From the Halls of SES West: “Search Engines: Friend or Foe”
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Written By Reprise Media | August 9, 2006 | Share This
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Possibly the most contentious panel at SES yesterday involved leeches and black boxes and Eddie Haskell. No, it wasn’t a potential sequel to Snakes on a Plane starring the cast of Leave it to Beaver. Instead, it was a war of words, a donnybrook, a brouhaha, a tempestuous tornado of topics including the engines, the SEM community and the controversial views of usability pundit extraordinaire Jakob Nielsen, PhD.
OK, it really wasn’t all that, but how often does a blog post get a chance to be so bombastic?
Dr. Nielsen’s contention was that search engines leech information from other content creators without returning enough value. According to the good doctor, Google and the like are blatantly pulling users away from establishing an ongoing relationship with content providers. By becoming the arbiter of what is relevant and appropriate, they disintermediate the natural flow of information between content providers and the users. And that’s not a good thing, according to Dr. N.
Needless to say, the SEM community disagreed. Most vocal was the sole representative of the engines themselves, David Jakubowski of Microsoft. (The other engines were nowhere in sight – reportedly, Google was prettying herself up for last night’s Dance, and Yahoo must have been getting more duct tape for the rumored vaporware that is Panama). Anywho, David’s point was that nobody is complaining about the traffic they are getting in return, and that the search engines represent an excellent way to make an unacquainted public aware of your content. “In the end,” David said, “the industry is providing a wonderful service, since the media community is providing all this access and content without charge.”
Our own Peter Hershberg, also on the panel, jumped into the melee by agreeing with David. “By and large,” he said, “our customers have discovered that syndicating their content has been beneficial for their business.”
Next, a popular topic at many of the day’s other panels reared its head – namely, what’s the impact of not having full visibility into the search engines’ operations? Google’s and MSN’s Quality Score (and Yahoo’s plans to introduce a similarly non-democratized model) mean that the engines increasingly work in a ‘black box,’ shielding data and insight that could lead to better intelligence and decision making on the part of advertisers. The SEMs agreed with Herr Doktor Nielsen on this topic, suggesting the various hoops and obstacles created by the engines themselves (can anyone say “mandatory API compliance?”) make it difficult to continually innovate and drive the search effort forward. In the end, even Jakubowski agreed that the engines could do a better job in the transparency department and promised to help lead the charge in delivering improved insight.
Finally, there was a round of pugilistic parrying on free content, which was compared to Eddie Haskell: all peaches and cream to your face, but a real bastard to the Beav. Many agreed that most free content eventually has a beneficial impact on customers (although the contrarian doctor did not agree, as expected, since he’s selling a book arguing the opposing view). But everybody agreed that Google Analytics is a difficult pill to swallow. The panelists all piled on the former Urchin offering, arguing that giving Google your conversion data is like giving your landlord your daily receipts. While Google might not overtly set your CPCs based upon your conversion data, letting them know what you make was universally considered a bad idea.
Gee, I wonder what the Beav thinks?
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