Automation tools can help B2B marketers regardless of the complexity or price of products that you sell. The newest research report from Search Engine Land’s sister site, Digital Marketing Depot, covers what you need to know when selecting an automation tool. The report answers key questions, such as:

• What trends are driving the adoption of marketing automation tools?
• Who are the leading players in marketing automation?
• What capabilities do marketing automation tools provide?
• Does my company need a marketing automation tool?
• How are marketing automation platforms priced?

Written in conjunction with consulting editors Scott Brinker, CTO of Ion Interactive and Thor Johnson, CEO of Team Thor Marketing, this 61-page report draws from primary and secondary research sources, including interviews with industry leaders, top-level executives at leading marketing automation software vendors, and marketers who have adopted marketing automation software.

The guide is free – you just need to fill out a quick form to access the download link and begin reading immediately.

Download the B2B Marketing Automation Tools 2013: The Marketer’s Guide

Why?

Here are a few of the highlights I’m excited about (for all of the juicy details, see The BIG SMX West Preview: Why You Should Attend over on our sister site, Search Engine Land):

• Facebook Keynote. Grady Burnett, Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions for Facebook, will talk with Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan about topics ranging from the recently launched Facebook Exchange to the even more recently announced Facebook Graph Search beta.
• A Candid Glimpse Inside Google’s Policy Process. Ever wonder how Google decides which sites should rank well, which sites should be penalized, whether it should remove certain negative results for a politician, a company, a person? In Evening Forum – Walk A Mile In Google’s Shoes: Dealing With Tough Calls In Search, Google search policy specialist Patrick Thomas looks at some of the hard decisions Google has to make and the careful balancing act it has to maintain.
• Deep Dives Into SEO, PPC, Social, Mobile & More. Let’s face it, if you’re an online marketer today you need solid understanding of a wide range of channels. SMX West features more than 60 sessions covering the latest thinking and cutting edge tactics needed to help you stay at the top of your game and be successful.
• SMX Summits. We often hear from people at SMX shows that in addition to attending sessions, some of the most valuable learning they take away comes from interacting and networking with others. To address that, we’ve added an all new track: SMX Summit. These Powerpoint-free sessions feature some of the foremost experts in the world discussing and debating important topics, followed by no-holds-barred Q&A.
• Envisioning The Future. While most sessions at SMX West focus on tactics and strategies that you can put to work right away, a number of sessions are forward-looking, helping you anticipate and prepare for the seemingly continuous change that can leave us blindsided — and severely impact our marketing campaigns — if we’re not prepared to face it.

SMX West is shaping up to be one of our best yet. Want to know more? See The BIG SMX West Preview: Why You Should Attend. Better yet –register now and take advantage of the early bird rate that expires this Friday, February 1.

Looking forward to seeing you in San Jose!

The report answers the following questions:

• What trends are influencing the digital agency landscape?
• How can I determine if my company needs a digital agency?
• What type of agency is the best fit for my organization?
• What is the process for choosing a digital agency?
• What questions do I need to include in an RFI or an RFP?

Download your free copy of Digital Advertising Agencies 2013: A Buyer’s Guide today.

Newly named Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, just three months into her job and giving birth to her first child two weeks ago, is obviously moving aggressively to reshape Yahoo’s management team.

De Castro brings serious experience to Yahoo. From the press release:

“De Castro brings more than 20 years experience leading operations, strategy, partner management and revenue generation for some of the world’s leading brands. He led Google’s media, mobile and platforms organization. Prior to Google, de Castro spent two years at Dell Corporation, where he managed sales and business development operations across Western Europe. He has consulted for McKinsey & Company, where he advised numerous clients across many different industries.”

More on de Castro’s background and why Mayer moved aggressively to hire him at AllThingsD.

IAC, parent company of Ask.com and many other prominent websites, has acquired About.com from the New York Times with a $300 million cash deal, trumping a $270 million offer from Answers.com. Many news sites have reported details of the acquisition, but I want to focus on the implications and opportunities for marketers that much of the news coverage seems to have overlooked.

About has nearly 1,000 topic sites, more than 3 million unique articles and nearly 100 million unique monthly users worldwide. Ask.com has more than 100 million users globally and despite fading from the top ranks as a leading search engine over the years, still remains one of the most popular Q&A platforms on the Internet.

