The next DFW SEM Association meeting is tomrrow night at the Renaissance Hotel in Richardson. The speaker will be Pubcon organizer and WebmasterWorld publisher Brett Tabke, who will be discussing search engine marketing, and also Pubcon Austin in March.
Corporate and individual memberships are available at the door, and the general public is welcome.
Go to the DFW SEM home page or blog for more information.
My latest column is posted at MediaPost Search Insider. This week I covered some of the key findings from a survey released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which was focused on search behavior “on a typical day”. Here is the first part of the article highlighting some of the key findings - a link to the full column is a the bottom:
The sample group consisted of 2,251 adults, ages 18 and older, surveyed between April 8 and May 11, 2008. The big question in the survey was, “did you happen to [use an online search engine] yesterday, or not?”, and yielded 1,553 who said ‘yes’. Here is what they found:
- Overall, the amount of daily search users grew 69% between 2002 and 2008.
- While coming in a close second to email in this study, search beat out other daily Internet activities such as reading the news (39%), checking the weather (30%), researching a hobby (29%), surfing for fun (28%), and visiting a social networking site (13%).
- Daily searchers are more likely to be “socially upscale”, and college educated with an income of $50,000 or more per year.
- Internet users with broadband connections were much more likely to search than those with dial-up at home (58% vs. 26%).
- Users between the ages of 18-29 and 30-49 were higher-than-average daily searchers (55% and 54% respectively). Of searchers 65 and older, only 27% were daily search users.
- Men are generally more aware of the differences between paid and natural search. The study found that men say they have searched more frequently, and are more confident in their search abilities.
Read the full column here:
http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/search_insider/?p=852
This one seemed to come out of the blue this morning. New search engine debuts, from a team that includes former Altavista lead engineer Louis Monier. I ran a few queries, and the most interesting thing I noticed was that it picked up relevant listings that I had not found before. But I have a few questions and personal thoughts about my experience:
- “Cuil” (pronounced “cool”) could not be any more confusing, and they would have to get “cool.com” to make it right. The problem is that the owner of that name is well known for holding on to his names, as he can afford to. Driving traffic to “cuil.com” will only drive traffic to “cool.com”, especially if word-of-mouth picks up. Google and Yahoo don’t have this problem.
- I saw a lot of relevant images, but they were misaligned with the results. It seems to infer that the image came from the site it indexed, but it wasn’t. It’s confusing, and irrelevant.
- The layout can be disorienting, and does not allow for easy scanning of the entire list. It would be nice if users had more control of the results display, including a standard ordered list, reduction of the desc/snippet, and prominence on the URL (a lot of trust is placed in the URL).
- The index could stand to be freshened up a bit. I found pages that had been removed months ago.
- The top 10 could use more diversity at the domain level. I found a lot of pages from a single domain that had little to offer.
All said, I’m keeping an eye on this one. Lots more to review - but this was my first impression. Danny Sulivan has a detailed review here: http://searchengineland.com/080728-000100.php
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