Advocacy group attacks Schmidt and Google privacy

The California-based consumer group, Consumer Watchdog, has purchased space on a jumbotron in Times Square for the holiday weekend to display a video that criticizes Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and the company’s current privacy policies. The video is part of Consumer Watchdog’s “Don’t Track Me” campaign, which is pushing for new government legislation to help protect online consumers and search users. According to Jame Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, “We’re satirizing Schmidt in the most highly-trafficked public square in the nation to make the public aware of how out of touch Schmidt and Google are when it comes to our privacy rights.”

Google releases a new version of Chrome

Google released version 6 of its Chrome web browser on Tuesday, marking the browser’s second anniversary. Since 2008, Chrome has captured roughly 80 million users and an estimated market share of 7.5 percent. For more information, check out Paul Mah’s article on FierceCIO TechWatch.

Music industry welcomes Google music

According to a post on the LATimes blog this week, Google, which is currently developing an online music service, is receiving a warm welcome from the music industry. Rumored talks with record companies would give Google the latitude to offer specific products across their Android platform and online, which could possibly reduce Apple’s grip on the digital music market.

Apple, Facebook and Ping

Apple made its entry into the social networking market this week with their new music-based social networking site Ping, and with it caused quite a stir. The service was supposed be integrated into Facebook’s platform, and would have allowed users to share music tastes and purchases with their networks. The integration failed, however, and it now seems that Apple and Facebook could not agree on terms for Ping. This topic has been widely discussed across the blogosphere, so make sure to check out Miguel Heflt’s article on the NYTimes and Ben Popper’s article on BNET for more information.

Blogs to check out:

• Claire Cain Miller’s article YouTube Ads Turn Videos Into Revenue takes a new look at YouTube’s revenue structure and the possibilities of video advertisement.
• Greg Sterling’s post on Search Engine Land covers Google’s new mobile ads, which are designed to take users directly from search to store.
• There has been a lot of talk this week about Apple’s press conference. For a more critical take on Apple’s conference and its planned projects, check out Eliot Van Buskirk’s article on Wired.com, which outlines the 5 reasons Apple is (still) boring.

I’ve always enjoyed the work of Aaron Goldman.  His columns on MediaPost are insightful and witty, and his presentation style at conferences is engaging and entertaining.  He’s a guy who clearly knows what he’s talking about, but is always approachable and regularly seeks input and ideas from the community.

He’s a great example of how to build your personal brand.  He regularly puts out thought-provoking content on multiple sites, maintains a dialogue with his audience, and occasionally makes them laugh.  And, as you’ll see in the video below, he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

Aaron details many of these ideas in new book, Everything I need to Know About Marketing I learned from Google and certainly puts them into practice in his approach to promoting it.  He recently embarked on a worldwide (web) “blog tour” in which he creates a unique 5-minute video for each of the blogs he visits.  For The Search Agents, Aaron goes over 3 key lessons from Google that any marketer should have taped up to their wall:

• Test Everything
• Track Everything
• Let the Data Decide

Check out the video, look for the shout-outs to a couple of our top Agents, and consider what new mediums you can use to promote your brand.  Maybe Agent Algo needs to launch his own blog tour….

A great way to plan out a winning strategy for fantasy football is to take a look at the winning team from last season.  The majority of leagues offer an archive where you can look at week-by-week scores from the past fantasy season.  Records from past fantasy seasons can be accessed by clicking on your current team and then your fantasy profile.

1.  Study the winners:  Which players were parts of the championship team last season?  (There is a high chance that Chris Johnson will be there.)  Taking players from the champion’s old roster will anger them and force them to make picks out of their comfort zone.  While not all players retain the same value from year to year, there are some that perform well beyond their draft day expectations.

2.  Look for high-quality organizations:  In SEO, these sites can provide you high-quality links.  In fantasy football, high-scoring teams can produce high-quality players that may slip under the radar.  Take a look at the teams that these players came from and the offensive situation.  If those teams have lost key pieces to their offense, then look for teams with the same type of situations.  Also take a look at playoff teams that sit star players during the fantasy playoff season.

