One of the potentially most exciting things about Microsoft going into search is their Adlabs system.

I say potentially, because it offers the POTENTIAL to be really useful. They are tantalizing us with so many potentially useful research tools.

Take their keyword detection tool. Receptional undertakes a huge amount of keyword analysis for its clients and in theory Microsoft's tool could make this task easy. But look at the relevance of the results for the keyword "competitive intelligence".

Shome mistake surely? As Private Eye would say. The scary thing is that I actually had to play around with the keyword to get any result at all. I tried initially with the phrase "competitor intelligence" and got a null result. It seems that even though the database that we are querying has been enlarged over recent months, it is still may below par. My added concern is that this is results for the whole world. Imagine how slim the data will be if and when it can be filtered to show the UK only? I appreciate that the dataset itself cannot just be switched on to be entirely perfect.

I heard last month that Google still find that 20-25% of all searches that they have to find results for are search queries that Google has come across for the first time. Now - on reflection, I don't think that means that 25% of their queries are unique, but maybe it does... who can tell with those darn statistics... nobody ever thinks to clarify what they mean. But I would have thought that the phrase
"competitive intelligence" would lead to other predictive terms than "Chicago Website" or "design logo".

Adlabs has the potential to be by far the most advanced keyword research tool, since - in theory - they can make predictions filtered in so many different ways. By age, sex, country and - eventually - by user intent. But until then, Receptional does not rely on one source of data when analysing keywords for our clients. We use data from Yahoo, your own logs, Google and Microsoft amongst others. We can supplement this with keyword discovery tools like Word Tracker and Trellian and - not insignificantly - by having good feedback from the clients themselves, who often have the most in-depth understanding of what their own clients might be looking for in search. Like everything else in search, keyword discovery turns out to be a more human activity than you might expect.

Let Receptional know if you would like us to conduct a review of your Keywords.

Dixon Jones