Monday, December 15, 2008

Over Optimizing Relevancy

As posted October 22, 2008 on SearchFuel.com:

My topic for this post comes from a thought I had during my last blog entry, Google’s Real Time Quality Score Changes Your Query Results.

“One of the reasons search works so well is because it’s the most-efficient advertising medium available. If the search engines keep making changes like this, it is not going to stay that way and then you have to wonder – will search still be as popular or will advertisers give up on it?”

Google’s Quality Score nightmares, while the most significant, haven’t been the only changes the engines have been making in the last few months. We’ve seen Yahoo’s unannounced version of extended broad match appear as if from no where. MSN had a fun time surprising us, and themselves for that matter, with their change in display URL de-duping policy. And good old Ask has upgraded their technology to provide faster and more relevant results.

What’s with all of the unannounced system upgrades guys? Not only did we find out about the Yahoo!, MSN and Ask upgrades after the fact, but why are the big four releasing these changes that are supposed to make things more relevant all at the same time? September and October have been crazy months here in the search world.


And let’s get back to the point of these upgrades- that are “supposed” to make search results more relevant. From what I’ve seen professionally and personally the results have become less relevant. For a professional example, let’s consider the brand Orbit gum. Note- Orbit gum is not a client of mine, although this scenario has happened with real clients at our agency. There’s just a pack of it sitting on my desk, so we’ll go with it. Let’s say you searched on Google for “sugarfree gum.” Now let’s also pretend we know Orbit gum is running a paid search account in Google AdWords. You would expect the Orbit gum ad to show since sugarfree is a major selling point for Orbit. Prior to the roll-out of the Real Time Quality Score (RTQS) changes, the Orbit ad for the search phrase “sugarfree gum” had a high Quality Score (QS), a reasonable CPC, strong CTR, and showed up in the top three positions consistently. Post RTQS roll-out; this is no longer the case. Orbit cannot get their ad to show in Google on a search query where they are undoubtedly relevant with their keywords, ads and landing pages- the same search query they had such amazing results with before RTQS was rolled out. Tell me how this ad is no longer relevant?

For a personal example as your every day searcher, I went to Yahoo! and searched on the title of a book I’m reading, “Twilight.” In my screen shot below, you can see in the paid results a listing for a show called Tudors was served.







I understand there may be value for Tudors to be bidding on the term “twilight”; they may be able to capture some clicks from people like me since the audience demographics overlap between the show and the movie. I get it. Is this ad showing as part of the new extended broad match-like system Yahoo is using? That I can’t say since Tudors is not a client of mine. Maybe they are bidding on the term “twilight.”

What I don’t get is how can the search engines tell me that Orbit gum is not relevant to a search on “sugarfree gum” but the show Tudors is relevant to the book Twilight?? These are just two examples and I’m using two different engines so as not to pick on just one. I could go on and on. My point here is have we finally hit a point where the engines have over-optimized their algorithms the same way search marketers can over-optimize an account? Has their quest to better understand what searchers are looking for gone too far so they’re now at a place where they don’t understand me at all? My hunch from what I’ve seen going on lately is…quite possibly yes.

As the engines keep raising our Min CPCs, telling us we’re not relevant when we clearly are, and providing searchers with listings they are clearly not looking for, what does the future of search look like? Will the algorithms revert back to how they were a year or two ago? Will they keep making new enhancements that don’t enhance anything except their bank account?