Teams that have clinched a playoff spot will turn the offense over to the second string in order to rest their studs but players on teams competing for a playoff spot can provide great value.

Strength of schedule and division are important factors to consider when facing a tough draft day decision.  Below is a chart showing the divisions that allow the most points.  When selecting players it is ideal to have both bars as high as possible. Last year’s highest scoring division was home to top scoring QB, Aaron Rodgers and Vikings RB Adrian Peterson.

3. Keep a Balanced Profile: Position player ratios are a very important factor for any fantasy team.  Be sure to check and see if the winning team was heavy in wide receivers or running backs and replicate the strategy. An uneven amount of running backs to wide receivers can result in some frustrating draft day dilemmas.  Always have players to fill in for bye week absentees.

The large number of metrics in football make in-depth SEO style analysis valuable in fantasy. Each player can be treated as an individual backlink that works together to help rank a page or site. The competitor tracing strategy is just one of many SEO techniques that can be applied to Fantasy Football. Test and see what works best but be sure to always go into draft day with a solid plan and backup plan. Best of luck to all participants in the 2010 Fantasy Season.

Germany Announces New Privacy Controls on Facebook

The German government announced this week a new bill that will ban employers from snooping on potential employees’ activities on Facebook and other social networking sites that are not specifically oriented towards professional networking. The bill also includes a measure that will prevent employers from secretly video taping their employees.

Google Devotes a Page to Real-Time Search

Google has devoted a new page of its search product to real-time search results, which index updates from Twitter and other social networks. Google has been paying Twitter for updates for almost a year now, but this is the first effort Google has made to specifically highlight real-time results.

Google Introduces Gmail Voice Calling

Google introduced its new Google Voice service this week, allowing users to ‘chat’ for free with other Gmail users. After its launch on Wednesday, Google tweeted that over a million calls were placed within the first 24 hours. To read more about Google’s new service and for a complete analysis of the motivations behind the new service, check out The Economic Times’ article “Google Opens New Line to Internet Phone Calls.”

New Netflix iPhone App

Netflix released a new app this week, making it possible for users to update their queues from their smartphones.

CollegeOnly Social Network

A new social media network has emerged behind the shadow of Facebook, CollegeOnly. CollegeOnly was designed by Josh Weinstein, the creator RandomDorm and GoodCrush, specifically for university students. In an interview “Facebook has changed — for the better — but its original use case is currently unserved, as college students are less likely to upload photos or post what they are up to with parents and potential employers looking on. As such, we realized that the opportunity to ‘connect student bodies’ wasn’t just romantic, but social.”

Blogs to check out:

Ad Auctions are Not Auctions

The Search Agents’ Bradd Libby has authored another insightful paid search article, which outlines the ways in which paid search auctions differ from typical auctions.

Google’s Nine Year Shopping Spree, Illustrated

Alexia Testosis authored a great article and graphic this week that charts the history of Google’s acquisitions over the last nine years.

Keep Facebook Places From Driving You Crazy

Feeling overwhelmed by the number of recent Facebook Places’ updates? Paul Boutin authored a blog, offering some helpful tips on how to navigate your way through Facebook’s new service.

There’s this unusual farm stand I go to. I walked up once and said “I’d like some pineapples, please.” The farmer said, “No pineapples for you, but I’ll sell you mangoes.” So I asked, “How many will you sell me for $1 each?” He said, “This many!” and held up a basket with 10 mangoes in it. Well, I like mangoes more than that. So I asked, “How many will you give me for $2 each?” He held up a bigger basket.

Some other guy stopped by and started eying the mangoes. So, I said “I’ll take the big basket for $2 a piece, please.” The farmer handed me the small basket. I said, “No, I want the big basket.” And the farmer replied, “Well now there’s someone else here who wants mangoes, so I’ll only sell you the small basket for $2 a piece. If you want the big basket, they’re now $5 each.”

So I gave him $20 for the 10 mangoes in the small basket and he gave me back $6 in change. ”What’s the change for?”, I asked. “Ten mangoes at $2 each should be $20.” “Well,” he said, “I count every dollar from you as if it’s worth $1.25.” So I held up the $6 and asked, “Then can I have a few more mangoes?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” he replied. “What crazy kind of farm stand do you think this is?”

