Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

According to this Comscore report, (thanks for the pointer to this Garth) Ebay is the largest SEM marketer on the web with 800+MM exposures and which represented 4.1% of the total (March 2007 data). It makes sense that their decision to pull advertising on Google made Google blink.

In March, paid search activity in the U.S. generated nearly 20 billion total sponsored link exposures. The top ten paid search advertisers, generating 16 percent of all sponsored links, were all retail or comparison shopping sites. eBay.com led with 802 million sponsored link exposures (4.1 percent), followed by Smarter.com with 366 million (1.9 percent), and Shopping.com with 357 million (1.8 percent).

Ebay also owns Shopping.com which is also an SEM Monster.

At Calvin’s recommendation I downloaded and tried out TabMixPlus (a Firefox extension) and it’s awesome. It allows me to configure the tab open behavior to the model that I want which means I’m not going to be opening IE7 as often.

The program has a wealth of options and allows you to control just about every aspect of the tab browsing experience. Thanks for the pointer!

PS: On an unrelated note, the new Google Analytics interface has added hourly intraday data back in, which rocks.

I know I’m going to hate myself in the morning for saying this, but IE7’s implementation of tabbed browsing has one tiny detail in it that Firefox doesn’t and it’s driving me nuts.

The issue is a small one (like most things that influence usability) - when you open a new tab in IE7, it opens the tab in the background immediately to the right of the tab that’s active.

Firefox opens a new tab in the rightmost position. Also, IE’s tab scroll controls are on the ends of the tab bar while Firefox’s are clustered on the right side.

If you’re like me, you frequently have more tabs open that will fit on the screen. This means that in Firefox the tab you just opened is floating somewhere off to the right and you have to scroll to the right until you can see the tab you wanted.

A typical flow for me:

• Find interesting blog post
• Start reading, come across 2-3 interesting references in the post
• Open references in tabs (so I can get to them after I finish the main post)

I often have more tabs open than will fit in the application window and I often find the idea of localized access applies to my reading. In IE7, my flow is uninterrupted - as I open new tabs, they are clustered around the one I’m reading. When I move from one to the other, my clicking is localized and I don’t have to search the tab bar for the pages I just opened.

In Firefox, I find myself constantly having to stop what I’m doing to find the pages I just opened. The tab I just opened is floating somewhere to the right and I have to click on the right scroll arrow to find it. Now, if I want to reference the original post, my eye has glanced to the left, I’ve noted it’s off screen to the left, but then I have to go back over to the right because the left and right controls are clustered together. In IE7, the left control is where my eye ended up - on the left side of the window.

This is a minor, niggly, nit-picky issue, but it annoys me constantly. It makes me notice the browser instead of having it fade into the background. On balance, I still strongly prefer Firefox, but this issue annoys me enough that I’ll open up IE multiple times/day.

Details matter.

PS: If I’m missing an obvious Firefox config setting or a Greasemonkey script, please enlighten me - I’ll be eternally grateful. (Ok, maybe eternally is slightly overstating the point - you know what I mean though…)

There’s a great, raw post on learning from failure at Raganwald that talks about “inventing a great solution to a problem no one cares about…” This is something which is all too familiar to a lot of us. It is definitely possible for something to be really cool and for nobody to give a damn. Mid-way through the post, there’s a section on selling that really resonated with me.

But something I learned from selling Macintoshes back in the day is this: only make one sale. Convincing someone they have a problem is one sale. Convincing them you have the solution is another. And convincing them that today is the day to act is a third. If you have to do all three at the same time, you are doomed.

This is why experienced companies distinguish sales from marketing. The first two steps are marketing, the third is selling. When you are a new company, you don’t have the resources to market and sell. You have to work with an established pain point (eliminating the first hurdle), then use PR and limited marketing funds to get the word out that you have solved the problem (the second hurdle). You only have time and energy for the third sale, separating customers from their money.

