I just don’t need it.

Thanks to transparency, technology, and Web 2.0, I’m informed, included, updated and empowered. I can maximize, optimize, and bastardize. I can crunch mountains of data and mash both up and potatoes.

But I don’t need it.

David Berkowitz hinted as much in his Search Insider column this week (republished on his blog):

My main concern centers on how much control users have over their search experience. Like every other pundit, I love spouting off on how consumers are taking more control over their media experience, but consumers don’t need to control every part of it. Consumers can let others decide when the new Indiana Jones movie hits the theaters, whether “Quarterlife” airs on MySpace or NBC, or how natural search results rank. Media and technology companies can exert their control where it helps.

It’s not a problem exclusive to the Internet. It also applies (with apologies to Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei) to genetic testing.

Michael Arrington just got his test results back from 23andMe, and they contain a pretty impressive quantity of information. From the sliver he put up on his site (he’ll allow anyone to access the full set of results on his 23andMe account), he can see 49 topics (including ‘Avoidance of Errors’ and ‘Bitter Taste Perception’); for each, he can see the study size, replications, contrary studies, ethnicities, the marker, a description of the trait, and whether you have higher than normal, normal, or lower than normal odds.

Too much information.

An optimistic Arrington commenter suggested the best possible result from all this: “Knowing what diseases you are prone to will help people make changes in their diets, exercise or work habits to make the risk of getting these diseases or conditions even smaller.” Sorry, but it won’t. We all know it’s not good for us to smoke or laze about or eat junk, and yet we still do; intellectual knowledge doesn’t drive behavior change.

What steps are you supposed to take if you find out that you have a lower than normal chance of manifesting 14 traits, a normal chance of manifesting 22 traits, and a higher than normal chance of manifesting 13 traits? What do you do when one trait requires you to eat more tomatoes and the other says you should avoid tomatoes altogether?

What would you do with all that information? Your comments are welcome. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll suggest what I see as the inevitable outcome of the infonami.

Sramana Mitra, in her plea for Yahoo to put up a fight, identifies the nub of the issue:

The problem with Yahoo at the moment is a complete lack of vision about how the web needs to evolve.

The MyYahoo user experience, for all its promises, has remained a marginal ?starting point? to the web. I still maintain, MyYahoo CAN be the starting point of the web. It?s just that Jerry Yang and team needs to map out precisely what role it plays in each and every web-based activity that we, users, perform.

There is also a lot of talk about layoffs this week. C?mon, how can you decide whom to layoff before you decide where you want to go with the company? (emphasis mine)

In Good to Great, the followup to Built to Last, Jim Collins talks about the importance of getting the right people on the bus, then figuring out where you want to go. He describes (and I’ve lent my copy out so I’m working from memory here) Fannie Mae at a time when they were losing a million dollars a day, yet took the time to get the right team and figure out its vision.

This isn’t contradictory to Sramana’s statement at all; the Good to Great focus is on the core team, not the general population at risk of being sliced and diced by Yahoo’s latest desperate maneuver. What Collins and Sramana (and now I) are saying is that solving the core questions will clarify the path ahead.

Getting the right team is a core question. Figuring out a company’s vision is a core question. Laying off 500 or 1,500 people is a tool that might be used in service of a company’s vision, but in Yahoo’s case, it seems they may be using this tool arbitrarily.

Sramana is asking the first principles question: what is the vision that is being served by Yahoo’s layoffs?

First principles. Ask the right questions. Sramana says to ask, “What’s the vision?” Gord Hotchkiss says to ask, “Why?” VortexDNA says to ask, “What are the purpose and values behind your behavior?”

Without these questions, our actions are meaningless.

What do you think is the most important question?

This piece appeared on Friday in Search Insider. It’s gotten some interesting comments, so feel free to respond either here or there.

On Tuesday, the BBC reported that Yahoo and Microsoft are adding new features as part of their ongoing attempts to convince the world that they are serious contenders to the Google throne. Yahoo will provide on-the-fly query suggestions, while Microsoft is quadrupling the size of its index. Both companies are touting the fact that they will soon include links to photos and video on the results pages.

Hmmm? where have I heard this before? In addition to Google?s own Universal Search, I mean. Oh, yeah! Ask.com did this back in June! And, despite rave reviews of Ask3D, comScore shows them slipping ever since, from a 5.0% market share in June to 4.7% in July to 4.5% in August.

Yet Yahoo and Microsoft insist on trying to woo searchers away from Google by launching new features. Unfortunately, they?re in a bit of a lose-lose situation right now. If they upgrade, they?re only playing catch-up. If they don?t upgrade, they fall even further behind.

