Internet in India – the role of search

By Rajesh on February 21, 2007

Search is here, search is big!
I moderated a panel discussion yesterday on ‘Internet in India – the role of search’ hosted by exchange4media.com on occasion of the launch of their first book – Gold Sift – Leveraging Online and Search Engine Marketing, authored by Vikas Malhotra.
Even though I generally played a good boy, my formidable panel didn’t disappoint. On the panel were 3 brand owners/CEOs from the Internet space (Niti Batra,Dinesh Wadhawan and Sanjiv Bikhchandani; 2 successful Internet entrepreneurs – Alok Mittal, now with a leading early stage venture fund and Sidharth, who leads a prominent interactive agency, and the author of the book Vikas.
For me the conversation was a learning. I am not summarizing what was said as you can read it here and here.
I wish someone from the media planning and advertising fraternity had shared their perspective on my audience question ” How do planners and advertisers (particularly the offline brands) see search marketing and how are they planning to use it”.
My key take-away – there is an opportunity in vertical search – like that thought.
Vikas shared an interesting statistic – only 8% of the Internet is presently searchable – opportunity? Challenge?

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  • Amit
    Hey
    That's actually the biggest opportunity one could get, 92% of the net is something very very huge, and to make it searchable means alot
  • Thanks Vikas and please do carry on this conversation forward.
    See you.
  • Hi Rajesh,
    Thanks for inviting me over.
    Raj to answer your question, the large part of web which is inacessiable is due to two reasons:
    1) The information is behind username and password. The search engines obviously cannot acess that.
    2) Then there are huge databases like Lexus-Nexus or Libraray of Congress which have terabytes of data about everything. However these databases again are not spidered by search engine crawlers and hence they never appear in search results.
    Hence this part of web which is called the "invisible web" is still under wraps for searching public. You can google invisible web for more info. Also there is an excellent book called The Invisible Web by Gary Price and Chris Sherman. It is compelling read if you want to know more on this.
    Amita, to quickly talk on your point, the search technology as it exists today is fairly advanced and should be able to serve quite a substantial portion of our information needs. Though it is far from perfect. You might want to take a quick peek at the one of the possible options, that might unfold in near future:
    http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-02-02-n25.html .
    Marina: Internet marketing has been knoncking on Indian doors for quite some time. It is only now however as you are correctly pointing out that the tipping point for this is reached. Also let me stick my neck out a little and say that the contextual advertising that SEs have popularized has the potential of being what Jack Welch calls a " game changer". Since online spends make ROI more transparent , traditional media in next 4-5 years might be shoved towards performance marketing as well. This space is hotting up and I am betting my dollars on it :)
  • Hey Raj - don't think it is a question of owners wanting to share their IPs- from what I understood (since I am not that great in my understanding of technicalities of search), substantial part of the remaining Internet is stored as 'databases' and therefore... will try and ask Vikas to give the correct answer on this one...
    Marina: Thanks for the candid admission. It was great to see you at the workshop the other day and you are making change happen - that's a great beginning. See you.
  • Marina
    Rajesh,
    SEM is largely treated like a poor country cousin in offline ad agencies. Majority of the media plans have no budgets allocated to Internet marketing & even if there is an allocation it is restricted to largely staid banner ads.
    Understanding of viral marketing, blogs for reputation management, SEO,etc are practically missing in an offline agency.Thanks to which recommending online advertising to our clients just doesn’t arise.
    I plan media for a leading management educational institute whose TG is between 18-20 years of age. The brand's spends on traditional media are in the Rs 50 lacs + range yet till a few months back internet did not even figure anywhere in the plan. Its only now that we have allocated a very small budget for internet marketing.
    That’s how offline ad agencies approach internet marketing. We are far away from realising its true potential
  • Raj
    Thanks Rajesh for sharing this.
    It's quite amazing how much all sections of the media depends on Internet and yet they have only eight per cent of the net is searchable.
    It begs the question: Is the remaining 92 per cent not aavailable because owners don't want their IP to be searchable or is it because many of them are unaware how to make it available to search engines.
  • Hey Amita,
    I am no search expert and will have to ask someone but I think...
    The results are partly a result of the search technology and partly because the content you and I are looking for, a large part of it, is not saved search friendly by the publishers (for want of understanding and knowledge on how to) but I think also because if all search results on the left of the screen (organic search) were just perfect, no one would take the contextual ads on the right of the screen :) - lol. Kidding?
  • Amita
    Hi Rajesh,
    The 8 % statistic got me thinking about my experience yesterday where after a rather desperate search session, I was disappointed not being able to find what I was looking for.
    There was a time when I found the 'mine' of information that google gave as rather overwhelming. Now I have no patience to go through the mine. The detour was fun earlier, now its tedious. Though the focus of your discussion was different, I feel there is considerable scope of improvement in the technology itself before it can be leveraged for marketing.
    Does that make any sense? Your view?
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