Three reports came out last week from Radar Networks, StumbleUpon, and ClipBlast offering what Search Insider blogger David Berkowitz calls, “more clues on how search and discovery are converging and diverging.”

“Web video is asking to be discovered” according to the ClipBlast! survey, which reports that for online video, traditional search techniques fall behind “discovery” methods popular on the social Web.

In the survey ClipBlast! asked 1,000 online consumers how they get to video on the Internet. 530 expressed a preference while 470 did not. Among the 530 respondents who had a definite opinion, “discovery” is the primary mode by which they find video online (28 percent), followed closely by recommendations from friends (27 percent). About 22 percent rely on search engines and roughly 10 percent get video from people they know only online – through social networks and the like. Relatively smaller percentages receive video from unsolicited email and RSS feeds, to which they have subscribed (5 percent, respectively).

StumbleUpon is a site that lets users discover, vote on, and share new sites through the use of a toolbar. The number of “stumbled upon” links has climbed steadily in the last two years. In the first quarter of 2008, the number of stumbles reached 974 million, 160% more than Q1 2007’s 375 million. StumbleUpon recently reached its five billionth stumble.

Eric Shonfeld of TechCrunch explains that while many people think of StumbleUpon as a “socially powered discovery engine,” rather than a new kind of search engine, he sees the site as evidence that personal discovery and search are colliding. And StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp agrees:

Personalized search is just getting started. I think personalized crawling will start too. Crawlers now are trying to create the biggest map of the web, but implicit filtering and intelligent agents—that is where search and discovery will meet.

Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, says that as we move from Web 2.0 (2000-2010) to Web 3.0 and beyond and the volume of data keeps climbing, the productivity of search will decline.

But with respect to video, these surveys and predictions may be off the mark because by and large video search isn’t very good yet. Given the paucity of robust, reliable video search online, it is hard to conclusively argue that because users aren’t searching for video in great volumes yet, they don’t want to discover videos via search.

Search and discovery will inevitably evolve as the volume of content increases online. With online video, there will necessarily be a strong connection between search and discovery; publishers will use automated discovery in an attempt to hold consumer attention, while users will want the control and specificity of search for navigating between and within online videos. The true evolution will be a user experience that allows the seamless transition between search and discovery—but until video search consistently provides the same level and quality of results as text-based search, users will continue to “prefer” discovering video because frankly, they don’t really have a choice.

In a recent study at Penn State, results showed that about 80-percent of online searches are informational in nature, whereas 10-percent are navigational and another 10-percent are transactional. Although millions of people use Web search engines, Penn State researchers show that most queries submitted can be classified into these three categories:

• Informational searching involves looking for a specific fact or topic
• Navigational searching seeks to locate a specific web site
• Transactional searching looks for information related to buying a particular product or service

This research was the first published work of its kind done using actual searching data, with the aim of real-time classification. “Other results have classified comparatively much smaller sets of queries, usually manually,” said Jim Jansen, the professor in charge of the study.

This research aimed to classify queries automatically. Our findings have broad implications for search engines and e-commerce if they can classify the user intent of queries in real time.

The study explains that nearly 70 percent of searchers use search engines as their point of entry on the Web. As such, the major search engines receive millions of queries per day and in response to those queries, present billions of results per week. The researchers asked, “What task, need or goal are these people trying to address with their Web searching?” The answer seemed to be that people are looking for information and entertainment and the majority are searching by topic. But are they finding all types of content?

One of the big challenges for media companies right now is ensuring that their content is both discoverable and consumable across the Internet. Information typically resides within documents, which is why articles and other text-based content do so well in the search economy. Similarly, with videos the core information is inside of the clips; however the only text accessible to the search engines crawlers is in the video titles, which tend to be broadly descriptive rather than specific and informative.

When a user searches CNN.com for “rising gas prices” they want to find any articles and videos that mention the topic—not just the content with their search term in the title. The process to date has relied on editors creating manual text abstracts of videos in order to get them discovered, but this doesn’t scale. Imagine if every document on the web could only be found if someone wrote an abstract! Increasingly large enterprises, especially those in the entertainment business, will need to make sure that all of their audio and video content has a consistent and complete set of meta data to unlock and exploit the types of distribution, syndication, and advertising opportunities that are rapidly emerging on the Web.

The Penn State study and resulting paper “Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of Web queries” drive home the importance of SEO—for all content types—and illustrate that the majority of Internet users are searching for topic-specific, newsworthy “infotainment” content. Search engines rely on rich meta data for content discovery, presentation, contextualization, and targeting advertising.

