Although Google and the traditional search model dominate the search marketplace, newcomers to the space continue to innovate. A relatively recent phenomenon, “human-powered search,” is beginning to gain traction with searchers and is becoming a more competitive vertical amongst entrepreneurs. Defined as a sort of hybrid search model that relies on actual humans rather than a machine-generated algorithm when providing search results, there are already several engines offering this type of service, Bessed, ChaCha, and Mahalo, to name a few.  The New York Times provided a recent article on this subject: “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip” (subscription required).

Among these, Mahalo has received a considerable amount of press, partially due to its high profile unveiling at the Wall Street Journal’s D5: All Things Digital conference in late May. Mahalo, which translates to “thank you” in Hawaiian, offers manually edited results for its searchers from a team of 30 editors (yes, actual humans) and an emphasis on the most commonly-requested search terms. For any searches that are not covered by Mahalo’s editors, the engine will provide Google search results. In its infancy, Mahalo already has human-edited pages of results for 5,000 terms within popular content areas such as entertainment, travel, health, and technology. By the end of Q4, the company plans to expand this coverage to over 10,000 terms, with the ultimate goal of providing results for 1/3 of the most common search terms.

An intriguing approach to search, yes, but the obvious question is can this model really be sustained? Mahalo founder and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis is betting on it – he claims that the top 10,000 search terms account for 24% of all searches.  If Mahalo can provide extremely relevant, well-categorized results with the promise of the human touch, users will hopefully begin to appreciate the difference between machine-generated and human-generated results. Indeed, a query for “iPhone” conducted on Mahalo provides a page of insightful results, all organized into simple categories, including news articles, information and reviews, videos, a list of retailers, and support and tips, to name just a few. The same search on Google provides the highest ranked Organic results for that query, and ads from retailers selling the phone – helpful, yes, but not nearly as intuitive or robust as the information provided by Mahalo.

Clearly, consumer engagement in the blogosphere, the wiki-world, and on social networking sites continues to grow, and human-powered search could be poised to become the next big thing. According to the New York Times article above, “sometimes a small variation on an existing idea is enough to make it stand out.” It will be interesting to note not only the emergence of new human-powered search engines following Mahalo’s lead, but also the response to the demand for the human touch from the powerhouses like Google and Yahoo! Search. The war of humans vs. machines has only just begun.

Google has updated Google Video, signaling many that they are moving towards becoming a true video search engine.  Google recently updated the video search results to include videos from other video sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo! Video, Atom Films, and eBaums World, among others.  

The current results presentation is somewhat clunky, and in some cases similar to how they present photos in Google Image Search.  Because the search results rely on what is placed in the description, it is basically a META engine.  While the results are dominated by YouTube, and with good reason, it is interesting to see other sites begin to show up.  With this move, it is very conceivable that video-heavy websites, such as ESPN and CNN, could begin to show up in Google Video results in the near future.

One other site showing up more consistently in the results is expotv. It’s a user-submitted product review site where anybody can record themselves offering up their opinions on products. The list of products ranges from candy to medicine to movies. Why is this something AA|RF and its clients should be concerned about? Well, you can’t control what people say. They might be saying very nice things about products, but they could also be trashing them. Google Video will be a Beta product worth keeping a close eye on in the near future, especially as more and more results are rolled into Google’s new Universal Search platform.

Yahoo! Search Marketing recently released a new update to their Panama User Interface. Account managers now have the ability to move keywords from any ad group into any other campaign/ad group. This is very valuable from a time-saving perspective if one needs to move keywords around in a Yahoo! account without using the sometimes difficult bulk spreadsheet. Some early benefits and areas of opportunity for YSM:

Benefits: 

• Ability to move the keyword details – match type, custom bid, alternate text, and destination URL will be moved with the keywords.
• Reorganizing keywords – allows the move of existing keywords easily without using the bulk download sheet
• Ability to copy keywords – Otherwise, one would have to delete the keywords from that ad group. This means that one can pause the old keywords and re-activate them if needed. This is a nice workaround for any performance loss.
• Move up to 1000 keywords – This is great, especially for very large campaigns that need to move only a few terms at any one time.

Areas needing improvement: 

• History – All history is lost for terms that are moved. This could mean the ad quality getting reduced and possible cost-per-click increases until the performance is built back up.
• Ad creatives – The account manager will need to create new ads or copy old ones, however, the ads from the previous ad group do not copy over.
• Editorial Review – even though terms were previously approved, they still have to go through a new editorial review.