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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.

The Bivings Group is a busy web development firm, and as such we don’t always spend the time we should on our own websites. As a consultant, you focus so much on helping clients that sometimes you don’t spend the time to help yourself.

In an effort to improve the performance of our own online program, we are going to take some time this summer to update the content, graphics, etc. on our main site, our blog and the website of our principle product, ImpactWatch. One of the first things we are doing is looking at ways to improve our performance in search engines. Our sites do pretty well in Google, but, like anyone else, we want to do better. We know that search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process, and that if we don’t consistently put in work our ratings will drop. (more…)

I owe a lot to the website craigslist.  It helped me find my current townhouse and housemates; it helped me find my current job; and it helped me find a great (and cheap!) dining room set.

The site began in 1995, with a very simple design.  Since that time, the design has not changed all that much.  "Keep it simple, stupid" is definitely the unspoken motto of the now-thriving entity.  There are very few graphics on the site, and the entire interface is very similar to newspaper classified ads.  Personally, I have always been a big fan of this design; I get very sick of watching flash intros to every other website on the market when I am foaming at the mouth to get to the actual content.

With an astounding 9 billion page views per month, yet only 25 employees, the website is well on its way to being the most used site on the web.  New cities and areas are added fairly frequently, with 450 being represented at the time of this post.  You can learn more about the wonder that is craigslist by visiting the "Fact Sheet" on their website.

Recently, and quietly, craigslist expanded its empire by introducing the first of several to come foreign language versions of the site.  Craigslist has never been one to make loud announcements about its new accomplishments and updates (just another reason to love it), and these new languages were implemented back in November of 2007.  Craigslist is now available in French, German, Italian, and Portuguese.  The individual areas of the site will continue to be community moderated.

The lack of multi-language support was the only thing stopping craigslist from being a bigger hit overseas, but with this welcomed foreign facelift, the site is poised to spread its influence even further.

Yesterday I sat in on an excellent Marketing Profs webinar titled "Advanced Tactics in SEO: Part Art, Part Science."  While the discussion focused on advanced topics, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz briefly touched upon basic link building.

One of the tactics that they emphasized was collecting links from organizations that involve the site owners.  The great thing about such links is that since the target organizations are already acquainted with the site, they're much more likely to honor a link request than other site owners. (more…)

Writing about Google, Inc. hits close to home, quite literally, as I am a past townie of Lenoir, North Carolina, which will soon become Google’s latest data farm. As I walked around my hometown a week ago, I began to wonder what the town would look like when the median income of the citizenship raises by $20,000. Moreover, I began to wonder just how much Google actually owns in the world. After some delving, I was shocked to learn that the company is only a few smart business deals away from owning Heaven itself.

Google currently owns over 520 domain names, ranging from ones of which you have already heard to ones that you likely never will. But do not kid yourselves, Google still owns them, and they always will. I predict that in another year, the number will reach approximately 1000 domains.

The company’s slogan has been “Don’t Be Evil” for some time now, although the company learned a sour lesson when dealing with its search engine in China. Unfortunately for the company, evil and big business sometimes go hand in hand. I personally do not blame Google for making the choices that it did, but I do believe that the setting of itself on such a seemingly high moral pedestal is bound to draw criticism until the moniker is dropped. Giving in has never been Google’s strong suit, however, and for good reason. If they had given in to the dark side, they may not have been elected Fortune Magazine’s Top Business for which to work, despite criticism from past employees of ageism and sexism.

If owning a large list of domains, being the top business for which to work, and being “not evil” were not enough, Google also simply owns a lot of…stuff. Some of its most recent acquisitions include YouTube, Tonic Systems, and even a 5% stake in AOL. Most recently, Google acquired DoubleClick, a company that provides Internet ad serving services. The deal was finalized on March 11, 2008. The types of tech that Googles embraces into its corporation are so varied that it leaves me scratching my head at what Google couldn’t acquire.

Lenoir is not going to be known for making great furniture much longer; it is going to be known for googling. You might as well familiarize yourself with Google’s Corporate Homepage; after all, they will own you one day.

Loren Baker of the Search Engine Journal reports that Google News has tweaked it algorithm (hat tip: MediaPost).  The search engine hopes to its users more relevant results about breaking news stories.

One of the tweaks aims to better identify the news source that was first in reporting information about a story.  Further, the tweak will better highlight fresher reporting as the story develops.

