Yahoo!, Gannett, IdeaLab’s Bill Gross: New Vehicles for the Search Superhighway
Important Details: It’s been a busy week in the seek-and-find business. Moves by Yahoo!, Gannett, and legendary entrepreneur Bill Gross all show how hot search models are and remind us that the Web world, seemingly stable day-to-day, is still shaking.
Yahoo!’s New Home Page
Yahoo! unveiled a new home page that is less remarkable for innovation than for its simplicity – all around the search and news utilities that are driving customer growth.
Visitors can toggle between the old page and the new. The new page is cleaned up, a little lighter and brighter. Up at the top – to the right of the Yahoo! brand – almost 3-D like, is Search. It is centered with tabbed choices better showcasing emerging multimedia (Images, Video, Audio), and the older stand-bys of News, Shopping, and Directory. And of course, Local, around which many believe the new ad dollars on the Web will flow. This all makes sense, of course, in the current search-based, hyper-driven, paid-search environment we live in. Notably, Yahoo!’s original inspiration – its directory (remember that Yahoo! actually stands for “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle”) – is significantly downplayed. In fact, it’s largely been replaced with a left nav directory, common to Web navigation.
What’s below really is more news-like. With the directory relegated to the dustbin of the ’90s, we see what we might have expected from a news site such as CNN or MSNBC. Top stories, with tabbed choices for entertainment, sports, and money, change the viewer’s display quickly. Newly accentuated is multimedia, with easy access to audio and video, in recognition of how Web expectations are changing. Outsell’s recent “News Users” survey showed that 18 percent use multimedia at least often and another 27 percent expect it sometimes, somewhere in their Web experience. So we’re seeing a critical mass of want, fed by broadband connectivity, and Yahoo! is figuring out how better to meet it and in this case highlight its growing offerings.
What’s not prominent on the Yahoo! page is much social networking (Yahoo! 360, My Search, Flickr, Del.icio.us). Inside Yahoo!, the word is that these Web 2.0 products haven’t gotten the traction Yahoo! had hoped. While individually compelling, they are a bit of a muddle to their audiences, who have a hard time figuring out what each does and how it connects with the rest of their search/sharing Yahoo! experience.
Gannett Acquires Planet Discover
“Local” is prominent on the Yahoo! page, and that’s a territory that Gannett, the nation’s No. 1 news publisher, hopes to defend. Monday, it announced its purchase of local search provider Planet Discover, that long-white-boarded, all-in-one search product. Newspaper publisher sites have long been bedeviled by the fact that the data for their key products (classifieds, entertainment, articles, Yellow Pages, archives+) are housed in separate databases. The separation has made a jumble of site search, making it hard for consumers to find what they are looking for.
Planet Discover’s promise is to deploy a single search of those multiple databases, simultaneously. It brings back one page with multiple results in modules. So far it is up in 40 markets, including Boston, Tucson, Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Cincinnati. Peter Krasilovsky, who tracks local commerce and especially the news-related Yellow Pages, features an interview with Planet Discover president Terry Millard, who says the company is ready to move quickly beyond its 40 current sites.
Some sites seem less than robust – each can decide how to implement the technology. In Wicked Local, you can see great vitality and new routes to commercial success. The site is the Plymouth, Mass.-based implementation of the Planet Discover product, published by the South of Boston Media Group newspapers: The Patriot Ledger, The Enterprise, and The Memorial Press Group. It’s a community – the kind Backfence and Microsoft with its “Live Expo” product are struggling to create. Local news. Calendars. Community input through blogging. Classifieds. Yellow Pages. It may not all be there yet, but it may be the beginning of a successful “out-local” GYM local movement.
Outsell believes the idea and the product may gain critical mass, especially as Gannett implements Planet Discover on its 110 Web sites.
IdeaLabs Revs Up Snap.com
Better search is essential for better ad monetization. And that monetization is what IdeaLab’s Bill Gross has his eye on. Gross, whose start-ups include Tickets.com, Cooking.com, PETsMART.com, eToys, NetZero/United Online, and Free-PC., has revived Snap.com. Last seen as a CNET news portal, the new Snap.com is Gross’ next-gen Overture. Overture, the pioneer in the paid-search business, ended up going to Yahoo! for $1.6 billion in 2003. And the rest is recent Web history.
Now Snap intends to leapfrog the paid search model of pay-per-click, and even pay-per-call. Snap intends to deliver on the pay-for-performance idea. The idea itself is simple: a merchant doesn’t want clicks or calls or even leads of any kind. The merchant wants sales. And if that merchant can pay for “advertising” only when it actually makes a sale, that may be merchant nirvana. Of course, the merchant would pay more than it would per click, but it may be worth it as the old risk/reward ratio between publishers and advertisers evolves.
Consider how that ratio has quickly changed. Print publishers (and broadcasters on radio and TV) find that selling mere “exposure” now faces increasing competition from measurable, actionable advertising. Much has been made of how the new Snap blurs paid search and algorithmic search results. Outsell believes this is a sideshow compared to the push to pay-for-performance, with which Gross is upping the ante in the $16 billion paid search industry.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Just a few days of announcements make a couple of things clearer. Search is the dominant way users approach their experience, clearly ascending over both directories and browsing. Outsell predicts the Google single search box phenomenon – as wildly successful as it has been – will be seen in our collective rear-view mirror as simply the first big car on the road, as jazzy new models are produced and unveiled daily.
Implications: �