The Digital Lookout

The finance comparison market has been a very lucrative and successful one over the past 5 years and it seems that Google has finally decided that it wants a piece of the pie! The screenshot below is taken from a Google UK search for secured loan (interestingly it only worked in IE and not in Firefox) and shows the Google Merchant Search function appearing above all PPC listings with drop down functionality allowing the user to select their desired loan amount before they even leave the SERP. Once an option is selected the user is taken to the Google Merchant page with their options shown based on the original selection, much like with all the other comparison sites in the market.

At the moment it appears this is just in Beta on the secured loan keyword but surely if successful this will be rolled out onto all other financial products. I couldn’t see where Google was getting these results from, and so I am not even sure if the providers know they are being compared (although I assume they are aware) and there is not indication of how a company would get its products listed, although this could just be a closed beta for now.

This could have massive implications for the comparison market, above and beyond the fact that there is another competitor in the market. In the first instance they have knocked moneysupermarket off the top PPC listing which will impact their volume, I am assuming they are not paying themselves a premium CPC for this position! They are also allowing themselves much more prominence on the page than a standard listing. 49 characters for a title and drop down functionality make it stand out on the page. Users could also see this as an easier option than clicking through a link and going through the whole process on a separate engine.

On top of this, if the beta is successful, what is to stop them adding in a variable to quality score which penalises other comparison sites? In one fell swoop generating themselves both more revenue from the sites willing to pay more and reducing the prominence of these sites and so driving more volume through their own tool. I may be a cynic but I can see it happening. Moneysupermarket spend a lot of money with Google but if they see a bigger opportunity in doing it themselves then they will surely pursue this avenue instead.

Is this the end of independent comparison sites? No, I doubt it, but if/when the beta is expanded it could be a big dent in their revenues and they will have to think of other ways to differentiate themselves. Some insurers (direct line to name one) are already boycotting the comparison sites and if Google is to offer this service for free, which they may well do in the name of stickiness and keeping people within the Google realm, more could follow suit.

I spotted something on Google today which I hadn’t seen before and is a new development in universal search.  On a search for “times” I was presented with the standard search results you get for a brand term but then in addition to this there was a search box contained with the results! On entering a search phrase into this box I was presented with the site search results but still with the Google SERP.  This functionality is well known and nothing new but the inclusion of the search box in the results is not something I have seen before. 

It is obviously just another element of Universal Search in action but is alos a good tool for Google to make their results as accurate as possible and keep people within their pages.  By allowing them to search within Google for keywords contained within a site you are not only enhancing the user experience but promoting loyalty and boosting query numbers at the same time, win all round.  On top of this they are also able to produce additional Adwords results on the secondary search and potentially boosting revenues as well.

I have just come across the Yahoo! Buzzapplication which is currently in beta testing.  From what I can see this is very much like Digg and Sphinn in that users provide articles of interest which are then voted on by the users to push them up the listings. 

Stories are given a “buzz score” which is ”derived from search term popularity, the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz, and the number of votes a story receives.”  Which could add a slight element of mystery if it is more than simply a case of adding the sum of all these parts together.  If it is going to work much like the quality score system in PPC then it may change the game a little and avoid all the spamming which takes place in Digg.  There will apparently be a manual editorial team in place to prevent spamming from taking place but how many and how effective they will be remains to be seen.

The other major twist in the tale is the statement from the site “stories with the highest Buzz Scores may be published on the Yahoo! home page.”  this would make the reach of top performing articles massive and the potential of this new application greater than that of Digg and Sphinn as it goes beyond the user base of the programme itself.  Apparently the same editorial team which will monitor the spam will also be responsible for deciding which stories are worthy of the Yahoo homepage exposure.  It will be interested to see what prominence these articles are given as they are free content and so Yahoo! would potentially be losing out on revenue if they replaced any of the paid placements.

It will be interesting to see how this progresses and whether the exposure on the Yahoo! homepage can make it a bigger property than the more established players in social bookmarking.