Changing behavior is really hard and whether you’re selling software or convincing someone to use your website, having to make multiple sales just compounds your problem. If you’re not alleviating pain, it’s going to be a tough slog.

There’s an interview on John Battelle’s blog with Udi Manber (formerly at A9, now at Google) that discusses universal search and what’s coming next. Udi’s reply to a question about next steps really made an impression on me.

Q: I’m very interested in the next steps. Without telling us too much (if you would like to, why, please do), what are the interesting problems in search right now that you feel well positioned to address?

A: As search gets better, user expectations rise even higher, and we need to improve at a faster rate. Most of our work still focuses on the fundamentals — making results more relevant, more comprehensive, for more users, in more languages. Much of this work involves pure algorithms, deep understanding of search and of the web, and just plain hard work. Just the way we like it. It is not sexy to the outside world and it doesn’t make headlines, but it has the highest impact. Most of the advances in pure ranking that we’re making aren’t obvious to users — they just find what they’re looking for more often and they take it for granted. Just the way it should be.

There’s no question that you have to continue to improve the foundation on which you’re building. I think this holds true for anything you’re trying to master. You’re never done when it comes to getting better at the basics.

Another powerful idea in here is the notion that as the tool gets better and better, it disappears and users start to take it for granted and focus on the task they are trying to accomplish. It’s something we should all be striving for.

At Judy’s Book, we get a significant fraction of our traffic to our deal and tag pages. In the site tree structure, these are leaf pages. Odds are that a visitor that lands on a deal page is not going to click on an ‘About’ link or click to the home page to see what the site is about.

This means that you have to think of every page as though it’s your site home page. It needs to do whatever job it’s expected to do (in the case of a deal page, it needs to describe a deal and drive a user to convert) but it also needs to tell a story that allows the user to determine what your site is all about.

Sorry for the flood of random Google junk today. Every time Google launches a new version of Desktop, I try it out in the hope that it doesn’t slow my machine down too much. Apparently, this version can now index mail I haven’t received yet.

I tried to log in to my Google Calendar today and got this:

Good to know that even Google has issues from time to time.

As you try and translate your product plans into reality, inevitably, you are faced with making tradeoffs between desired features and ease of implementation. You have to walk a line between your perception of user value and time-t0-market. In general, I tend to lean towards simplification to get things moving but it’s important to recognize when you’re in danger of crippling your product. In addition, the temptation when something is released to move on to the next thing - this has to be avoided; especially if you released with some rough edges. You don’t want your user experience to die the death of a thousand cuts. By all means, simplify, release and iterate. Just make sure you iterate.

The best way to improve your ranking in Google search results is to give your users something they care about. I’m a big believer in being smart about SEO but anytime you start doing things that don’t benefit users to boost short term search rankings, you’re headed to dangerous territory. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore SEO best practices. Quite the opposite in fact. Making sure search engines can make sense of your site is critical.

Seth Godin has a great post about this on his blog:

It seems to me that in the SEO arms race, shortcuts have a shorter shelf-life than ever before. Building 43 is obsessed with them, and they outnumber whoever you might hire to beat the system. Organic success, on the other hand, is a clear path. If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Not just boilerplate information you stole from a legal website, but really useful stuff about you, the local courts, the forms people need… the things you’d want to find if you were doing that search.

Once you’ve done everything you can… once you’ve built a web of information and once you’ve given the ability to do this to your best clients and your partners and colleagues, then by all means apply the best SEO thinking in the world to your efforts. Hire the best consultants and use the resources you’ve got left to be sure you’re playing by the right rules.

I think Seth is spot on with one exception. I think you need to be smart about using best practices for search discovery from the outset. Google organic traffic is like gold and having a good knowledge of SEO best practices (or working with someone who does) from the start is incredibly important.

P.S. Seth also points to a NYT article by Saul Hansell that takes a look at Google’s Search Quality group. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it if you’re interested in search.