John Battelle's Searchblog

Mary Hodder has a good post over at biplog about the new push in Congress to overturn Feist. Feist is the case which established you can't copyright facts, like, say phone numbers, or the temperature outside. Congress is looking to change all that, and that is not a good thing. The EFF has a page on how to make your voice heard here.

Why does Searchblog care about this? Lock down facts, and search is much less useful.

Search Tuna - yes, Search Tuna, is a registration site that purports to take search deeper - like a tuna diving deep in the sea. Yikes, the metaphors, migod. But, in any case, I registered, and I'm going to check it out. Thanks to Tim Bray for the pointer. Tim is surfacing all sorts of cool stuff in search ever since his On Search articles were highlighted in SEW.

Anyway, as to Search Tuna. Some tidbits from their "about" page:

Search Tuna performs a live, customized web search for you. This takes some time, but our goal is to always get you the best results possible. In this sense, Search Tuna is a results engine.

We e-mail you a link to your results when we're done. That is why we ask you to register — we need your name and e-mail address. Your results are also always available at your account page. Or, you can simply wait.

I kind of like the attitude at this site. It's very no nonsense.

But orkut keeps chuggin nonetheless. Xeni sounds off about how she can't seem to bail from the system (I think they never considered that anyone would *ever* want to leave...), Marc gets tossed in jail without a phone call or a lawyer, Corante is not pleased (pointing out that negative posts and comments about orkut have been deleted from the system, at least early on),danah has a more than a few pointed words as well (and 19 trackbacks and counting...). Folks, the buzz ain't so good. What to make of it?

Well, I think it's fascinating, but I'm writing a book about search, and watching Google manage this particular herd of cats is simply too interesting to look away. So here's my comment, for what it's worth: pretending that this is not a Google project is disingenuous. Orkut *is* a Google project. End of story. Even if it wasn't intended to be, it is. And the folks at Google know that as important as the influencers in tech might be, orkut, in the end, is about the folks who could give a crap about the blogosphere. I'll wager they'll ride out the initial bad reviews, and hope the masses join up. Unless, of course, a few major journalists write it up as a bust. It's rather like the Dean campaign, no? Are Xeni and danah providing the primal scream?

Does anyone know anything about this outfit: RSSAds. The site is pretty thin on details, but I'm trying to grok how a business model will develop for RSS, and this company is clearly trying to set up against that issue. Anyone else out there have input or ideas? (Matt?)

Jeremy Zwadony nails a key reason Google needs Orkut - it's the data...Yahoo, MSN, AOL all have boatloads of data about their users. For future search models like local and personalized advertising, and for user lock-in, this kind of information is critical. So far, Google has very little data on its users. Orkut could solve that, for a portion of the user base...if it would work, that is. It was offline (unintentionally) most of yesterday...wonder if they are ruing the .net decision...

A good overview of MSFT's role in the industry, with special attention paid to the European antitrust case and the role Google plays as MSFT's next target.

Yesterday I spent the morning with Halsey Minor, founder of CNet, then 12Entreprenuering, creator of Snap, icon of the boom and bust, and now CEO of Grand Central. Halsey was his old enthusiastic self (not to say he ever wasn't, but it's not been easy these past few years, after all, and he did move away for a spell).

Halsey is convinced he's got a winner with Grand Central. After a couple hours of whiteboarding, it's hard not to at least see his point. The company is in a really interesting space, essentially providing the glue that allows for innovative companies to create really cool tools through web services. While web services as an industry has been on a three-year slow smolder, I think it may finally catch fire this year.

Should it ignite, I am not as convinced as Halsey that Grand Central will be the winner. He points out that there's really no one in the space doing what he is doing, but then again, Jonathan Abrams probably said that when no one had heard of Friendster. If Grand Central proves the space, IBM, MSFT, and others will move quickly to own it. Halsey has a defense on this point too, but in the end, it's all about execution, so we'll see.

Nevertheless, Halsey's vision for the space is compelling. It's based on the law of unintended consequences, in a way, combined with the concept of network effect. But maybe it's best put as a Who Woulda Thought Of That kind of business. (As in, who woulda thought a major bank would sell certificates of deposit via an internet auction?!)

