When Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, first penned an article in 2004 called The Long Tail, he was thinking about e-commerce. The article — and later a book by the same name — showed that web-based sellers like Amazon and Netflix had much larger sales potential than mass-market vendors like Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster.
“People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles … And the more they find, the more they like,” Anderson wrote about the trend in book, video and music sales. The Long Tail, he discovered, was roughly 90 percent of the content out there; the “hits” account for just 10 percent. For example, Amazon stocks some 2.3 million books while Barnes & Noble has 130,000. (Those are 2004 figures, of course.)
He wasn’t necessarily thinking about search engines, but of course the web, like Amazon, is filled with a long, long list of content. Applying Anderson’s model, Google is the Amazon of web search, spidering the whole web and making the “whole catalog” available. Microsoft and Yahoo, meanwhile, focused on the most popular topics and did a poor job at delivering the rest of the web.
Google Owns the Long Tail
At least that is the insight of Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the online audience group for Microsoft Bing. Microsoft now realizes, Mehdi said in a speech at the Search Engine Strategies show in New York, that search is about the long tail — something that Google got many years ago.
“Think about the explosion in the long tail. You have to crawl, index and make sense of that,” Mehdi said. “On any given month, one-third of queries that show up on Bing — it’s the first time we’ve ever seen that query. A huge chunk of those, we’ll…