Vertical Search for the Masses
Lunch time rolled around yesterday, and I realized I had not yet checked out the new Google Custom Search offering. So I decided to spend 30 minutes looking at the Google product, then get something to eat.
Imagine my surprise when 30 minutes later, I had not only looked at Google Custom Search, but actually created a vertical search site and installed it on our company website http://www.infocommercegroup.com/ (give it a try yourself; it's right on the home page, below the fold).
Google Custom Search really is a vertical search application that virtually anyone can use. It's free, powerful, incredibly easy use to build and install, and delivers the improved relevancy you would expect from a highly focused search. You can include any number of other websites or specific web pages from other websites. You can include your own website as well. At your option, search results can be standard Google results that move results from your specified sites and pages higher in the search results rankings, or you can go "pure vertical" and show only results from your selected sites.
Google Custom Search, which is built off the Google Co-op platform, in essence creates a filtered look at the main Google index, so you can combine the breadth of the Google search engine with your own expertise about which sites are most relevant to a specific topic. It's a powerful combination, and did I mention, oh so easy. Google even remembered monetization this time: AdSense ads surround the search results, but Google will happily pay you a percentage: just check the box on the set-up screen.
It's all very cool, and as with most things Google, potentially disruptive. What are the implications for the growing number of publishers moving into vertical search? Google Custom Search raises the bar in vertical search a bit, but that's probably a good thing, because any publisher considering a move into vertical search should be thinking a lot past what Google Customer Search can offer in terms of features and functionality. While we're seeing some stunningly powerful and innovative vertical search sites lately, there are still quite a few that look like they were thrown together during someone's lunch break. As an industry, we can and must to better. That's why we see this new offering from Google as a useful warning shot across the bow.
There's still time. I think I'll have the chicken salad.
Yes We Can
The creativity and innovation that makes data publishing such an important and exciting field was on full display at last week's InfoCommerce 2006 conference in Philadelphia. Can you predict company earnings using historical weather data? Yes you can. Can you accurately predict automobile industry sales levels, by make, model and even vehicle options using just your website log files? Yes you can. Can you build the number one most highly trafficked B2B website in one year with a small staff and no professional investors behind you? Yes you can. Can you build sites that are more powerful than the general search engines for specific types of information? Yes you can, yes you can, yes you can.
But what was also clear at InfoCommerce 2006 is that innovation and creativity alone do not guarantee business success. Success comes from basic business blocking and tackling -- sweating the details and understanding intimately the needs of our customers and our markets, making this year's theme, "Becoming One with Your Market" , the most on-target we've had in a while. We were struck by the number of speakers and attendees who mentioned that they are getting closer to their customers by sitting with them -- literally sharing offices and cubicles with them -- to study in detail the nature of their work and their work processes. It's this level of engagement, connection and understanding that is helping to define our success.
Several of this year's Models of Excellence winners provided real-world examples of products that prove that workflow integration is much more than theory; it's a very, very good business to be in. We got a taste of the huge opportunity that awaits us with vertical search, and we saw how data publishers are capitalizing on their central market positions to become powerful "switching centers" for entire industries.
And while the search engines remain huge factors in our fate, the right combination of site optimization and search marketing, coupled with a user-based interface, powerful site functionality and most importantly of all, great data, can assure us sustainable and very profitable business opportunities that will only get better as the online information business evolves.
Can we get there from here? Yes we can.
Whither Content In The Traffic Economy?
In 1999, Internet guru Esther Dyson made the remarkable prediction that "content (including software) will serve as advertising ... [and] the likely best defense for content providers is to exploit the situation to distribute intellectual property for free in order to sell services and relationships."
Of course in 1999, the venture capital-fueled notion that "information wants to be free" was accepted wisdom, except of course to those of us who created information for a living, who wondered, "So how do we get paid?"
Since then, a lot has changed, and some of us are even still in business. But there are several high-profile examples of companies doing exactly what Dyson predicted, sites like move.com, where you can find a massive free database of homes for sale, produced in cooperation with the National Association of Realtors; or Amazon.com, which acquired Internet Movie Database to become, in essence, a merchandising front-end to its video retailing business.
