The new tool, with the catchy name 'Detecting Online Commercial Intention', has been launched to estimate the likelihood that a given web page or search query is information, commercial-information or commercial-transactional in nature. The idea is that this information (i.e. understanding the goals and preferences behind a user's online activities) can greatly help webmasters decide on what type of content to put on their sites.
If people are spending more time trying to personalise e-commerce sites and improve user satisfaction then the internet as a whole will be a better place as a result...well, that's the theory!
Consider the following: your e-commerce site ranks consistently on Google's page one for the uber-competitive search queries, say: 'digital camera', which is driving thousands of 'free' clicks to your site each week. Then, following a change in the way Google rates the site, all e-commerce sites are removed from page one to be replaced by informational sites offering reviews of digital cameras and wider knowledge based sites such as Wikipedia. Suddenly, all that traffic suddenly drops off and your online orders (and profit margins) are affected as a result. This is a common scenario which has driven many e-businesses to the brink of bankruptcy as a result.
Now, what if you knew in advance how the search engines were going to rate your site's keywords and you could therefore structure your content to cater for these preferences? That's what Microsoft's new tool is aiming to help us with. If I am searching for a term which MSN (or, Windows Live) rates as highly informational or non-commercial (i.e. 'Alton Towers') then the online commercial intention (OCI) score returned is low, and my own e-commerce site selling packages to Alton Towers will need more informational content about the theme park in general in order to achieve a high ranking on the organic SERPs.
Why is this? The answer is because, generally speaking, the web pages at the very top of the organic rankings need to be informational and transactional in nature as categorized by the search engines. If my own e-commerce site for Alton Towers wants to appear high up, I'll need to pay for it. If I want to rank well organically, I'll need to provide the best information and have the best quality back links. That's the trade off and search engines are becoming increasingly savvy at making that distinction.
What's the fallout? Keywords are always going to be important, but this information gives us a better idea about what content is actually going to be needed on the page in order to rank well in the organic listings. Yahoo!'s 'Mindset' tool is another Beta demo which gives us a better idea of how Yahoo! ranks intent within its own search results, sorting sites on whether they are more commercial or informational.
It seems as though both webmasters and search engines stand to benefit from making all this information public knowledge. How? - on the one hand webmasters and online marketers will know what terms to target for top organic rankings compared to which ones they will need to bid more on with paid listings. On the other hand this information pushes up the demand for the top positions for paid adverts and the revenues generated from paid search rise as a result.
Everyone's a winner with AdCenter, or, at least, so it seems...
For a little further reading and to try out some of the tools mentioned in this bigmouthmedia article, the following links could be useful:
Microsoft's AdCenter Labs
Yahoo!'s Mindset Search Tool
WebMetricsGuru Indications of Low Quality Search Spam
