Heather Dougherty, Research Director, Hitwise agrees that the ability to tailor results for relevancy is imperative. There are now longer queries with five or more words and more complex relevancy is quite an issue, personalization can help tackle this problem as well as search suggest according to Dougherty. Shifting behavior includes more input from social media and she reminded the audience to keep in mind that companies need to participate in social media for branding purposes. She uses video to illustrate the point. Music is entrenched in video. MySpace is a lot of music searches.

Those mediums must be leveraged to create a relationship with the end market. Facebook is more about people, LinkedIn is more about business searches, Twitter is very topical, each social network is different and provides value in different ways, “Things can seem trivial until they are viewed with hindsight and that can help identify trends,” said Dougherty.