Google searchers aren't always in buy mode. Oftentimes they're looking for something to entertain them, inform them, or navigate them. But search, and Google in particular, has become the platform of choice for expressing commercial intent when it does arise. Ultimately, though, commercial intent doesn't just spring up out of the blue. There needs to be some other stimulus creating demand that buying something can solve.
This can be anything from your stomach demanding you to buy something to eat to your significant other demanding you to buy new deodorant. Your challenge as a marketer is to reach your customers or prospects at a time when they're most frustrated by the problem that you can solve.
That's the point from which commercial intent originates. From there, you must reach them again at apertures where that commercial intent is expressed. So how can you identify those apertures? Oftentimes, they don't exist, so you have to create them.
Image recognition is an area Google has struggled with for some time, so its investment in Pixazza makes sense. Recognizing the limitations of its algorithm - and propensity for Web site publishers to stuff keywords into image ALT tags to fool it - Google created a "game" called Google Image Labeler. Here's how the game is played.
You get paired randomly with a partner, and both of you are shown the same set of images. Your goal is to label the images in as many different ways as possible to describe what you see. You get points for each label that matches your partner's. And you get more points for more specific labels. Essentially, Google is trying to train its algorithm, and rather than relying on its own technologists - who presumably have better things to do than labeling images one at a time - it creates a game to tap the wisdom of crowds.
Why is Google so keen on image recognition? Surely, one reason is to improve its image results, which currently lag behind Bing's. But perhaps more importantly, Google realizes the potential power of commercial-based image consumption. That's why it invested in Pixazza. That's why it created this fun labeling game. However, I'm not so sure fun will be incentive enough once people realize how powerful the information they're providing to Google really is. There must be some other payoff.
Google does something similar with Google Voice and GOOG-411, gathering millions of different speech patterns that it can use to fine-tune its voice search algorithm - a critical component of its Android mobile operating system. The difference with Google Voice and GOOG-411, though, is that it offers free voice mail and directory assistance services in exchange for participation - not just a few brief moments of fun with labels.
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