Over the past week, I’ve been busy “Future-Proofing.” Below are links and lists from bylines I’ve written sharing my expectations for the coming year. We’ll see how things shake out but the one thing I’m certain of is that 2011’s gonna be Googley!
10 Crazy 2011 SEM Predictions
1. Facebook will create its own search engine
2. Apple will create its own search engine
3. Groupon will create its own search engine
4. EBay will create its own search engine
5. Google will fall below 60% U.S. search query market share
6. Google will buy TiVo
8. Comcast will buy Yahoo
9. Adobe will buy AOL
10. You will buy my book
Today I kicked off my role as MC of the MediaPost Search Insider Summit with an intro to the theme of “All Roads Lead Through Search” and an interpretation of 2Pac’s California Love with my man Rob McEvily (who also created the poster above) working the beatbox. Skip to about 10 minutes in if you just want the rap and see below for the lyrics…
As you may have guessed from the last slide, Tha Lyrical G made an appearance. Will post the rap in its entirety in a separate post. (Waiting for YouTube to complete the upload.)
UPDATE: Here’s the Googley Lessons rap. Turn up your speakers, click the link, and then brace yourself.
This was my response.
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In 5 years, search will be an incredibly personal experience.
When we want information, entertainment, or commerce, we’ll use apps that know our preferences and return not just the results we want but the actions we want to take.
To deliver on this promise, the search engines of the future will tap APIs from virtually every content publisher, brand manufacturer, and retailer to deliver immediately actionable opportunities.
And, to make the experience more relevant, “likes” will be weighted more heavily than “links” in the search engine algorithms. And location will be automatically factored in.
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This thread is covered extensively in Chapter 21: Future-Proofing and Siri is profiled as the “search-and-act” engine or “app-sisstant” of the future.
As for Google’s role in this brave new world… as discussed in the book, the Big G can either become a search-and-act engine itself and/or the underlying platform upon which these engines are built. Think API-burner.
It’s interesting to see Bing taking steps towards this new expression of relevancy though its recent deal with Facebook to incorporate “likes” into its search algorithm. I explored the potential for a search engine that pivoted on the social graph in a blog post from 2008 titled, “The Perfect Search Engine.”
It’s hard to say whether 5 years is the right window for all this heady stuff to come to fruition but if we look at how far search has come in the past 5, I wouldn’t bet against it/us.
Well, I’m no intellectual property expert but I wonder if this concept is even patentable [Clarification: meant to say, “I wonder if this patent is even enforceable.”] It’s not like Bill Gross was able to patent CPC on search engines.
That said, the closest thing we’ve seen to CPA search results to date was Microsoft’s failed experiment with Cashback. The idea was advertisers would essentially pay a CPA for actual conversions and a portion of that fee would be passed along as incentive to the searcher. Microsoft never got the advertiser adoption it needed to scale Cashback and, without a lot of offers, it wasn’t able to provide a great user experience.
One of the biggest challenges in a pure CPA search model would be getting advertisers comfortable with implementing new tracking code on their websites to allow the search engine(s) to track actions. Fortune 500 companies and leading internet retailers are already leery of letting the fox into the henhouse.