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The recent acquisition of Peterson's Guides by student loan marketer Nelnet now suggests a larger trend is underway. Yet this new market dynamic that rationalizes owning a site solely to generate traffic in order to move product doesn't sit quite right with me. Why buy when you can rent? I am sure for a lot less than it paid to acquire Peterson's, Nelnet probably could have been the exclusive sponsor of key Peterson sites, getting the exposure and clickthroughs with none of the hassles of owning and operating a business they don't really understand.
Since none of the four finalists bidding for Peterson's were publishers, the thinking that site traffic is so valuable that it's worth the expense and hassle of buying and running content companies in order to have full control of that traffic must be hitting the mainstream. It's an odd and perhaps sad moment when content companies can only realize their maximum value when turned into what is effectively a high tech version of the self-liquidating premium.
What will be interesting to see is if content companies start to flip this emerging paradigm and start acquiring product and service companies. With the growing resurgence of online marketplaces, the industry may slowly be moving in that direction. But is it the right turn, or a dead end?
Doing Buying Guides the Intuit(ive) Way
This is potentially a big development, though it has not garnered much fanfare in the press: Google has announced a partnership with Intuit, publisher of the ubiquitous QuickBooks software, to provide seamless integration between QuickBooks and both Google Maps, Google AdSense and Google Base. Interesting but not huge news you say? Wait, there's more.
Intuit, using technology from a company it recently acquired called StepUp Commerce, will create an interface between Google and QuickBooks that will allow businesses to not only upload their product information to Google Base, but real-time inventory status as well. Google, with help from its new best friend Intuit, has put all the pieces together: discovery by location and by product, along with critical inventory data, something that even the largest companies still struggle to provide online.
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Another thing Google gets out of this deal: a new sales channel that could well reduce its need to partner with yellow pages publishers to get "feet on the street." Intuit has huge penetration of the small business market and has shown real prowess over the years selling such add-on services as payroll and credit card processing. It even has integrated a vendor rating program (Zipingo.com) and has even previously provided direct access to credit reports (D&B).
Anyone with product buying guides, particularly yellow pages publishers, needs to be monitoring this program closely. Google, through Intuit, is trying to assemble product-level data in a database format, enhanced with real-time inventory data, all tied together with strong discovery tools. Play this scenario out, and it could portend radical and largely unpleasant changes to those of us, both B2B and B2C, who are involved with product information.
More realistically, this is going to take some time to get off the ground. Though details are sketchy, we will assume Intuit will try to charge for this new service, creating a paid participation revenue model that tends to yield uneven and incomplete product catalogs. At the same time, if this new program captures the imagination of small businesses, and Intuit doesn't get too greedy, its implications could be huge. At the very least, Google is once again upping the ante for data publishers, by providing the real-time inventory data that few product guide publishers provide today.
The Power of Partnering
The announcement of the latest Google beta offering, Google News Archive has finally pushed the "friend or foe" debate into more positive territory.
Google News Archive is being positioned by Google as a way to search for historical information online. In reality, it is Google's first significant effort to get involved with paid content, largely on an a la carte basis. The most important aspect of this is that it's the first cooperative effort between Google and publishers, with publishers happily furnishing their paid access content, on whatever basis works for them, in exchange for the huge visibility Google can provide.
Providers such as Factiva, Alacra, HighBeam, LexisNexis, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are all eagerly jumping on board this new Google initiative, despite it's potentially threatening if not disruptive effect on their business models. Google probably made their buy-ins less painful by not trying to force these publishers into a one size fits all approach, and (at least for now) doing everything for free. Google's "yes, we have no revenue model" approach is alive and well.
Google's focus on the historical aspect of this service is truly strange, since it becomes clear from your first search that the news "archive" contains information as recent as 2006. This would seem to present issues about what goes into the main Google search index, and what goes into Google News Archive. Based on our test searches, however, this really isn't much of an issue, because virtually everything we saw in Google News Archive is offered on a paid basis, and that's the true delineation between the two services. What we have here, for all practical purposes, is Google Premium Search.
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Some of the news aggregators are selling articles on an a la carte basis, but we saw that HighBeam was offering access to articles in exchange for a free trial subscription, showing that Google can accommodate different business models within this service.