Digital Media

Tech lovers used to be dubbed geeks and nerds. According to a new report, we're all geeks and nerds now.

Young, old, single, married--they're all online, using PCs, watching digital TV, and chatting on cell phones, according to a report published Wednesday by Forrester Research. Looking at American consumers by "life stage," Forrester examined the devices people own, what technology they buy, how they use the Internet, and how they set up their digital homes.

(Credit: Forrester Research)

Singles under 40 and couples under 40 sans children are well-connected to the Web, noted the report, with 87 percent of them frequently online, both for personal and work reasons. They're also apt to venture online in locations beyond home or work, with 55 percent of them more likely than the overall average adult to access the Web on their phones.

Among parents under 40 with kids under 18, 88 percent of them regularly use the Internet. They also buy devices for the whole family, such as Blu-ray players, digital camcorders, digital video recorders, and game consoles. In this group, 86 percent own a cell phone that's likely to offer music or video playback.

For parents over 40 with kids under 18, 84 percent of them are online, typically splitting their Internet use between work and home. Two in three of these families have broadband, the most of any group surveyed by Forrester. They also love their personal gadgets, owning the most PCs, laptops, MP3 players, and GPS devices of all the groups.

Among singles over 40 and couples over 40 sans kids in the house, 70 percent are online and gravitate toward services that directly benefit them, such as online shopping. The report found that consumers in this group spent more money online over the past three months than any other group.

Across all technologies, HDTV grew the faster in 2008, discovered Forrester, with almost 10 million new households buying a high-definition TV. The second most popular technology was the home network. Forrester predicts that these two technologies will continue to grow at a record pace over the next five years.

(Credit: Forrester Research)

The venerable PC continues to shine, with the average family owning two or more computers. The under-40 singles and couples are also more likely than other groups to own a laptop.

(Credit: Forrester Research)

More than five in six of all homes own a cell phone, with families with parents under 40 leading the way with 93 percent adoption. Among families with parents over 40, 57 percent have at least three mobile phones.

Forrester's report is based on an annual survey sent to consumers by mail. The company said it received 48,412 completed questionnaires in the U.S. this year.

IAC CEO Barry Diller

(Credit: Dan Farber/CBS Interactive)

InterActiveCorp chief Barry Diller said the company is in talks to buy Yahoo Personals to augment its Match.com business.

The comments were made on IAC's first quarter conference call this week (Techmeme). Here's what Diller said:

We are very interested. We'd love to have Yahoo! Personals and I think there is some initial discussions about that, whether they're going away or not is of course enormously speculative. But I think, Yahoo! has said that it's not an absolute core asset their future and it is core to us. We're a leader in the category. So, we're very aggressive behind Match and any possibilities for increasing its future money in the world.

Yahoo has been looking to shed non-core properties and IAC could be a buyer of other assets. too.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Microsoft believes it's found a way to gain an edge against Google's dominant search engine: a deeper understanding of what people are searching for and what's on Web pages.

Specifically, the company believes examining a full sequence of user queries can lead to more useful results. Today, the company only keeps track of the immediately prior search, but often users use search engines to explore subject areas broadly, said Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search, portal and advertising platform group, at the Search Engine Strategies conference here.

"I believe this notion of understanding user intent--being able to analyze (search queries) and come up with search patterns and use them to shape the search experience--is one of the most important areas for us," Nadella said.

Many searches are quick operations to get to a specific site, but Microsoft is eying the in-depth operation search has become for many. Half of search queries at Microsoft's search site are part of a 30-minute session spent searching and checking Web sites, and at some point in that half-hour span Microsoft should be able to depart from "one-size-fits-all" search results to a more carefully tailored response, he said.

Of course, that kind of deeper analysis of people's search behavior--which presumably could be accompanied by more carefully targeted and perhaps higher-priced advertisements--could also raise hackles. Basing search ads on a few keywords typed into a search engine is less intrusive than basing them on an entire history of online behavior. Behavioral targeting of ads, though a concept that covers a broad spectrum of possibilities, is under increasing scrutiny.

Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search, portal and advertising platform group

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Microsoft, which trails leader Google and second-place Yahoo, was thwarted in its effort to get ahead in the search market by acquiring either all of Yahoo or just its search assets. But Nadella takes the long view, arguing Microsoft only started its online search effort in earnest four and a half years ago. The Redmond, Wash.-based company will keep plugging away, trying to take advantage of "inflection points" where search technology changes significantly, he added.

"If we come again and again with innovation that matters, we will have the opportunity to grow our volume and our share," Nadella said. "We made decent progress but we have a ways to go."

A long way indeed. In a meeting with reporters, Nadella said he wasn't happy with Microsoft's share of search queries that's less than 10 percent. And upper management's deep interest in better results is evident not just from the Yahoo acquisition turmoil but from the company's successful acquisition of Powerset, a search start-up banking on natural language processing as a way to better understand Web page content and search queries.

"Bill has definitely not retired for us," said Scott Prevost, Powerset's general manager and product director, referring to Chairman Bill Gates' move to part-time work at Microsoft. Prevost also spoke during the meeting with reporters.

Powerset figures prominently in Microsoft's search work. The start-up's technology only made it as far as indexing and searching Wikipedia, but results, even from that relatively narrow domain, will be used to augment Microsoft's search results, Nadella said.

"You'll see us integrating that with Wikipedia articles," he said.

The Powerset technology can be used to better understand people's search queries and the Web pages that Microsoft's search engine indexes, Nadella added. "We think that tech, natural-language processing, is going to be a very critical way for us to improve relevance further, at scale," he said.

Google is of course a formidable competitor with a massive and fast-moving research effort. And while it may design its search engine for the broadest use possible, it certainly can take a user's search history into account. The optional Web History feature can adjust search results according to users' earlier practices. However, Udi Manber, head of Google's search quality work, said earlier this year that personalization has only a minor effect on the ordering of search results.

Microsoft has other ways it hopes to diverge from the one-size-fits-all approach. For example, Nadella said the company also hopes to redirect the search experience away from a generic interface depending on subcategories people are using, Nadella said, pointing to travel, health, images, and video. "These are the domains where we have domain-specific task-oriented" interfaces, he said.

The company also has ambitions for changing the business behind search, he said, pointing as one example to the Microsoft Live Cashback program, which converts the fees that search advertisers pay to Microsoft into rebates for people who buy products through the search mechanism.

Another business change coming for the search industry overall is the move toward more sophisticated payment schemes. Currently, advertisers pay search engines for ads when searchers click those ads, a model called cost per click (CPC), but the payment model will shifting toward cost per action (CPA), Nadella predicted. CPA requires more activity on the part of a searcher--registering for a service or buying a product, for example--before payment is made.

"CPC is fantastic. It will remain. But there will be additional things (such as) CPA," Nadella said. "We think that will bring next level of efficiency to the search marketplace. We're very bullish about that."

Google has begun showing details about how it customizes search results for location and search history.

(Credit: Google)

Google's search engine gives different responses depending on the location of a person and various other factors. On Wednesday, the company said, it will show searchers exactly what those differences are.

"Today, we're rolling out a new feature in Google Web Search that will help you better understand how your search results are already customized," said Rachel Garb, a Google product manager, in the blog post. A message will appear above the search results telling how searches were customized and offering a link to share more details.

Specifically, the message will show how search changed from three customization possibilities:

• Location, as judged by an approximate real-world city based on a user's Internet Protocol address or by address information stored in a user's Google account.

• Recent searches. Google pays attention to previous search queries because they can provide context Google can use to interpret the search. "We keep the most recent query on your browser for a limited time. After that, the information is removed from your browser and disappears immediately if you close your browser," Garb said.

• Search history. For users who have Web History enabled (users must explicitly enable it), Google also factors in a longer history of searches. "One important note about Web History: it belongs to you and you have complete control over it," Garb said. "You can remove specific items or pause the service at any time. And if there's a particular search that you'd rather not have personalized based on your Web History, you can also just temporarily sign out of your Google Account."