year old child. So about an hour into the film I can feel my wife squirming beside me, she clearly needs to go to the toilet. The she checks her phone and I her start counting down out loud 10, 9, 8, 7… and when she got to 1 she dashed off to go to the toilet. 3 minutes later she came back. I said “Don’t worry you didn’t miss anything”. She said “I know”. She had an app to tell her exactly when to pee – amusingly it’s called the RunPee app. Now the problem with Hunter Gathering information is that this only works if you know how to get hold of the relevant information – in this case if you know that such an app exists. But let’s road test this idea. How many of you have been in a situation where this app might have been useful? And how many of you knew that this app existed? The biggest problem with apps is they are only useful to people who download them, or in other words, your customers are not the people who need you, they’re the people who download you. This is wrong and we need to be more proactive about surfacing and domesticating information so that I don’t have to search for it, it’s just there when I need it.
- Now we’ve made advances in domesticating information but they are currently just in isolated pockets. Let’s take spelling for example. Do you remember what a pain spell check used to be? You had to complete writing a document and then click on a spell check button to painstakingly correct each mistake throughout the whole document? Now Office does spelling for you, such that if you make a glaring error in your slide, suddenly these red squiggles start to appear. Spelling has changed from being reactive to proactive – the answers come to you before you ask for them. Now I’m at a stage where Word is a better speller than I will ever be. This is an over simplified example but we’re no longer hunter gathering here – we’ve domesticated the information of grammar so that I don’t have to actively seek it out – it comes to me. This is what we should be doing with search.
- And this is the trick with domesticating information, it should be simple and intuitive and the intent should be resolved in the place where it first originates. Because who made the rule that accessing the web is solely in the domain of browsers and apps? Why can’t search draw together the information I need in an email. Let’s say I get an email from my boss along these lines. I’ve never heard of The War on Drugs and I have no idea if this is something I want to be doing with my boss in my free time. In my current hunter gatherer mode I have to go to a browser or to an app to find the relevant information that I want – namely whether this band that I’d be happy to see? We should be able to scan the content of the email and give me some handy pointers all at the place of my intent – the email – without having to go elsewhere. So Bing has surfaced information about The War on Drugs and presents it to me, and if I want to listen to a sample of their music I can do so in a single click. But it will also tell me about the venue so if I don’t know that KOKO is in Camden and it can understand the context of where Camden is in relation to my home and how easy it will be for me to get back after the gig. Here we don’t need search to be in a box, it simply needs to power the engine that can serve me the information I need. Domesticating information in a way that is intuitive and simple.
- An important part of that example is that we’re capturing and resolving intent in the place that it occurs. We shouldn’t need an app for every occasion like with my Pee example earlier. We should be able to get the information we want in the places where we are already hanging out – in what I’ve decided to call super apps. Just look at the vastness of usage of some of these super apps where people are spending an extraordinary amount of time already. We want to resolve the intent in the app we started the journey in. So if you’re already on Facebook – that’s a super app – let’s resolve the intent in Facebook without having to go to a browser to find the answer you need.
- And if search starts to become a useful connector of information between super apps then we’re suddenly moving towards a world without search engines. Or rather a world without dedicated search boxes. The engines are still there to power and serve the information but we don’t need SERPs anymore we are reaching philosophical zen like state of search without searching. Because really, having to actively search for stuff in that hunter gatherer mode is annoying. I don’t want to search, I want the answers to my questions. So I am happy for search to happen, I just don’t want to be conscious that I am doing it. I want the information to be domesticated – I don’t want to have to go and hunt for it.
- If all goes well jump to slide 18. And it’s from the seeds of this idea that Cortana was born. She’s a personal assistant and a super app where you can resolve a lot of your intentions and where she will start to give you information proactively without you even asking for it. Do I need a coat today? – What’s that in Celsius? Next time I speak to my boss, remind me to ask him for a pay rise Who is playing next in the World Cup? How old is David Beckham? Who is his wife? Where is the nearest MacDonalds to here? How many calories are there in a Big Mac? Where can I get sushi near here? Which is the best? Now Cortana is great and resolving your intentions but we’ve also imbued her with a personality so it’s not just you talking to a machine. She is clever enough to determine the context of a question and whether I am being serious or playful. Whose your daddy? How much is Bill Gates worth? What is the meaning of life? What kind of music do you like? What do you think of me? May the Force be with you OK I think that’s enough from you Cortana. Now I’ve taken you through a number of scenarios there, each time I am asking a question in plain English and I am getting information surfaced from the internet, my software like my calendar, apps and devices. And Bing is powering all of this in the background to give me the relevant information I need without me having to make multiple requests.
