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During Search Engine Strategies San Jose back in August, I did a video interview with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. It will be uploaded to the SESConferenceExpo’s Channel on YouTube tomorrow.

Why the wait?

As Maury Sline explained to The Blues Brothers, “A gig like that, you gotta prepare the proper exploitation.”

So, here’s a taste of what you can look forward to seeing and hearing in tomorrow’s video interview: Matt talks about his job interview at Google before he joined the company as a software engineer in January 2000. He takes a look at trends in the industry, including mobile search. He praises an iPhone App developed by Barry Schwartz, President of RustyBrick. And he discusses the Cuttlets, the people who crowd around him at every search conference.

And what can you do today to ensure that you don’t miss the Matt Cutts video interview tomorrow? I’m glad you asked.

First, go to the SESConferenceExpo’s Channel and take a quick look around. You’ll find there are now 184 videos from SES London, SES New York, SES Toronto, and SES San Jose 2008.

According to YouTube Insight, these 184 videos currently have more than 45,000 combined views. That’s about three times more views than the number of people who attended these four conferences and expos this year.

And there will be more video interviews added during and after Search Engine Strategies Chicago, which will be held Dec. 8-12, 2008. That’s a lot of content — and a lot of insights from top search experts and the search engines themselves.

Now, some of these video interviews are uploaded to YouTube during each SES conference. But others are uploaded in the weeks and months following a show.

So, if you want to be alerted when the Matt Cutts video interview has been posted, all you need to do is hit the orange “Subscribe” button in the upper left hand corner of the SESConferenceExpo’s Channel, which already has 142 subscribers.

To embed one of these video interviews, just copy the code from the “Embed” box — which you can find in the “About This Video” box when you’re watching the video. Once you’ve copied the code, just paste it into your website or blog to embed it.

And if you want to embed several of these video interviews, use the Search Engine Strategies video widget. It will let you customize a SES Video Player Widget for the audience on your website or blog.

For example, in the header options, I selected the standard link and said I’m blogging at SES Chicago. For my playlist content, I selected videos of everyone, picked two thumbnails with a maximum of 25 results. And for my format option, I selected a vertical orientation. And the SES Video Player Widget generated the code for me to past into this blog post.

Now, I could have selected a customized header. And after going through an authentication process, I could have customized my playlist — and display only videos of my company. Or I could display videos of everyone, but with videos of my company first. You can see an example of this on the SEO-PR website.

Or, you can see an example of a more bi-partisan approach on the Search Engine Strategies Chicago home page — just below the fold. (By the way, if you register by Friday, Nov. 21, you can save up to $200 with the Early Bird rate.)

Now, I don’t need to explain the benefits of adding video to your blog. Search engine marketers and popular bloggers understand that already. But consider the benefits of adding relevant content from the latest SES conference and expo — quality content that can be customized for your audience. And, don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself. It is useful content that your website’s visitors will find beneficial or your blog readers will find valuable.

What’s the catch?

Well, if you select videos of everyone, then you might end up with a Matt Cutts video interview on your website or blog. And if anyone watches it, that would give the SESConferenceExpo’s Channel on YouTube more views.

Or, as Elwood told Maury Sline, “I know all about that stuff. I have been exploited all my life.”

Bill Tancer, the General Manager of Research at Hitwise and one of the keynote speakers at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, will be interviewed by Matt McGowan, Global VP of Marketing at Incisive Media, during an SES Webcast on Friday, Nov. 7, 2008, at 1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT. The title of Bill’s presentation is: “We Are What We Search.”

At a time when search engines are rapidly replacing the yellow pages (and news search engines are routinely scooping daily newspapers), Bill has access to a wealth of consumer information about Internet user behavior that was never available before. Bill is well known in the search industry for mining the latest Hitwise data, which is a sample of over 10 million Internet users U.S. and 25 million worldwide, to glean insights on the sites we collectively visit, what we search for and what that tells us about ourselves.

I spoke with Bill yesterday and he shared this news nugget with me: “I’m going to talk primarily about what search term data can tell us about the economy and consumer sentiment. I’ll also spend some time on finding insights on the effect of an economic downturn on search. You might expect that with recent contractions in online retail that search traffic to that category would be declining….Our data (while showing a recent small drop-off) indicates that search traffic to retail is up over the previous year….”

Bill’s webcast will cover other news-breaking search trends, implications for online advertisers, and he will give Webcast participants opportunities to ask him their most burning search trend questions! Oh, and Bill will give away 10 copies of his latest book, “Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters,” to the best questions fielded during the SES Webcast.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt must love controversy. In a speech to magazine executives Wednesday he called the internet “a cesspool”, AdAge reported.

I don’t know if that makes Google a sewerage company, but I think Schmidt should realize that many look at Google as their filter to the web. Employees like Matt Cutts spend all their time working on ‘purifying’ the results, to expect publishers to be the answer may not be the right approach.

Criticizing opponents to the Yahoo-Google ad deal may not be a smart move given the recent drop in value of the once “golden child” of the web. Schmidt challenged “if you are going to criticize us, criticize us properly.” Claiming ad prices would not increase under the Google Yahoo ad deal.

Schmidt displayed a certain amount of callous aloofness when he avoided questions about how publishers could improve their ranking with Google.

“”We don’t actually want you to be successful,” he said. The company’s algorithms are trying to find the most relevant search results, after all, not the sites that best game the system. “The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance,” he added” AdAge reported.

