Ten Questions with Ralph Tegtmeier Part II
...continued from part
I
What trends
do you see evolving in the online
world over the next few years?
While I make
no claims to being clairvoyant,
I do expect the "everything
must be free" type of Web
to disappear fairly soon. Of
course, there will
still be a lot of free stuff available all over the place, but commercialization
is the call of the day, like it or not. So expect to only get what you pay
for - never more, and very often, alas, quite a lot less.
Also, sophistication
is on the upswing, the more people
are familiarizing themselves with
the Web and its mechanics, including
those ruling search engine marketing.
As in every other business, you'd
better treat your clients with
the respect they deserve instead
of trying to con and scam them,
if you're at all interested in
becoming really successful. Which,
it goes without saying, applies
to the search engines themselves,
too.
Online search will
probably be dominated by Artificial
Intelligence subsets such as linguistic
analysis and automatic content
recognition. Already, there are
some pretty interesting and very
powerful programs and platforms
available, offering just that.
So it's only a question of time
till we will see them implemented
on the major search engines, provided
they can actually make ends meet
financially.
Also, searchers'
sophistication may improve considerably
over the next year or two. Hardly
anyone enters single-term queries
these days, and this has been
an ongoing trend for the past
two years or so. This may not
make life any easier for the average
SEM, but it will probably generate
more user satisfaction for the
search engines which in turn may
translate into more viable business
models.
Basically,
information is no longer as
free as it was once considered
to be - and one of the next
likely steps may well be that
finding that information won't
remain free, either. This has
actually come to pass already.
As a surfer, if you're not willing
to pay a fee for search services,
you will simply pay the price
instead by being served commercial
search results rather than those
you may deem far more relevant.
Do you see the search engines unduly shaping the web? Are too many webmasters
trying too hard to please Googlebot?
No, I think
that's a tunnel vision specific
to people working in the SEM
industry only. The vast majority
of web sites out there don't
seem to give a fig for search
engine optimization. Of course,
commercial operations are a
different breed altogether,
with their very own agenda,
requirements and expectations.
But they still don't constitute
the lion's share of sites, not
by a long shot as far as I can
see.
And what with industrial-strength
cloaking being available for a
mere pittance, who cares what
tyrannical standards search engines
are trying to impose unilaterally
on webmasters anyway? Let me reiterate
that the engines are basically
parasitic in nature - webmasters
shouldn't be forced to pay for
inclusion, it should actually
be the other way round: search
engines should pay webmasters
for the privilege of spidering
their sites, eating up their bandwidth
and caching their copyright protected
content. After all, where would
they be if not for the untiring
labor of millions of webmasters
generating content the search
engines don't have the slightest
clue about?
Obviously, this
is very unlikely to happen anytime
soon, if at all. And don't get
me wrong either: I'm not into
search engine bashing here! It's
just that they haven't the slightest
moral justification for flaunting
the arrogant, patronizing stance
so many of them still seem to
adopt when it comes to SEM. Perhaps
it's time for them to get real
just like anybody else on the
Web.
And this applies
to the SEM community as well.
Maybe this will come as a surprise
to some of its members, but there
actually IS a life beyond SEM,
and I'm not at all sure that SEM
won't be superceded by some other
promotional medium or marketing
tool one day we haven't even dared
to dream of yet. So let's keep
things in perspective and let's
not wax moralistic or hysterical
whenever Googlebot - or any other
crawler for that matter - happens
to catch the cold for a month
or two. It's happened before and
chances are it will happen again.
No point in getting all worked
up about it.
If your business
model is based on search engine
rankings alone, I would opine
that there's something fundamentally
wrong with your business philosophy.
This is akin to building your
house on quicksand - no particularly
wise approach by any standard.
There are lots of other marketing
channels and opportunities out
there, entirely unrelated to
SEM, and that's a good thing,
really, because it gives you
a greater choice rather than
simply having to turn your operation
into a mere lackey to the search
engines' whimsies.
