Digital Essays: Where next for search?

Yahoo!'s vision has long been to take this concept further, to deliver a
more relevant and satisfying search experience through social
search.

In other words, to provide better search through people - combining what
people know with web-search technology.

Collective sharing is arguably the next chapter of the web, with the
user turning publisher. Barriers to entry for content creation on the
web are constantly being lowered and new technologies are allowing
people to create, develop, produce, market and sell content in ways
previously unimaginable.

Flickr is an excellent example of collective sharing in action -
originally created by fewer than ten people, it now has millions of
participants and is made up entirely of user-generated, organised and
distributed content as well as functionality that allows developers to
build applications on top of the Flickr platform.

The bulk of relevant human know-ledge - particularly the community-based
knowledge that is highly valued by individual searchers - still resides
with people and not in mathematical algorithms. Today, search
breakthroughs will come from rich new sources of metadata and
user-generated content.

The collective knowledge in a user's community will become the driver
for more relevant search results.

When searching for restaurants, for example, friends should be able to
poll each other's collected knowledge of information - either via tags
and other metadata attached to websites by users, or through direct
engagement with other users in a search environment. Released this
month, Yahoo!

Answers is a social search experience, complementing algorithmic search
by delivering real-life answers in an engaging environment.

Social search takes advantage of other people's acquired knowledge and
experiences in previously locating and experiencing the same
information.

Therefore, search results are more relevant based on the previous work
of others.

So what are the implications of the rise in social search for marketers
and for the advertising industry?

The rise in communities and group wisdom has an important impact on
marketing because it breeds an experience-based culture. Consumers are
no longer solely influenced by tangible factors such as price and
features. Although social media appears to be largely a separate entity
at present, going forward, the best sites will find ways to weave social
media into their core, creating powerful communities.

In essence, social media offers brands an opportunity to engage with
customers - and elements of social search products will provide this
opportunity in the future.

Another key area of focus for online marketers this year will be to
fully integrate online campaigns with each other and into the rest of
the mix.

Increasingly, search marketers are looking at the use of search
marketing for branding purposes and to drive purchases offline:
marketers now appear to be taking a more holistic view of search and
looking at how it can complement other campaigns across different forms
of marketing. For example, if you are a low-cost airline embarking on a
big-budget TV campaign, can you be sure people will remember the website
flashed up at the end of your ad?

Research recently carried out by Yahoo! Search Marketing in France
indicates that consumers often remember the ad, but forget the exact web
address, then turn to internet search to find out more. More than eight
out of ten users habitually use a search engine after having partially
remembered site addresses.

Additional global research by Isobar and Yahoo! reflects this. Entitled
Fluid Lives, the global study showed that offline media often prompts
people to go online - and moreover, more and more people are going
online while engaging in offline media. More than half of the
respondents to our survey spent time online while watching TV, to find
out more information about what they're watching and simply to
multitask.

So, if your website is not listed high in the search results for "cheap
flight" at the peak of your TV ad campaign, imagine the number of
consumers you're letting slip through your fingers. Furthermore, it
could actually have a negative effect on your brand. Our research in
France found that having seen an advertisement offline, if a user could
not find the advertiser's website through search, this had a negative
effect on the user's perception of the brand in more than one in three
cases. Proof indeed of the importance of search in any advertising
campaign.

- Stephen Taylor is the regional vice-president of Yahoo! and Yahoo!
Search Marketing, Europe.