Tim Kilroy

A Quiet End for Yahoo! Search

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

A shift that should have measured 10.0 on the Richter Scale produced barely a tremor.

Last week, Yahoo Search disappeared. While not the first search engine, Yahoo was the granddaddy to almost every major innovation in search. Yahoo was fast and nimble. They were experimental and innovative. And perennially underappreciated.

A long time ago, I worked at Inktomi, a former high-flier in the search space (before the crash in 2000). Yahoo was the major competition. There was Yahoo, and everyone else. Yahoo acquired Inktomi in 2002 and incorporated the best parts of the Inktomi algorithm and technology into Yahoo. So I feel like I owned part of Yahoo’s backbone. And truly, I am sad to see Yahoo’s search engine disappear. But it is being replaced by an equally innovative, laser-focused search engine, Bing.

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Facebook Is Killing the Internet – And I Love It

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

OK, so right off the bat, let’s get over the whole Facebook privacy thing. While it has spurred some really interesting discussion, Facebook is not out to steal your credit card, your social security number or anything that is really, really private. We can talk about that later. Today, I want to take a look at how Facebook is just killing the internet…and, I love it.

Facebook is a giant monster. 4 bazillion people use it every day. And according to a statistic I just made up, every man woman and child in the United States wastes 119.7 hours each week playing Farmville and Mafia Wars.

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Facebook’s Open Graph: Pros, Cons and the Future

Posted on May 10, 2010 by PM Digital

PM Digital bloggers weigh-in on Facebook’s Open Graph.

Marketing Opportunities vs. Privacy

Suzy Sandberg:  When I first heard the details of Open Graph, I immediately went into Facebook to turn the feature off.  Facebook went with a pre-checked box to enable the Open Graph feature which requires unchecking to opt out.   We’ve seen this before — a Facebook platform change with privacy implications where the user must seek out and select new privacy settings in the application to undo a new feature.

Open Graph is getting buzz for two reasons:  one is its ability to socialize the internet in a new, unique way.  The other is the emergence of new privacy concerns, of which Facebook has already had its share of in the past.  Are the benefits of Open Graph really worth the positive buzz?  And/or how much of the privacy concerns are just noise?

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What the iPad Means for Marketers

Posted on April 13, 2010 by PM Digital

Now that we’ve have had a week to put the new iPad through its paces, we asked our PM Digital bloggers for their thoughts on the device with an eye to its potential for marketers.  Below are some of their initial impressions and takeaways.


OS4 Will Make the iPad Truly “Magical and Revolutionary”

Chris Paradysz:  OS4 will have multi-tasking capabilities.  Now, I love the iPad.  I can be excited about any great technology, but it should fulfill the hope I had back when I blogged about it earlier in the year that it will create an intimacy bond between content and users.

Music, video, words, pictures should no longer be disconnected from touch and feel.  The iPod and iPhone didn’t transform this connection with people (consumers).  With the portability, size and weight of the iPad well-suited to most people’s hands and laps, it can easily move from one position to another and from one person to another.

From a marketing pov, this creates a new experience sensation and viral ability that prior e-readers have failed to deliver.  Within an app or the internet, an advertiser can deliver a rich brand or offer experience, not just ink on “paper”.   With the iAd and technology infrastructure to support it, I have two questions:  1) how soon will it be before Apple starts up an advertising agency; 2) will a new SNL Apple skit be on this Saturday night?


A Must-Have Device You Didn’t Know You Needed

Suzy Sandberg: Just to get this out of the way, YES, the iPad does look like a giant iPod Touch. (iPad owners, I feel your pain on this relentless comment).  And since I can’t strap the iPad to my arm when I go running, I do still need my iPod Touch. And I still need my laptop since the iPad has limitations (no USB for one). I also have/need a cell phone until/unless Verizon ever actually does get the iPhone.

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Online Marketing Meets the Presentation Layer

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

Forget about controlling your customers and dive deep into the essentials of messaging and brand.

Marketers love control. We crave it. We want to own the discussion. Setting the parameters of the interactions that our brands have with our consumers is our professional mission.

Many marketers have “grown up” in one-way media, be it television or print or catalog. In these experiences, the terms of the discussion were at the control of the marketer. By and large, we decided what our customers saw and heard.

But with the advent of the internet, our control has started to slip away. We control the presentation on our own websites (mostly), and in the early days of the internet, that was sufficient. As the dynamic nature of the internet and social media and search has evolved, it has become harder and harder to get the consumer to our little corner of the world, where their experience is shaped by our vision. Now we must attract them to that experience through multiple presentation layers that are the discovery mechanisms from which consumers self-select their interaction with us.

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Going Mobile

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

In 1971, The Who released a great album, Who’s Next, and Track #7 is the classic “Going Mobile”.  Who would have known that Pete, Roger and the gang were actually predicting the great mobile explosion of 2010?