Click traffic is like food for a website and that crazy farm stand I go to, of course, is paid search. The search engines claim that their systems are auction-based. Some even say that the second-price mechanism by which ad slots are allocated promote ‘truthful’ bidding – that is, each advertiser, by the design of the system, has the incentive to bid honestly, without any regard to the bids of other participants.

If paid search is an auction, though, it’s a very strange one indeed. Here are some ways:

1. In paid search, both the seller and the auctioneer are the same entity. This is seen in some auctions, like those by governments for public debt or broadcast spectrum rights, but in most auctions (like eBay) the auctioneer and the seller(s) are different groups.

2. The rules are not fully disclosed. The search engines claim that fully disclosing the rules would make their systems more vulnerable to spammers and other low-grade advertisers. But if their systems encourage truthful bidding, then this should not be the case. Logically, they cannot claim both that (1) truthful bidding is an equilibrium outcome of their system and that (2) they need to keep some aspects of the system confidential in order to avoid low-grade advertisers. If truthful bidding is an equilibrium outcome, then it should be possible for them to fully disclose the rules.

3. Bidders can be excluded from any single auction (or category of auctions) on a whim. It’s strange and disturbing that the search engines often provide no greater explanation for why an ad is not showing for a particular keyword besides saying that the ad is ‘low quality’.

4. There are advertiser-specific minimum bids. One little-known aspect of AdWords, for example, is that for each keyword, for each advertiser, Google sets a minimum bid that advertiser must supply to be allowed into the auction. If no advertiser bids more than their minimum amount, no ads are shown. If one or more ads are shown, the lowest-placed ad must pay the minimum CPC chosen for that advertiser.

5. Bids are weighted. As with the farm stand above, in paid search the auctioneer treats money from some advertisers as being worth more than money from others, via the ‘Quality Score’ or ‘Quality Index’. (And again, the exact calculations behind these weighting factors are secret.) Dictionary.com says an auction is “a publicly held sale at which property or goods are sold to the highest bidder” (emphasis added) yet the search engines readily admit that the highest bidder is not guaranteed top placement in the results, or even placement in the results at all. (It’s surprising how often people get this wrong. A recent LA Times article said: “[Google] continues to advocate an advertising auction model that’s been successful in its core search business, whereby search terms are sold to the highest bidder.” This is simply untrue.)

6. You can bid against yourself. Say you bid on the phrase-match version of the word “shoes” and the phrase-match version of “leather”. A user enters a search for “leather shoes”. Which of your ads (if either) gets shown? Presumably, the search engine picks whichever will make them more money per impression, on average. If you raise the bid on the lower-CTR ad sufficiently, the search engine will make more money by starting to show that ad instead. So, a bid increase on “leather” can cause your traffic for “shoes” to drop, and vice versa. If you don’t spot the conflict, the engine has you bidding against yourself.

7. The auctioneer will bid for you. Google’s ‘Conversion Optimizer’ and its new ‘enhanced CPC‘ feature bid based on the performance of an advertiser’s ads. The advertiser puts code onto its website which gives Google conversion data (sales, revenue, and so forth). Of course, this makes it so that Google knows the full spectrum of data in the search process, from how many queries occur to how many sales result, and their value. Their feature is called the ‘Conversion Optimizer’, but what exactly they are ‘optimizing’ for is not made clear. (Notice that it is not called the ‘Conversion Maximizer‘.)

8. The auctioneer only reveals whatever data it wants to. When I went to an antiques auction near The Search Agency’s office recently, they had a viewing period before the auction started. Every bidder was allowed to browse the items and examine them (with the seller’s permission). As each auction ran, the participants bid by holding up paper signs. That is, every piece of information known to the auctioneer was known to all of the bidders. But in paid search, the engine only reveals the information it wants to. You cannot audit the records to find out who appeared where in any individual auction nor how much they bid, nor even to simply make certain that the engine has done its accounting correctly.

