John Battelle's Searchblog

Hi John, how was Etech?
I just finished reading some search articles from WWW2005, and was wondering if you could please post some information about Vivisimo and Clusty? Just to vary a little bit.

Keep up the great finds and thanks for considering.

Andrien Zanier

I sincerely understand the repurcussions on privacy for GDrive users, but if you just say no to GDrive and GDesktop, what do you have to worry about? There are so many choices out there, people.

You got to think that Google may just have a little too much on their minds, taking on some many endeavors and competitors at once. I downloaded the presentation to investors they made the other week, but they had already caught the mistake so I did not see the notes -- though I heard others were able to get the entire original presentation.

It may be time for them to step back and get a little rest.

Maybe there is something to the leaks, and the slowing growth. I just found this analysis from the Financial Times - funny to find Monday's edition in an airplane seatback on Thursday night.

Here are a couple of excerpts.

"Search dominates advertising on the internet. The typical internet advertisement used to be a pop-up that got irritatingly in the way of what you were trying to read. It is now a snippet of text displayed on a search engine, linked to what you are searching for. Such advertisements account for 40 per cent of internet advertising revenues – double the percentage on display ads."

...

"But, looked at another way, the search engines run by Google, Yahoo and MSN have a weirdly high share of internet advertising. Most people spend 95 per cent of their time on the internet doing other things than searching. They read news and entertainment sites, send e-mail or instant messages, blog about their beliefs or even display indecent photographs of themselves."

...

"So 5 per cent is the number that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN Search should worry about: the amount of internet time devoted to searching. Perhaps it is even lower, since a lot of searches are so broad and unconnected with any impulse to spend money that no one will buy a linked advertisement. Whatever it is, an awful lot of advertising revenue flows from a single digit."

...

"But can search engines maintain a 40 per cent share of advertising on a 5 per cent share of internet viewing indefinitely? That seems unlikely, no matter how smart their engineers and how valuable the signals their users send. As Mr Reyes bluntly indicated, Google and its peers have already made their easiest money."