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.