9. The auctioneer charges you to set or change your bid. To keep down the frequency of bid changes, Google permits advertisers to access their system a certain number of times per month via API for free. Additional requests for information incur a charge. (If AdWords promoted truthful bidding, it would not be necessary to surpress the frequency of bid changes.)

10. The ‘second-price’ mechanism is novel. The process the search engines use to allocate space is called the “generalized second-price” (or GSP) mechanism, but this term did not appear in auction theory literature until 2005. Many different kinds of auctions have been developed over the centuries (the Dutch auction, the rising-price English auction, and so on), yet the GSP mechanism apparently was not devised until just a few years ago. Perhaps the reason why the term ‘generalized second-price’ never before appeared in auction theory literature prior to this is that this system is just not an auction at all.

What then is paid search if not an auction? At Search Engine Watch, Alex Cohen called the system a ‘negotiation‘ and with that term I think he struck the nail on the head. With each keyword you choose and bid you submit, you are providing information to the search engine about your interest in buying certain traffic. The presence of other advertisers, the bids and the budgets, simply act as constraints with which the search engine must contend in order to maximize their own revenue. Just like at the farm stand, when dealing with paid search advertising, it’s not the other customers you need to worry about.

Late last night I was shopping with my daughter in our local Super Wal-Mart in the ketchup aisle.  Most people in this industry are too young to remember, but Heinz ketchup did a huge advertising campaign in the 1970′s based on Carly Simon’s “Anticipation” song, which turned their ketchup’s attribute of slow pouring into an advantage.  The ads (here’s one) would show people pouring ketchup, excruciatingly slowly, onto tasty hamburgers and so on, while Carly Simon sang “Anticipation…anticipayaytion…is making me wait”.  Anyone over 40 pretty much can’t walk past the ketchup aisle without hearing the song in their head, it was pounded into the American brain so relentlessly.  It was a brilliant campaign, one that any Ries & Trout fan (or Carly Simon fan for that matter) would agree they should just run forever – it was memorable, and cemented Heinz’s position as the #1 ketchup on the product ladder in people’s minds.

But when I arrived at the Heinz ketchup bottles last night I was shocked to see some new packaging with a familiar logo now appearing on it – below is a close-up of an actual ketchup bottle…a little hard to read here, but the logo says “Find us on Facebook”:

Anticipating new friends

My initial reaction was – wow, what a smart way to get a lot of Facebook friends!  But I think what Heinz is doing is much deeper.  A long time ago, I once took a job where the previous fellow named Erik was leaving to become a product manager at a packaged food company.  When I asked him what his focus was going to be, he said “K.C. Masterpiece, but particularly the potato chips co-branded with it”.  It was surprising to me that anyone’s job could focus on something like co-branding a few products, but over the years since then I’ve repeatedly come across studies in the marketing field which have shown that co-branding can have a very positive effect on product sales.
If chosen correctly, a combination of two products can gain the benefit of positive association from both brands in the prospect’s mind, and reinforce both brands’ position in the mind.

There are numerous examples of this type of co-branding we run across daily:

Examples of Co-Branded Products

Heinz is not only building their community on Facebook, they are placing the Facebook logo on their packaging in supermarket aisles to encourage young people to select their ketchup, right at the point of the purchase decision, based on positive association with Facebook’s brand.  Think about it – there are really only two brands that nearly every young person interacts with today – iPod and Facebook.

Co-branded products more typically come in the form of “powered by” – “Intel Inside”, “Made with Hershey Chocolate”, and so on.  In this case, it looks like Heinz is telling the consumer that their community of ketchup lovers is powered by Facebook – it’s a bit of a stretch, but it does the job of getting that logo front and center.  It will be interesting to see the inevitable writeup in Advertising Age after there’s time for Heinz to gauge results of this campaign – I think it’s brilliant and has a lot of potential to drive results for them.

And yes, I’m so vain I’m anticipating a friend request from Carly Simon after she reads this posting any minute now.