The combination of the two provides marketers with a potentially significant new avenue for capturing traffic and acquiring customers. Both sites are top-100 web destinations, and the combination of the Q&A format offered by Ask with the depth of “curated” content by About.com suggests that there are true “synergies” that are so often touted in these types of mergers but which rarely actually translate into meaningful opportunities for online marketers.

Full disclosure before I get into the details: I was the web search guide for About.com between 1998 and 2001, a position now occupied for years by the estimable Wendy Bosworth. “Guides” are the curators and, in a sense, ringmasters of specific topic areas for About, and one of the “hidden” strengths the site offers that differentiates it from other so-called “content farms.” More on that below.

So, Why Now?

Over the past year or so, Google has focused on changes designed to demote so-called content farms – sites that exist primarily to derive advertising revenue by creating short, somewhat relevant articles that purport to address user information needs, but in fact more often have been crafted to capture traffic by combining some relevant content with sophisticated SEO techniques that match certain types of keywords, leverage link networks and so on. Specifically, Google’s panda and penguin algorithm updates have targeted these types of “thin” content-farm types of sites, demoting or even removing them from high-ranking search results.

But neither About nor Ask have ever sought to capture traffic via the methods used by content farms. Some may disagree with this claim, but I’ll reiterate it based on years of observing both companies. Let’s start with Ask.

Ask.com began life as Ask Jeeves in 1996. Unlike the search engines and “web directories” (think Yahoo) of the day, Ask Jeeves differentiated itself by allowing users to ask “questions” via natural language queries rather than simple keywords. It also offered “results” in the form of “answers” via drop-down menus, rather than the familiar “ten blue links” that we are all accustomed to today.

Behind the scenes, a crew of “jeeviants” created a database of millions of “answers” to the most common questions posed by users. Until Google came along, with its vast index of the web and superior interpretation of understanding user information needs came along, Ask Jeeves was one of the best places to go to find many types of information on the web.

But as Google became popular and pretty much destroyed the other search services of the time, Ask survived by first attempting to become a crawler-based service by purchasing the Teoma search engine in 2001, but ultimately abandoning that approach to become a Q&A focused site with users asking questions and others answering them – a precursor to currently popular sites such as Yahoo Answers, Quora and others.

Today, Ask.com is a shadow of what it once was, but still maintains a respectable position as one of the internet’s top destinations.

About.com was also an early pioneer in helping people find information on the web, beginning life in 1995 as The Mining Company, changing its name to About in 1999. With a model similar to Ask Jeeves, the company employed “guides” who were knowledgeable about specific topics to create directories of web links on those topics – but also to personally interact with users who had questions they couldn’t find answers to on the web, given the poor quality of search back in the day.

In its early days, Ask Jeeves hired many librarians and information professionals to help create its trove of information (our own indefatigable human-search engine and contributing editor Gary Price, was an ambassador for the company for a number of years). By contrast, the Mining Company contracted guide positions to anyone who could complete a rigorous (and speaking from personal experience, I mean rigorous) trial that demonstrated competence with both finding and annotating (now more commonly referred to as “curating”) relevant web content related to their subject matter expertise. Jeeves hired salaried staff; The MiningCo/About paid guides based on the page views their topic-specific guide-sites generated.

Enter Google, The Automated Giant

Humans created the first web directories, but as the web grew (and grew quickly) it was apparent that automated technology was going to be the wave of the future. Search engines like Lycos, AltaVista and Infoseek employed crawling technology to discover and index content on the web with little human intervention. Problem was, in those early days in the mid-to-late 90s, banner and pop-up ads were the only means of “monetizing” this nascent form of search – so most early search engines tried to branch out with other services (rebranding themselves as “portals”) that ultimately weren’t popular with users, and thus they struggled financially.

Google emerged in 1998 with a “laser-like focus” on search, and while it didn’t figure out how to make money until a few years later when it launched its AdWords and AdSense programs, it rapidly gained market and mind-share and its overwhelming popularity among users became a significant factor in what became rapid user-abandonment and demise of the pioneering search engines.

Today, as we all know, Google is dominant in search, virtually everywhere in the world. The company also dictates standards that content providers must abide by to get good visibility in its search results.