Online video usage has grown tremendously over the past years and is a trend that will continue, with 107.7 million video viewers in 2006 and an estimated 150 million by 2010 (eMarketer, February 2007). This growth has created a unique opportunity for media companies and other infotainment sites to leverage their vast amount of online multimedia assets; content producers will only realize this opportunity when they successfully optimize all content forms and connect this content to the search engines and in turn, to consumers.

In a release that went out this Monday, iProspect revealed that according to a recent study comparing universal and vertical search:

…in the case of news, image, and video results, search engine users click specialized content within general search results more than they do within vertical search results.

The study, conducted by Jupiter Research demonstrates the natural user preference towards universal search as well as the increasing importance of getting content onto the coveted first page of search results.

Only 17 percent of search engines user click a “news” result after conducting a news-specific search whereas 36 percent click “news” results within blended search results. With video, 17 percent of search engine users click “video” results within blended search results, compared to only 10 percent who click a “video” result after conducting a video-specific search. Among the various content types now showing up in blended search, “news” results were found to be the most clicked form of vertical content. And what about video; why are the numbers so low? The study noted:

Google—the largest search engine in terms of searches performed—does not offer a vertical specific search for videos on its main search page. Instead, video search is an additional click away…This is one of several probable reasons why video finishes a distant third behind images and news in terms of vertical search usage.

According to the iProspect study, it is paramount for marketers to optimize all of their digital content types so that they may be found within blended search results. The study emphasizes how important it has become for publishers to have all of their digital content turn up at the top of search engine results lists, both from a traffic-generating perspective as well as a branding perspective. Those organizations with a diverse portfolio of digital assets are best positioned to capitalize on the benefits provided by blended or universal search.

In order to successfully get these digital assets to the top of Google—and other search engines—Web publishers will need to optimize their content. One constant throughout the evolution of the Web has been the importance of text in driving search and navigation. The key to optimization across content types is the text associated with each article, image, sound bite or video clip. The ability to attribute these objects with text in the form of tags, categories and transcripts is critical to plugging this content into the top search results pages across the Web.

“Blended search allows marketers to capitalize on their digital assets without the need to affect a change in user behavior,” said Robert Murray, President, iProspect.

It essentially brings a variety of content types to users - where they are most comfortable and open to receiving it - and allows them to choose between the various result types…The bottom line is that companies that have optimized a variety of digital assets will have a distinct advantage. Those who lack such assets will essentially forfeit page real estate to their competitors.

Information Week had an interesting article last week responding to the addition of the extra site-constrained search boxes that now appear on Google search results pages.

Google believes these new destination search boxes will help make information more accessible to users as they allow searchers to conduct follow-up searches, drilling down into a specific site’s content without leaving google.com. Some find the change irksome, as searches conducted through the new search boxes mean more ad revenue for Google. As Google describes it:

Our goal is to provide the best user experience, and ads that are related to searches from competing providers are useful to consumers.

According to Google, they developed this feature to improve the user search experience—something all content producers and distributors should also take very seriously. Satisfied users stay on your site longer, consuming more content and in turn increasing your advertising revenue.

This “search within search” makes a strong case for the growing importance of good SEO practices and improved universal site search. Because the currency in the search economy is text, search engine-friendly Web pages must use text to increase the discoverability and placement of all content—including audio and video—across the major search engines. If your content is optimized so that users find specific, topically relevant pages in Google search results—and are not merely directed to your home page—odds are better that the searcher will click through to your content sooner.

But getting users to your site is only the beginning. Even IDC search analyst and Google critic Sue Feldman acknowledges that many small sites (and I would say many medium and large sites as well) have poor search capabilities—which may make users leave the site more quickly. If publishers improve their internal site search by surfacing results across multiple forms of content, they will keep users engaged; I will stay on the site longer if I can read an article, then move onto a related video clip or sound bite. For this kind of comprehensive, universal site search, publishers need to use the text currency as well. In this way they create a microcosm of the Internet’s search economy within their own site across their own content.

It may not feel fair, but it makes a whole lot of sense that Google would try to capitalize on this opportunity to both improve the user search experience online and increase their ad revenue. The best response from content producers would be to make sure their own content—text, audio, video, and image—is discoverable and consumable both through search engines and within their own sites. Google has already taken off with text content, but video is still a relatively new frontier. As such, online video offers a new opportunity for content owners to get ahead; with the right tools, content owners can take control of the optimization, distribution and consumption of their video content in a way they never could with text content. Control is essential for content owners because only by managing their brand, the context within which their content is consumed and the associated advertising can they capitalize on the growing revenue opportunities online.

