One of the more interesting things that Nathan covered were factors which provide specific benefit to page rankings in Live Search.

It was striking when he covered one element in particular: URL formatting.

Nathan stated that URLs which were shorter and which contain valuable keywords are likely to provide greater keyword relevancy benefit to pages which have them. URLs which are shorter and which have richer words that describe a page’s content work better for endusers and for marketing purposes. Users seeing a keyword-rich URL are more likely to click on them when they see them in search results page listings, because they reinforce the perception that they contain what the user is seeking. URLs also should have keywords delimited by dashes, rather than underscores or even periods.

Check out this slide from his presentation which demonstrates how keywords within the URL can provide additional signal to a page for the terms they represent:

(click to enlarge)

Have difficulty in adding keyword URLs to your site? This is one of the things which GravityStream provides automatically (or even manually-generated). GravityStream proxies a site in order to automatically optimize a great many search ranking factors, including keyword-rich URLs.

Nadella spoke on how Microsoft approaches search and how the company intends to shape trends in search development and how they intend to exploit them.

Gur Kimchi, Principal Architect, Microsoft Virtual Earth

Gur provided a lot of demonstrations of existing and upcoming features from the Virtual Earth teams:

One of the interesting tidbits he mentioned was how Microsoft had acquired Caligari, a 3d modeling and animation company to expand defining realworld understanding within the virtual mapping apps. He provided a lot of examples of how Virtual Earth understands 3d projections from flat map data and can even plot streets beneath buildings in satellite/aerial photos. Unlike some top apps like Google Maps, Virtual Earth even corrects the Escher Effect in these pix.

According to him, the platform is capable of “indexing everything in the world”. He was referring to the real, physical, locative world, and mashing up other, virtual information with it.

He also stated that the key to monetization of it was to eventually create “deeply contextual advertising” which is highly relevant to the consumer — this is the key to ad effectiveness. “Almost mind-reading,” as he put it.

Regarding the mapping/display of sensitive security subjects, Gur stated that “…we never show critical infrastructure. The CIA tells us what to avoid (in America).” He also spends a lot of time meeting with government representatives from around the world in order to designate and avoid such sensitive areas.

The demonstrations were impressive and almost overwhelming. He showed a lot of content from Photosynth which we’ve seen before elsewhere, but it was still intriguing in the context of how it might be applied to search interfaces for mapping. Greg Sterling suggested that the audience might find it a struggle to understand how all the eye-candy could apply to search marketing, but I think it was still interesting to everyone to hear opinions from Gur, since he clearly is something of a visionary in the future of innovative mapping and user interfaces.

The two keynote interviews were mentionable.

First on Tuesday morning, Danny Sullivan interviewed Kevin Johnson, the President of the Platform & Services Division at Microsoft:

Johnson spoke about their new Live Search Cashback program (this offers rewards back to consumers a cash back rebate for purchases made online). Johnson stated that they felt the future of online search marketing was headed in that direction. He also mentioned a number of times that Microsoft is dedicated to the concept of multiple choices in the marketplace for software and search services — something which made a lot of audience members chuckle a bit.

Related to Microsoft’s Cashback program, Microsoft has just today announced a “Search and Give” program which will donate one cent for every search (up to 500 per user) to a charity. Many of Microsoft Live Search’s promotions such as the cash back program, Search & Give, and previous things like the Ms. Dewey promo are all engineered towards getting usage and usership of Microsoft pumped up.

SMX ended the day with the second keynote interview, this time with famous Googler, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team:

The Q&A with Matt was very interesting and revealed a number of interesting tidbits, not least of which was how he and Google view some of the less-ethical link-building strategies that some others suggested at the conference.

I’ll probably post more details on various conference learnings in upcoming days.

I’ve previously opined that classic SEO may become extinct in favor of Usability, and announcements like this fluid handling of underscores would tend to support that premise. Google, Yahoo! and MS Live Search have been actively trying to reduce barriers to indexation and ranking abilities by changes like this plus improved handling of redirection, and myriad other changes which both obviate the need for technical optimizers and reduce the ability to artificially influence rankings through technical improvements.

I continue to think that the need for SEOs may decrease until they’re perhaps no longer necessary, so natural search marketing shops will likely evolve into site-building/design studios, copy writing teams, and usability research firms. The real question would be: how soon will it happen?

Now, he was apparently speaking solely about the print yellow pages, but the statement still seemed a tad bit bearish, considering that Microsoft is partnered closely with my former company, Idearc Superpages.com, one of the largest yellow pages companies (print or otherwise) in the world, to license the yellow pages data and service for use in Microsoft’s Live Local Search, and for the MSN Yellow Pages.

Now, Gates isn’t alone in predicting the demise of printed directories, since many others have also foreseen their eventual extinction, including me. But I think that other analysts out there have stated terms more in the ten-year range. Even if the numbers of some directories are declining, I still note that usage and sales are still very strong, so I’d be inclined to expect that print YP will likely go on for longer than five years.

