New forms of vertical search are becoming increasingly important. Areas that the search engines have already embraced include local search and mobile search. In addition, voice-recognition-based search is an area in which all the major engines are actively investing.
Local search was an active business before the advent of the Internet, when Yellow Pages as supplied by your phone company were the tool of choice. As the World Wide Web first became prominent in our lives, the first way that this unfolded on the Web was in the form of Yellow Pages migrating online. These types of sites have themselves evolved to leverage more of the unique nature of the Web. Some of the major players are MapQuest, CitySearch, Local.com, and Superpages. You can see the relative market share of these four sites in Figure 13-6, which depicts a chart that Compete.com created in March 2009.
As the major search engines evolved, they integrated sophisticated mapping technology into their systems, and then began to map in local business data as well. You can find these local search engines at http://maps.google.com/, http://local.yahoo.com, and http://www.bing.com/maps. These search engines map in some of their business data from the same types of data sources that drive the Yellow Pages websites, such as Acxiom, InfoUSA, and Localeze.
Still, the more traditional sites are doing reasonably well in terms of market share, as shown in the Complete.com chart in Figure 13-7.
Figure 13-7 shows that MapQuest and Yellowpages.com are still drawing significant traffic. Keeping in mind our earlier chart on the traffic at the major search portals, you can see that CitySearch, Superpages, and Local.com would have material traffic and placement on this chart as well. Note the steady increase in Google’s market share, and the arrows that highlight that Google’s growth comes at the expense of the local portals.
The next major advent in the realm of local search was initiated when Google announced Universal Search in May 2008. As a result of this announcement, you could get local search results without having to go to http://local.google.com, and these results began to appear prominently in the basic web search results. Figure 13-8 shows an example search for boston rental cars.
As is common with these types of queries, the local results show up at the top, under the ads, and before the regular web search results. This is prime positioning, and this increased the intensity with which publishers began to focus on local SEO (a topic we covered at length in Chapter 8).
One reason for all these moves is that local search volume has skyrocketed. Just how much of search has local intent? Greg Sterling was able to get some research work performed for him by comScore that suggested that 35% to 40% of search queries had some sort of local search intent (http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2007/03/01/local-numbers-setting-the-record-straighter/).
One of the big challenges facing the local search engines is map spam, the proliferation of spam results in local search. Here are URLs to two articles from October 2008 that provide numerous examples:
Resolving these issues is obviously critical for the search engines and is a major area of investment for them. We believe that local search is an area whose importance will continue to grow. With a very large number of searches having local intent, this is potentially a major frontier for developments in search.
Over time, you can expect that these problems will be worked out. Local search is already extremely powerful, but you can anticipate that the search engines will control the flow of customers in cyberspace and the real world, because customers will be finding merchants through search. Success in local search will be what makes or breaks many businesses.
Consumers are becoming increasingly reliant on local search and its auxiliary services—street maps, directions, satellite views, street views, 3D visualizations (Google Earth), enhanced listings, user reviews, and ratings. These tools guide consumers’ movements and their decision-making processes; this means the search engines are in a powerful position to manage the flow of customers from cyberspace to brick-and-mortar businesses. So, in a way, the search engines are in the logistics business, building the connection between online and offline.
Mobile search has been a hot topic in the industry for a few years now, with frequent predictions that “this year will be the year of mobile search”. Although this has not happened in quite the way people have expected, mobile Internet usage and mobile search have seen steady growth. The increased use of smartphones has proven to be a driving factor in this growth, with Asia and Europe leading the way.
The U.S. market is gradually catching up, though. In November 2008, Marketing Charts reported the following (http://www.marketingvox.com/smartphone-adoption-accelerates-mobile-local-search-041827/):
A rapid rise in the rate of US smartphone adoption is driving a corresponding increase in local mobile search activity, according to the latest wave of the “Mobile Market View” (http://www.kelseygroup.com/research/mobile-market-view.asp), a consumer study of US mobile phone users from The Kelsey Group (http://www.kelseygroup.com/) and ConStat (http://www.constat.com).
Marketing Charts also noted that 19% of U.S. mobile users were using smartphones, and 49% planned to buy them within the next two years. The 49% figure comes from a survey of consumers by The Kelsey Group.
Similarly, The Kelsey Group found that mobile usage of the Internet is growing at a significant clip in the United States, where between September 2007 and October 2008 mobile Internet usage increased 20%. How much of this is search? Additional data from The Kelsey Group reveals that users performing Internet searches grew from 9.8% to 15.6% of mobile users. That is nearly 60% growth in 13 months. This data shows us that rapid growth is in progress right now, and it is reasonable to conjecture that the growth will continue.
Over time, you can expect the world to become untethered. The Internet of tomorrow is a mobile Internet. This trend is even more evident in developing nations. According to mobiForge (http://mobiforge.com/analysts/blog/mobile-internet-users-india-outnumber-pc-internet-users-3-1) in India, mobile Internet users outnumber PC Internet users three to one. In one year, the number of mobile Internet users in India doubled to account for 9% of mobile Internet users worldwide. And according to The Hindu (http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/002200706070350.htm), one in 11 of mobile Internet users worldwide are in India.