Facebook Places

The biggest story this week was Facebook’s introduction of their new location-based service Facebook Places. The service mirrors several of the services already available, like Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp, and will enable users to ‘check in’ at restaurants, cafes and local businesses and alert their friends of their whereabouts. The product manager of Facebook Places, Michael Sharon, explained during Wednesday’s announcement that Places is “not a service to broadcast your location at all times, but rather one to share where you are, who you are with, when you want to. It lets you find friends that are nearby and help you discover nearby places.”

It has long been anticipated that Facebook would introduce a location-based service, given their expanding network and the increasing popularity of services like Yelp and Foursquare. Given Facebook’s user base of over 500 million people, this new service could have an impact on online marketers’ ability to directly address their target audience.

The announcement has created quite of bit of controversy within the blogosphere. Here are some of the arguments you shouldn’t miss out on:

What does this mean for marketers?

The Search Agents’ David Carrillo authored an article in response to Facebook’s announcement, which takes a closer look into the hype around Facebook’s Places and offers marketers strategic advice on how to best optimize their Places campaigns.

What does this mean for Google?

Tom Krazit points out in his article on CNET that if Facebook Places catches on, Facebook will be sitting on a goldmine of local advertiser information, which should make Google worried.

What does this mean for privacy?

Almost immediately after Facebook’s announcement, The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California expressed concerns over the new service, citing that Facebook once again failed to address critical privacy features. To read more, check out Jenna Wortham’s article in the New York Times.

For a more detailed account on where Facebook Places is already failing in terms of privacy, check out Ian Paul’s article on PC World.

Facebook announced yesterday the release of their new Facebook Places feature. The feature allows mobile users to “check-in” to their physical location or “place”. Users can do this on their smart phones or browser on web-enabled mobile devices. Currently, the service is only available in the US, but other countries  cannot be too far behind. This puts Facebook head to head against other LBS (location based services) biggies like Foursquare and Gowalla (if you aren’t 100% familiar with the extensive list of LBSs, check out this shameless plug for my white paper on location-based social media.

So why worry about investing in a marketing strategy involving Facebook places in this saturated market? Here are the top 5 benefits to marketing with Facebook Places:

1) Robust Profiling Data

Users connect their profiles to a plethora of interests on Facebook. They overtly state their interests in the “info” tab and indirectly connect themselves to interests when they “like” a brand or community page. Now, with the addition of social plugins, users connect their profiles to everything they browse outside of Facebook. This gives Facebook a library of data about users so rich that you can target for pretty much anything. Want to advertise a special only to urban hip hop lovers? Using creative keyword and location choices, you can really hone in on exactly the audience you want to view your ad.

2) Immense existing audience

Facebook Places is currently available only in the US. This equates to an audience with about 150 million users, while other LBSs  struggle to hit the 1 million user mark. These users have an average of 130 friends. Users who are likely to be early adopters to Facebook Places will most likely have a higher average number of friends. These users group themselves into communities in groups, community pages, and brand pages. As a manager of Facebook brand pages, you get to know the active community members well quickly. If active users checkin to your place, they can quickly and organically make a very large audience aware of your business.

3) Unique Advertising Opportunities

As a member of the team focused primarily on optimized organic campaigns, I often get sick of hearing about all of the display advertising capabilities of Facebook. Despite my personal nausea over the topic, Facebook really is doing something right. There are constantly new types of ads to engage users. These ads often have better bang for your buck and a better ROI than traditional non-SMM ad types. Great display can lead to successful branding campaigns, event marketing, and fan acquisition. You can serve photos, get users to “like” your page in the ad, view videos, pretty much everything short of purchase directly in the ad (I claim a portion of rights if Facebook comes out with this anytime soon). All I get served by Facebook are ads around shoes, pizza, and travel. They know me well.  Many LBSs services offer the chance to advertise, but Facebook is definitely ahead of the game in the variety of possible ads.

4) Viral Sharing Options

When a user checks in, the check is blasted to their wall, and into their users stream. The check in is linked to the place, and able to be commented on and liked. Every time a user interacts with this check in, the viral potential grows. Some LBSs have yet (or have just begun) to allow integration with other social media sites. Users may adopt and share more in Facebook’s new all-in-one social media community and LBS, without the extraneous checking in with other services.

