PageRank to PlaceRank Is More Than Changing a Few Letters Around
There was a great article yesterday by Chris Silvery, who works for search engine marketing firm Key Relevance and is a regular contributor to the Local’s Only Section of Search Engine Land. The article highlights some of the ways that location oriented search within Google behaves, and frankly how it very often doesn’t behave the way it ‘should’.
Per John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local from a recent TechCrunch article : ”PlaceRank is like PageRank for places, it tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as references on the Web, reviews, photos, how many people know about it, how long its been around.”
By the way I think it’s notable that the thing being “figured out” here is “prominence”.
Now I understand that you’ve got to start somewhere, but Read more
Kelsey: Interactive Local Media 09
The Kelsey Group held their annual Interactive Local Media conference last week in Los Angeles, focused on the role of digital marketing in driving offline and local commerce. I didn’t make it, but there was ample Twitter and blog coverage. I posted many of the presentations from the event in the presentations section and many are worth a closer look. Reading through all the coverage there seem to be a few overarching themes:
- From the macro point of view, everything points to a significant opportunity here, high mobile phone penetration, more powerful and sophisticated devices, better mobile internet connections and experience, and the consumers strong predisposition to act offline and locally, etc
- many companies are swarming to create solutions ranging from digital out of home, to online local SEO, local display ad networks and online reputation management.
- The highly fragmented nature of the SMB market is challenging to sell into, and sales feet on the street seem to be a pre-requisite. It seems that SMBs won’t just find their own way to your online services and begin participating, you need a sales guy in the store at some point to get the ball rolling.
- as with a lot of things in this world, making offerings targeted to this market simple and easy to understand will go a long way. Many small business don’t even have a website and have never heard of Facebook or Twitter, so keep it simple!
Here are some of the top stats culled from the Twitter Streams (#ILM09) and various Internet coverage of the event. Read more
Warning to Sprint Customers…
Thinking of knocking over a bank? Be sure to leave that phone at home. An Indiana University student was hanging out at a wiretapping and interception conference in Washington DC, gathering information for his PhD thesis, and was suprised to hear that law enforcement had used Sprint’s nifty new self service web site for law enforecment to pull up Sprint customers historical GPS data a whopping 8 million times over 13 months. Chris posts more details and audio from the event on his blog.
Am I suprised that the goverment actively looks up peoples location data, no. Am I surprised that they did it 8 million times, well yes! Maybe they should lend the login to the Sprint field sales team so they can track down and give a personal face to face pitch to the ~1 million customers that Sprint is losing each quarter!
Location Aware Mobile Search: Pages Vs Places
Ah the random stuff you think about when you can’t sleep at night. Tonight’s edition for me… how search engines work and how that may potentially translate to creating a search capability around people visiting places… you know places like gas stations and hamburger joints. Yeah I know, I am getting sleepy too!
I’ll be honest I don’t know very much about search engines, a few years ago I printed out a copy of Larry and Serge’s Stanford paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine and read it on a cross country flight for a job interview on a related subject… needless to say I didn’t get the job and I pretty much dropped any more digging on the subject.
But after attending last weeks MetaPlaces conference and listening to the various speakers, including one on the opportunities in mobile search and also a refresher on Sense Networks, the subject is back top of mind again. Read more
Metaplaces: Random Thoughts Day One
Some other random take-away’s from day one at Metaplaces. They stuck out to me as particularly interesting or thought provoking, even if some are not particularly new:
- On advertising front, search and action oriented is getting more traction than display, and it’s hard to cover costs with just low cpm banner and network inventory
- From the carriers perspective, location look-ups are expensive and taxing, almost the same overhead as setting up a full call
- None of this stuff really takes off in a mass market way until we figure out ubiquitous always on location
- The fragmented nature of mobile/carriers is still quite an issue when it comes to trying to get any one thing to scale and for getting advertisers to take notice
- There are a lot of cool and interesting LBS things being built with only the faintest idea of how they’ll one day make money. Reluctantly, advertising seems to the revenue source of choice… but often knowledge of the industry is very limited and attitudes borderline hostile. If you’re a vegetarian, animal rights activist, it’s going to be very hard to make a career as a butcher.
