Attention Allocation“Entering the User's Mind: Search Engines, Social

Networks and Recommendations”

Chris Dumke, September 2007, Waterloo - Canada

1. The Attention Economy

Attention Economy

● Search Engines: quantifiable objectives

● Social Networks: spreading through the “Social Graph”

● Recommendations: layering votes

● Portability: Users own their data

www.complexification.netmade with “processing”

Web Growth

Search Growth

Search Traffic

Continued growth of Search Traffic, especially Personal Finance, Car, Travel

Ad Spending/ Query Length

Ad Spending by Medium Increase in Average Query Length

Why Search Marketing?

Continued growth of Internet usage

Most product searches involve search engines

Better ROI for your ad dollar – qualified customers, reach, cost and flexibility

Search is a unified approach for allocating qualified attention: Attention 2.0

Better results through metrics: CPC, CPM, CTR, Conversions, Page Visits, Bounce Rates, Keyword Planning, Targeting etc.

Hard to classify

Natural Web Search

Paid Search

Banners, Lead Generation

Market Intelligence

Web Metrics

Content Optimization

What is Information?

Relativity (left) and Sky and Water I (right) by M.C. Escher

articles, books, cartoons, databases, encyclopedias, files, gestures, holograms, images, journals, knowledge bases, laws, maps, numbers, ontologies, paintings, quizzes, rules, signs, texts, users, variables, web sites

strange loops of circular definitions: data is information is knowledge is information is data

Alexa RankingGlobal Germany

Facebook (DE)

Technorati – Web of People

Source – State of the Blogosphere 2004, Technorati.com

Technorati – Blog Traffic

Source – State of the Blogosphere 2006, Technorati.com

Technorati – Posting Volume

Source – State of the Blogosphere 2004, Technorati.com

Search Traffic

Directory Results: dmoz.org to all search players; Yahoo! to Altavista

Paid Results: Google provides to Ask, Lycos, iwon, Netscape, AOL Search, Hotbot; Yahoo! provides to MSN

Primary Search Results: Google provides to AOL Search, Hotbot, Netscape; Teoma provides to Ask and Lycos; Yahoo! provides to Altavista, Inktomi and alltheweb

Secondary Search Results: Ask provides to iwon, Hotbot

Ask

Personal Technology – Walt Mossberg Review of Ask: http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20060330.html

2. Search EngineOptimization

Coverage

Coverage

Google

Google multi-algorithmic (full-text search, metadata, popularity measures)

Index size

Fast

Search Concepts

Organic vs. Paid Search

Indexing

Precision vs. Recall

Phrases, Anti-Phrases, Stopwords

Ranking, Relevance

Keywords, Density, Prominence

Link Popularity, Page Rank

Metatags

Meaning

Search Types

Navigational

Informational

Transactional

Andrei Broder – Senior Engineer at IBM, formerly Alta Vista

Keyword Selection

Example: Cancer.gov ranks high for “cancer” but isn't in the Top 10 for specific results, i.e. “lung cancer”

Google Bombing

The initiator chooses the word(s) to be bombed with.

The initiator chooses the target website.

The initiator creates a link like this: <a href="http://example.com/">keywords</a>

The initiator then places this link on pages indexed by Google, and may get others to do the same

Examples: “failure” for George W. Bush and “liar” for Tony Blair

Semantic Indexing

Apple Powerbook and the Query “laptop”

What to do

A) Get your pages in the search index

B) Choose the right keywords

C) Optimize your content

A) Indexing

Inclusion ratio

Spider traps, Spider paths

Robots.txt directives

Javascript navigation

Dynamic URLs: no more than 2 dynamic parameters, no session Ids, URL mapping

Lynx

Redirects: 301, 302

Slim down pages

Site maps

B) Keyword Planning

Hot vs. cold

Overheated subjects/ meanings

Wordtracker

Yahoo keyword selector

Google sitemaps/ adwords

top/medium/low priority

stages

C) Content Optimization

Search filters: language, country, region

Page factors: link popularity, popularity data, URL length and depth, freshness, page style

Query factors: keyword prominence, density, query intent (n/i/t), contextual relevancy, term rarity (idf), term proximity

Especially work on: title, description, body

Analyze your snippet

Writing style

Links

Altavista, Compaq and IBM have advanced the “Bow-tie theory”

Core pages: Comprising 30% of the web - are the most linked to and linked-from on the web

Origination pages: 24 %, link into the core

Destination pages: 24 %

Disconnected pages: 22 %

Fraud

Cloaking

Doorway pages

Link farms

Keyword stuffing

Example for all: bmw.de

Google Adwords

Vickrey Auction (sealed-bid second price auction)

Integrated

Google Webmaster Tools

Web Analytics

Urchin.js

3. Social Networks

Website Networks

Pre 9/11 U.S. Senate

http://analyticalvisions.blogspot.com/2006/04/senate-voting-patterns-part-2.html

Post 9/11 U.S. Senate

http://analyticalvisions.blogspot.com/2006/04/senate-voting-patterns-part-2.html

Another Harvard Drop-Out

The Ultimate Social Network

30 Million active users

Why Facebook?

Spreading through the Social Graph:

I. News Feed

II. Notifications and Requests

III. Facebook Applications

4. Recommendations

Recommendations

● Blog Roll● Tagging● Voting/ Ranking● Bookmarks

Flickr Tagging

5. Outlook

Pace Layering

Ambient Findability – Peter Morville, O'Reilly Press 2006

Anatomy of the Long Tail

Chris Anderson retracted his estimate that 57% of Amazon's book sales are in the Long Tail. Full Description at -

http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/08/a_methodology_f.html

Long Tail

Search drives the Long Tail

Folksonomies/ Tags: linkedin, friendster, delicious, flickr, Last.fm

The “Social Graph”

Big Concept: Push vs. Pull

Social Search vs. AI

Yahoo! vs. Google

Last.fm vs. Pandora

Folksonomy vs. brute force

Semantic Search

Classes, Attributes, Parts, Subclasses etc.EconomyNet

Thank You!

Any thoughts – give a shout at:

chris@mediaintransition.com

or on the blog: http://mediaintransition.com/blog