5) Make a splash, be the first

This benefit will only be applicable for a short time. There are currently no brands making marketing headlines with a nifty Facebook places campaign. Whenever a new social media function or website comes along, audiences pay most attention while the new feature is still “shiny and sparkly”.  For a little more than some creative genius and some effort, you can get the extra return that a groundbreaking marketing strategy can bring you. So, put on your genius hats, grab a six-pack, get your smartest players, and come up with the cool campaign that will rock everyone’s socks off.

Have you tried Facebook Places yet?  Give us your initial impression of this new service.

Location-based services have been the hottest topic in online marketing.  Yelp, Foursquare, and Gowalla have all had huge growth in their user base, and businesses of all sizes are jumping on board to find new customers and reward their loyal evangelists. If you’re not familiar with how these sites work and their value to marketers, I highly recommend downloading the Comprehensive Guide to Location-Based Social Media.

Despite their growing popularity, though, location-based services and advertising have been considered more blog hype than corporate success story.  That may be about to change following Facebook’s announcement that they are entering the world of location via their new service, Facebook Places.

This comes on the heels of a Forrester Research report released in late July that suggested advertisers stay away from location-based marketing and location-based social networks because not enough people currently utilize those types of services.  Wired did an excellent job highlighting a few key points of the report, such as the fact that only 4% of online adults use location-based services and only an additional 3% are aware of friends that use them. Perhaps the most intriguing notation, though, was an excerpt from the report that said only a few million consumers use geo-location apps monthly.

I don’t know about you but “only” isn’t the word I’d use to describe a few million consumers.

To be fair, the report does have some pertinent data and recommendations. For instance, it states that people who use location-based services tend to be well-educated, young males from households that make over $100,000 a year. It also points out that people who use these services tend to influence their social graph, making them prime targets for hyper-focused advertising.

Sadly, each insightful piece of information in the report leads to an incredibly shortsighted conclusion – marketers not looking to reach a specific segment of the male audience should sit back and wait on location-based marketing and advertising until it has a higher rate of consumer penetration.

While I am not suggesting that every marketing, advertising and internet agency begin unscrupulously throwing cash at this burgeoning platform, I do think it would be foolish to cast it aside completely. As an industry, we should be fully engaging with location-based services so that we will be ready to capitalize on them if and when they cross into the mainstream. Facebook’s entrance into this space only further convinces me that location-based services and marketing are worthwhile investments.

With that in mind, here are 5 reasons why you and your company should absolutely embrace location-based marketing today:

1) Forester Research pointed out the relatively few users of location-based services, but what it failed to highlight was the explosive recent growth of such services. Foursquare alone has over 2.5 million users and has experienced 28% growth in just the last month, according to RJ Metrics. More and more people are beginning to utilize location-based services, and as smartphone adoption increases in the U.S. and around the world, the numbers will only continue to increase.

2) Many location-based services have a similar structure – users open an app and check into a location to receive various types of points or rewards. However, this is but one type of functionality that is possible. Services such as Google Latitude allow people to constantly broadcast their location and newer services like GroupTabs combine check-ins with the power of group buying services like Groupon. The possibilities, both from a consumer and marketing standpoint, are endless.

3) As alluded to in the last point, one of the knocks of using location-based services is that checking in to a location is not the most seamless of processes. Enter geo-fencing. Geo-fencing allows users to place virtual “fences” around specific areas and broadcast their entering or exiting of the “fence” to others. For example, let’s say I place a fence around a local restaurant I like to eat at. When I enter the fence, the restaurant will be notified and a location-based marketing ad could offer me special coupons or discounts.

4) Although “only a few million consumers” use location-based services now, let us not forget that even the aforementioned Facebook did not reach 500 million users overnight. In fact, there is a segment of the population who are already interested in receiving mobile alerts. According to a study done by Harris Interactive, nearly a third of parents with children between the ages of 6 and 12 would opt-in to mobile marketing. In addition, 25% of non-parents would be interested in the same services.

