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No, I'm talking about THAT time of the month - although it's definitely something we as marketers should think about because it does affect a person's buying patterns and it's likely to affect their surfing patterns as well. And THAT time of the month does affect both men and women so, with a little bit of thought, it could be quite possible to take advantage of those times when people's hormones are a little whacky ...
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Hmmm ... my brain is starting to drift off along some faint thought paths here ... but I'm not here to have a brain doodle today. Oh no ... maybe that might be something to think about later in the week because right now I want to write about a new patent that was awarded to Microsoft at the end of January.

Now if you thought that search was all about you, or a surfer, entering a word or phrase into a search engine's search field and then getting the best results that the search engine could come up with then you're back in the horse and buggy days of search. Search has come a very long way since those days when searching for something was as simple as what I have described above.

These days there's a whole lot more finesse to search than you might think and if search engines want to keep your business then they really do have to go a whole lot deeper than the simple meanings of the word or phrase that you typed in when you were looking for something. These days what you enter into a search engine can be compared with what you searched for in the past so that the results that the search engine provides can be of total relevance to you.

By being that relevant the search engines hope to keep your business and keep you coming back. Not only are you providing them with valuable information every time you search but they can market to you in any number of ways and so they can make money by offering you things that you will recognize as being important to you.

Obviously some people are going to find that very creepy ... a faceless search engine knows what you want perhaps even before you have completely assembled your vague thoughts into a definite want.

And as marketers we're going to find it a real problem too. If we're selling long blue widgets then we want to rank well for just plain blue widgets as well as the more focused term. By getting our marketing in front of those who are looking for the more generic 'blue widgets' term we've got a chance of making a sale of our long blue widgets. But what hope have we got when the search engines know what people are really looking for?

John Doe might have searched for short blue widgets in the past and the search engines will remember that. So now, when he types 'blue widgets' into a search engine they'll want to be relevant for him so instead of showing him our long blue widget page the first results they're going to offer him are more short blue widgets pages. See how it affects us?

Well now, with that Microsoft patent things get even more interesting. The Microsoft patent is for an:

'... information dissemination system ranks the search results based on a temporal weight assigned to each search result. The temporal weight is an indication of the importance to a user that varies with time. For each search result, the information dissemination system calculates a temporal weight that is based on the temporal proximity of the event that is related to the search result. The temporal weight may be used to re-rank the search results.'

Cutting through that high-tech talk we get down to the nitty-gritty of a search system that ranks the results not only on what you've just typed into the search box but what's going on around you and the time of the month is just one of those things that's going on around you. It's going to build a profile of you based on what you're doing, who you're working for and what's happening within that company.

It's going to look in your email and use what it finds there to assess the relevance of what it might return in response to your search query. It will want to peek in your diary and look at other things all in the name of relevance.

Now that's where search and the positions we can obtain for important search terms really does begin to become a real challenge. It's also the point where search and what search engines want to know about us ... and have the ability to collect ... really does become scary.