If you call the web a cesspool but do not offer insights to quality content providers who pay money to provide professional journalism I don’t think you are serious about cleaning it up, so much as taunting an economically challenged industry.

Google had been doing a series of posts about search quality. Today, the latest post in the series discusses how evaluation enters into the the process.

Scott Huffman, Engineering Director, gave four insights into the nuances of difficulty experienced in search evaluation:

• First, understanding what a user really wants when they type a query — the query’s “intent” — can be very difficult. For highly navigational queries like [ebay] or [orbitz], we can guess that most users want to navigate to the respective sites. But how about [olympics]? Does the user want news, medal counts from the recent Beijing games, the IOC’s homepage, historical information about the games, … ? This same exact question, of course, is faced by our ranking and search UI teams. Evaluation is the other side of that coin.
• Second, comparing the quality of search engines (whether Google versus our competitors, Google versus Google a month ago) is never black and white. It’s essentially impossible to make a change that is 100% positive in all situations; with any algorithmic change you make to search, many searches will get better and some will get worse.
• Third, there are several dimensions to “good” results. Traditional search evaluation has focused on the relevance of the results, and of course that is our highest priority as well. But today’s search-engine users expect more than just relevance. Are the results fresh and timely? Are they from authoritative sources? Are they comprehensive? Are they free of spam? Are their titles and snippets descriptive enough? Do they include additional UI elements a user might find helpful for the query (maps, images, query suggestions, etc.)? Our evaluations attempt to cover each of these dimensions where appropriate.
• Fourth, evaluating Google search quality requires covering an enormous breadth. We cover over a hundred locales (country/language pairs) with in-depth evaluation. Beyond locales, we support search quality teams working on many different kinds of queries and features. For example, we explicitly measure the quality of Google’s spelling suggestions, universal search results, image and video searches, related query suggestions, stock oneboxes, and many, many more.

Not sure if I’m buying that Olympics example. Google didn’t do a great job with the Beijing Olympics, and surely their algorithm could handle serving up more relevant search results during the time surrounding the event.

I’m not saying that search query intent evaluation is easy, just that the Olympics query is not quite as problematic as Google is making it out to be.

The rest of the points are things we’ve been hearing from Google for a long time. We know they’re progressing on universal and personalization search efforts, all in their famous intent to create the best user experience.

So, what methods does Google employ to address these evaluations? Huffman offered up the following:

• Human evaluators. Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or “side by side” with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions.
• Live traffic experiments. We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of queries are shown results from alternative search approaches. Ben Gomes talked about how we make use of these experiments for testing search UI elements in his previous post. With these experiments, we are able to see real users’ reactions (clicks, etc.) to alternative results.

What do you think of Google’s search evaluation? What evaluations would you like to see them conduct? Discuss in the comments.

According to Abbey Klaassen of Advertising Age, YouTube plans to launch a new feature called HotSpots this week that will allow “video creators to monitor how viewings rise and fall within a video.”

Klaassen writes, “HotSpots plays a video alongside a graph that maps whether the audience is lower or higher than average for a particular length of video. When the graph goes up, the video is ‘hot,’ and more viewers are watching — because there’s either less attrition or some viewers are fast-forwarding or rewinding to isolate a particular point in the video. When the graph goes down, the video is ‘cold’ because viewers are leaving the video or skipping to another part of the content.”

Klaassen adds that YouTube plans to unveil another service, called Visible Measures, which measures audience engagement within a video.

I can’t find any additional information about YouTube’s HotSpots or Visible Measures, so it appears that Abbey has a scoop.

In her article, Klaassen also interviews Matt Williams, a senior at State University of New York-Brockport, who makes funny videos and with his friend Andrew Reynold under the YouTube channel name StanleyJenkins. Williams estimates that optimizing videos based on YouTube Insights data has doubled his traffic.

Williams also noted that most of his video traffic was referred from related videos. That’s something that I also highlighted during my presentation at SES San Jose last month.

Li Evans of KeyRelevance interviewed me following the Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) session about the importance of related videos — and the benefits of reaching out to influential bloggers to ask them to embed videos in their blogs. Check out Li’s interview below.

VSEO - Video Search Engine Optimization - with Greg Jarboe

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Recently, SEW Expert Erik Qualman examined Google Insights for search trends related to newly announced Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Like Barack Obama, being unknown sends people a-searching on the internet.

Google Trends and Insights gets a lot of attention when it comes to measuring searches, and so does measurement firm comScore.

But the number 2 and 3 search engines also provide insight into hot searches. So, let’s take a look at Microsoft’s xRank and Yahoo’s Buzz Index to see what’s hot in their user searches this week too.

Microsoft’s xRank sorts hot searches by categories. The current categories are Celebrities, Musicians, Politicians, Blogger and Olympics.

Here’s a screenshot of the Politicians page for this week:

The Yahoo Buzz Index has categories, but not one for politics. Here’s a general look at the top searches:

What do you think of xRank and Buzz Index? Let us know in the comments.

The recently announced Google Insights tool provides unprecedented data on Google’s user searches and trends. In today’s building brand equity column, “(Google) Insights on VP Candidate Sarah Palin,” Erik Qualman offers three quick tips on how to leverage Google Insights, whether you’re running a Presidential race or a brand marketing campaign.

» Full story

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