It could be even longer, if there’s some more revolutionary tech introduced, such as I earlier suggested in “Could Nanotechnology Save Print Yellow Pages?”

UPDATE: Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team, also posted on his blog about the Summit, and he quoted a Seattle Times report which gave a further quote from Bill Gates about the yellow pages:

The traditional Yellow Pages are doomed as voice-activated Internet searches combined with on-screen interfaces on smart mobile devices get better and proliferate, Gates said. The company’s recent acquisition of voice-technology provider TellMe is accelerating the trend.

Dodge further states:

Microsoft’s recent acquisitions of MotionBridge and Screentonic, coupled with the acquisition of TellMe will support Gates vision of search and advertising on smart phones.

       

Ms. Dewey flounced onto stage in the middle of the interview, throwing out a number of cute bon mots and clever retorts to things that Danny and Berkowitz said.

As soon as I heard her voice and she went on stage, I started clapping, along with one or two others in the audience. I’m guessing that not everyone has actually been aware of who Ms. Dewey is, since most search marketers obsess more about Google and Yahoo!, in that order. So, it was sort of tragic that the audience didn’t really know who she was, or what was up when she invaded the stage.

When she heard my clapping along with the other few folx who recognized her, Ms. Dewey turned towards me and gave me a really enthusiastic “thank you!” Having the pretty geek poster-girl give me such a heart-felt thank-you really woke me up, I can tell you. The Ms. Dewey character is played by the gorgeous actress, Janina Gavankar.

I previously blogged about the Ms. Dewey Live Search interface as a cool, interactive avatar for the search service, and pointing out a bunch of the funnier responses that she has pre-programmed for various keyword searches — check them out for an idea of what she’s all about. This link-bait promotion was wonderfully built in order to promote Microsoft’s Live Search service, and to persuade users to submit searches through it.

When I saw Ms. Dewey come out, I grabbed the opportunity to snap a few pics, including the one above. Click on it to view some more in the same series.

Although she wasn’t widely known when she came on stage, I think the audience caught on that it was some sort of promotional stunt within just a few minutes, so by the time she exited, the audience was fairly captivated by her, and everyone applauded.

 Now, I’m completely familiar with how impolite dataminers can impact service for real users — that’s something we police for as well here at Superpages.com. But, I’m unhappy because Seidman’s announcement sounds more like it’s not just impolite datamining they’re after — it’s all automated usage of those specialized queries.

Microsoft is quite lite on features supporting the web community and optimizers, so I’m unhappy that they’re halting the very data that supports those folx. While I don’t use those queries much in my work (because their data hasn’t been all that useful to me, and because such a relatively small fragment of our users come through MSN), it seems like a backwards move for them to revoke the functionality.

It’s the very sort of functionality that lends itself to automated queries. If an agency is trying to manage large amounts of sites and URLs for many customers, they need an automated way to do it. Further, if you want to know from day to day how many of your site’s pages are indexed by them, you’d want to use an automated query report to gather that data.

What this move says is that they’re not sophisticated enough to be banning just the dataminers that are impacting human users. If a bot is asking for documents too frequently, they’re the ones who should be banned.

Further, MSN is behind the curve. They should be offering reports for the web community sort of like the reports Google provides in their Webmaster Tools. Where are the Webmaster Tools for MSN Live?  There are none.

They could further improve by not only providing reports, but providing an API service on a separate farm of servers from the interfaces used by human users. Allow people to enact those automated queries through an API. The data in these automated queries isn’t used to recreate the entire search experience — it’s specialized use for a variety of research and support needs for webmasters and the agencies that assist webmasters. MSN Live’s action has just pissed off the very communities of people who they need to be courting.

I’ve also mentioned before that I thought Google Webmaster Tools should increase the types of reporting that they provide for sites, such as providing expanded keyword ranking information. I know their concern is giving people so much information that they could “game” the system, but not providing the info just encourages people to use more and more subtle methods for executing automated queries in ways that are harder and harder to detect/ban.

MSN Live needs to work on engaging with the webmaster and SEO communities better. Provide reporting tools outright, and through APIs. Ban only dataminers that don’t throttle back the rate of bot queries to polite levels.

To support this initiative, they will jointly support sitemaps.org. If you recall, “sitemaps” was the product name that Google had been using, and which became deprecated just a few months ago in favor of “Google Webmaster Tools”. Obviously, the wheels had already begun turning to repurpose the “Sitemaps” brand name into a jointly-operated service.

Now when Sitemaps are generated to follow the common protocol, webmasters will still need to submit the link feeds to each of the SEs via their existing managment tools such as in Google Webmaster Tools and in Yahoo! Site Explorer.

If you recall, I was one of a number of webmasters out there who had requested that they collaborate on a common protocol, such as in a blog post I wrote back in September:

“Hopefully each of the major search engines will try to employ identical or compatible formats for site URLs, because it will be a hassle to have to keep up with multiple formats. This is an area where the SEs really ought to cooperate with one another for “pro bono publicoâ€? – for the common good. Currently, Yahoo seems to be just defensively immitating Google in this arena, and no one’s showing signs of collaborating.”

