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As I have worked at The Bivings Group, I have focused on helping design websites and applications for specific audiences – professionals and adult aged individuals.  Many of the clients I have worked with don't need to focus on children, and young web surfers have unique needs.

Recently, I was introduced to the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) website.  While the site has a rather conservative and standard design – in my opinion – I am really intrigued by its book search feature geared towards children.

On this page, children are presented with a search interface that is different from an interface geared towards adults.  Adults are asked about keywords, authors, and titles, but children may not know such information.  Further, children are probably more prone to browse when searching for a book instead of having a specific author or book title in mind.  That is why IDCL provides children with different search options.  For instance, a child can search for a book that has orange on its cover.  Or instead of searching for historical fiction, children can search for “Make Believe Books” or ones that have “Imaginary Creature Characters.”  Further, they can search for books based upon age groups and type – picture or chapter books.

Another interesting feature is that the search options are presented as graphical buttons that children can easily suss out the meaning of.  The search results are also presented by showing the book covers, and children can also flip through the entire books on the computer.

I think that this is an interesting search feature.  Imagine if Google or Yahoo! was set up like this…

Search engines meet social networks in Hunch.com , while Bing.com delivers fewer search results with higher relevance – welcome to decision engines.

Flickr creator Caterina Fake Monday launched Hunch.com, a search engine guiding users to their ideal sites and products for searches on business, travel, shopping and even life advice.

Type in a question like “Am I in the Friend Zone?” and Hunch will lead you through a series of questions about your personal relationships and to your answer.

Outside of being an exaggerated version of a Cosmopolitan quiz, Hunch offers quite a bit more analysis and learns about you the more you – and others – use it. The system blends social media advice and internet data to get users to answer other users’ questions as the system builds.

Fake sees Hunch as a useful tool that will grow into an enormous resource.

“It might take five years for Hunch to reach maturity,” she said, according to SearchEngineLand.com. “Right now, it’s like Wikipedia circa 2002. To me, what makes social software great is that it improves over time.”

Also giving traditional search giant Google a run for its money is Bing.com, marketed as a “decision engine” and launched late last month as an answer to overwhelming search results on traditional engines.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim reported in May that 42 percent of internet users “are constantly unsatisfied with our initial search results.”

“Search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

Like Google, Bing aggregates all types of content on a particular search term, but organizes it in a more useful way. Type in “Rome” and you’ll get searches organized by the city’s history, weather, events, travel deals, etc.

While it remains to be seen how big an impact systems like Hunch and Bing will have on traditional internet searching, it’s clear that innovative technologies focused on quality over quantity and a way to utilize community intellect cannot be ignored.

The much hyped “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha launched over the weekend to what can only be described as a mixed reaction.  I played with it for a few hours and came away with two primary thoughts:

1. Wolfram Alpha is something completely new, and that is fascinating.
2. Everything about Wolfram Alpha is going to be compared to Google, and the engine will suffer due to the comparison.

And now for something totally different.

Wikipedia has been around forever, but I still occasionally go on Wikipedia binges where I’ll search for something and then end up following various links and learning lots of things I didn’t intend to.  Wolfram Alpha inspires similar explorations.  Starting from the examples page, here is a list of some random things I learned about as a way of showing what the engine is like:

• AIDS deaths in Africa
• Largest countries by population
• Stats about my birth day
• Weather forecast for today in Washington and the weather in 1995
• The current time in London
• The distance from San Antonio, TX to Washington, DC
• Current exchange rate between dollars and pesos

Pretty cool, huh? I love Wolfram Alpha’s user interface, with its focus on visual search results.  And I love the way it encourages you to explore.

Will people use it?

While I find Wolfram Alpha fascinating, there are certainly idiosyncrasies.  You will simply not get results for a great many of your searches and you will run into strange results at times.   The site is clearly not yet a finished product, and this will frustrate some.

But I think the biggest challenge is the point of reference many users will bring when using the new engine.  Most of the reviews I read focused on comparing Wolfram Alpha to Google, and found it lacking.  Indeed, it seems that the first thing a lot of people did when playing with Wolfram Alpha was search for their own name, which isn’t really the point of the tool.  Fast Company sums up the problem pretty well in its article titled “Wolfram Alpha Isn’t Google, so Stop Comparing Them.”

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.  Google is so dominant in the search space that a service interruption recently caused a 5% drop in overall Internet traffic.  Most of us have used Google so often for so long that if you put a search box in front of us and ask us to type something, we can’t help but compare the results we get to Google.  Google is our defining search experience.

In my mind, Wolfram Alpha isn’t really a Google competitor, any more than Wikipedia is.  I see it as something totally new, that can enrich my search experience when used as a complement to my daily Google use.  This shouldn’t be seen as Wolfram Alpha vs. Google, as I don’t see it as a zero sum game.  Unfortunately, I think most others do see it as an either/or proposition, in which case it is going to be difficult for Wolfram Alpha to truly catch on among general users.

What do you think?

I'm not a fanatic of Bravo's competition show Top Chef, but my colleagues Chuck and J.W. who both sit next to me are big fans of the show.  So, in honor of the show's fifth season premiere tomorrow and the likely endless commentary that I'll overhear at work for the next few months, I've decided to do a cooking related blog post today.

