Primitive Search?

At the same time this week that Google was reporting a surge in net profits - net income climbed to US$1bn in the first three months of 2007, up from $592m on a year earlier – hakia, a new meaning-based search engine released an interesting survey in New York.

92 percent of web-based ad experts say paid search advertising is only evolved halfway at best. Of the 221 polled on April 11-12 at the Search Engine Strategies 2007 Conference in New York, 71% say the industry is half-way there, 21% responded the industry is very primitive; and just 3% believe the industry cannot get any better. Five percent of respondents were not sure.

According to Melek Pulatkonak, president and COO of hakia, “The reality is the search industry still has a long way to go when one considers that the average search takes 11 minutes and half of searches are abandoned. The paid-search advertisers’ vote reflects this sentiment.”

What does this mean for Pingar?

I believe it suggests that there is a major opportunity for start-ups and mash-ups in this space. Had I voted in the same poll, I would probably have looked very seriously at the ‘very primitive’ option. I do not really believe that ‘paid search advertising’ has evolved to any level of depth at present.

Longer term, search must become significantly more sophisticated in terms of both the analytical tools it can interface with and the application output it can generate. At the moment, it rarely delivers more than a list of links which the user then has to interrogate. The real value of search will become apparent when the technology moves beyond this indexing mode. The creation of analytical tools which can filter search query results and publish them dynamically through new and innovative applications will create new opportunities for the user, the content owner and the advertiser alike.

The companies who can capture this value will determine the future of paid search advertising and the business models it will induce.