Which begs the question of the moment: With Google as powerful as it is, why would a content provider like About make a good match with an also-ran search engine like Ask that’s now primarily a Q&A service? And why should marketers care?

Good questions.

Why The Ask/About Combination Makes Sense

Let’s start with the official, PR point of view:

“The About.com acquisition is completely in line with IAC’s M&A strategy of acquiring, at disciplined valuations, companies that are complementary and synergistic with both our existing businesses and our areas of expertise,” said IAC CEO Greg Blatt in a company issued press release.

Yeah, sure. We’ve heard similar essentially meaningless blather before, a million times from a million companies doing these types of deals. But count me in the camp that actually believes this marketingspeak for a change, and allow me to explain why I not only think it will work but why it’s a rare opportunity for online marketers to get in on something before your competitors do (more disclosure: I have no connection in any way with either IAC or the New York Times other than channels of communication with many key players – no financial or other interest than as an observer).

When you deconstruct the generic blah, I believe Blatt is correct. About is a rich source of mostly high-quality content that has existed on the web for years. At first, it was created by a group of people who really cared about directing people to the best information on the web. Then, under the ownership of the New York Times, it was also known for producing world-class content that lived up to similar standards of one of the most recognized sources of authoratative news in the world.

Through most of this time, the search engine marketing/optimization efforts undertaken by About were overseen by the capable stewardship of Marshall Simmonds, who was Chief Search Strategist for About.com/New York Times Company from 1999-2010, and someone many of you will recognize as one of the most respected experts in the field from the very early days of search marketing (even before it was called search marketing). I asked Marshall what he thought about the deal, and he replied in his characteristically diplomatic way:

“About.com is a pioneer in the online content space. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met worked, and continue to work there. Throughout the massive changes in strategy online About has continued to persevere. Early on we successfully honed an approach that always focused on users first and promotion second. They were the first online company to integrate SEO deeply and throughout the organization and truly make it part of a daily workflow. Management was always at the forefront of innovation fully embracing recommendations and promotion strategies. Definitely looking forward to seeing where this new transition takes About.”

Bluntly: About isn’t, and never has been a content farm. It’s been a high-quality source of web-based information, overseen by an ethical and very skilled SEO and management team from the beginning. I realize some may take this as cheerleading – but it’s not – it’s an objective observation drawn from many years of observing what the service has created and provided to web users.

Net: IAC has purchased a gem – and one that’s vastly underutilized by online marketers. This is a significant opportunity for marketers, especially for those pursuing niche or specialized areas where it’s difficult to garner significant traffic via more conventional methods.

Advice For Marketers

There are two primary channels you should be considering to leverage the About/IAC combination.

Advertising Options. Ask offers display advertising, claiming to be “the 10th most trafficked site daily that accepts graphical advertisements” (according to 2010 data from comScore). Ask is also part of the Google Search Network. By default, your ads will appear on search network partner sites when you create a campaign – but to be sure your text ads may display on any future Ask/About combination, be sure to check that the “Search partners” option on your campaign network settings is selected.

About.com (at least for now) also has advertising options, using Google’s Dart system .

Social Media/Direct Contact. Because Ask is primarily a Q&A based service, it’s highly social. Register with the service, and Ask will keep an ongoing count of the number of questions you’ve asked, answered, and how many “thumbs up” votes” you’ve received from the community. As with any community-based site, be careful to be helpful, relevant, polite and use all of the other common-sense online hygiene rules for engaging with people socially.

With About.com, remember that each specific topic area is overseen by a “guide” who essentially owns the topic area (put another way, a tightly focused group of people who are passionate about a subject, product or service that are optimal people for you to be considering reaching out to). There are two ways you can interact with these communities.

First, similar to other social media, via the forums that are associated with each topic area. About has a convienent drill-down category guide that makes it easy to identify the “communities” that make the most sense for you to be intereacting with. Once you find a particular guide site (for example, Tech Careers), navigate to the forum, familiarize yourself and start participating.

About also makes it easy to interact directly with guides. Remember – these people are not only curating links to relevant web content – they are also creating original content, and like all journalists or other publishers are looking for helpful, relevant sources of information that make their jobs easier.