While I don't know if any of the Top Chef contestants, judges, or fierce fans, google or search Yahoo! for recipes, some people do use search engines to help plan a meal.  As the Food Channel explained in November 2005, search engines can help with meal planning.  You can type ingredients that you already have into a search engine to look up recipes using them.  I have never done this, but perhaps I'll give it a try someday to see what would come up if I use three ingredients that I do have — apple pie spice, microwave popcorn, and spinach…

My point is that technology influences our lives in interesting ways.  Who would have thought that Google or Yahoo! would help you cook dinner?  Well, maybe that doesn't sound that big of a stretch for Ask's mascot, Jeeves the butler. 

Has anyone had success with cooking with the help of search engines?

Is Jeeves Top Chef material?

Yesterday I listened in on a Marketing Profs Seminar titled "Actionable Web Analytics: Unleash the Marketing Power of Your Web Data."  During this seminar Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik gave several straight forward tips on how to better harness web analytics data.

The tip that I liked the most is to look at the bounce rate data for referring pages. Of particular interest are the pages with the lowest bounce rates. A low bounce rate is a good indicator that traffic referred from this site is more likely to convert and accept the site's call to action.

Part of search engine optimization (SEO) is garnering high quality links on other sites that can help drive quality traffic to one's site, and using this bounce rate data is an easy way to identify some great sites to consider requesting more links from.  In fact, this strategy is not only accessible to analytics gurus, even those new to using web analytics programs can quickly find and analyze such data. 

The seminar costs money to view, but you still learn from Kaushik at his blog Occam's Razor.

Today, the Internet is abuzz about a new search engine called Cuil, which claims to return “better results” than Google.

I did a few quick searches and wasn’t that impressed.  As an example, when I search for our company name, Bivings, the first four results are random posts from The Bivings Report about John Edwards, our newspaper study, Daylife and Hotsoup.  Our main website, www.bivings.com, is the sixth result.  As another example, a search for my name returns a lot of nonsense, with the second result being a random account I set up on the DNC website two years ago and haven’t visited since.  A search for my name in Google returns a much more useful set of results.

Obviously, it isn’t fair to compare brand new Cuil to the well-established Google, and I’m sure Cuil will improve over time.

However, no matter how much Cuil improves it is going to be nearly impossible to get me to start using it as my primary search engine.  I’ve been using Google on a daily basis for five plus years and know its ins and outs.  When I do  a search for something I know what to expect.  If I search for a company name, I expect and want to see results for their main website and their Wikipedia entry.   When I search for a person’s name, I expect and want to find their personal website as the first result, followed quickly by links to their Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts.

Basically, I’ve used Google so much that I don’t really know how to judge search results except by comparing them to Google.  Cuil results could be better than Google by some objective measure, but I’d still prefer Google because it returns the results I expect.  It is familiar.

It is sort of like going to Europe and being forced to drive on the left side of the road.  For all I know study after study may show driving on the left side of the road to be far superior to driving on the right.  But all the studies in the world aren’t going to make me feel comfortable doing it.

Update: Search guru Danny Sullivan has a good Cuil review.

Yesterday I streamed a recorded webinar from MarketingProfs titled "Beyond Trade Show Metrics: Improving Your Event Marketing ROI," conducted by Skip Cox is CEO of Exhibit Surveys, Inc.  This interested me since we had a booth at the Personal Democracy Forum for ImpactWatch last month.

During the webinar Cox discussed the concept of selective attraction.  This is basically a smarty pants way of describing the importance of attracting the trade show attendees who are the most interested and in most need of the product that an exhibit is pitching.  These people are much more likely to purchase the product or service than other attendees, and devoting time to someone who isn't interested is a waste of time when a potential client is left alone.

This makes sense since, considering our recent experience, not everyone who is attending a politics and technology conference is interested and/or in need of a media monitoring program.  For instance, I met plenty of great folks at our ImpactWatch booth, but some didn't need what we offer.  However, I hope we attracted the people who were interested in our product.

So how am I going to tie trade show exhibit metrics and search engine optimization together?

Well, selective attraction is also an important concept in SEO.  For example, we may optimize the ImpactWatch site to rank high for searches for a general keyword like "news," but a very small portion of these searchers are interested in a media monitoring product.  Perhaps they simply want to know how the stock market is doing or what Punxsutawney Phil did on Groundhog Day, not reputation management. 

Thus, it sometimes is wasteful to invest in ranking well for a general keyword.  That's why the long tail of search is an important factor to consider.  Although focusing on appropriate long tail keywords may attract fewer site visitors, if a greater portion of site visitors is coming from a more niche term are likely to convert from a visitor to a customer, that is a better practice — especially since it is probably less competitive to rank well for a niche term.  

To learn more read our SEO Basics white paper; we discuss selective attraction in the keyword section.

We're excited to post a new document about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to the research and articles section of our site.  This is an important discipline in web development.  It is the process in which one tries to boost how search engines like Google and Yahoo! rank a web site when they provide search results to their users for specific keywords.

Many people openly discuss SEO on the Internet, and we wanted to contribute to the discussion by writing our document, SEO Basics (click to download it in PDF format).  While there are many great resources out there, we hope that we present things in a different way so that we can help more people understand this field.  We hope you like it and welcome your feedback.

In it we briefly define SEO and then discuss keyword selection, title and meta tags, content, site structure, link properties, and content management systems (CMS). It is important to note that in this document, we focus on on-site optimization.

There are many aspects of a web site that one can control, and we have focused on the major ones.  Having said that, there are many factors that a site administrator cannot control that have major influence on a site's search engine rankings.  One such factor is the links pointing to a site, and collecting and managing the links pointing to a site is a very important part of SEO that we do not focus on in this document. So, please keep that in mind as you read our document.