3G = GPS, Government and Glitches
Unlike reading a corporate report, where bad things are often described as ‘soft’, ‘sub optimal’ and ‘unfavorable’, the GAO doesn’t mess around with such niceties and refreshingly, yet starkley, tells it more like it is. The title says it all “GPS: Significant Challenges in Sustaining and Upgrading Widely Used Capabilities” and it only gets worse from there… some key thoughts:
- The US Govt recognizes GPS as “a key tool in an expanding array of public service and commercial applications” and “In light of the importance of GPS… GAO was asked to undertake a broad review of GPS.” and what was found was well seemingly a mess, and a mess with potentially big consequences…
- The guys put in charge of GPS, the Air Force, are not sure they’ll be able to get new satellites up to replace the old ones in time to ensure uninterrupted service. See the chart above showing the probabilities of having the full 24 satellite constellation. Depending on which and how many satellites fail without replacements, this would mean that not only could consumers not know to take a left in 1/4 mile, but also maybe our military’s smart bombs could becoming dumb bombs as soon as next year.
- What seems to be the problem with getting the satellites up? Well the Air Force can’t seem to stick to a budget and schedule… currently at three years late and at $1.6B…more than twice the original budget of $729 million… citing ‘significant technical problems’ and the lack of one central point of authority to guide the project… even with the admission that “GPS had already been ‘done’ before.”
- contributing factor #1: too many cooks in the kitchen and different priorities between military folks and commercial oriented folks about requirements of the system
- contributing factor #2: its so hard to find good help these days. From cnet there were problems with mergers related to their GPS vendors”the aerospace and defense bits of Rockwell were acquired by Boeing shortly after it won a GPS contract. A year later, Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. The work was moved again. Next Boeing acquired Hughes Electronics’ space and communications business, which meant another move; all the while shedding “valuable workers and knowledge.”
The net net here seems to be that there needs to be a government GPS czar who makes all the decisions and leads the project. Any takers?
Mobile Search Will Beat and Steal Lunch Money From Mobile Display Advertising
A great blog post over at Local Search News about the mobile local opportunity. Definitely worth the full read, but key take aways for me was the expected shift in ad dollars on mobile to move away from the largely display oriented stuff we see today toward an explosion of mobile search revenue. The Kelsey Group shows display revenue at over 60% of total 2008 mobile ad revenue, but sinking to just under 10% by 2013, mostly as the result of massive search growth from a mere $39 million to a whopping $2.27B or around 70% of all mobile ad spending in just five years.
I dug around to get the latest and greatest, and it looks like in the good old fashioned web world search is about 45% of ad revenue today with premium display close to a 1/3. So Kelsey’s predictions for the mobile world certainly seem to magnify the trend we’ve seen so far on the web with search having an even bigger role and display, a decidedly smaller role. To some degree this makes a lot of sense, since the small footprint of the mobile handset doesn’t leave a lot of room for all that lovely creative ad work, the sight sound and motion and all, and search is simple, quick and to the point which is well suited to the phone.
An even more interesting part, was not just the AMOUNT of search revenue, but the TYPE of searches expected… citing data from Google that mobile searches are 2-3x more often to be local in nature than searches done via a desktop, The Kelsey Group calls for over 1/3 of mobile searches to be “local” in nature in five years, and for over half of that whopping $2.27B in search revenue to be generated from “local” search queries.
Kinda makes you wonder what kind of local stuff all those folks will be searching for on their phones and who will be the benficiaries of that cool $1B+ in local oriented search ad spending. 
More on location based twitter
There seem to be a lot of the sites popping up for twitterers to register themselves in a geographic area, I know there are many more, but the ones that have caught my eye include geofollow.com, twitterlocal.net, localtweeps.com
After playing with the geo location features on my mobile twitter client Tweetie and also playing with the location oriented Twinkle application by Tapulous, which all use various types of technology to determine your location and the filter out tweets from folks outside a certain radius… going back to the old school way of registering yourself on a good old fashioned website
with your twitter name and your city or zip code just felt well, very old school…
So I had to dig around and find out why such an old school thing like a local twitter registration site would even exist, let alone seem to be proliferating.
From the best I can tell, there seem to be two potential drivers… one is that I was suprised to learn that nearly 2/3 of twitter users are using the service directly through the web or via a desktop application. Maybe it’s because of how I was introduced to Twitter, but I always thought it more as a mobile thing… you know with the 140 character limit thing and all… well evidently it’s not. So that alone explains alot, most people don’t have the technological approach to a geo-filter available and they just want to find local people to twitter with… fair enough.
