Generation Google a General Disappointment - Part 1

[Jason]

This morning I went running, hopped in the shower, and ran to the conference, hair still wet, because I didn't want to miss the Generation Google panel. I was excited to hear more about Harrison Gevirtz, a sixteen year old affiliate marketer, and Chloe Spencer, Stephan Spencer's daughter and a blogger who makes a good chunk of dough from AdSense earnings. Joining them were Evan Fishkin and Andrew Sutherland, with Danny at the podium. (Fun fact: Andrew wrote the democracy plugin for Wordpress, which currently ranks #7 in Google for the word "democracy." Can you say wow?)

Much to my surprise, the session didn't go how I thought it would. I was expecting that we'd hear more about how Harrison, Chloe, and Andrew got their start as marketers, get a general idea of the amount of work they put into their projects and jobs, and what got them interested in the field in the first place. Rather, instead of enlightening the audience about these young, savvy, and budding web professionals, we listened to them answer general questions about their search habits and opinions about the web in general.

Maybe the session was incredibly fascinating and enlightening if you were in your 40s and wanted to know what those crazy kids were up to these days, but seeing as how I'm all of 24 years old, these kids' responses about the Internet and search really didn't surprise me. I'll drill through some of the questions and provide my personal commentary:

Who taught you how to search?

Evan said that his mom (aka Gillian) taught him how to search. I don't really know why this question was asked, since it's not terribly novel. My oldest brother taught me how to search, and computer classes throughout middle and high school helped as well. I guess the only really interesting way to answer this would be to say something like "Phil Collins, actually. Funny story behind that..."


Do you click on paid search ads?

Harrison said that he always likes to click on his competitors and see what they have to offer, while Andrew thinks “Oh, I'm going to cost this person $.80 if I click on it,” and thus is more conscious about clicking on those results. These answers are on par with what a typical search marketer would say, which is what most of the kids were on the panel--young search/Internet marketers (in some form or another). It's not like you went to the mall and polled some random kid, so I didn't really regard their answers as representative of their demographic. In fact, Harrison did mention that he has heard friends complain about paid search and their “scamming,” but he's not sure they know exactly what paid search is all about. His more "normal" friends would probably have provided more demographically accurate information than the panelists.


Do you ever look past the first page of search results?

Evan said that he goes past the first page of results all the time and is curious to see who's not there and who's working their way up. Again, this isn't what a typical teenager would say--this is an Internet marketer's response.

How often do you use search for your homework?

Evan said he only uses it for English homework, while Harrison said that he always uses search and that it gets most of his homework done. Chloe said that she'll search for information for projects if she needs to research something, but otherwise, she doesn't use it much for homework. Andrew said that he gets a lot of information off of Wikipedia, and while teachers say that students shouldn't use it, for the majority of assignments, it suffices. This question was fairly solid in that it elicited actual "teenage" responses versus "marketers who also happen to be teenagers" responses. However, except for the Wikipedia part, the response of "Yes, we use search often to help us with our homework" isn't really anything new. I used the Internet for various projects in school, starting a bit in junior high and getting more prevalent through high school and heavily in college. I just think that we've started an era where kids will use the Internet to help them with homework, projects, etc, plain and simple.

Next, the kids were asked something along the lines of their teachers' understanding of search engines. Harrison said that he got in trouble at school for arguing with a library teacher who said that people pay to get on the first page of the SERPs. Again, I'd argue that this is what a more savvy search person would do. I doubt that a typical teenager would argue about ranking factors and algorithms to someone who mistakenly thought that all search results were paid results.


Do you use mobile search?

Harrison said yes, Andrew said no, and Chloe only uses it to download ringtones. I'd actually be more interested in finding out how many teenagers have phones with good web functionality (iPhones, Blackberries, etc) vs. those who have more basic phones like Razors and whatnot that also have web access but have worse functionality. I mean, Harrison has four phones, for crying out loud (an iPhone, a Sidekick, a Juke, and a Nextel). He did say, however, that he hasn't really seen many of his friends adopting mobile search or using it much. This didn't really surprise me that much, though, because mobile search is still in a relative infant phase, so I wouldn't expect many adopters (regardless of the demographic) yet at this point.


rebecca