Drawing on data from this study, David McCandless maps the decline in North Atlantic fish stocks over the past century. “Today’s fishing quotas and policies for example are attempting to reset fish stocks to the levels of ten or twenty years ago. But as you can see from the visualization, we were already plenty screwed back then.”
Google Places search was released on October 27 with a great deal of fanfare and commentary. It has been available for over a month and the Places Dashboard analytics data can now provide some insight into the impact of the new display.
I have assembled an overview of the impressions and actions based of the Dashboard analytics for 45 listings for the 4 weeks prior to the rollout and the 4 weeks after the rollout.
I recognize that these numbers are, by design, superficial and are on occasion buggy (showing fewer impressions than actions). We also don’t know if the analytics kept up with the main search results page. However in aggregate, they do provide some general insights about the switch. The business listings represent a range of industries, locales and business size so the sample should represent a reasonable cross section of reality.
| Overall | |
| Change in Aggregate Actions | Up 28% |
| Change in Aggregate Impressions | Down 25% |
| Action Impression Ration | |
| Action/Impression Ratio Before | 7.17% |
| Action/Impression Ratio After | 12.26% |
| Businesses with Increases | |
| Number of Listings with Increased Actions | 20 |
| Average % increase in Actions for Businesses
with Increases |
328% |
| Average % increase in Impressions for Businesses
with Increases |
7% |
| Businesses with Decreases | |
| Number of Listings with Decreased Actions | 22 |
| Average % decrease in Actions Business
with Decreases |
-55% |
| Average % decrease in Impressions for Businesses
with Decreases |
-23% |
| Number of Listing with No Change in Actions | 3 |
Discussion
The number of listings with increases is roughly equal to those with decreased actions although the average increase was significantly higher than the average loss. I have not done a granular enough analysis to fulling understand but it appears that strong (ie better ranking websites) got stronger and the weak lost visibility.
In one particular case, it is obvious that a business in the burbs that was doing well organically but not locally on the major city searches has been rewarded with a blended placement on the major geo phrase. The bears further study but gave me the distinct impression that the geo area that defines a given search has in some cases been expanded and that businesses that were previously outside of that range now have a shot at first page blended placement.
It is interesting that the actions increased while the impressions were down. The average of actions to impressions increased from 7.17% to 12.26%. This would imply that the UI changes with Places search significantly increases Places related actions (directions, website clicks, more info clicks) and is more efficient at leading to actions that Google wants. This makes sense in that previously some local search traffic was “lost” to organic results. These results obviously reflect the new blended reality.
One area that would be of use to explore would be to examine the relative changes in specific behaviors within the Actions and compare that to changes in website traffic overall. It would be interesting to know if Google or the business is capturing more of the activity.
As in many changes, there were winners and losers. But in the end if more people are finding what they want with fewer searches then those businesses that understand the rules, the users AND Google will all benefit.
Technology is not unlike fashion. What was once considered hip and trendy falls out of fashion, only to returned in a retro-improved way after a period of time. I never realized this until I hosted a group of Dutch Waterboards at the ESRI Headquarters in Redlands, CA…
Seeing some of my former clients after some 5 years was a pleasant distraction from the day-to-day business of projects and product development. It provided an opportunity to recollect some of the work we did on creating a common data model for water boards in the Netherlands ten years ago and look at how the goals of that project were doing: share application development to reduce redundant investment, less dependency on a particular application vendor, bridge the information gap between organizational units and business processes, and others.
Although the data model has changed name, its contents are still very much alive. Over the years, the Waterboards have developed several client-server applications that connect to a single data store, thus integrating the various business processes within a Waterboard. All organizational units have the same definition and information for the objects they manage, including but not limited to waterways, hydraulic structures, permits, and numerous other aspects of water management. This would lead you to think: mission accomplished!
But the group of visitors expressed new desires that have come up in this past period that have lead to their study trip to the United States: further separate the layers of the application architecture or the use of new features in supporting software components, to name a few. Over time the client-server pattern has been followed by thin-client and other application architectures. More recently service oriented architectures and the enterprise services bus (or is it services-buzz?) are in-vogue. The accepted styles for user interfaces have changed with those technologies as well. Not that the current application wasn’t meeting the initial needs, but the needs have changed with the advent of new technologies and capabilities: how did we ever do without AJAX?
People trade in their cellphones, not because the old one is broken, but because the new ones have more cool features, and the availability of those features creates the need for them. This is the old supply-demand principle of a market economy.
This principle also applies to software technologies as well. Where a couple years ago the use of HTTP GET/POST protocols for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) services specifications was well accepted, there now is a growing need to add support for SOAP/WSDL to these specifications. Not because HTTP GET/POST doesn’t work, but because the context in which the OGC services are being used is changing to use Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) that require the use of specific standards such as SOAP. Note that the data or the data model that is made accessible through these changing protocols is not affected by the particular choice of protocol.
Well, ever noticed what happens if you use SOAP (most noticable in the shower)? It dissolves and you have to buy new soap! New technologies will come for messaging, information exchange, presentation, aggregation, central versus distributed data management, and what not. Acknowledging this is half the victory of the technology battle: do what makes sense for the foreseeable future, follow the general trends of IT, and assess what and when new technology fits your business needs.
For the Dutch Waterboards, the constact factor in this 10 year period has been the data model, confirming one of the assumptions that lead to the definition of the data model to begin with. The tremendous effort that was put in analysing entity-relationship-diagrams, class-diagrams, data dictionaries, and other exciting materials, proved its value in a world of ever changing technologies.
Appeared in GeoInformatics Magazine (www.geoinformatics.com) in October 2006
