The Iceberg’s Tip

Since their inception, search engines have relied on the visible to locate relevant content. Visible text, to be precise. And not just any visible text, either - the text had to be accessible and readable to a web crawler. That is, it couldn’t be inside an animation, image, script, video, or a wide assortment of other file formats. It couldn’t be stored in a ‘deep web’ database such as the CDC or USGS, one that was reached only via an active user query. And it certainly couldn’t be spoken.

This meant that, for all the blow-your-mind number of visible web pages out there on the web, all this time only a tiny fraction of the available content has been indexable and searchable by search engines. In 2001 the company BrightPlanet estimated in their white paper “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value” that public search engines made only 0.03% of the total web content available to searchers. That’s tiny. And this estimate wasn’t even considering content hidden in images, audio files, and video. Like a giant iceberg of data and content, the majority of the web remained - and still remains - invisible to search. But this is all changing.

Making sense out of sound

Google’s beta release of Gaudi, its audio indexing tool heralds to the wider public a profound shift in the search environment. Why? Hasn’t audio search been around for years now? Actually, no. Not this way. (Read the full article…)

Let me share with you how one PPC advertiser achieved…

• An ROI increase from 77% to 323%
• A conversion rate increase from 6.15% to 8.39%
• A CTR increase from 6% to 8%

…solely through match type testing and refinement.

But first some background… (Read the full article…)