Sorry for the reference to apple picking, but here in the Northeast we are smack in the season, and nothing beats a ripe Honeycrisp apple.  The issue at hand is that as an industry we do not have a standard way to compare Search conversions to Display conversions.  There is much digital ink spilt over how Display and Search work in tandem.  There is even a recent study put together by comScore and Starcom showing the lift when Display and Search are ran together.  So, I pose the question will we ever, or even if we should, be putting our energy into finding one?

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I still remember, vaguely, when Fonzi jumped the shark on Happy Days, signaling what we know today as the decline of the show, but more importantly, I remember when Henry Winkler actually jumped a shark on Arrested Development.  Much like Happy Days, Twitter seems to be in a decline.  This statement is based on general observations and not on actual usage statistics because user statistics don’t show the real value that something can provide.  I know from personal usage (I have been registered on Twitter for over a year now) that I check it frequently and every once in a while I find something useful, but a majority of the time there isn’t anything that peaks my interest.  The following is some of my observations why I believe that Twitter has strapped on their water skis, hit the ramp, and are flying through the air in their best Fonzi impersonation.

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I know from the title alone that people are scratching their heads and wondering how the heck I could apply the title of “David” to a behemoth of a company like Microsoft.  I can because Microsoft last week announced a civil suit that they have filed against three individuals that they accuse of participating in click fraud on the MSN ad platform.  Microsoft is the “David” because Click Fraud (now turned into an entity by this post) is huge in the search industry, and though we deal with it, sweep it under the rug, pretend it is not there, etc. it is the “Goliath”.  The civil suit that Microsoft filed is less than one million dollars (as you read, know that I am touching my pinky finger to the corner of my mouth and looking evil), but will reap much, much more.  The PR alone, when we are all evangelizing about Bing, is enough to keep the momentum going for Microsoft.

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This year I was lucky enough to attend the Search Insider Summit in Captiva, Florida, for two reasons.  One, this conference is one of the best (though I do find it a bit incestuous) out there for Search and Online integration – it completely delves deeper, and I believe, provokes thought more than say a SES.  Two, it was in Florida’s high 80 degree weather and on the beach, and not in NYC’s rainy low 60 degree weather.  I attended most of the discussions, and a common theme of attribution became prevalent by the end of the conference.  Attribution in the Search world, for those of you that don’t have your buzz word dictionaries handy, is summed up basically by assigning value to all of the media that a consumer partakes in before they become a conversion, not just the last click.  Currently, most companies are using a Last Click Attribution Model.  This attribution theme was all over the place, but centered around these main themes; ability to track an attribution model that moves away from the last click, politics on that model and guidelines on the weights that model will bring.

The first theme of having an ability to track results based on a model other than the last click are there, but just hard to find.  Marion Software and Atlas are two that have the capability, or are driving the solutions that will allow us to do this sort of tracking seamlessly.  I admit, I have not worked with either in this capacity, but have been involved with Atlas as they were working on this model over a year ago.  The need or major push to work away from last click attribution just has not been there yet, and this brings up the next theme, politics.

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I will be the first to state that I welcome any new progress in search, whether it comes from Yahoo!, MSN, or another third tier search partner in order to break up the natural monopoly Google owns.  That is why I am excited, albeit hesitant, with the news that MSN is working on a more improved search engine.  I have always felt that MSN has the potential to do well for the user who is using search in order to find the information that they desire.  So with that, I am excited of the news that has hit most of our inboxes this morning, that MSN is testing their new code, named search engine Kumo, internally.

Kara Swisher at the WSJ Blog, BoomTown, reports on the new features and actually has a few screen shots.  I like the clean look that Kumo seems to be trying to achieve, and that the features navigation is on the left side; definitely a way to breakout and be different from Google’s across the top navigation.  I have always found Google’s to be somewhat cumbersome if you are wanting to use one of their other features around the particular KWP search that was performed, i.e. product search needs the searcher to click on the “more” link in order to drop down the Shopping section of Google.  MSN’s navigation has the potential to provide all features that they offer in a single view navigation.

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