They should have called me first. Me or Jeremy Kaplan, the editor of PC Magazine. Kaplan was interviewed on MarketWatch for his thoughts on the matter, and he had this to say:

It seems like it?s really a mindshare thing more than anything. I think most of the search engines seem to be able to cull the same information. It?s just a question of getting the brand out and transforming the way people search, and that?s definitely an uphill battle.

It?s likely that Jeremy Kaplan has access to a broader dataset than I do; even so, I surveyed myself and found his observation to be true.

For example, I have absolutely no inclination or disinclination towards Microsoft search. In fact, I?m quite confident that it delivers similarly useful results to Google. In addition, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I have MSN as my home page because it came with the browser, and I?m doubly ashamed to admit that I?m too lazy to spend the three seconds it would take to make Google my home page. Nonetheless, every time I have to run a search, I launch Explorer and type Google into the address bar.

Thank you in advance for your many words of advice on how to change my inefficient habits. I realize I need help. My point here, however, is not about my own loss of street cred; it is that Google?s hold on the market, or at least on that share of the market sitting at my desk, is so strong that I invest effort to bypass the Microsoft search bar on my home page.

I invite you to think about your own habits when you search, and whether the promise of a couple of new features would be sufficient to entice you to change your behavior. What would it take?

Whatever the answer to that question may be, I don?t think it?s accessible to Microsoft and Yahoo. They?ve never achieved escape velocity, the minimum speed necessary to bust out of the Earth?s atmosphere, and now it?s too late: they?ve begun to decelerate.

No, there are only two possibilities for another search engine to unseat Google, and they would pretty much have to happen simultaneously:

1. A new search engine, or coalition of search engines, will have to offer both the novelty to capture the imagination of early adopters and the substance to cross the chasm, and
2. Google will have to make a major misstep.

Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines understands this, which is why he?s fighting for alternative search engines to collaborate. He realizes that, combined, they have a lot more momentum than they do individually, and a much greater chance of reaching escape velocity.

Within a few years, the Universal Interface that he champions could be in outer space—while Microsoft and Yahoo watch from the ground and fiddle with features.

The New York Times yesterday published a piece by Brad Stone entitled, MySpace to Discuss Effort to Customize Ads. In it, Brad unpicks the vast potential of using profile information to personalize ad service.

…MySpace, the Web?s largest social network and one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, says that after experimenting with technology over the last six months it can tailor ads to the personal information that its 110 million active users leave on their profile pages.

Executives at Fox Interactive Media, the News Corporation unit that owns MySpace, will begin speaking about the results of that program this week. They say the tailoring technology has improved the likelihood that members will click on an ad by 80 percent on average.

?We are blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life?s passions of our users,? said Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, who will talk about the program at an address to investors and analysts at a Merrill Lynch conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday. ?We have an opportunity to provide advertisers with a completely new paradigm.?

That’s rather a long quote, so I’m going to repeat the bit that jumped out at me:

…the tailoring technology has improved the likelihood that members will click on an ad by 80 percent on average.

80 percent!

Remember how much everybody freaked out when Panama was shown to improve click-throughs on Yahoo! ads by 10%?

Back then, Jonathan Thaw was saying a 10% increase in click rate could translate into a 5% increase in revenue growth. So, ummm, if 10% equals 5%, then (let me just check my math with Miss Teen South Carolina here), such as, 80% could equal 40%? Which, such as, works out to more than $2 billion at Yahoo! and nearly $5 billion at Google.

I don’t need Don Dodge to tell me that a) this is an overly simplistic translation, b) Google and Yahoo would have to have access to the same extensive bank of personal information that MySpace does for each searcher in order to make it work, and c) I should call him for my math questions and just appreciate Miss Teen South Carolina for her beautiful heart and shiny white smile. No matter which way you look at it, these are big numbers we’re dealing with here.

Brad gets into the privacy issues on page 2:

MySpace also plans to give its advertisers information about what kind of people its ads have attracted. ?We want them to leave knowing more about their audience then when they came into the door,? Arnie Gullov-Singh, vice president in the advertising technology group at Fox Interactive.

That is precisely the goal that worries some privacy advocates. They argue that users of social networks like MySpace and Facebook are not aware they are being monitored and that current ad-targeting is only the first step in what has become a huge arms race to collect revealing data on Internet users.

?People should be able to congregate online with their friends without thinking that big brother, whether it is Rupert Murdoch or Mark Zuckerberg, are stealthily peering in,? said Jeff Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington.

His organization will ask the Federal Trade Commission, during a planned hearing on Internet privacy in November, to investigate social networks for unfair and deceptive practices, he said.

This is definitely sensitive territory that MySpace is playing in, and they need to be careful. As I wrote yesterday, trust is worth more than gold on the Internet, and an 80% increase in clickthrough will mean nothing if there’s nobody there to see the personalized ads.