But the other cool aspect of a list of local twitter users is for accomplishing the opposite of what the location aware technology does for ya… location aware tech allows you to see those immediately around you and their tweets, but the old fashioned registration site in theory could let you drop in on virtual tweeps and their tweets in a specific area somewhere else.
Now the inner Colbert in me may joke that focusing in and reading the tweet stream of the general public in Shanghai if you live in New York, seems pretty damn useless, and in many cases it probably is. But in some cases it could be valuable, for example if you’re heading to a new city and are looking for recommendations on where to get a good steak, who better than to ask than the local twittersphere in the city where you’re headed. Or if you want to keep tabs on what the buzz is in your old college town, you can drop in on the local tweet stream there… in theory having a local group to zoom in on could have huge possibilities in allowing journalists to zoom in to follow the local action related to a breaking news event in a particular area.
On a related note there is a great article on Local Search News about how Twitter should register and create accounts for local businesses to help better identify them in the twittersphere. Not so we can follow the local Italian restaurant to read a constant stream of tweets about how good their last batch of lasagna is, but to allow for a common currency for referring to specific places and establishments as twitter nation so often does. It makes a lot of sense to me.
Kitt: "Buckle up Michael, we’re about to jump the shark"
Saw the news the other day that Mio, the folks that brought us the Knight Rider personal navigation devices, are shutting down their U.S. offices. Seems that it will take more than a retro ’70s tv show themed device to make it in todays competitive PND market.
Wait, I know… maybe a retro 90′s book brand instead! If Knight Rider wasn’t your thing then why not the lovable, easy to understand for Dummies branded PNDs for those with an eversion to all things technical. Yes, seriously there is a for Dummies line of personal navigation device… evidently it goes for as low as $89.99 at your local CVS.
Watching the developments in the PND market these days feels an awful lot like watching the waning episodes of Happy Days where fresh out ideas, desperate for sale and wanting to milk a trend for all its worth, while doing as little new innovative work as possible, we’re seeing folks resort to placing cheap, easy and desperate bets to delay the inevitable.
Can the GM Kitt 2010 concept car be too far off?
So does this mean we’re reaching the end for PNDs in general, or is there another explaination? I am sure many of you have seen this before but there is a company called Gartner which is a technology research and advisory firm which looks at stuff like this. A while back Gartner came out with this idea of the Hype Cycle to explain how new technologies gain and grow adoption through a number of cycles… most notably that there is an early period of frenzy and excess public enthusiasm which ultimately hits a wall, followed by a period of disillusionment before the technology revitalizes itself, often in a more useful and widespread way.
In terms of GPS and location awareness technology, I suspect that we are passing from the irrational exuberance stage around navigation and into the retrenchment phase where the next more powerful incarnation is currently being formulated.
While many companies at this point are becoming dissolusioned with the future prospects for navigation devices, there is a new breed of companies (and some new innovative products from old companies like Garmin) that are busy layering in search and social networking capabilities to take-up where the “navigation only” systems left off, as they realize that there are more broad benefits from location awareness then knowing where you are, where you want to go and how to navigate there.
The world always just seems to zig, when everyone is calling for it to zag.
On a related note, I noticed the news out of the New York auto show where Ford unveiled its Transit Connect service (which already includes some gimmicky RFID features) and GM its new internet and wi fi offering which will bring internet connectivity to their latest vehicle lines… so maybe we will have connected PNDs afterall, just with your Caddie providing the Internet connection rather than device makers like Garmin.
Retail-ization of Google Search Results
What’s the fuss about? Well before the recent change if you performed a Google search for a term like “dentist”, “florist” or “lawyer” you would normally get links to other WEBPAGES with content about “dentists”, “florists” and “lawyers’. So for example a search for the term lawyers would have links to the Wikipedia entry on lawyers and lawyers.com, and about 100 million other pages like it… in other words connecting the Google searcher to more and more INFORMATION about the subject of “lawyers”. But now with the change that seems to have been put in place, Google is trying to infer the intent of the searcher in some instance… assuming that maybe the user doesn’t want to find more INFORMATION about lawyers in the general sense, but instead wants to be able to locate a real nearby lawyer.
In case you’re wondering, Google evidently uses standard IP lookup to determine the location of the searchers computer in order to give the appropriate geographically relevant results… see above an example of the SERP from a search for the term ‘coffee’ from a PC in midtown Manhattan.
Enormous leap toward Google embracing location awareness as a core element of search? Or simply Google trying to further improve the search experience and giving people the results that they most often want?