Another tweak that I find really interesting and helpful to local media outlets is that Google aims to place more emphasis on providing users with reports from media outlets whom are local to breaking news.  Thus, if there is flooding in Houston, Google wants to highlight reporting from, say, the Houston Chronicle instead of a wire report picked up by the Los Angles Times.  That is if the local coverage is at least equal in relevance to articles from elsehwere.

I think that this is great news for local news outlets since Google is explicitly trying to promote them.  Of course, this does not negate the need for local sources from working harder than larger organizations that have more resources and enjoy a larger presence on-line, but the search engine's changes could level the playing field.

Many people are buzzing about how snazzy 2008 presidential campaign sites are with their slick designs, multimedia content, and social networking tools, but how many campaigns are taking advantage of Internet text ads?

Awhile ago I took a snapshot at who are buying Google text ads for searches for both democrats and republicans presidential candidates and found that only Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Barack Obama bought ads for these searches.  Wired has taken a broader look at presidential campaign text ads in an article today. 

Sarah Lai Stirland reports that only the McCain and Mitt Romney campaigns are buying ads for issue and news searches. 

Text ads are incredibly useful since they are much cheaper than other forms of advertising, and since they're based on what people actually search for, organizations that use these ads can target their advertising dollars towards people they can better identify as a likely customer, voter, etc.

Richard Ball, founder of Baltimore based search engine marketing firm Apogee Web Consulting, blogged and was subsequently quoted by Wired that: 

For less than the cost of postage, a presidential candidate could have acquired a visitor to their election campaign website. How much would a direct-mail advertising campaign have cost to acquire 1,820 visitors to their site? How much would a radio or TV or print-ad campaign have cost to generate that much interest?

Stirland's article concludes with the fact that the vast majority of presidential campaigns have ignored Internet text ads and are likely missing out on a great campaign resource.  She also quotes Eric Frenchman, political Internet marketing strategist at Connell Donatelli in Washington, D.C, as saying that since people are interested in news and issues candidates should advertise on keywords that they take clear, strong stances on in hopes of luring people to their web sites.  Frenchman is a good guy to talk to since Connell Donatelli is managing McCain's on-line advertising.

As people wonder how political campaigns — perhaps even the candidates themselves — will further embrace social media tools like using videos and social networks to better connect with individuals in upcoming elections, maybe they'll also use text ads more to connect with a broader, yet targeted, crowd.

The Bivings Group's Fred Thompson Disclosure

While I am no search engine optimization guru, I know enough to see many SEO goofs that outsiders and neophytes make.  One of these mistakes is dismissing the importance of site visitor feedback and web analytics.

If you want to drive traffic to a site, pay attention to those who already visit it.  Sure, it sounds simple enough, but the other day I was reminded of how many sites don't follow this advice.

I'll focus on keywords.

The other day I was writing some content and wanted to see what keywords sites about the same topic were using.  After doing some quick keyword research in a search engine provided tool, I checked the other sites, and they didn't use words that people readily used to find sites like them.  Ugh!

Keyword research is just one way to find out which words people actually use.  I used an external tool, but a web analytics program should also provide such data.  When listing referring sites, most programs (even free ones) will reveal the keywords someone used if the source is a search engine.

Of course, this is much easier typed than done, but it seems strange to me how often sites ignore data that reveals how site visitors actually find a site and what lingo they use to find it. 

Just because a restaurant reckons that people will search for "Amsterdam eatery" doesn't mean that is what potential patrons will use to search for it.  What if they use "Amsterdam diner" instead?  An organization's internal lingo likely does not match that of its target audience. 

Granted, site visitors use different terms, but usually there are a few words that a significant amount of visitors use.  Thus, a site should not just target one or two, but if it does, it better at least target jargon that members of its target audience do use.

It is important to note that in some cases a site might justifiably target less popular terms.  In sectors where the popular terms are very competitive, a site may not have the ability to rank well with the most popular search keywords.  However, a site may do well by targeting less popular terms if it can rank well under searches for them.  That's where harnessing the long tail of search can kick in.

I'm not saying that keyword strategy is easy, but virtually ignoring research and analytics that reveal what site visitors actually use is just plain dumb. 

After my experience the other day, it seems that there are still many people who ignore this piece of advice.

Earlier today Google launched a new feature called Hot Trends, which shows you the 100 hottest search terms on Google in near real time. You can also go back and browse the hot terms for previous days.

Note that this is not a list of the most popular searches on Google. Instead, Hot Trends “analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic.” Sounds good and useful.

The Google Blog has a post with a full explanation.