The reason this is so tricky is that MySpace members gave up the information in a context that had nothing to do with advertising.

In the NYT article, MySpace representatives were dismissive of the issue:

MySpace and Facebook executives argue that they are harming no one. They say that they are using information their members make publicly available, and contrast their ad targeting with efforts by Yahoo, America Online and Microsoft, whose advertising technologies follow people around the Web and try to deduce what they are interested in based on what sites they are looking at.

I think that’s a dangerous attitude to take, though. Given the potential reward, MySpace would be foolish to back off of a personalization program, but they need to get clear that retaining their audience trumps an increase in clickthroughs. A later comment indicates that perhaps they realize this:

Fox executives also say they are planning on letting users opt-out of the ad-targeting program on MySpace, though it means those members will see fewer relevant ads.

Smart move, but I think they’re doing themselves an injustice if they limit it to a simple ‘On-Off’ equation. We love to buy, but we don’t like to be sold to, and the primary difference is in how much control we have over the process. The more control MySpace gives its users over their ad targeting, the happier the users will be. Imagine a dashboard that offers me the ability to allow ads served based on the groups I belong to but not based on my individual conversations. Or that lets me indicate if I’m in ’shopping mode’. (My boyfriend will tell you that I am permanently in shopping mode, but that’s just not true.)

VortexDNA’s aim is to facilitate highly relevant personalization with complete control and total privacy. That is the triad—those three things are all equally important. It’s clear from the above article that MySpace understands the importance of personalization. I hope they manage to balance the triangle as well.

What do you think about their personalization efforts? Are you a MySpace user? Would you like to see targeted ads or would you feel they were intrusive? I’m eager to get your thoughts.

Should Yahoo outsource search to Google? That was the title of a speculative piece Larry Dignan posted today over on ZDNet. In it, he outlines ideas from Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck, who puts forward as possibilities a range of dramatic chess moves and his take on the benefits and problems associated with each:

1. Yahoo outsources search entirely.
   This possibility doesn’t seem likely, according to Dignan and Peck.

   For starters, Yahoo needs to give Panama some time to work. Going with Yahoo would toss years of developing Panama down the drain. More importantly, however, is the fact that advertisers want to bundle search and display ads in campaigns. If Yahoo went with Google for search it?s unclear how these bundles would work. Yahoo has a hard enough time coordinating its own businesses. Imagine bringing Google into that loop somehow. In addition, Yahoo has combined its search and display sales teams to sell bundles.

2. Yahoo gets bought by Microsoft.
   This possibility is presented as one of the reasons for Yahoo not to outsource to Google.

   There?s another cynical reason for Yahoo to refrain from partnering with Google: A partnership would diminish Yahoo?s takeover price. Think about it. If Microsoft buys Yahoo today (something Peck floated) it would grab more search market share and make catching Google more of a reality. Right now, Microsoft catching Google in search is a pipe dream. If Yahoo sells out to Google one excuse to buy Yahoo disappears.

3. Yahoo outsources to Google in Europe only.
   The argument for this scenario is that Yahoo gets the benefit of Google’s fairy dust in a market where Yahoo isn’t looking too good to begin with, without burning too many bridges in its primary market.

   Peck estimates that if Yahoo outsourced search to Google in Europe it could double down on its U.S. efforts and rid itself of a situation that looks hopeless. In Asia, Yahoo would stay in the search market since it is in a much better position competitively.

   Outsourcing Europe search to Google would leave a lot of avenues open to Yahoo. If Yahoo were to close the monetization gap with Google it could always take back its Europe search.

I know you’ve all been saying to yourselves, ‘Bear Stearns is okay, but we really want to know Kaila’s take on it,’ and I am not one to disappoint people, so I’ll give it to you.

Gut reaction: NOOOooooooooooo!!!

Analytical reaction: First principles, people! This is a big question, one that presumably is requiring Yahoo flavor-of-the-month chief executive Jerry Yang to step back and ask himself a bigger question:

Why is Yahoo in business?

What is the purpose of the company? It may sound overly simplistic, but essentially if search is an integral part of the company mission, they should keep it; if not, they can at least explore the possibility of outsourcing.

Here’s Yahoo’s mission statement:

Yahoo!’s mission is to connect people to their passions, their communities and the world’s knowledge.

Google’s:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

So if Yahoo is outsourcing search, what does that mean in terms of why the company exists? In what other ways are they connecting people to their passions, their communities and the world’s knowledge? In what ways are they adding value to the information that Google has organized and made accessible? If Google’s running the show, Yahoo isn’t connecting people; it’s acting as a landlord to an 800-lb tenant.