5) Did I mention Facebook?  The social networking giant’s new service is the biggest X-factor of all. Facebook Places instantly exposes 500 million users from around the globe to the world of location-based services, and this should be enough to get would-be location-based marketers excited. The fact that Facebook is also partnering with 3^rd party services – and not going for outright domination of the space as some pundits had speculated – gives Facebook Places an even greater chance to gain widespread acceptance.

What It All Means

As with any type of marketing campaign, there is no one size fits all strategy. Certain products will lend themselves better to location-based marketing than others, but a limited amount of consumer penetration should not scare you away from investing in the platform.

Do you want to be late to the location-based party as many companies were and continue to be with Facebook and Twitter? Do you want to lag behind the competition as many companies did and continue to do so in regards to search engine optimization and search engine marketing?

Or would you rather get ahead of the curve and become an expert in location-based marketing before your competition does? Not only will you become better informed about mobile marketing strategies, but you will also be putting your company in a position to capitalize on the industry when it begins to really take off.

In short, with location-based services just beginning to unlock their potential and Facebook Places about to bring this budding industry to the masses, now is the time for you and your company to invest resources into the platform.

Just like in real estate, it’s all about location, location, location.

Answers to some questions in life cannot be captured within a Google search box. Sometimes, we have questions like “Are apartment rents increasing in New York City when a lease is renewed?” or “What is the best cat food brand out there?”—things we would choose to ask a real person rather than a search engine only if we knew who to go to. To address this market gap, several prominent sites have emerged to provide a link between human questions and human answers. “Social search”, as it has come to be called, utilizes human knowledge that even Google cannot tap into.
Social search is still in its infancy compared to algorithmic-based search engines, currently accounting for 4 percent of the total market. Nevertheless, it seems that some of the big companies see opportunities in the field, as reflected by Google’s acquisition of Aardvark (a Q&A site started by an ex-Googler), Benchmark Capital’s investment in Quora (founded by ex-Facebook employees), and Facebook’s introduction of the new Facebook Questions feature, all of which took place this year. Social search, which tends to be more personal and expressive, gives new and deeper insight into user data. Thus, it could potentially be a lucrative location for more targeted advertising, although the profit mechanism for these sites is yet to be realized.
Here are some of the major social search sites and their features:

Aardvark

• Users can submit questions directly to Aardvark’s search site Vark.com via web, IM, email, Twitter, or iPhone
• Aardvark searches through all of the people in the user’s network who are available over IM or email to find the right match
• If access to Facebook is given, it will gather information from the user and his/her friends’ profiles—geographic or work networks, interests, etc.
• The social data will be used to select individuals to send the questions to for answers

Fluther

• Online question-and-answer community
• Any registered users can provide answers to the questions; moderators oversee the activities
• “Federated Flutter” (launched August 2010) allows third parties to integrate Q&A on their websites and increase traffic through organic search

Quora

• Anyone can add questions and answers
• Users can follow questions, topics and people, creating a stream of relevant questions and answers for each user
• As of August 6th, search engines like Google can index content on Quora

ChaCha

• Users can call or text questions from their mobile phones to ChaCha, and the question is routed to the most knowledgeable person on the topic in the Guide community
• The questions and the answers written by the Guides are available on the ChaCha website
• The answers are provided by ChaCha Guides, independent contractors working for ChaCha

Mahalo

• “A human-powered search engine and a knowledge sharing service”
• Registered Mahalo users share their expertise
• Users can tip each other for their information in Mahalo Dollars, which can be cashed-out or spent at the Mahalo Store

As mentioned earlier, the user data along with the Q&A threads can reveal dynamic information about the participants. Conversations sometimes contain information on user demographics, age, and gender, all of which can be used as the basis of targeted advertising. There is no doubt that the social search market is gaining more and more exposure, and the audience base of social search sites is growing. Companies are interested about the investment opportunities in the social search market, and hopefully it will come about as a profitable innovation, just like how Google and Twitter did.

What do you see as the potential for these “human-powered” search engines.  Can they become profitable on their own?  Or will Google and Bing incorporate the functionality and render them obsolete?