(co-written with Rob Carney)

At the Future of Media workshop at FASTforward ’07 Sue Feldman of IDC previewed some research findings that have enormous implications for the way we think about search. Her report has now been released by IDC as “Who Owns the Web?”

What she and the IDC research team find, counter to popular intuition, is that the vast majority – perhaps 70% – of all queries on the Web are NOT taking place on the major search engines. They are instead “Enterprise Search” queries on individual sites.

A few excerpts from IDC’s report “Who Owns the Web?” by Susan Feldman and Rachel Happe follow to give the gist of the argument. Then we add some thoughts about how this connects to what goes on inside the firewall.

“Popular wisdom tells us that the battle for Web hegemony is won. The big search engines — and in particular Google — have the online ad market all sewn up. But new research at IDC may put an end to this belief. IDC has spent the last year mapping the structure of the digital economy and turning it into an interactive market simulation tool. We seeded it with publicly available data on the number of queries, clicks and ad revenue. But we also gathered data on the number of hours that users spend searching on the Web, and on their online purchasing behavior for both business and personal use.

When we turned our model on, we found a large hole: unaccounted for queries, perhaps seven to ten times the number that were commonly reported in the press. Those query numbers are not just an academic concern: every query represents an opportunity to generate ad revenue. While our results are only preliminary, we now believe that roughly 70% of queries on the Web are not going first to search engines to be referred through results clicks to Web sites. Instead, users are going directly to the Web sites, the destinations, on the Web, and are bypassing search engines entirely. This behavior makes sense: once you know that you can buy books from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, why would you return to Google or Yahoo to purchase a book. Purchasing managers at businesses know which office supply vendors they buy from and bookmark Staples, for instance….

Media companies–newspapers, online content providers, yellow pages publishers–have a golden opportunity to retrieve control of their markets. Publishers already know their audience. They understand their customers - the demographics, trends, and local interests. They already have a dedicated sales force that know their market. If they can seize this new ad revenue stream, improve the ad targeting by using their customer knowledge to increase the relevance of the ads, they can attract more advertisers to their online content sites.”

Of course these dynamics in the digital marketplace that Feldman and Happe are reporting on have a direct parallel inside the firewall. Namely, every enterprise has no excuse not to know its users and know them well. And the more the search on the digital property (portal, collaboration environment, etc.) knows about the customer or consumer or employee, the more detailed and relevant the content on the site and the delivery of that content can be. Enterprises should think about whether they can take 70% of internal queries and channel them to sites where internal users really want to go, and provision those users with content that is really useful to solving the issue of the moment.

Has your enterprise started to think of its population of “associates” as shoppers for quality information yet? Do you think your associates know where to find the amazon of customer information or the staples of the supply chain for your business?

As Feldman says, “every query is an opportunity” - the value can be measured by ad revenue on the consumer web, but also by the quality of the answers to someone’s problem inside the company.