Most guides publish regular email newsletters, and also tweet and are active on facebook, so sign up, follow and make friend requests. You can do all of this through a guide’s bio page (here’s David Weedmark, About’s Tech Career’s guide bio page as an example).

Then, slowly, thoughtfully engage with the guide. Don’t take a PR approach – remember, these are real people who are passionate about what they’re doing, not journalists who are jaded and tend to discard or pay little attention to a majority of the slick pitches sent their way. If you engage with a guide on a personal level it’s possible you’ll be getting a fair amount of attention from them – and attention that’s going to mention you on highly trafficked sites, again to highly targeted audiences.

Bottom line: Until IAC acquires and integrates About it’s impossible to predict whether this will become a truly valuable resource for marketers. But if you are looking to explore new alternatives to those you’re currently using, don’t delay – start exploring your options now before everyone else catches on.

The Times is selling About because it has been struggling with its overall business. Last month, the Times Co wrote down value of About by $195 million. The Times originally purchased About from Primedia, Inc. for $410 million in 2005. Prior to that, Primedia acquired About in 2000 from its original founding investors in a deal that valued About at $690 million.

I’ve spoken with a number of key players on all sides of the potential transaction (including one of the founders of About, which started life as the Mining Company), and will follow up if/when there’s a definitive announcement of a sale.

Contrary to what many have written, I’ve never regarded About as a content farm subject to penalties from Google’s panda and penguin updates (full disclosure: I was the web search guide for About.com from 1998-2001). About has always had rigorous guidelines for the people who created its content, and never tried to spam search engines or otherwise promote their content in other than kosher ways. They also had some of the most highly respected search marketing people employed on staff, since before the company was sold to Primedia.

Stay tuned for details.

What are they? In a nutshell, the new gTLDs are a way for potentially anyone to create a “dot-anything” internet domain. Dot-company, dot-brand, dot-country, dot-religion… literally, dot-anything. We wrote extensively about what marketers need to know about the new generic top-level domains back in January in our What You Need To Know About The New Top Level Domains.

Many pundits are hailing this as the new internet “gold rush”—an opportunity to stake a claim in cyberspace that your customers will come to know and love, your competitors will find impregnable, and will solve your SEO worries, forever. Many obviously believe this, as we can see in the number of well-known organizations who’ve registered just to be considered for their own dot-whatever domain (at the incredibly bargain price of $US185,000, not counting the money spent on paperwork, legal fees, infrastructure requirements and many other costs).

In all, various organizations ranging from well-known internet players and consumer brands to governments to obscure holding companies requested more than 1,930 new gTLD “strings” (the word/phrase that will come after the “dot” in the new domain).

Count us solidly skeptical. I’ll go into why below, but first, a bit more about what actually just happened.

Applications were received from 60 countries, with 911 from North America, 675 from Europe, 303 from the Asia-Pacific region, 24 from Latin America and 17 from Africa. For the first time, ICANN also considered “internationalized” domain names written using non-Latin alphabets. 116 of the applications were for internationalized domain names, in alphabets using Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and other character sets.

Here’s a look at some of the more interesting applications.

Google: Looking For Love, Mom & Wow

Google was one of the most active bidders, submitting more than 100 applications for new gTLDs. Not surprisingly, many bids were for Google’s own trademarked terms, including Google, YouTube, Gmail, Android, etc. But the big G also submitted some goofy string requests, including “love,” “dog,” “foo,” “mom” and “wow.”

The company didn’t bid directly, instead using a subsidiary called “Charleston Road Registry Inc.,” though the primary contact person listed has a corporate Google.com email address. Much of Google’s main headquarters campus is located along Charleston Road in Mountain View, California.

The full list of strings that Google bid on: È°·æ­œ, Á¿Ã‚“な, °ーグル, Ads, And, Android, App, Are, Baby, Blog, Boo, Book, Buy, Cal, Car, Channel, Chrome, Cloud, Corp, Cpa, Dad, Day, Dclk, Dds, Dev, Diy, Docs, Dog, Dot, Drive, Earth, Eat, Esq, Est, Family, Film, Fly, Foo, Free, Fun, Fyi, Game, Gbiz, Gle, Gmail, Gmbh, Goo, Goog, Google, Guge, Hangout, Here, Home, How, Inc, Ing, Kid, Live, Llc, Llp, Lol, Love, Mail, Map, Mba, Med, Meme, Mom, Moto, Mov, Movie, Music, New, Nexus, Page, Pet, Phd, Play, Plus, Prod, Prof, Rsvp, Search, Shop, Show, Site, Soy, Spot, Srl, Store, Talk, Team, Tech, Tour, Tube, Vip, Web, Wow, You, Youtube and Zip.

