Search Engine Tigers

Yesterday I listened in on an online webinar given by Microsoft. The two main topics were demographic targeting for Adcenter, and Adlabs tools. However, the webinar got off to a very slow start due to the problems that the presenters had with Microsoft Office Meeting Live… the meeting facilitator in Redmond was doing fine, but the presenters in NYC couldn’t see the slides (not to mention the application crashed on me about 3 or 4 times over the course of the hour).

The demographic targeting was interesting (I didn’t realize the data was based on Microsoft Passport user behavior), but the adlabs tools were more interesting. Here’s a look at 4 of the tools that are available for your use (in beta mode). Naturally all data is based on MSN search data.

The first is the Keyword Group Detection tool. The idea behind this tool is to give you related terms to the keyword that you enter. This seemed fairly buggy, looking at the image below you can see what was returned to me for the term “cookie bouquet” (in case you’re wondering, I stumbled on that term after it was recommended to me as a related term for pizza), not really much related to either cookies or bouquets, unless you get a free cookie bouquet with every new lexus…

The next tool that I played with was the Keyword mutation tool. This tool finds all common misspellings of the keyword that you typed. This is a useful tool, although like the others it does seem to be limited in the keywords that will return results. i.e. “Wolverine” had no significant mutations, however big G did.

The next tool is probably the most interesting of the lot. It’s the funnel tool. With this you can see what searches people either did prior to entering the keyword, or after entering the keyword. It’s handy in that you can see the evolution of a search, and identify high quality tail searches for your particular keywords, so you can see what the user intent tends to be for your particular keywords. It may not be what you think.

The last tool that I’m going to talk about here is the seasonality tool. In theory this sounds like a great tool, giving you estimations and actuals for search terms. Unfortunately it has a couple of big problems. The keywords that can be used to show results must be selected from a limited set of keywords. Then when you select one, it appears that the actual data stops in June 2005… 18 months ago…

The tools have potential, but they’re not there yet, so it was curious that they decided to have a webinar to push them out to the public, although it does have to be said that the problems with the in-house webinar software really set the stage for these tools that aren’t ready for primetime (hence their presence in adlabs rather than actually out in adcenter).

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