Net radio ads are on their way to becoming “premium inventory”, as they follow the growth and evolution of online search engines and the search ads that have rocketed to fame (and fortune) in recent years. That’s the prediction TargetSpot CEO Doug Perlson lays out in the Forbes article, “The Coming Online Radio Ad Boom.” Perlson maintains that Internet radio advertising — with its visual/audible elements, geo-targeting capabilities, growing audience, immediate feedback, and low cost — could very well follow the search inventory ad trajectory to become the next big thing in Internet monetization. That said, driving online radio consumption will be a key component to helping propel online radio towards Perlson’s predicted advertising boom.

Advertisers want the assurance of a growing, targetable listener base. As such, Radio companies will need to keep established listeners coming back for fresh, quality content while simultaneously driving new traffic to expand their online audience. Online radio currently has more than 80 million listeners in the U.S. and trends point to continued growth. According to a J.P. Morgan survey, Internet radio’s listener base has grown 27% annually since 2000. Consumers are spending increasingly more time on the Web in search of premium content, and radio broadcast content repurposed for online listening is clearly in demand.

“Internet radio advertising offers a unique ability to cut through the noise and deliver a message that is both literally and figuratively heard. It’s a high-impact medium that has only recently opened up to the advertising masses through advanced technology solutions.”

Perlson believes that if we look to “the history of the monetization of the Internet, the direction in which online radio must go is clear”; online radio must be positioned to highlight: its association with major media companies and trusted brands, the premium nature of its content, and the high-impact of the audio medium. Yet there is a major distinction between the search advertising success story Perlson says Internet radio advertising is set to emulate. And that difference is text.

Search ads successfully took off creating a “search economy” in which the primary currency is text; thus far this has proven somewhat problematic for media companies. To play the game radio companies need to drive traffic through the search engines as listeners want an easy way to search and access radio programming online. However most of the value of online radio content is trapped inside of the clip, out of view of the large search engines. Plugging radio into the online search economy via text is a great way to solve this currency problem, propelling Internet radio into the search economy at full throttle and bringing the coming boom within more certain reach.

Big changes at EveryZing this morning. First, we issued an exciting announcement here detailing our two new products, ezSEO and ezSEARCH . With these products, for the first time audio and video content producers have the ability to integrate all of their content into the “search economy” with our unique approach to video search and video SEO. The search economy is the billions of consumer searches and billions of dollars of revenue surrounding these searches that happen every month. The key to the search economy is text, and EveryZing’s unique ability to generate highly accurate, timestamped text from audio and video files means all of your content is visible and discoverable inside the major web search engines. Further, the text enables users to easily search across content catalogs and even within audio and video episodes with our patented “jump-to” technology.

Through the fall we have been working with a number of new customers including Boston.com, Entercom Radio’s WEEI.com, Reuters, and Dow Jones to help them deliver these great features to their end users, and we are looking forward to announcing more customers we are in the process of launching over the coming months.

Finally, you’ll notice our website has changed dramatically to highlight and detail our solutions to content producers. The consumer facing multimedia search site still exists at http://search.everyzing.com, and we will continue to offer this as a demonstration of our technology.

We are thrilled about our new products and the great customers we have the pleasure of working with. We look forward to an exciting future and welcome your feedback.

-Tom Wilde

CEO, EveryZing

According to Peter Morville, we are “at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet” however as he sees it, “the user experience is out of control,” and “findability” will become the real story moving forward. In a recent post on Read Write Web, Richard MacManus examines Morville’s ideas, particularily his notion of ambient findability—which Melville defines as “the quality of being locatable or navigable.” Ambient findability, Morville contends, becomes more and more fundamental as information overload increases and mobile devices play a greater role in our day-to-day activities.

Morville’s most recent book, appropriately titled Ambient Findability, explores his theories on user experience and information overload. The central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are critical components of the new world order. He further states that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future.

Search is among our most important and complex challenges. As the choice of first resort for many users and tasks, search is a defining element of the user experience. And, as a unique amalgam of content, metadata, technology and design, the search results interface demands intense cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Morville believes that the future will be about something beyond search—and that something is his “findability.” His conclusion is a broad call for greater innovation—the seeds of which he sees in both Google Book Search and EveryZing. As the wealth of information continues to expand and the line blurs between on and offline activity, search becomes increasingly complicated and multidimensional. Business intelligence systems, such as software built to find and sort based on patterns, will need to bring together taxonomies and tags so that browsing and search complement one another and enhance the user experience.

Search is not broken, however the search results leave much to be desired. Meta Data, which is really just “information about information”, will be one of the biggest growth areas this decade in terms of R&D and application development. The Semantic Web vision will only happen when content producer invest in technology and systems to automatically and consistently generate accurate meta-data for their content. This meta data becomes the key to “Ambient Findability” for all content across all formats and all devices.

In the second part of his interview with John Shinal, EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde talks about what he’s learned in a decade as an Internet executive and entrepreneur.

A good company starts with a great consumer experience, according to Wilde, a former executive with the search engine and Internet portal Lycos.

