Google Is Your Friend & Needs Great Content

Here are my edited notes from the session that ended minutes ago during SIPA's "New Rules" Conference held here in DC. Please pardon typos, fragments, etc. Much of this is direct quoting, or as close as I could paraphrase. This is NOT a transcript. Mr. Madden was a forthcoming and articulate speaker. --Tom Hagy

Andrew Madden
Strategic Partnership Development
Google
amadden@google.com


Google is your friend . . . I am here to speak about how to improve your visibility on Google. We want to communicate directly with content partners.

“Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” We are increasingly focused on offline content, so we can get access to it; this tends to be a pretty easy job as content owners see they are getting crawled and indexed. At first, we crawled what was available online. Since Google was founded about 10 years ago, we have seen dramatic change in the kinds of content we crawl and index, and kinds of content users are seeking. Users used to be satisfied with whatever was out there on sites, now they want biographies and documentaries. They want local and mapping information. These are the content types we have had to integrate. We are bringing books online to make them discoverable online online. We see the impact of video online is huge. We are unsure of what the next big innovation will be . . . .

The three key components of the Google business model. Users. Content. Advertisers. Users are the most important. “Google is not interested in being a content creator. We want to drive users to content creators. If a content creator wants to work with an advertiser we want to support that as well.” . . . .

The Internet highlighted the untapped potential on both the content and advertising side to reach smaller companies versus the large media companies and advertisers. It’s the “long tail.” “People are searching for everything. And Google helps content owners move down the tail.” Popular searches like "Harry Potter" are huge, but people also are searching "Peruvian Orchids" or "Jersey City." We won’t sell directly to you, but we will send you to Amazon or Borders . . . .

Now I will mention a few of our products "where we actually make money."

Key-word advertising. We are making an educated guess about what you are looking for as a searcher. We also offer ads in a syndicated format, so there are ads positioned on AOL and other sites. With syndicated content ads we load in contextually relevant links based on the content on a given page. See AdSense for Content. It is fully automated and fully self service . . . .

Improving Visibility on Google.com. The Google News Archive Search pulls from archival content. It is introduced as an index you’d find on Google News. Users can now take a deeper dive. They can refine searches by date and publication, or cluster results for similar topics.

If you, as a publisher, have paid content and the user hits the wall to register, our crawlier hits that same wall. Our crawlers are good but can’t get behind this. “With News Archive Search, we want full access to content behind the pay wall, driving more traffic. We kept advertising out of the mix for this relationship.” Good landing pages [e.g. with content] are great, bad pages [e.g. with walls] are death.

“To crawl firewall content some of it has to sit on our servers. We enter an agreement with providers to take the content down at anytime.”

We have dollar signs and amounts in search snippets. We give user the ability to make a decision to purchase. “User experience is important to us. If content is not labeled premium, and it is, they turn away from the bad experience.”

First Click Free. With this service the publisher let’s us in to full access to their content, so a Google searcher can intersect with fee content. “The searcher gets to consume the full text of one article. Once moving beyond that they hit the pay wall. Once in they can consume other content. Good for publishers who want to use teaser content or sell subscriptions. For news providers with a lot of content being posted throughout the day, it is a pretty compelling way to get people to your content.”

Another way is to use Google Web Master Tools. Submit a site map, inventory of site, add it to Google index. We know when you make updates. We can tell you what might be wrong with a page. We can provide detailed data. Help you to diagnose problems. Tell you which queries are most popular. We can do a much better job of accessing your site. It is simple to use. Powerful. Tells you what pages have errors, what pages are not found, which are blocking crawlers, timing out, or not reachable. Stuff publishers tend not to know. You can take down documents. Good self-service way to get Google to know what you are doing. Great for mobile devices. Provides a great way for content partners to push their content to us.

You can create shortcuts to content if you are a provider. iGoogle. For people with Google account. You can build modules around what is of interest to you. Personalized home page content modules. Same for toolbar.

Google Co-op helps users tailor their experience. Same for search. Some like broad general results. If you search Angelina Jolie, you can pick a source to appear first, e.g. People Magazine. I can subscribe to people.com. “When I get a search, having subscribed, those results appear at top of my search results.”

Custom search engine. Tailoring search results at your site, e.g. www.jumpup.com, from Intuit. There you see top business resources. Google custom search engine across a set of sources. Helps build community at site. Offers a better search experience. Highly targeted search engines can be assembled by your editors focusing on the URLs you want to focus on.

“The power of Google is the sources it searches.”


Question from this blogger: What prevents people from moving to the next hot search engine?

Answer: That is the fundamental question that we face at Google. How to keep people coming back. It is through content partnerships. Getting access to content that others can’t get access to. Something like archive searches. We look to hundreds of partners to allow us to use this content. What you can’t get elsewhere, like maps, YouTube . . . What we can add to our corpus of content that we can surface. Add more trusted, more respected, more useful content.