Kudos to Google and Yahoo for overcoming traditional corporate competitiveness to do something that mutually benefits website owners as well as the search engines!

 

The Ms. Dewey avatar is a clever piece of Flash engineering coupled up with various video files and the MS Live search engine. Ms. Dewey is played by an actress named Janina Gavankar, who apparently prerecorded a bunch of video snippets which are queued up contextually for various responses to search terms that are typed into the submission form field. After you submit a search keyword, she says (and sometimes does) something witty, then the MS Live search results scroll down in an AJAX menu beside her.

Try out these particularly funny search terms on Ms. Dewey:

A “share this with a friend” link is included, making this qualify even more as some nice linkbait, as some online marketing folx refer to it. While quite a few folx have turned their noses up at Ms. Dewey as not being a serious search service contender, they’re perhaps missing the point that she’s pretty fun to interact with, and as a promotional effort goes, it’s probably pretty effective linkbait. Within just a short timeframe, many people will have emailed links to Ms. Dewey to their friends, getting a whole lot of people to use MicroSoft’s search engine who otherwise wouldn’t have tried it out.

I’d only say that the design group has dropped the ball a bit by not highlighting their MS Live brandname on the search results. (They also dropped the ball by advertising Ms. Dewey’s email address through the interface, ms-dewey, because it’s inoperative, at least when I tested it. “Status: 5.0.0 – Remote SMTP server has rejected address”. They should have had someone responding to those notes, or they should’ve created an intelligent agent to respond to submissions to it.)

It’s maybe mentionable that Ask dropped the Jeeves butler mascot from the frontend of their search earlier this year, and here MicroSoft is adding a human mascot onto their search. Ask was never this attractive, though, and this ploy doesn’t seem in the least retro. Slick!

Interfaces like Ms. Dewey actually aren’t all that hard to do, and there’s one company that has made it really easy to incorporate interactive avatars similar to this within your blogs and other websites. Read on and I’ll describe how you can use avatars.

Oddcast.com is offering their configurable SitePal avatars for this sort of application, at wonderfully competitive pricing. Their avatars are a bit cheesier than Ms. Dewey, since they’re built out of Flash animated cartoonish illustrations (I should say “comic-book character illustrations”) instead of out of a custom-filmed, gorgeous model/actress. However, there are a number of other features that are actually very cool.

SitePals allow you to choose from a large set of different avatar faces to represent your site, along with configurable choices on eyes, ears, nose, clothes, and jewelry. They’ll even draw up a custom avatar, perhaps a character based on your own photo if you wish, for special pricing. You can also use their preset backgrounds, or easily upload your own art to use as the backdrop for the avatar.

For the voice, you can upload your own audio files, or record sound from your computer, using the speakers as a microphone. The avatar programming matches up the motions of the avatar’s mouth with the spoken voice.

If you don’t wish to use your own voice, and don’t have anyone to record, you can make use of their text-to-audio voice synthesis which also comes with a few different male and female voices to choose from — some voices are foreign accented, intended for use with other languages.

The voice synthesizer is very cool to me, even if many consumers would consider it to be a bit passé due to mechanical sound quality. SitePal’s voice synthesis is actually using the AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech technology which I’ve been playing around with for years. Automatically converting written text into audio is complex technology, and AT&T’s system is one of the most advanced, although you sometimes still have to submit text that’s phonetically spelled. SitePal has made a great API for using this technology, and they’ve even handled a lot of pronounciation quirks of common English and they’ve handled expansions of common abbreviations automatically for you.

The SitePal API will let you start and stop the talking, and have slight control over avatar behaviours like making the eyes follow the user’s cursor, or glancing around.

There’s apparently also an option to use an intelligent agent and knowledge base in order to enable the avatar to respond to queries from endusers, but if you have programming capability, I’d recommend you program your dynamic responses all on your own. I didn’t try this option out, since I’ve played around with intelligent agents before, and it didn’t seem as interesting as the other features.

This is a really cheap and easy way to add a talking head to a website. Unless this is adopted widely, this could be a good differentiator for some sites, and it can humanize and enhance the user experience when navigating around webpages. They have a few different packages, and the pricier packages are the best in terms of features like the no branding option, and you can set up multiple avatars to use, etc. This is also a beautifully cheap way to add a talking voice to a webpage — very useful for a lot of applications, and easier than trying to use other commercial interfaces for the AT&T software.

For the Oddcast.com staff, I have one big recommendation for a feature that would seem to be highly desirable to most avatar users: smiles. The API really, really, really needs to allow you to submit a parameter to get the avatar to smile on command.

This VR paradigm is likely to continue influencing the internet, as I implied in another recent blog posting on the use of Second Life for online marketing. Ms. Dewey is probably just the beginning. Savvy online marketers know that 3-d spaces and humanized user interfaces are more inviting to consumers.