• by David Berkowitz , December 19, 2006

Once every twelve months, as tradition now dictates, I get to publicly eat my hat. It's both humbling and cathartic, and it's in line with the values of accountability that search marketers preach.

Of the eight predictions for 2006 that I penned in January, I aced three, was way off on two, and got partial credit on the others. Let's reminisce.

How sweet it is

My biggest coup was just barely realized in time for this year's roundup: "Jeeves goes local." I wrote that InterActiveCorp would get its $2 billion worth from Ask Jeeves by making a big push with local search. IAC delivered a few weeks back with AskCity, a move that was discussed in depth last week. It launched too late to make an impact, but it's one of the better search sites that debuted this year, and there's a lot of room for Ask.com to build on it.

For another entry in the win column, I predicted last year, "Measurements debut for engagement; search is neglected." Sure enough, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a campaign for interactive advertising that touts search marketing below mobile marketing, but it never bothered explaining the role of search in engagement. Bill Wise explained in a column he penned this month,  "The IAB doesn't seem to be looking to search. You can see that clearly when you look at the IAB's 'Media More Engaging' page... Digital and display are on top; search is at the bottom, and appears below-the-fold on my laptop. Perhaps more tellingly, the page itself is entirely Flash-based. And as any search marketer can tell you, Flash is completely unreadable to the search engines."

The final win was predicting stagnation for MSN, despite raves from the press and marketers. Microsoft has done a great job of reorganizing its account groups and is much better equipped to cater to advertisers in the year ahead, and its adCenter Labs has so many free tools, you can spend weeks just getting a sense of the intelligence you can mine (read Aaron Goldman's recent column for a review). Still, consumers are tougher to win over; comScore showed a slight decline in MSN's market share year-over-year based on its September and October search engine rankings, and data from Hitwise's blogs and Compete's site rankings also showed MSN was treading water this year.

Whoa, I was halfway there

My first prediction for 2006, which some mobile properties vowed to prove wrong this year, was "Mobile search remains confined to text messaging." It wasn't quite that bleak, as Google and Yahoo, among others, have rolled out mobile search properties and ad models. Yet if you're an agency advising a marketer on how to broaden the reach of a search campaign, how high would mobile rank on your list? Now is a great time to start testing mobile search marketing campaigns, especially while there are far fewer competitors to worry about, but 2006 was not the year of mobile search, even if a lot of the groundwork was built and some early adopter consumers came to swear by it.

I also predicted, "Google Wallet goes Base jumping," which was mostly right. Instead of Google Wallet, this summer we were graced with Google Checkout, which has become one of Google's most heavily promoted offerings, especially during the holiday season. Google Checkout can be used with any Google Base posting, so you can complete a transaction through the Base-Checkout pairing. Such usage remains minimal, though, and Google hasn't given Base enough of a push to even remotely consider it a challenge to eBay, or view it as a significant revenue stream.

Another prediction was that in 2006, behavioral targeting and search would join forces. Several companies have made strides here, and some marketers are tapping into various forms of this, but it might be another year before marketers run such campaigns en masse.

Rudie can fail

There were two outright misses. One was the out-on-a-limb prediction that iTunes would improve its search functionality and become more of a music search engine. That just didn't happen; the iTunes search experience is no better than it was this time last year. Given that you can only use iTunes to search for content within its system, the major engines trump iTunes handily for music search.

Then there's the more humbling prediction: "Yahoo is the partner everyone wants to dance with." Yahoo had its big wins, held on to search share, made strides with social media, released industry-leading research, and struck some notable partnerships, but from Panama postponements to peanut butter manifestos, this was a year Yahoo would rather do over.

Fortunately, we all get a do-over, even columnists. Thanks for forgiving some of the missed calls in 2006. While I'll share some predictions for 2007 in an upcoming column, here's my first one: you'll have a wonderful New Year. If I just get that one right, I'll be happy.