Search Engine Tigers

The post I put out the other day about the chocolate bar that was ‘not for girls’ was a bit of a joke. It’s a real product on the shelves in the UK, and yes that’s how they market it. Do any girls eat them? I’m sure they do, some in protest, others because they just like the chocolate.

I’m returning to the topic of demographics as I’m currently writing this post, on the Blackberry, at an indie concert. I don’t remember the unfeasibly long name of the warm up band (edit: The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, a very peculiar, interesting outfit) starting in 35 minutes, but the headliner is 20 year old English singer Kate Nash, who isn’t terribly well known over here, although this gig is sold out (about 1100 people according to the stage hand I just asked).

I was introduced to the music of Ms. Nash on my last trip to the UK, and I found myself enjoying her music, so when I found out that she was in town (DC) tonight I jumped on craigslist and located a couple of tickets.

Through a series of friends & family being too tired, having to work, or visit with their children, I ended up here on my own.

Arriving early, as I’d had to meet the gent I was buying the tickets from, it dawned on me as I walked up to join the queue that it was quite possible that I was going to be the oldest person there, and one of the few males. (Thankfully more people of ‘my generation’ and older started arriving as I waited for the doors to open, listening to those in front of me complain about the genetics paper they’d had to hand in that day).

Ok, so I’m out of my element, how does that apply to this blog? Well it could be:

1. Demographic targeting is a best fit solution, you’re most likely not going to appeal to everyone in what you consider to be your target demographic, nor is your actual audience necessarily going to fit neatly into one particular bucket no matter how hard you try.
2. When a user hits a landing page (the queue at the front of the club) if what’s presented to them doesn’t match what they expect they way just leave without a second thought, unless they’re motivated (a Yorkshireman having already spent money on a ticket is very motivated to not have it go to waste).
3. Maybe I need to modify my listening habits? Nah, my eclectic music collection ranges from Kate Bush to Queen to Bjork to TMBG to Marilyn Manson to George Formby, so I’m good.

Thanks to all those that attended on Saturday, especially those that drove in from Richmond & Williamsburg.  We had some great discussions, and the largest attendance to date, which unfortunately meant that we didn’t all get to talk to everyone, but I think we tried to talk to as many people as possible.  We did do some round table discussions about various topics, and got to meet some new people.

So thanks again to those that attended, and we’ll hope to see you there the next time we have a meeting.

Semantic Search Engine Hakia announced today that they’ve added Credibility as a determinant factor in their search engine for all health related searches. They list Credibility, Freshness and Relevancy as the main 3 factors.

What do they mean by credibility? How does a site become credible? Well, the way they’ve done it is to take the Medical Library Association’s list of quality health web sites, and say that any site on that list is credible as far as they’re concerned (link builders, head over there and get your medical clients listed). Any results that are from one of these credible sites are then shown above the regular listings, and are displayed in red.

So does credibility make a difference to the user experience? Well, the first issue is that there’s no key for the user to understand why these listings are in red, and others not. Not all searches produces ‘credible’ results, i.e. a search for treating a strained calf muscle produced 0 credible results. Credible sites get to double dip – if a credible result is in the organic results it will display in both the credible and non-credible results, which can reduce the feeling of freshness. Also, I would assume that the hope is that a credible resource should also be a relevant resource, that’s not always the case. For example, in the search that I did below for “recurring knee pain” the first result is not from a medical site, but from Al Jazeera talking about an A.C. Milan player with that problem.

Now, Hakia is still a beta product, so it isn’t fair to judge them on a non finished product, and they are at least trying out different things, but as to whether this will be something that can catapult them to the forefront, or even into the pack behind the leading pack remains to be seen.

Just a reminder for everyone that the VA SEM Meetup is on Saturday at 11am at Bertucci’s in Tyson’s Corner, VA.

You can find more details in this post. If you can make it out, we’d love to see you there. So far we have 10 confirmed attendees, and 5 maybes, so it should be a good sized group.

Don’t forget, that there may even be a side trip out to the tidal basin to see the famous DC cherry blossoms…

Popular MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) game City of Heroes is a game that’s been around for almost 4 years (April 28th 2004). Continual development, and ongoing maintenance of the game are paid for with monthly subscription fees from their user base (~139,000 users as of September 2007). But the team that runs City of Heroes has decided that they want to be more aggressive with their development schedule in order to ensure that they retain their users in the face of other newer, fresher MMOs.

How could they do this? Well, the advantage that they have over many MMOs is that their game is set in a ‘real world’ with roads, buildings, etc, whereas a great deal of their competition is set in fantasy sword and magic settings. Why is this an advantage? Well, with the buildings come billboards, and with the billboards comes an opportunity to sell in game contextual advertising. Take a look at the images below to see how they’re going to do this.

What this does for their advertisers is give them access to a user base that NCSoft (the publishers of City of Heroes) has detailed demographic data for. It’s not unthinkable that at some future point they may even set the ads to display differently to each user based on their demographic information (location, age, gender, etc). Now, this advertising system does have the option for a user to opt out, so it’ll be interesting to see how many people actually do (should they release those figures).

For a marketer, advertising in games such as this give you that captive audience that if you target correctly, can work very nicely for you. Imagine if Blizzard somehow implements this in World of Warcraft – a game with 10 million subscribers…