Microsoft: A Few, Mostly Non-Search Bids

Unlike Google’s prodigious, wide-ranging set of bids, Microsoft limited itself to just 11 strings, and only one specifically search related: Bing. Google bid on the string “search” but Microsoft did not. The 11 strings it bid on were Azure, Bing, Docs, Hotmail, Live, Microsoft, Office, Skydrive, Skype, Windows and Xbox.

The Other Players

According to a CNN Money Tech blog post, by far the biggest participant in the bidding process was a company called Donuts Inc., a Web registry founded in 2011 (ironically, a company that couldn’t apparently secure its own “dot-com” name as its website is “donuts.co”). You won’t see Donuts Inc as an applicant for any of the 307 top-level domain names it applied for, as the company used wholly owned subsidiaries with computer-generated names to bid for each string, according to CNN.

Some of these names are just bizarre, like Atomic Maple, Extra Dynamite, and Just Goodbye. Most of the strings the company bid on are popular keywords like “bet, vote, spa” and so on. It seems pretty clear the company is engaging in a classic domainer’s arbitrage play, getting into the game early and then selling later to someone willing to pay much more when and if the initial bet plays off.

In the search area, Yahoo bid on its own name and Flickr, but nothing else. Apple, Baidu and Yandex bid for their own names, but nothing else.

Several players other than Google bid on the “search” string, including the Donuts Inc. subsidiary “Bitter McCook.” Interestingly, another major player wanting “search” was Amazon. The fourth bidder for “search” was dot Now Limited, apparently a subsidiary of Famous Four Media, which describes itself as “a global provider of services to the gTLD industry with operations in London, New York and Gibraltar (global HQ).”

Amazon was the third largest bidder, with requests for 75 strings, including its brands (Amazon, Audible, Zappos) as well as more generic terms like book, cloud, game and video.

The Impact On Marketers

The reality is that the new gTLDs will do little to nothing to help anyone other than ICANN (who collects the rich registration fee), domainers and registrars (who as they always have will profit handsomely by trading and arbitraging “valuable” domain names) and lawyers (who just benefited from one of the most generous “jobs programs” in history, thanks to the inevitable bickering and lawsuits that will be filed over who has the “right” to own the words associated with the new gTLDs).

There’s little need for marketers to be concerned in the short term, and probably not in the long term. First, today’s “reveal” just marks the conclusion of the initial application process. ICANN has said that the evaluation process to decide who actually gets the to run the new gTLDs will take months, if not years. Once up and running, it will take even more time for the new domain spaces to gain credibility and authority with the search engines, regardless of how well-known or admired the organizations running them.

And finally, there’s the issue of user behavior and habits. This isn’t the first time ICANN has allowed new gTLDs. In both 2000 and 2004, ICANN introduced a number of non-dot-com gTLDs, including some created for particular types of organizations, such as “.aero” and “.museum.” It also created others, like “.biz” and “.info” haven’t really caught on with internet users. Bottom line: the odds are against the new gTLDs gaining much traction with the world at large, at least over the next decade or so until there are literally no more affordable dot-coms and/or people have become accustomed to finding what they’re looking for using hundreds or thousands of “dot-whatever” names.

The exception to this is for groups that already have strong affiliations, and want to create mechanisms to connect more closely. For example? Religious groups. Ethnic groups spread across disparate regions. Other groups that may feel a need to bond or that they are disenfranchised from traditional culture.

But with all of these examples, marketers will need to think very carefully about how to reach out and connect appropriately without unintentionally alienating group members. So again, this is a problem that for now is really non-existent and how it’s to be approached in the future is largely unknowable.

A Boon For Lawyers?

