PALO ALTO, Calif. — “Glacier Bay” sounds like a scenic national park.
In fact, it is, but that doesn’t mean
that’s what most people are looking for when they type the words into a
search engine.
That’s why you have to look at the clickstream.
“You learn from what people are looking for and we are often corrected
by users,” said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, during a panel
session at the AlwaysOn conference here.
Search types
At one time, Norvig said the majority of searches on the term were
actually looking for the Glacier Bay Faucet company, which came in No. 4
in a search on the term today.
“When you look at the clickstream you find
out what people want, not what you think they want,” he said.
Yahoo’s Usama Fayyad said his all-time favorite odd search query is: “How can I tell if I’m pregnant?”
“It’s always in the top 20,” said Fayyad, senior vice president of
research at Yahoo. “I thought we solved that one.”
One late night, Google’s Norvig said he was looking at search queries and
decided to see if any series of searches were being made in the pattern of a
haiku. There were many, but his favorite was:
“Java ECC”
“Java elliptical curves”
“Playboy FAQ”
“That was a real story of search and frustration,” Norvig said, laughing
along with the audience.
Michael Yavonditte, CEO of Internet marketing company Quigo, said the
funniest keyword he’s come across was “fuzzy dice.”
“It was the best
keyword for selling used cars on eBay Motors,” said Yavonditte.
Advertisers and search
But there was more serious discussion and debate at the panel about the relevancy of results
and what it means to advertisers.
Yahoo’s Fayyad said Yahoo Mail keeps
growing with thousands if not millions of new users, but the challenge has
been to have them continue to come back.
“It turns out, adding a news preview box in the log-in page works really
well. I wouldn’t have guessed that, but the data shows people look at a lot
of news.”
Fayyad also pointed to Yahoo’s main portal page and the growth of other
services like Flickr and Yahoo Answers to assert that there is a lot more
going on in its battle with search leader Google than simple search.
“It’s not about passively searching the Web anymore,” said Fayyad.
Norvig said Google was looking to improve results by working with speech
technologies and other improvements to the interface. He said the average
query is only two or three words, but it’s not a question of having users
enter more data.
“The way to go is a better communication chain,” said Norvig. He gave
some insight into Google’s thinking by comparing the process of finding
information at a library.
“You had this person called a librarian and
explained what you were looking for. There was a dialogue and you came to an
agreement.”
Yavonditte said video, as exemplified by the runaway growth of sites such as
YouTube,
is a clear trend on the Internet waiting to be exploited by advertisers.
“YouTube has a ton of data and demographic information from their
registrations. I think you’ll see them leverage that going forward.
“One of the things that makes these sites explode is the visualization
of the Internet. Bandwidth costs have gone down and now you can even buy a
disposable video camera.”
But Yavonditte was less optimistic about the prospects for vertically focused search
sites.
“There are hundreds of business plans going around Silicon Valley,
but I don’t think it’s going to take off. General search is good enough.”