Even in the United States, the convenience of being able to get the information you need while on the go is just way too compelling. Why be tied to a desk if you do not have to be? Further, in many countries, freedom from a desktop is a requirement because the space that people have for their personal lives is quite different from what people experience in the United States.
The ever-expanding versatility and power of mobile devices—from indispensable utility apps, to immersive multimedia players, to massively multiplayer online games, to paradigm-shifting hardware advances such as the iPhone’s multitouch display, proximity sensor, GPS, and gyroscopes—will fuel this growth. The network effect, whereby the value of the network grows by the square of the size of the network (Metcalf’s Law), gives further incentive for users to migrate to their mobile devices as more and more apps allow them to interact with their peers in increasingly more interesting ways.
The small keyboard/typing surface is currently a severe limitation, but the search engines are working on voice-based solutions to circumvent this. The advent of the LUI will certainly revolutionize mobile search, and when this happens a whole new set of skills will be required of the SEO practitioner.
As we noted in Country-Specific Search Engines in Chapter 2, China has more than 600 million mobile phone users, which is approaching double the entire U.S. population. Currently, only about 12% of those users (72 million) are accessing the Internet with their phones, largely because the telephone carriers there do not have 3G (high-speed Internet for use over the phone system) licenses at the moment.
In March 2009, Interfax released a report (http://www.interfax.com/4/479860/news.aspx) that indicated that China’s mobile Internet industry generated more than $650 million in revenue in 2008, up 73.2% from 2007, according to a research report released in March 2009. Mobile search is still a small component of the revenue, though, with the report indicating that only 3.8% of the revenue comes from it.
CCID analyst Wei Guichuan indicated that “the low speed and high cost of mobile Internet services in China has held back the sector’s growth,” but the report also said that there will be 240 million mobile Internet service users in China in 2009.
Looking to Japan, a September 2007 article in The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/27/guardianweeklytechnologysection.mobilephones) reported that in a nation of 127 million, there were more than 100 million mobile Internet subscribers. When you consider the lack of utility of mobile phones to infants and small children, this is pretty close to 100% saturation. The broad acceptance of mobile devices in Asia is not limited to China and Japan, either. Many other Asian countries have significant numbers of mobile device users, such as Korea, Taiwan, India, and more.
Western Europe is also very advanced in its acceptance of mobile devices and the mobile Internet. According to a report by Forrester Research (http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,42199,00.html), “by the end of 2013, one-quarter of mobile phone users will have a 3.5G-capable device. By that time, we expect 38% of mobile subscribers to use mobile Internet services at least once per month.”
According to the African Mobile Phone Fact Book (http://www.web4dev.org/images/8/8d/Africa_Mobile_Fact_Book_2008.pdf), growth of mobile device usage in Africa is also projected to be rapid. The year 2008 ended with about 370 million mobile subscribers and the report projects that there will be more than 560 million mobile subscribers by the end of 2012. The use of 3G devices is still quite low, but almost 19% of handsets are expected to be 3G-capable by the end of 2011.
By all counts, the growth is rapid and is a natural consequence of the attractiveness of the mobile device. Being chained to your desk to access the Internet is not a problem when you are working on major tasks. But if you are out and about and you need some quick information, it is a huge value to be able to pull out your mobile device and get it.
What remains unresolved is the revenue model that will drive mobile search services. Presumably, mobile search revenue will be advertising-based, but it is not clear in the mobile environment that people will be that accepting of ads. After all, they may not be in the mindset to buy something when they are mobile. When the LUI becomes the primary interface, desktop computing will be pervasive. “Calling” your computer for a project discussion will likely be as common as calling the office.
One thing that is clear, though, is that the ability to conduct searches when you need it on a mobile device will become a requirement, so that means some mechanism must come into being to help pay for it.
Google is the dominant player in mobile search in the United States (per Nielsen Mobile, http://www.nielsenmobile.com/html/press%20releases/GoogleandYahooSearchData.html). Figure 13-9 shows a summary of the company’s data for Q1 2008.
So, there is nothing new here in terms of Google’s dominance. Nonetheless, mobile search is a new environment, and new environments always create the potential for change.
When users are mobile they must deal with the limitations of their mobile device, specifically the small screen and small keyboard. These make web surfing and mobile searching more challenging than they are in the PC environment.
Voice search could be a great way to improve the mobile search experience. It eliminates the need for the keyboard, and provides users with a simple and elegant interface. Speech recognition technology has been around for a long time, and the main challenge has always been that it requires a lot of computing power.
Two examples already exist:
- GOOG-411
This is a free service from Google that you call at (800) GOOG-411. The system is voice-activated, and you can use it to find businesses you are looking for and get maps sent to your phone.
- Google Mobile App for iPhone
Included in this application is voice searching capability. You can speak your query into the application and the results are displayed on-screen.
Processing power continues to increase, even on mobile devices, and the feasibility of this type of technology is growing. This should be another major area of change in the mobile search landscape.
In addition, it is reasonable to expect that voice recognition technology will be applied to the actual recorded content of audio and video files, to determine content and aid in ranking these media types within search results, something that will likely lead to video “script” optimization as an added component of video SEO.