Many big brands and trademark owners didn’t bother registering for a new gTLD, because ICANN has make it explicitly clear that it will not grant rights to new gTLDs to anyone other than the intellectual or legal owners of those “strings.” Notably, huge brands such as Pepsi and Coke are missing, though there are applications from Fedex, Acer, DuPont, Samsung, Sanofi and others.

But that didn’t stop people from bidding on popular “generic” terms such as “art,” “book,” “dentist” and so on. More than 230 names were requested by two or more applicants, the most popular being “app” (though surprisingly, Apple was not among the 13 bidders for rights to the string). Despite ICANN promising a “rigorous” review process, the legal profession will undoubtedly benefit greatly as companies dispute who the “rightful” operator of these new gTLDs should be.

The legal skirmishes between Google and Amazon should be particularly entertaining to observe—the companies both bid on 20 identical strings: app, book, buy, cloud, dev, drive, free, game, mail, map, movie, music, play, search, shop, show, spot, store, talk, wow, and you.

A full list of all applications, including String, Applicant, Location, Primary Contact Email and other information can be found here. It’s also available in PDF [602 KB] and CSV [245 KB] formats.

So as a marketer, it behooves you to occasionally seek out research that can provide serious insights into understanding customer needs and taking novel approaches to satisfying those needs that may not have occurred to your competitors.

The Proceedings Of The WWW 2012 Conference is a great place to start. Not familiar with it?

The World Wide Web Conference is a yearly international conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. It began in 1994 at CERN (the birthplace of the web) and has run every year since, hopping from country to country. In fact, it was at the 1998 WWW conference that two guys presented a paper called The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine describing the PageRank algorithm mentioned above, that many consider the “launch event” for Google.

The 2012 WWW Conference is happening this week, in Lyon, France. More than ever before, I’m struck by how many of the papers and plenary sessions are focusing on the real-world: How people search, how people respond to online ads, the mechanics of spam networks, how social media is changing our brains… these are just a few of the topics covered.

At the conference itself, presentations are often delivered with standard power-point bullets. But each presentation is backed up with a scholarly paper that has been peer-reviewed and accepted by some of the foremost experts in the world. Even better, these papers are online, free to read, consider, and totally available for you to apply lessons learned to your own marketing campaigns. Of the more than 90 papers, I’d say that well over two-thirds are of interest and valuable to marketers, if you’re willing to slog through sometimes dense academese (translation: tortured phrases written to impress peers or evaluation committees rather than just explaining things in straightforward English). Trust me on this one: with this conference, the “slogging effort” is usually worth it.

WWW Conference Highlights For Marketers

Note: these are direct links to chapters in the gigantic 1076 page PDF of the proceedings, though most papers load relatively quickly.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Search Task Trails

From researchers at Microsoft and Nankai University, a new way of looking at searcher intent via “task trails,” defined as an “atomic user information need” that attempts to understand what people are looking for at a more granular level than what most analytics packages deliver at the session or query level. Some good nuggets here for those wanting to take keyword research to the next level.

How Effective is Targeted Advertising?

Researchers from Stanford and Yahoo question the effectiveness of ad targeting, the currently highly-touted though controversial method of delivering ads based on previous search queries or web activity. Conclusion: an overestimation of the lift from targeting on brand-related searches by almost 1,000%. Ouch—leads to the question, if you’re doing targeting or retargeting, are you wasting money?

Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews

From Google and the University of Chicago, a look at how internet users try to game the system by “opinion spamming” and how models based on the relationships among groups, individual reviewers, and products they reviewed can be created to detect fake reviewer groups. So: If user-generated content is one of your key online marketing efforts, are you being an effective cheerleader—or contributing to what’s likely to be one of the next “signals” search engines will be looking at in their ongoing efforts to combat spam and penalize miscreants?

Recommendations to Boost Content Spread in Social Networks

From UC Santa Barbara and Yahoo Labs India, “novel algorithms for recommending connections that boost content propagation in a social network without compromising on the relevance of the recommendations. Through experiments on real-world social graphs such as Flickr and Twitter, we show that our approximation algorithms achieve content spreads that are as much as 90 times higher compared to existing heuristics for recommending connections.” Caveat: this is very hypothetical work, but the lessons drawn can be very useful to marketers who have the chops to take advantage of APIs offered by social networks and weave together human and machine based relationships.

Are Web Users Really Markovian?

