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Is Google having a panic attack…?

4th November 2011 |

Google is a fine company – let’s get that straight at the beginning. They provide you and me with plenty of useful services. Even if you only use their search engine, can you imagine life without? We all depend on Google to a smaller or larger extent. And as a business, they are not doing badly – billions of dollars cash in the bank and massive revenues based on an average transaction price of less than a dollar. Not bad eh?

Is Google having a panic attack thanks to Facebook?However, Google has a problem – and it knows it. Traditional search engines have a limited life; new ways of searching which are more accurate, more relevant and more speedy are going to be required as the volume of Internet data grows at exponential rates. If Google does not adapt its search engine to the new online world, we will give up using it – and with it the company’s revenues will decline.

The good folk at Google are not daft – gosh they have more PhDs per square foot than Oxford I reckon…! For a number of years they have adapted their search engine, improved it and spent hours in their laboratories looking at “semantic search” – search which knows exactly what you mean when you type.

Consider the kind of problems Google has to face. Just type in the word “apple” to Google. Seems simple. But Google has to work out do you mean Apple, as in the company, apple, as in the fruit, or Apple as in the girl’s name. Just which one did you really mean? At the moment, all Google can really do is take an educated guess. For most searches it does a reasonable job – but here’s the problem: 50% of all the search terms that are typed into the Google search box each month have NEVER been typed in before in the 13 year history of the company. Each month, half of what it sees is brand new and that means it has an ever increasingly difficult task of making sure it can deliver. Semantic search will help – but Google now faces another problem: human search.

If I simply ask you “Apple?” you will probably say “no thanks, I’ve eaten” or “I prefer oranges”. But if I look at you strangely you might then answer, “oh sorry, you want an apple, I’ll get one from the fridge for you”. And then, even if I say no more, but set-aside the apple you have given me, you’ll say “don’t you like Royal Gala apples then?” and even if I continue with my silence, you’ll say “Oh I get it, you want to look at my new Apple computer”. At which point you flash me your iPad and I’m still not impressed and you say “Oh, where did I get it?”, I smile, and you say “PC World have them back in stock now”.

One word and nothing else and you can get to the exact thing I want. One word into Google and it fails, unless it can make a really, really good guess (and to be fair it does that quite a lot). But humans are better at working out what other people want to know than mathematical algorithms. If I ask you “where is the best restaurant near here where I can take my wife for a slap up birthday meal” you can tell me, in an instant. Google can’t. It suggests I might be interested in a website on “television tropes and idioms“. Wrong!

And guess what – people are discovering in their millions that Twitter and Facebook are fantastic search engines – because you can ask questions that only human beings can answer and to which you get accurate, rapid answers. Google, of course, is aware of this and realises that as people gradually discover that humans are better at providing answers than search engines, they could lose traffic themselves over the coming years – and that will reduce their income.

Enter Google Plus, the FIFTH attempt at social networking produced by Google. Former efforts, such as Jaiku, Buzz and Wave have already been consigned to the Internet trash can. Only Orkut remains, and then almost only in Brazil. And Google Plus is not as successful as we think. True it is the fastest growing social network ever produced – but also the fastest falling. Traffic peaked and dropped. The only significant advantage it had over Facebook was “circles” and within days the engineers at Facebook added “Friends Lists” which provides exactly the same function.

In the meantime, Google is clearly concerned about the way we are searching using social networks and the way that the advertising industry is predicting where they will spend their cash in the coming years (70% of it on Facebook). So, Google appears to be pulling out the stops to make us aware of Google Plus and want to use it. But their attempts seem more driven by panic than strategy.

For instance, Google news is widely regarded as an objective compilation of news from world journalism. It is a brilliant system. Until now. Google has now added photographic “bylines” to the articles it lists. But those bylines are only produced if the writer is a member of Google Plus. In other words, Google has now added subjectivity to its otherwise brilliant product. The message it is sending out is that the writers of some articles are better than others BECAUSE they are on Google Plus. Not necessarily true, of course.

Meanwhile, over in the search team, Google is making search more “secure” – but actually what it is doing is preventing website owners from seeing the keywords that their visitors typed in to get to them. This is crucial information to online businesses, but Google is “in the interests of privacy” preventing website owners from retrieving such data – oh, unless they happen to be using Google advertising products and then it is OK. Call me a cynic, but the much needed move for greater privacy appears to be mere window dressing for a strictly commercial move to get people to spend more money with the company.