Ive finally gotten round to having a little think about the big news story of the week, Microsoft tabling a bid of $44.6 Billion in cash and stock to buy its rival Yahoo.  There has been no official comment from Yahoo on the reports but I thought Id document my thoughts on the impace this could have.

The portal market

Yahoo and MSN are the two big players in the portal market, the one stop shop for all you web needs, search engine, web mail, news feed, weather reports, all in one place.  This is where Microsoft will gain a massive advantage and pretty much gain complete dominance.  Aside from the ISP sites, which gain their visitors through having a default homepage setting in the ISP setup process, Microsoft will have a dominance in this field comparable to Google’s in the search market (more of that in a minute!).  So what does this mean to MSN? Well instantly they will take on board the lions share of the portal advertising revenues around the world.  Yahoo has built an advertising model which is highly lucrative and brings in a huge amount of revenue each year, utilising the latest behavioural targeting technology to keep online advertising moving forward.  MSN obviously has its own advertising model and ideas on how the market is going to advance but they will automatically boost their ad revenues with the purchase.  It also sets them up well for the predicted rise in online ad spend over the next few years, from $40 billion to $80 billion if you believe the predictions, dominance in a market this size is a mouth watering prospect.

The search market

This is where it gets really interesting.  Microsft has struggled to gain a foothold in the search market since it launched its own PPC model in 2006 and I forecasted in a previous post (Microsoft sets its sights on 40% market share) that a purchase may be on the cards if they were to achieve their targets.  The purchase of Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), if part of the deal, would possibly take their market share into the double figures in the paid search arena.  Their system is good at present, the quality of their traffic is good, its just the volume they have been missing.  YSM would help boost this and make them a legitimate number 2 in this arena and they undoubtedly have the fire power to make dents in Google’s dominance (see their response here).  It does raise the question, what does this mean to search agencies?  the market which was due to fragment with the launch of wikia search, AOL breaking out in the US, Ask hinting at the same, is now significantly consolidated if this deal does actually go through.  Does this make SEM simpler? Not really but it could be perceived that way, a post for another time I think.

How do they manage it?

This will be interesting, does Yahoo become Microsoft branded?  or is it just another property of the technology giant?  Does it become Microhoo? Yasoft? Mahoo? or does it become Yahoo - a Microsoft company? and more importantly for internet marketers do they keep the two infrastructures separate, the advertising interfaces, the search algorithms, the display advertising models.  This is what will be the key determinant of what this means to the industry and what it means to digital agencies.

Whether the deal goes through remains to be seen, when it goes through is another question yet to be answered. What is undeniable is that it is going to influence the online advertising market significantly, in what way, remains to be seen.

Search engine land reported today the release of some new functional by ask which allows a user to upload their own personal background image for the search engine.  The functionality to add a skin to the background has been available since last year but this was only for predetermined images and wasn’t customisable.  I like the idea of customising the results page and this is a much simpler solution than Google’s which involves xml information rather than a simple image upload.  It is also much more flexible and interesting than msn and yahoo’s offerings which only allow the selection of different colour palletes for the page.

This functionality is just another stage in the battle for search engine supremacy but also for loyalty within internet users through added value.  Yahoo had this a long time ago through positioning itself as an information portal and one stop shop for your internet needs (email, news, sport, search…) a similar position taken by MSN.  Then Google smashed this with its simplicity and accuracy of results.  But even the big G has recognised the need to give people more and through iGoogle struck a balance between information on the page and usability by allowing the user to choose which information feeds they received.  The issue at the bottom of all of this is keeping people using your page/engine, setting it as their homepage, and a base for all their online activities.  If they can use your site for everything they need online whey would they go elsewhere?  The longer a user in on your site, the more searches they do, the more ads they view, the more ads they click, the more money you make! Simple.  Expect a lot more releases like in this in the next 12 months as the battle continues.

It’ll take a lot more functionality for Yahoo, Ask or MSN to catch Google but I do know people who now use the Yahoo homepage as they prefer it to Google so there is some movement going on.   You can check out the Ask function on the US site here, it is not yet available in the UK.