- Cortana is all about making your life easier. And she learns from your preferences which you are completely in control of. Search without searching Cortana is surfacing information that you will find relevant
- Then on my way to work I can ask for my caffeine fix Cortana will find me local coffee shops It will also plan my journey and tell me when I need to leave to meet my next appointment if there is traffic which will slow my journey I can ask her complicated tasks such as the next time I speak to my colleague remind me to ask for my vinyl back
- And then when Clay calls the reminder pops up but this would work with an email, text, call whatever form of communication I choose. Cortana has a sense of humour so if you ask some quirky questions she will give you quirky responses. So if I ask where do babies come from? And she punishes you if you are too arrogant like any good assistant. OK I think that’s enough from Cortana. Now I’ve taken you through a number of scenarios there, each time I am asking a question in plain English and I am getting information surfaced from the internet, my software like my calendar, apps and devices. And Bing is powering all of this in the background to give me the relevant information I need without me having to make multiple requests.
- So what does all this mean? I’ve talked a lot so far about intent, about understanding context and about domesticating information so that we can resolve our intent in the place that the journey starts. What we haven’t touched on yet is what this means for advertisers. We are going to have to adapt to a new way of thinking about advertising with search. And it’s not going to be a one way stream of messaging from brands. We’re going to start moving away from thinking about search advertising as impressions and start thinking about interactions with audiences.
- So here’s my example - I am your customer – and I am looking for a holiday in Canada. Now in the current world of search advertising you serve ad impressions, and to a certain extent you can be targeted in your approach by increasing your bid for certain demographics but in reality you have very little control over who clicks on your ads. You’re currently paying the same for the teenager doing research on world’s prettiest lakes as you are for the family of four who are looking to book a hotel. This shouldn’t be a one way flow of content from advertiser to consumer but it should be a connection, of intent from the consumer and value from the provider. I mentioned earlier that search is a great way to measure intent but there are so many other ways. Let’s take my calendar. What better indication of intent do you need that someone is thinking about booking a holiday than them clearing their dairy and block booking a week off. Now I want to go to Canada, and I want search to resolve the intent from within my calendar and give me a list of available flights to Toronto. Let’s say I pick this one, I’ve still got a whole week to fill, and so for an advertiser I am a marketers dream, I am a valuable potential customer who has expressed several desires, not only have I booked time in my diary I’ve booked a flight. I am coming to Toronto, and so now it becomes a bid auction based on what’s valuable to me the consumer. I’m going on holiday for a week – who wants a piece of me? I’m going to want to hire bikes, go kayaking, be taken on mountain walk expeditions, I’ll probably need to buy some new walking boots. So here I am – bid on me. And the brand which provides the most value to me as a customer is the one that is going to be top of the results.
- Alright I am out of time, in fact I am probably over time and there are drinks waiting for you. So here are some thoughts which bring together what I’ve talked about today. I started off by saying I was an optimist and I am optimistic about the future and the potential that can be achieved. I also talked about a vision Microsoft has – and it’s a vision of search without search engines – it’s not confined to a place, it’s a service which weaves together the digital components of our lives across software, apps and devices. And if we think about search in this way then we don’t need search engines in the way that we have needed them for the last decade or so. What we do need is the ability to resolve intent where it occurs, and search can power that. We also need to be able to understand the context of our intentions so that the information we get is relevant. We need to domesticate the knowledge supply so that search is doing a lot of the hard work for us in the background without us even noticing, and I don’t actively have to hunt for information anymore it should just come to me. Finally, I believe the future for advertisers is going to be in connecting value providers with value customers, and whoever can offer me as the customer the most value is going to be at the top of results.