At the same time as all this is going on, the team at Gmail have upset hoards of people with an iPhone app that was so derided they took it down from the web TWO HOURS after launching it. And there are loads of blog posts and comments all complaining about the “new look” of Gmail, which appears to make using it really great if you happen to be a PhD engineer in San Francisco.

On top of this the company now wants to charge businesses for using Google Maps and it recently closed down the Google News Timeline, which was an essential tool for many academics the world over. Plus if you paid for Google Apps, you couldn’t have a Google Profile attached to it – yet Google ranks profiles highly for an individual’s name. Indeed, when Google was in love with its Buzz product (now dead) it didn’t let its paying customers have access to it via Google Apps. And to cap it all, the re-configuration of Google Reader has its fans up in arms because it simply cannot use it the way they always have.

Oh and one more thing – if you used the Advanced Search on Google you may well have used the plus sign (+) to find words together. That has been part of the advanced search facility of Google for over a decade. They quietly switched it off last week, because they clearly are keen on preserving the plus sign as an indicator for Google +; never mind the fact that millions of searches now won’t work.

It all looks like Google is in a bit of a state. They are annoying people left, right and centre – which is not a good idea when many of those people are finding human search on social media is producing more accurate more rapid results for many categories of questions. Indeed, you only need to ask a question in Quora or LinkedIn these days and you’ll get an answer pretty quickly. And the answers are often much better and more incisive than the educated guesswork of a bit of mathematics.

Clearly, Google can overcome all these difficulties – they have the experience, the expertise and the money to be able to do so. But at the moment, the company is rather looking as though it is in a bit of a panic because it realises that the advertising spend is slowly but surely likely to leak out to of Facebook. And we will go with it, as we increasingly rediscover that human search is superior to an algorithm in many instances.

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Categories: Future, General, Search, Social
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Online businesses can learn from Woman’s Weekly

3rd November 2011 |

Woman's Weekly provides lessons for online businessThis week, Woman’s Weekly magazine is 100 years old. Happy Birthday, old gal. And in spite of the magazine market exploding since the introduction of the 1d (one old penny) magazine, it remains the best performing magazine in the sector, with sales slightly up in a market that has seen an 8% drop. Even at 100, they’ve still “got it” at Woman’s Weekly it seems.

And when you peek inside that first edition – reprinted in its entirety this week – you’ll discover that not a lot has changed in the past century. One woman was so incensed that her husband dared to complain about her handling of the household finances, she told him to get on with it himself. Needless to say, he made  hash of it. Another contributor made the point that the real reward from her nursing career was seeing people get better.

Both of these women are essentially pointing out that there is more to life than money – the other rewards and the way they were treated were also significant factors in how they felt. And that’s exactly the kind of conclusion you can draw from today’s younger generation, according to a study by Cisco. This found that today’s young job-seekers consider the Internet to be fundamental in any work they do. Indeed, one in three of the participants in the survey say Internet access is the same kind of requirement as having water or electricity.

The study also showed that many youngsters want unrestricted access to social networking as part of their job. The use of Facebook and the like has become so much part of their way of life, a company that does not allow access is unappealing in terms of career suitability. Indeed, the young people in the Cisco research said the presence or lack of free Internet use in the workplace is a game-changer. In other words, businesses that block web sites or restrict access are reducing their appeal to their future workforce significantly.

What this Cisco study shows – rather like the articles in this week’s Woman’s Weekly – is that people are more interested in other aspects of their working life than they are in the money. It was this way 100 years ago it seems – today the “other aspects” just happen to be Internet-related.

Studies have already shown that businesses which restrict Internet access have lower productivity levels compared with the time when their offices had free web access. Now, it seems, such firms won’t even be able to attract people to work for them any more.

The Cisco study is a reminder of what those women said 100 years ago – money isn’t everything. And if your business thinks you can attract the right staff and support simply by paying more, think again; it is not the salary that matters, but the other things which go with the jobs you offer, such as enjoyment, challenge, stimulation and – nowadays – the unrestricted use of the Internet.

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Did Prince Charles or the Pope invent Twitter?

28th March 2011 |

His Royal Highness Prince Charles was responsible for a considerable change in the conversation in Washington, DC, when he and his wife – Princess Diana at that time – were due to visit the political centre of the USA. Some eight weeks before the couple’s planned visit in 1985 the chatter in Washington was no longer about politics and economics, but about the Royal Couple. Indeed, according to The Evening Independent, Washington was “a Twitter” over the visit. The article describing the change in mood in the American political capital also uses the term “social media”. What’s this? “Twitter” and “social media” being used in the same article prior even to the invention of the world wide web? What’s going on? Quick – we need a conspiracy theory.