A.I. technology seems to lag well behind other technical advancements on the
web. What are the major failings of the existing search engines? What do
they do well? If you were to build your dream search engine, how would
it operate?
Their perennial
major failing is the lack of
reliable automatic content recognition.
While Teoma is doing a much
better job of this than Google
with their doubtful, logically
flawed PageRank algorithm quite
unsuitable to a commercially
focused web, it's still far
from perfect.
What they do well
- imposing a modicum of logic,
order and navigation infrastructure
on the basically chaotic information
environment that constitutes the
World Wide Web.
My dream search
engine? Why not let search engines
certify SEMs without charging
an arm and a leg for it, permitting
responsible, non-misleading cloaking,
for example? Trusted feed models
are up and running now, but they're
far too expensive for the average
webmaster, and even those few
search engines currently offering
it are full of moralistic crap,
giving their paying clients the
shivers by encumbering them with
a patronizing pile of irrational
rules, regulations and admonitions.
We at fantomaster.com
are actually looking into the
possibility of just such a business
model. It wouldn't even be that
costly to set it up - for starters,
I'd say that about $10-15 million
should do the trick nicely.
Such a search engine
could easily pay for itself within
about a year or two - offering
a decent mix of pay-for-inclusion,
free spidering and state-of-the-art
automatic content recognition
achieving the highest relevance.
User friendly, no blatant ads,
no paid rankings, combined with
an intelligent marketing strategy,
it could well blow the present
big shots away in no time.
So is this
a mere pipe dream? Not necessarily
- the search market is still
very young and hardly developed,
as is the whole Web. Look how
Google cornered it in only three
years! AltaVista did something
very similar the years before
until they decided to play craps
with their ever-fluctuating
business models and lost.
There
has been a lot of talk recently
on Google becoming too powerful.
What's your take on this?
It depends
on how you define "powerful",
obviously. Sure, they are a
very dominant player in the
market, meaning that they do
generate an awful lot of traffic.
But depending on what you're
actually doing - or selling
- on the Web,
things may actually look quite different.
Take Yahoo!, for
example - when they included us
in their index (for free, may
I add) and even featured our fantomNews
as an editor's choice resource
for a while, our traffic boomed,
yes. But did it actually increase
online sales? Not one bit!
Same with Google
- we're getting an awful lot of
traffic from them currently, but
conversion rates are almost non-existent,
and this includes AdWords. Meaning
that from a sales point of view
a lot of this is merely junk traffic.
By contrast, we're getting a fair
amount of sales conversions from
Inktomi and Overture powered engines.
Nor is this particularly
new. Back in Fall of 1999, when
AltaVista had the hiccups, losing
hundreds of thousands of sites
from their index for several months,
one web site of ours lost about
70% of its search engine generated
traffic. Yet, turnover nearly
doubled in that very same period!
How come? Because at the time
this particular site generated
most of its sales via Lycos, whereas
AltaVista would only send us the
window shoppers who wouldn't ever
buy anything if you offered it
for free. (laughs)
So searcher demographics
are all-important. While Google
may boast being the current head
honcho in this game, it may prove
less than powerful when it comes
to generating revenue via good
Google rankings. Obviously, your
mileage may vary - again, it depends
on what you are offering precisely
and whether it will appeal to
Google searchers.
From a civic
standpoint, I would certainly
prefer to see other engines
get a greater piece of the pie,
if only to safeguard diversity
and freedom of expression. For
example, Google has demonstrated
its willingness to go for political
censorship several times in
the recent past. Who knows where
this may end? The greater the
influence they exert on people's
means of information access
and retrieval, the less endearing
the prospect of their turning
into yet another Microsoft dominating
the world.
<end>
Onya, Ralph. Always
a pleasure :)
In the next few
weeks, we'll feature interviews
with Cindy McCaffrey@Google, Danny
Sullivan@Calafia and Jill Whalen@High
Rankings amongst others.
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