I was inspired this morning by Danny Sullivan’s recent piece about Yahoo and Microsoft allegedly gaming search share reports. Essentially, they take non-search actions — clicking on pictures in a slideshow, for example — and interpret them instead as search intents, serving up results and counting the entire interaction as a query, which boosts their share. Sullivan is rightly upset with this shady behavior, and calls for reform in how search share is calculated.
This got me thinking, which led to this piece I just posted on Tropophilia. I talk about the rise of intentless search, or what I decided to call collateral search. I also point out some of the implications of this trend as we move closer to the Internet of Things. Hope you’ll give it a read, and let me know your thoughts.
