dessalles

So there’s the widely accepted assumption that the future of online advertising lies in profile-based targeting. The thought being that people don’t hate advertising, they hate irrelevance. And maybe, just maybe, if enough information is gathered about an individual, a precisely targeted ad will transcend into some sort of enlightened state of personalized, peer recommendation - leaving behind the delusion of disruptive marketing

Well, we’re starting to catch glimpses of just how complicated advertising nirvana will be. Last week the New York Times ran a story about Google’s latest search result enhancement:

This month, the company introduced a search-within-search feature that lets users stay on Google to find pages on popular sites like those of The Washington Post,Wikipedia, The New York Times, Wal -Mart and others. The search box appears when someone enters the name of certain Web addresses or company names — say, “Best Buy” — rather than entering a request like “cellphones.”

So if users are going to be searching for content, no matter where, Serge and Larry would like they them to be using Google. Makes sense. But wait!

Retailers, [Internet consultant] Mr. Rimm-Kaufman added, should be even more leery of this feature, and not because they will lose sales to competitors whose ads appear in Google’s refined search results. More sophisticated retail sites have search functions that take into account a customer’s past behavior to suggest certain items, as well as more accurate data on which items are in stock.

“Some of our retail clients have pretty horrible site search,” he said. “So for them, this will be a benefit. For our larger clients, we’ll probably ask Google to turn this off.”

That is the route that Amazon has apparently chosen. The retailer declined to comment for this article, but last week Google’s search-within-search function did not appear when users entered “amazon.com” into the initial search box.

That’s right Goog, if it’s Amazon’s content they’re after, it’s Amazon that’ll be doing the targeting - thank you very much.

Beyond the obvious competition for opportunities to serve targeted ads to users, and the distant possibility of Amazon opting out of Google completely, what I find particularly interesting is the prospect of competing recommendations on either side of a search result. What happens when Google is telling you one thing, and a second later Amazon is telling you something very different? Meanwhile, the context hasn’t changed; the only difference is the profile data on which the targeting is based. Who’s recommendation carries more weight? Well, whose algorithm knows you best? Will I ever find myself preferring one rec system over another because “it just gets me”? And do the mental transaction costs of deciding who’s got you figured out, undercut the value of the recommendation? In this future of super-relevant, profile-based targeting, what happens when everyone who knows anything about you is recommending you something different?

And sadly, Google missed out on the obvious recursive geek joke. Alas, a search box doesn’t appear under the first search result for “google“. I guess they’re too busy drinking other peoples’ milkshakes.