“If that’s high quality and a service to the user, the company usually benefits from that,” Wilde says.

Go to vator.tv to watch the interview or catch the previous segment here.

In a recent post, Video Nuze looks at the growing number of video-based “how-to” websites. The Video Nuze post highlights the logical popularity of how-to videos, asking:

How many of us would rather watch a video of someone explaining how to do something vs. reading a lengthy and often poorly-written guide?

Such sites have multiplied recently as a rush of well-funded competitors clamber for entry into the space. These companies have varied strategies, business models and content approaches. For the ad-supported sites, some strictly show professional videos while others focus mainly on UGC.

Both types of sites are seeing a good deal of buzz around advertising. One of the main reasons there is a lot of activity on the ad-supported side is that how-to videos sites deliver the highly-targeted and engaged audiences that sponsors crave. Great revenue opportunities exist for those sites able to aggregate enough traffic in a given category to attract advertising sponsors.

But with so many competitor sites crowding the space, how can each site effectively draw-in and engage users? With all of this video being produced, how will the companies ensure that when users search—either through Google or directly on their site—the most relevant content is delivered? Video content is at a fundamental disadvantage to text content in that it is largely invisible to Google and Yahoo. To build its traffic, 5Min plans to pursue widgetization, 3rd party distribution and SEO; this will be a good start, but SEO for video is non-trivial. That said, this category of video content lends itself well to speech to text to enable it to “plug-in” to the Search Economy. To succeed, these how-to sites must enable superior search and discovery of their videos. Solid video SEO and positive user experience through straightforward, accurate site search will be defining factors of the sites that manage to pull ahead of the pack.

As globalization increases, technologies grow more advanced and human knowledge expands, we must adapt on an individual as well as a societal level. Our knowledge continues to mushroom, becoming too great to store in our print libraries and, for each person, in our minds alone. As online networks and social sites become deeply integrated in people’s lives, the virtual becomes inextricable from our “offline” activities, communities, and lives. With greater amounts of personal information moving online, we need ever more powerful and accurate search to keep our contacts, photos, videos etc. accessible. Universal search will become invaluable as people take advantage of the free storage capacity the web has to offer for everything from pictures to videos to calendars and contact lists; as our lives and our memories move online, our need for comprehensive universal search will grow exponentially. Web storage—unlike our attics and basements—must be easily navigable.

Storage Capacity

There are a number of factors that point towards the exciting direction of information storage, particularly as it relates to people’s sense of their real and virtual selves and the steady merger of these concepts into one cohesive identity. As Bhavin Turakhia, Founder & CEO of Directi highlights on his blog, Web 2.0 applications act as extensions of our desktops, storage costs are continually dropping, and people now expect nearly unlimited storage online.

The Implications

Dropping storage costs and free space to store data online—particularly within social networking sites—mean that more and more you can store anything and everything about your life at little to no cost. YouTube, Flickr, Facebook et all are already accumulating multiple facets of people’s lives online. The virtual world has grown so that what we do and how we represent ourselves online are now essential components of our identities. A recent report from accustream entitled, “User Generated Video 2005 - 2008: Mania Meets Mainstream” shows that the market for user generated videos grew by an estimated 70% in 2007, up from a total 13.2 billion views generated in 2006. These are videos average people are making and uploading; these are vignettes, pieces of our lives on YouTube. The same report forecasts that the market will continue to grow by 52% in 2008, reaching 34 billion views.

Social networking sites only want to encourage these trends. In a MediaPost article about the coming launch of the MySpace Developer Platform (an initiative in direct response to the success that rival Facebook has had with its own open developer program), MySpace COO Amit Kapur states: “This is a critical year in the evolution of the Internet” describing his focus for MySpace as creating an increasingly “personal, portable, and collaborative Web.”

The Transactive Web

And what about our own personal storage capacity: our memory? MediaPost’s Search Insider blog had an interesting couple of entries by Gord Hotchkiss recently relating to what he calls “transactive memory” and its place in the digital age. As he illustrates, we have different methods for storing our memories. Hotchkiss explains that as some people are better at remembering certain types of things, we have adapted to extend our memory capabilities collectively by using transactive memory. This neurological plasticity allows our brain to prune itself, getting rid of capacities we no longer need while strengthening those that we do.

Hotchkiss raises the questions: What about computers, and, by extension, the Internet? What about search? New technologies let us dump the details of our life on a hard drive or website somewhere and search for it when we need it. In the place of all this memory digital storage is freeing up, Hotchkiss thinks we may develop greater skills in navigating online spaces. We may improve our navigation skills, but more importantly, we will expect comprehensive, powerful universal search technology to make finding all things virtual as easy as a simple click of your mouse.