Six Important Search Trends To Watch

This week MediaPost.com's Search Insider published two important columns about developing trends related to innovations in search and search marketing.  The first by David Berkowitz, Tuesday, January 2, 2007 and the second was published today by by Rob Garner, Wednesday, January 3, 2007. 

If you follow search trends all the time, these won't be new.  But we'd like to highlight six of the search trends (first 3 from Rob and last 3 from David) because we are seeing innovations take shape rather quickly in each these areas and we believe there will be many new developments to come...

1. Demand for agencies practicing hybrid paid and natural approaches will increase. As research and analytics continue to prove the dynamic impact between natural and paid search on conversions and brand visibility, marketers utilizing two separate agencies or departments will begin to realize that their campaigns are not running on all eight cylinders. For those paid agencies trying to play holistic catch-up, attaining a dual competency will be more difficult because of the required skill sets for managing natural search in an increasingly competitive and technical landscape.

In fact, there has been a great deal of research about how much more effective media programs are when the two approaches are combined.  As competition, heats up in the paid search marketplace, expect leading brands to demand solutions from their agencies and marketing partners to develop plans that integrate the two.  (related post about natural search results on OrganizedWisdom.com).

2. The emergence of the Pageless Web will generate some soul searching among SEMs and search engines. Continuing a trend that began in 2005, more rich Internet applications will be built to improve user experience and navigation, though they may come at the cost of search visibility and performance. In the pageless Web paradigm, finding, being found and being counted will become more technical and complicated than ever before; engines, optimizers and developers will spend the year working out solutions to the challenges.

This year everyone will realize that the MySpace pageview numbers are heavily inflated because of the archaic infrastructure that forces users to continually click to do anything useful.  Yahoo! on the other hand has been shifting its focus to improving user experience, even though the media is playing up the fact that MySpace just surpassed Yahoo! in page views.  Sites that focus on user experience will ultimately win.

 

3. Users will begin to have an impact on algorithmic search. At last July's Keystone, Colorado Search Insider conference, representatives from both Yahoo and Google stated that users would soon have at least some influence on algorithmic search results. This is a particularly significant shift for Google, considering its long-term position on maintaining the "computer-based" integrity of its results. Expect to see at least one rollout of user-impacted results from Yahoo in 2007, with Google holding out longer to "officially" add it to the mix in 2008.

Note: Pay attention to Wikiasari.

 

4. Video tagging and hotspotting will change how people find and consume online video. Video producers will easily be able to tag video content in myriad ways, from dividing it up into chapters just like those on DVDs to tagging elements such as characters, genres, quotes, and other aspects.

We expect to see this trend take shape with audio as well.

5) Image search will wow you. You'll be able to search for faces, colors, and even ideas within images. Tags will help, but a lot of this will come from more sophisticated technology, such as facial recognition. The technology emerged last year, but in 2007, it comes out of beta.

Not sure this will be all there in 2007, but amazing progress is taking shape.  This will ultimately improve how consumer patients are able to find specific information related to enhanced self-diagnosis and symptom checkers. Imagine being able to easily find pictures that look exactly like a symptom you are researching and then being able to send that image directly to your doctor or TakeCare clinic.

6) It's the year of the tag. Some might say this was true for 2006, but I'd argue that tags remained largely confined to early adopters, such as users of Yahoo's My Web and del.icio.us. In 2007, Amazon will feature tagging more prominently, Video tagging will make content more accessible, tags will be part of Search Wikia, and tags will gain the spotlight as a major building block of the Web.

More businesses will figure out the importance of "crowdsourcing" and the Wisdom of Crowds.