Look at these staggering figures from Hitwise – US visits to Q&A sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers and Answersbag, has increased by almost 900% over the last two years (February 2006 – February 2008). Talk about a shift. The Internet is really starting to live up to its promise of engaging and empowering people.

Here are some of the compelling stats from the survey:
• The most visited website within the Questions and Answers category (Wk of 3/15/08) was Yahoo! Answers which received 74.05 percent of the market share of U.S. visits. WikiAnswers was the second most visited website, followed by Answerbag.
• WikiAnswers, launched in June 2007, has seen its U.S. visits increase 125 percent comparing the week ending Jun. 9, 2007 versus Mar. 15, 2008.
• Females accounted for 52 percent of all the U.S. visits to the top five Question and Answer websites for the week ending Mar. 15, 2008. The majority of these visits came from users between the ages of 35-44, 24 percent, followed by users 25-34 with 21 percent.
• For the week ending Mar. 15, 2008, Yahoo! Answers received 52 percent of its share of traffic from new visitors.

So, I thought I’d try out some of these site – namely Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers and Answerbag. I picked a question related to health and posted it this morning:

Question posed on Yahoo! Answers

Question posed on WikiAnswers

Question posed on Answerbag.com

Now. Let’s see if I get any responses. I’ll keep you posted.

Here are the ingredients:

1. Take code from another site you really like - let’s say HealthPricer
2. Add one junior developer
3. Augment with a developer tutorial code
4. Add copy text “verbatim” – I mean, they’ve already optimized it for SEO, so you know you are all set.

And what do you have?

We’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Here’s our candidate – before they embark on their re-design:

Candidate search for Diflucan in August, 2007

And after the redesign:

Candidate search for Lipitor in April, 2008

Now, let’s compare to HealthPricer’s recent search page – before our re-design last week:

HealthPricer search for Motrin up to end of March, 2008

And there’s more:

SEO optimized text at bottom of candidate search page

SEO optimized text at bottom of HealthPricer search page

Again, new text added since the candidate re-design:

Candidate text at bottom of search page in August, 2007

And what’s the result? Unless you know the secret ingredient, the cake will simply not taste the same.

Cynicism aside – I just want to state clearly that eDrugSearch.com is truly unethical in its blatant plagiarism and we are offended that a company would stoop this low. Sure, everyone researches the competition for ideas and innovation, which is just plain smart. However, in this case, attempting to re-invent our search engine is plain wrong. Consumers beware!

A recent article by Catharine Taylor, the new Social Media Blogger at MediaPost caught my eye. She was considering a recent debate she had seen between John Batelle of Federated Media and Nick Denton of Gawker Media – two of the biggest names in for-profit blogging.

The two gentlemen sit at opposite ends of the spectrum in the social media advertising debate. Batelle sees social media as the thing that will finally make online advertising truly engaging. Denton feels people don’t want to be sold to when they are deeply engaged in a highly personal medium.

Sure, there are lots of examples of particularly irrelevant and intrusive advertising in social media. Facebook did take a beating not long ago. And there is the case against banner ads in social media. How many more classmates and University of Phoenix ads can we really take?

However, as social media tools evolve, so will tools to sell products and services to people. Take, online health, for example. In working with partner health sites, we have found that relevant product placements that accompany the search that each visitor is doing at that point in time is welcomed and valued by users – matching health information and e-commerce in one place.

In the past I’ve talked about vertical ad networks and how we see the future of relevant products being matched with health information. You may remember the insulin patch example, where you may be looking up articles on diabetes on a health site or have subscribed to a feed on diabetes. This is how we see that evolving:

Contextual ads part of next-generation advertising

You may have been looking for a new glucose meter and decide to click on the ad. And you are surprise to find that you are not redirected to a single store selling the item, but a comparison shopping site, where you can search for the best price from a number of merchants:

Ads that take you to a selection of merchant offers

This exact model can work very well in social media. There really is a case to be made for product placements in social media. Health communities such as cafemom.com, ehealthforum.com, steadyhealth.com and dailystrength.org, feature regular articles, forums and chatrooms for people with similar health interests.

Take this cafemom group for example.

Cafemom discussion group

A mom asking for specific product advice. Here are some of the responses from other mothers.

Responses

Responses

Why not provide product ads, and comparison shopping services, for the products being recommended by the other mothers? It’s a lot better to place these relevant product ads than advertising for completely irrelevant ones, such as classmates or the University of Phoenix – don’t you think?

I’m heading off to the Big Apple next week to speak on a panel at SES NYC 2008 arranged by Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines and Kevin Ryan of Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch.

This will be an enjoyable one – it’s set up ‘American Idol’ style and I’ll have seven minutes to prove that HealthPricer is a better search engine than my competitors. And my competitors are EveryZing, Retrevo, OrganizedWisdom and Surf Canyon. The panel has been arranged for March 20 at 12.45 pm. Apparently the audience has a say in who wins – so, if you are attending the conference, come cheer us on.

SES NYC 2008

I decided to do a little search on my competitors and found out that HealthPricer has some formidable opponents for this showdown. It seems that most of us have been selected to speak at DEMO or as DEMO Innovators to Watch, so we’ve all had some practice at the pressure cooker presentation. I’m particularly intrigued by OrganizedWisdom as they are in the same space as us – health. They describe themselves as a human-powered health search service.

If you’re at SES NYC next week and you’d like to meet, leave me a comment below and hopefully we can connect?

A recent article in the New York Times about undetected lesions for colon cancers, sparked (unintentionally, I believe) a debate about healthcare. Here’s the section of that article that started it all:

"Easily overlooked lesions tied to colon cancer", NY Times, Mar 5, 2008

Popular blog, The Consumerist, picked up on this and received a whopping 27 comments in a matter of minutes.

Consumerist leads debate on healthcare comparison shopping

You can read the whole thread of comments here, but I decided to pick out some of the more impact-ful comments:

Consumerist comment

Consumerist comment

Consumerist comment

Consumerist comment

Consumerist comment

Lots of food for thought.