Susan casey
Keynote: Satya Nadella
Good morning, folks! It’s time for a keynote and I’m excited. This girl had a lot of fun at the IM Charity Event last night and didn’t get out of control like some of the rest of you. [glares knowingly]
This isn’t my first time covering a keynote with Satya Nadella aka the Senior VP for Microsoft’s Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group. Feel free to check out the previous Satya Nadella Keynote from SMX Advanced 2007 before checking out this one. Or not. It’s up to you. Apple juice is delicious.
It looks like we’re about to get started.
[ZOMG, someone needs to get control of the sound system before Michael Gray and I are blown out of the room. Why so loud, SES, why so loud? I swear we’re awake.]
Satya says good morning. Good morning, Satya! He offers us a brief bio: Before he joined search, he worked on enterprise systems, building CRM and ERP systems. In 1999 and 2000, he was associated with Link Exchange. He worked on the banner exchange and click trade. They were doing interesting things in search marketing early on. It’s been amazing to come back to the industry to see how far it’s gotten and how it’s matured.
He’s going to talk about how Microsoft thinks about the evolution of search and how Microsoft will shape those trends and how they’ll take advantage of them.
How should we think about the current state of search? The best way to categorize is to look at core search itself. Look at the business model and see how each part in the eco system comes together. Then, you have to look at the users and their needs. History is not a linear thing.
The first phase of search started with directories. It was built up by human taxonomies. It was about getting links into those taxonomies. The business model was based on impressions and paid inclusions. The participants were fairly passive. It wasn’t clear how they would participate in a marketplace that was driven through directories. With the end users, they wanted to navigate and browse. It was about finding information.
From there we went to the magic of keyword-based search and how simple it was. We learned about the tricks you could play with map and stats on top of that. It can do magical things in terms of giving you relevant results. That’s come a long way, even in the past 3 or 4 years. The business model has gone to cost-to-click.
The ROI that advertisers care about is still there in CPC, but the sophistication today is phenomenal. It’s amazing to see how quantitative these businesses have come. Publishers are still reacting but they’re hooked. Today, SEM is an art form and a science. The question is what’s next?
The end users are really interacting with all of this just using keywords. It’s the easiest thing to use. For an end user, they type in a couple of keywords and it allows them to talk to a search engine in a very simple way. That’s the state we’re in today and it’s a pretty good state.
The question now is will search change? Is there room for improvement? And if so, what are some of the pressure points that are going to cause this change?
Key trends he wants to talk about: User intent, Content and Context, and Advertising Efficiency.
User Intent:
As they look at their log data and analyze it, the interesting fact is that people aren’t just doing a single query and getting out of a search session. If you look at the time spent on search engines, the amount of time spent in long sessions is amazing. Most sessions are greater than 30 minutes. That’s a pretty revealing fact about what people are trying to get out on search engines.People spend a lot of time on the engines and 50 percent of the time you’re starting with something you did before. There’s something going on here in terms of users really using search to accomplish a task. So the question is what are we going to do to help them with that task?
He shows a pie chart of what a user session looks like. They start with a set intent. They search, they go back, they modify their query, they check another site, they go back, they update their query, and they finally buy about 55 minutes later. That’s the type of query behavior we’re seeing in search engines. What are the experiences we build that can be more optimized for such behavior?
They’re trying to understand search patterns. They can’t prematurely try and slap some new experience in front of users before the intent has been fully expressed. But if it’s a 30 minute session, you’ll probably, at some point, have a better handle on what people are trying to do.
The notion of understanding user intent and user tasks will help them look at using ways to shape the search experience. It’s one of the most important behaviors for them to look at in the industry.
Content and Context:
Their index growth on images and video is …
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