Transcript The Search Economy Chapter 7 Peter Byun

Chapter 7
The Search Economy
Peter Byun
The Google Dance
= Google’s periodic updates of its algorithms
Reason: To penalize people who were gaming
their sites so they could be ranked higher
Result: Hurt a lot of innocent small internet
businesses
The SEO World
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
1. White Hats: Businesses that followed
legitimate guidelines to help Web sites so that
search engines could find, index, and
accurately rank them
2. Black Hats: SEOs that took unsavory
measures to game search engines.
Problem: Nobody was sure which practices were
white hat and which were black
Gray part: Affiliate Sites
= Redirect potential customers to larger
sites that have programs that pay for leads
AuctionBytes by Ryle Goodrich
-> “Florida” hit, two weeks later
Who Decides Gray?
- Contradiction between search results for
“New York Hotel” and “Digital Camera”
The AdWords Connection
• People were forced to buy AdWords
• Some people had suspicions that Google was
intentionally implementing new filters to drive
advertisers to AdWords
The Marketing Firmament Shifts
-Paid search shifted
content attachment -> intent attachment
-Content attachment:
Unpredictable, Untraceable
-Intent attachment: Lack of information
- Future: Content + Intent
They’re All Search Businesses
• Music business
- half-billion-dollar online business
• News business
- should let others on the Web link to
articles
• Make content that is worth pointing to
Local Is a Search Business
• Yellow pages will soon be a dead industry
• The mobile and local search revolution
Ex]
Universal Product Code (UPC) system
Effect
-Markets will have to compete on other factors
unrelated to price
The Problems Looming
• The trademark issue
-American Blinds: “Google is encouraging
and profiting by refusing to ban people
from buying others’ trademark terms on
AdWords”
-Google: “Google is only an intermediary
that works without bias.”