Evidently Peck feels that way too:

?We believe that the strategic impact of becoming a Google partner, rather than the financial, is weighing more heavily on the minds of management. We think it is strategically important for Yahoo to continue to be a principal in search, particularly in the domestic market,? says Peck.

People who read this blog regularly know that helping people and companies act in alignment with purpose is one of the primary drivers for VortexDNA, and there’s a simple reason for that: it works. If I want to become an Olympic gold medalist, I’m not going to hire someone to do my workouts for me. But if I were only looking at the emotional and physical cost of spending all that time in the pool, I might consider it. See what I mean? The core purpose has to be the yardstick against which big decisions such as these are measured.

The Europe question:
When I read Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity, I was amazed at that part. You know, the one where he’s got the music biz and the airline biz, and the music biz is going really well and the airline biz is in the crapper, and he behaves exactly contrary to conventional wisdom and sells the great business to funnel money into the lousy business.

Should Yahoo outsource search to Google in Europe? I don’t really know. But Sir Richard’s parable taught me this:

Knowing what you really want to accomplish can help you remove obstacles in your thinking.

If Virgin had been stuck on, ‘Oh, we don’t have any money,’ or ‘Oh, the music business is going really well so we can’t sell it,’ then the Virgin empire would look very different than it does. But Branson was clear that he wanted to be in the airline business, which meant he could easily see that selling the music company would both free up his attention to focus on the airline and give him a comfortable cash injection to really make it work.

Until Yahoo is really clear about what they’re trying to do, they aren’t going to be able to resolve these questions to anyone’s satisfaction.

Would Microsoft even be allowed to buy Yahoo? That’s a question for another day. Right now, I’d really rather hear from you: what do you think about Yahoogle?

First, they aren’t.

CNet News says

[Susan Wojcicki] was quick to add that no data is stored or remembered, as opposed to behavioral targeting, which serves ads based on a user’s online activity over time and which rivals Yahoo and Microsoft are experimenting with. “We want to be sensitive to users’ privacy, and I think we believe that task-based information at the time is the most relevant to what a user is searching on,” she said. “If you wanted to buy a car two weeks ago and you bought it, you don’t necessarily want to see ads for cars today.”

Reuters was at the same press conference. They’ve got

“[Behavioral targeting] is not something that we have participated in, for a variety of reasons,” Wojcicki told reporters at a briefing at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

“We believe that task-based information at the time (of a user’s search) is the most relevant information to what they are looking at,” she said. “We always want to be very careful about what information would or would not be used.”

But Google’s blog says

We’re always experimenting and testing ways to deliver relevant and new kinds of ads, and as part of that, we recently started running a test of an ad serving technology that will help us understand online ad serving better, and allow us to experiment with some new approaches to privacy for third-party ad servers.

When you drill down into their test ad server privacy policy, you can find this:

We use the information collected through the test ad server to:

* Provide a variety of products and services, including customized display advertising to users and ad campaign reporting to advertisers

..but of course, the ‘customized display advertising’ could just be personalization according to adjacent searches.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is shouting their targeting activities from the rooftops, or at least from the pages of the Wall Street Journal:

In the middle of Yahoo Inc.’s plan to reinvigorate its big, sluggish display-advertising business lies a new breed of diminutive, chameleon-like advertisements.

The ads, which the Internet giant began offering to travel-industry advertisers a month ago, change colors, images and messages in response to what Yahoo knows about the Web surfer viewing them. A woman in New York who researched plane tickets to Miami on Yahoo Travel could be shown two days later an airline ad in a feminine hue including a fare quote for flights there.

Gord Hotchkiss has some insightful suspicions as to why Google’s treading softly while Yahoo’s behaving boldly:

I had a chance to chat with Larry Cornett from Yahoo last week about search user interfaces. We talked about the fact that user acceptance of personalization will be a moving target. As the wins for the user increase as functionality is rolled out, the resistance to surrendering personal information lessens.

I believe Google is acutely aware of this quid pro quo factor and is carefully playing its personalization cards one at a time so as not to spook the user. There’s just too much at risk for Google, especially on the search results page, if users begin to lose trust in the ads.

Gord continues to explain why he doesn’t believe Google’s refusal to target behaviorally will last:

But I believe the stand that Google currently taking about the use of personal information as a signal for serving ads is a temporary one. It’s a line drawn in the sand, and as user sensitivity around targeting and personalization begins to drop, as it inevitably will, Google will be a little less reluctant to use the words behavioral targeting.

Do you agree with Gord? Do you think Google is biding their time until they begin to use behavioral targeting on advertising?

And here’s a question to make you take an honest look at yourself: are you more willing to accept behavioral targeting from Yahoo or Amazon than Google? If so, why?