Winston Churchill said that “short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.”

Jakob Nielsen has made a very interesting link to how people write punchy and memorable prose and how people use search engines.

His thesis is that when searching for something on the web, the users will tend to use old and familiar terms.

Jakob comments, “Old words rule because people know them intimately. Familiar words spring to mind unbidden. Thus, users are likely to employ old words when they boil down their problem to a search query, which is typically only 2-3 words long.”

It’s one of those points that make you smack yourself on the head and say of course – he also suggests that you must cut down on marketing speak  and write simply using common terms “blind” as opposed to “visually impaired”  for example.

Also you should  use generic terms as well as brand names – to capture users who are in the early stages of looking Jakob’s comment is “don’t abandon the other 95% of prospects who are searching for their problem and don’t know the name of your solution.”

This is something we have done for some of our clients in both promoting brand name products, but also making sure that the web page is written to cover more general terms.

To give an example we have a client who sells Burglar alarms so we will do work on the site so that it works both for their (fairly well known)  brand name “Response Alarms” but also do some work on more generic terms like burglar alarm or home alarm – so that their site is found by searchers who know what brand of alarm they want and those who may be in the investigative phase of buying a product.

In July this year, AOL mistakenly released information on 20 million search queries by 658,000 of its users.

This search data was based on searches conducted between March and May 2006. The users did not give their permission to release this data.

* The data sample represents about 1.5% of AOL’s total users in May 2006 and about 0.33% of total searches conducted on AOL in the time period in question.

Some of this data had not been sufficiently protected, so theoretically, individual users can actually be identified and their search history traced. The search history could be potentially harmful.

Although I am sure some people will be aggrieved about this AOL error, from an online marketing point of view, this data gives us a good insight into searchers behaviours – particularly as AOL use Google’s search engine and Google searches make up around 75% of UK searches.

Highlights

47% of searches do not result in a clicks on the returned results

- This supports the theory that users, rather than clicking through search result pages, refine their search query and search again.

90% of user clicks are on the first page

- Page 1 ranking, or don’t bother!

4% of user clicks are on the second page

42% of clicks are on the 1st placed result.
12% of clicks are on the 2nd placed result.
8% of clicks are on the 3rd placed result.
6% of clicks are on the 4th placed result.
5% of clicks are on the 5th placed result.

More on this story at The Register

Microsoft have launched their innovative AdCenter programme, which is set to compete with Google’s Adwords – head on.

The Microsoft AdCenter is a pay per click advertising model used by many search engines, with a far greater focus on profiling the web user. Simply put, its a platform that will allow advertisers to target specific groups of consumers who are searching the Microsoft search engine.

With AdCenter, you can select click thru’s to your site from searchers by gender, age, location in the UK, days of the week and times of the day. This is a major breakthrough, as you can now limit your clicks to your target audience.

How do they know this information about the search engine user? Microsoft have 10m registered users of MSN instant messaging and 8.8m registered users of MSN Hotmail, this gives the a great deal of information to filter through to their adverts on msn.co.uk and live.co.uk, their search engine.

With this filtering, Microsoft are in with a strong chance of gaining some ground on Google’s Adwords market share, but how long will it be before Google and Yahoo provide a similar offering?

We’ve been testing the new Adcenter. Although it doesn’t seem as easy as Adwords, the profiling is a great addition. However, it has been very slow to use.

Google has won a biding war for the right to serve adverts on MySpace. The deal is worth approximately $900 million, but given the revenue that Google can make from serving up AdSense it should more than make up for that.

One concern for Google could be that a large proportion of the MySpace user base are not old enough to have credit cards, which would limit potential advertisers. There is also anecdotal evidence that college students and older MySpace users, have migrated to FaceBook and other social networking sites, so not all advertisers may feel inclined to display adds on MySpace.

Given that the average MySpace site could charitably be described as “in need of some improvement” it will be interesting, as Google checks pages that want to serve AdSense adverts for quality and content. These checks by Google help determine which ad’s are placed where.

Other commentators think that the social aspects of MySpace will be used, for example possibly being able to see what your MySpace friends are searching for.