Well, we can find it if we trawl back even further through the archives. Back in 1962 the Pope at that time, Pope John, decided to give his staff the day-off to help celebrate his 81st birthday. And what did he give them time-off from? Well, it seems the Vatican was in the midst of discussions of “social communications media”. That’s right, the Pontiff had Twitter in his sights 44 years before it was even invented. You can see the conspiracy theory forming now – it has all the necessary ingredients; Prince Charles, Princess Diana, the Pope and secret American technology.

But what this journey through the News Timeline at Google really shows us is one fact: the phrase “social media” has been around for a lot longer than what we now thing of as “social media”. Many people believe that “social media” is a fad, a here-today, gone-tomorrow kind of thing. In fact, back in 1938 The Montreal Gazette reported the existence of “social media” in the 19th Century, when Dickens was busy writing. Which all points towards the notion that “social media” is not as new as we might think it is – and neither therefore is it some kind of faddish thing.

And indeed it isn’t – media of all kinds have been social for centuries. Dickens himself was very social with his media – reading out his own stories in public and sharing them socially. Err..we call that Facebook nowadays.

One thing is different, of course. These days you need a “social media expert” to help you do something which people have been doing naturally for the past 200 years or more. Indeed, being a “social media guru” is now a whole new career path for “digital natives” – people who have grown up with a computer virtually strapped to their arms.

Back in Washington a quarter of a Century ago, there were no “gurus” to help the chattering classes there get “all-a-twitter”; they did it themselves, naturally. Likewise, Dickens didn’t need an “expert” to help him share his stories and talks; he just got on with it. The reason is that like the people in Washington he just saw it as “normal”, part of the world he inhabited and so it just happened.

When you see something as “special” or “different” that’s when you need a “guru” to help you because you have over-complicated it. Remember The Beatles flying in their meditation guru? When you over-complicate relaxation, mind-emptying and personal reflection and give it a special name, that’s when you need help  to do it. But when you just call it relaxation or reflection on your lot, well, hey, you can do that without any experts advising you.

It’s the same in many other areas. Take “personal development” for instance. Successful people often “just get on with it” and simply have a goal in life and strive each day towards it. Others who call this “personal development” need gurus, DVDs, tapes, workshops and a whole host of other support to tell them the same thing every time – set yourself a goal and get off your butt and do something about it.

Today “social media” is in the same arena. Trawling through the archives shows us that it has been going on for donkeys; but now we have allocated a special name to (don’t tell anyone I told you this, but it is called “talking to people”), then we over-complicate it and then we need experts.

True, I admit, you might need practical guidance on what to do. But you don’t need special advice on “being social” – you already know what that is and how to do that. Which is why Twitter isn’t new – people were doing it in Washington 26 years ago. Facebook isn’t new – Dickens was onto that 150 years back. And the Pope? Well each one of them has been engaged in social media for centuries – how else does any religion survive without it?

So perhaps Prince Charles did not invent Twitter and neither did the Pope. But then neither, really, did the folks at Twitter. All they invented was a technology that allowed us to do what we have always done in the real world, online. Social media is not new; don’t let any of those gurus tell you otherwise.

And that’s why, quite soon, business owners will realise that what the gurus are telling them is, well, common sense and stuff they already know. The result? “Social Media Gurus” will disappear to be replaced by the next so-called “online fad” expert. Fancy being a “semantic search marketing guru”? They’ll be popular in a couple of years. Or how about being a “Social Search Guru” – gosh, social search is taking off big time now, so we must need “experts” in that area. Oh…you don’t know what “social search” is? Well, just ask a friend, they’ll know. Whoops – given the game away; there goes my opportunity of being a social search guru.


Categories: Future, Social
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You can get people to pay for websites

29th March 2010 |

The Times is due to charge onlineReaders of The Times online are going to have to dig into their piggy banks come June; The Times and The Sunday Times are to start charging for access to their websites. You will need to pay £1 a day or get it discounted to £2 a week. If you subscribe to the print edition – £6 a week – you get the online access free of charge. Is this commercial suicide? Almost certainly for a newspaper; yet for other businesses such charging models could do well.

The problem that Rupert Murdoch faces is two-fold. Firstly, the circulation of The Times is plummeting. The latest figures, released in February, show that the newspaper is down 17% in the year since 2009. That’s the biggest drop of any national daily newspaper and compares with circulation increases for The Sun and The Star. The Sunday Times is down by almost 8% in the past year. With falls in circulation – and the resulting drop in income – there is also a reduction in advertising fees. Advertisers don’t like paying standard rate card fees when the circulation is falling; inevitably they negotiate the costs downwards too.