From Cornell University and Yahoo, a scathing evisceration of the fundamental premises underlying Google’s PageRank algorithm, calling out the extent to which the Markovian assumption [on which PageRank is based] is invalid. Laced with dense math and logic, it’s still fascinating to read such a carefully reasoned attack on the most fundamental search concept that SEOs swear by—at least for now. Ironically (or perhaps serendipitously), one of the authors, Prabhakar Raghavan is now a Vice President of Engineering at Google.

Trains of Thought: Generating Information Maps

Do you really want to get into your customers’ heads? This could be considered a rather radical update of the traditional consideration and purchase funnel, from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research. “When information is abundant, it becomes increasingly difficult to fit nuggets of knowledge into a single coherent picture. Complex stories spaghetti into branches, side stories, and intertwining narratives. In order to explore these stories, one needs a map to navigate unfamiliar territory. We propose a methodology for creating structured summaries of information, which we call metro maps.”

As said, these are just a few highlights from the more than 90 papers available from this week’s Proceedings Of The WWW 2012 Conference. If you like this kind of stuff and find it useful, you should peruse other papers that have been published in conjunction with these conferences on the WWW conference history page.

These aren’t the kind of tactical tips you’ll find in most search marketing forums, but for those who get inspired by academics trying to do systematic research on how people act and respond to online marketing, the research papers published in this collection can lead to some truly valuable outside of the box insights.

With more than 14,000 people responding, nearly two-thirds said they would cancel their Google account, with 15% saying no and just under 20% not sure.

Look at other indicators of customer outrage, however, and the picture isn’t so clear. For example, instructions on how to delete a Google account aren’t appearing as a hot search on Google trends. Nor are they appearing as an auto-complete suggestion when searching on Google itself (though Gmail is in the #5 position):

The backlash to Google’s changes is reminiscent in many ways to the response to Facebook’s privacy changes in 2010, which sparked a lot of interest to “how to delete” articles but made virtually no impact on Facebook’s continuing growth in users. We covered that phenomenon in How Traffic Spiked For Site Offering Advice On How To Delete A Facebook Account.

Want to delete your own Google account? Be careful. Google itself offers detailed instructions on How to close your Google Account. But they also offer two very explicit, and very important warnings:

If you delete your Google Account:

• You’ll permanently remove the Google products associated with that account, such as your orkut profile, your iGoogle page, and your Web History.
• If you use Gmail with your account, you’ll no longer be able to access that email. You’ll also be unable to reuse your Gmail username.

Google recommends checking all of the data associated with your account using your Google Dashboard, and saving anything important (such as your contacts, documents, photos, etc) before deleting anything. You can also use Google’s Data Liberation Front to expedite the process of “liberating” your personal stuff from Google prior to shutting down your account.

Google faces both criticism and governmental inquires regarding “competition” issues (aka anti-trust concerns). At Search Engine Land, we’ve covered many of them, including Bing’s Travel Search & Kayak Favoritism Angers No One, While Google’s Gets Headline Attention From WSJ, Dear Congress: It’s Not OK Not To Know How Search Engines Work, Either, Koreans Accuse Google Of “Obstructing” Antitrust Investigation and many others.

The FTC “commission’s consent order” was something Google agreed to last year over concerns about Google’s ill-fated Buzz service. With that order, Google agreed to make more prominent privacy disclosures to users (and obtain their consent for any data sharing).

“Although data from a user’s Google+ contacts is not displayed publicly, Google’s changes make the personal data of users more accessible. Users can opt out of seeing personalized search results, but cannot opt out of having their information found through Google search,” said a note on EPIC’s website.

Last September, EPIC asked the FTC to investigate Google’s acquisition of YouTube, arguing that Google was favoring YouTube videos in search results. Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan examines the allegations of favoritism in his post, To Understand Google Favoritism, Think “If Google+ Were YouTube”.

Postscript: See our follow-up story, Report: FTC Expanding Anti-Trust Investigation Of Google To Include Plus.

Related Articles

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Google “Search Plus” Impact on Local: Limited So Far
• Twenty Year FTC “Privacy Audit” Intended To Punish, Make Example Of Google
• The Incredible Stupidity Of Investigating Google For Acting Like A Search Engine
• Google Tying Google Plus and Many More