From 3G enabled smartphones to ubiquitous WiFi-enabled laptops to the looming iPad, the internet is going mobile. I know that this isn’t really breaking news (I was involved in a mobile internet project launch in 2000), but now the mobile explosion is here. The question at hand is how do marketers take advantage of mobile and how do consumers use mobile.

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It’s All Search

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

Search is a big channel. There are die-hard people in the SEO world who never think about paid search as part of search…it’s advertising they say. There are PPC jockeys who have disdain for anything that doesn’t have an easy metric and a quick way to A-B test. Anything else is squishy, they say.

Well, any debate that pits natural search vs. paid search is missing the synergistic whole.

It’s all SEARCH.

Search is about the traffic that comes from results to specific queries. And while there is a difference between the way paid and natural search works, as a marketer, it may help you to think of them as a single channel, because they work together so well.

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Apple iPad: The Future at Your Fingertips

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

Welcome to the new world of internet intimacy and the acceleration of image-based search.

I watched the unveiling of the Apple iPad with some genuine excitement the other day. At the end of the presentation, I can honestly say that I was underwhelmed. The iPad is just a big iPhone…so what?!?

And then I thought…wait a minute…the thing is a big iPhone…that changes everything! (Well, not really, but it does have some interesting implications.)  What has really resonated with me is the concept of intimacy. With Steve Jobs demonstrating the iPad from a cushy looking chair, engaging the internet with his finger, it dawned on me what has just happened. The internet became a much less cerebral place. No longer is your interactivity with content tempered by mouse navigation, the internet reacts to your finger. It is instinctual, organic and perhaps even a little impulsive.

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10 for 2010: What Matters Most for Natural Search Success in the New Year

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

As the New Year turns, it’s normal to look ahead. So here is my list of what’s coming up in the world of natural search for 2010.  In lieu of predictions, however, I’d like to offer up something a bit more actionable: a rundown of key areas that will require online marketers’ focus and attention to maximize natural search success in the coming year.

1.  Mobile Matters – I have actually been beating the mobile drum since I worked on mobile search in 1997, but this year, mobile really matters. (Google and Apple have spent almost $1 billion in the last quarter to buy mobile ad networks…that should tell you something!) The growth of mobile is torrid and with the rise of the smartphone and ubiquitous 3G, mobile search is working. In 2010, you will see an appreciable amount of traffic from mobile browsers. Are you thinking of how you can present yourself to the mobile user? If you aren’t now, you should be.

2. Images Matter – Visual search is hot. There have been dozens and dozens of early stage visual search engines that have been no better than demo-ware. But Google Image search has exploded, and we see that our clients are driving traffic through images searches. (If you are looking for a red dress, doesn’t it make sense to look for the red dress in pictures?) And with the advent of Google Goggles, image search will continue to explode. Are you optimizing your images to be relevant and available for image search?

3. Not Being a Dog Matters – Do you remember this incredible cartoon which touted the invisibility of who you are online? Well, the world has changed dramatically since then, and your reputation as a marketer is now well known on the internet. In 2009, I suggested that reputation was about to become an important part of the online world, and 2010 that will become even more valuable. How you behave as a marketer, how you share information with customers, and how you engage with customers will have an impact on your search visibility in 2010.

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Ready For a Cuppa?

Posted on December 8, 2009 by Tim Kilroy

Google Caffeine’s obsession with speed will bring tremendous opportunities for marketers in 2010 – but you’d better get moving now.

GoogleAnyone who knows me knows that I am mildly obsessed with coffee. I savor it, gulp it, glory in it. But really, it is all about the caffeine. Caffeine makes me feel alive. Caffeine makes me engaged. Caffeine makes my heart purr along at 600 beats per minute. Caffeine is essential. Google shares my love for the caffeinated lifestyle. They are obsessed with speed. They want their servers chugging along like they’ve spent the afternoon with 400 of their favorite baristas. Google is ready to rock Caffeine, their new internal search architecture.  Google Caffeine is ready to roll out after the holidays.

What Does Google Caffeine Mean to Marketers?

Fundamentally, it doesn’t change your current search positions a lot. The essential algorithm that Google uses to determine which sites are relevant for particular terms isn’t really changing that much in the near term (but look out…big changes are coming…more on that before Christmas). But there are nuances that are becoming evident:

1. Indexing - Caffeine is all about indexing speed for Google. How many more pages can Google add to its index and how quickly?  Caffeine represents a significant change in Google’s housekeeping. This is good for Google. They are speeding up the indexing because the web is exploding in its growth. (See my Here Comes The Flood for more info on the whats, whys, and wheres of the explosions).  Google needs to get faster so that it can keep up with the deluge of new information and links. The takeaway for marketers is that you can expect to see your newer pages show up in the index (but not necessarily well ranked) sooner. Speed of indexation is good, but a bigger index means that you have even MORE work to do to keep yourself visible. You will likely have to do less work to become seen by Google, but more work to be visible to searchers.

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