The second issue which faces Mr Murdoch is the increasing demand for online news. Indeed, The Times gets almost five times as many people reading the newspaper online than it does buying a newspaper. A recent study showed that people now prefer to access online news instead of physical newspapers. But with the plethora of online news sites, people are spoilt for choice. And that means if The Times charges, readers can simply opt for a free news site, including The BBC which has confirmed it will not charge for online news.

Clearly, the chances of success are not stacked in favour of The Times. They are stuck in an old-fashioned business model in which charging for news was acceptable – because that was the only way we could get it. But with Twitter, for instance, world news can be spread to millions of people the moment it happens and without any need for the costs of journalism. The old business model doesn’t work. For the newspaper industry, they need to think again. One possible model would be free online news and then access to the in-depth material published as a print magazine, or video material downloadable at cost, for example.

And therein lies the secret to how you can charge for your website. People are not prepared to pay for information they can get for nothing elsewhere. But they are prepared to pay for analysis and in-depth support which is specifically geared to their particular needs. The Guardian, for example, has hinted that this is the direction it will take – charging for in-depth analysis and special sections, rather than the general material which can be obtained anywhere for nothing.

Thousands of websites already exist using a subscriber model. But the basic set-up is always free. The paid-for material is then the specific, in-depth, analytical stuff that helps people improve their situation. So, what in-depth analysis can you provide your potential online customers?

With the “free” model for information so well-established online, you are only going to be able to charge for material that goes beyond what other websites provide. That’s the point that has eluded Mr Murdoch and his cronies. Don’t fall into the same trap, assuming that people will be happy to pay because of who you are. They won’t; they are only happy to pay online for highly targeted, in-depth and supportive analytical material they cannot find anywhere else. Your challenge, as ever, is to be unique.


Categories: Future
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Why you must print out every page of your web site

17th February 2009 |

Your company web site has no-doubt had several loving hours spent on it. If you have a blog, it’s pretty certain that there will be tens of thousands of words in it by now if you have been blogging for a a year. This web site, for instance, has over half a million words of editorial in it – that’s around ten books worth; quite a lot of work. How many words does your web site have? Indeed, have you even considered the intellectual capital you have embedded in your site?

Now what if, by the click of a switch, someone, somewhere decided that they will change the way the software that produced your site works. What if the way that sites are stored was changed? What if a key company went bust in the chain that gets your website out to the world at large? Could you resurrect your site – would your intellectual capital be lost forever?

OK – I know – you’ve heard of backups before and I’m sure you have them. But, Dr Vint Cerf – the person who invented the coding that makes the entire Internet work – has said at this week’s Search Marketing Expo that we must all consider the problem of “bit rot” – the fading away of parts of the Internet because they were constructed with old software that is no longer available.

This is a problem that has been taxing the National Archives for many years. They are charged with storing everything they possibly can to preserve an archive of the country. Since so much of that is now online – what if the archive could not be accessed at some stage in the future?

As Dr Cerf said: “Imagine it’s the year 3000 and you’ve just done a Google search and you turn up a 1997 PowerPoint file, and you’re running Windows 3000. The question is, does it know how to interpret the PowerPoint file? The answer is probably no.”

But you don’t have to think that far into the future. I have book manuscripts in a program called MacAuthor; it was all the rage at the time – in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Douglas Adams even wrote The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy on it. We used to speak at conferences together about the use of such “desktop publishing” software in business. But sadly the original manuscript of that book – and the original manuscripts of my books are no longer accessible. To edit such books, they now need to be scanned in again from the paper records because MacAuthor no longer exists and nothing will import the files any more.

{module fineprint}So even though Dr Cerf is pointing out a potential problem for the Internet long-term, not having a copy of your work which can be accessed in more traditional ways could be a real problem for you.

And as Dr Cerf pointed out in his speech, paper will be accessible for many, many, many years to come. After all you can still look at the real, 1000-year-old Domesday Book – as well as access the online version nowadays. But if, in a few years time, that online version failed to work because of some change in software along the line – we’d still be able to access the paper version.

So, consider your web site and your current online resources. What if Facebook decided you had to upload all your profile material, rather than typing it into an online form? They could do just that now if they wanted, nothing is really stopping them (apart from ease of use). But what if they did? Do you have all your Facebook profile information in a file you can upload? Or would you have to start from scratch again? Even if it was on paper, you could scan it in and then upload it.

It may not be very “green” to keep a copy of your web site in paper form; but it would preserve your work, not only for yourself if something went wrong, but for future generations who may not be able to get into your digital work otherwise.


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