When the web is viewed as a platform, individual services can be snapped together to make for powerful and previously unthinkable solutions to common problems. Grand Central is something like a big Lego board, a common interface where corporate IT guys, web developers, and publishers can think up and build cool new hacks.

Want proof? So did I. Halsey has a bunch of examples in his process directory, and he walked me through a few. Sales automation, for one. Imagine you're using Salesforce.com and your CRM system tags a bunch of potential leads. With Grand Central as the intermediary, your company could write a process that goes out through Grand Central to a bunch of disparate web services - Dow Jones, Dun & Bradstreet, Google, the SEC - and compiles a dossier of competitive information for your salesforce to use when it calls on that client. Grand Central negotiates with each of the databases and/or websites, organizes all that information into a format Salesforce.com understands, and then pushes it back into the system.

Not convinced? How about this: I think it'd be really cool to use such a system to hack together an index for the internet economy (or anything else) via dozens of feeds, integrated into an online application showing the health of the sector in real time, with various knobs and buttons you could tune. We tried to do this at the Standard, but it would have taken too many engineers too long. With web services and Grand Central, the idea may be possible to execute. Still don't see it? How about an application (perhaps integrated into your calendar) that knows when you have to go to the airport for a flight. It asks you for your flight number and your location (if it doesn't already know), then runs a process which queries online traffic information sites, MapQuest, and SABRE to determine when you need to leave for the airport. It determines which route is the best, then sends you an email with a map and the optimal time to leave.

Still want more? How about this: Grand Central has already created an interface that optimizes and automates the process of selling things on eBay, integrating SAP and EDI for big companies that want to clear inventory. There's a lot more to be done in this space - and GC claims to be working on it. Ditto for Amazon. (For more on that...see this CIO piece.)

Anyway, the options are as limited as the imagination. And that's cool. Whether Grand Central will make it happen remains to be seen. But don't count them out. Their tech has been feted by Infoworld and the company is one of B 2.0's "Hot Startups" for this year. Halsey has a very tight relationship with Salesforce.com (CEO Mark Benioff is on his board, Halsey was on the SFDC board till they filed, Halsey is a major shareholder in SFDC). He also seems quite patient. He says he expects to be pushing the rock up the web services hill for at least another 18 months. A lot can happen in that amount of time.

So... How on earth does this relate to search, you might ask? Well, using web services to open up previously dark and deep databases of corporate information is a very interesting aspect of the search story. These databases require many levels of access control - many require fees and security/querying protocols, and many are not HTML compliant. Until the web weaves itself into more of a platform, and companies like Grand Central allow for business models to develop which make them available to the masses, those corporate databases will remain unsearchable to most. Halsey commented that the massive amount of useful, structured data that is in fact NOT available through Google et al is an extraordinary problem/opportunity. I agree.

According to reports surfacing via the Times in London, CEO Schmidt is telling private investors that he is in no hurry to go public, especially given how much cash his company is already generating. The race to claim the Second Coming of the Bubble seems dealt a setback.

Silicon.com, Times of London commentary, and news story.

He might have the FBI on his tail...(thanks to SEGuide)

Trademark issue is heating up again, CNET reports...in essence, American Blind is not waiting for resolution on Google's earlier request to the courts, and is suing Google, AOL and Netscape for trademark infringement.

(via IP) I am constantly amazed by the business models made possible through the Internet. Turnitin.com is an anti-plagiarisim site - the student's work is submitted to the site, the site then makes a "digital fingerprint" of the work and compares it to thousands of others. It feels eerie and somehow wrong, and a student at McGill University agreed. CNN reports he won a university review case regarding the use of the system.

Is this a search-related story? I think so. Turnitin.com has to search the web for papers, apply their algorithm, then compare submitted papers against their database. Newly submitted papers add even more to the database. Given the site has contracts with 3000 universities, this database must be massive. Trusting Turnitin.com's algorithms to determine what is "unique" without some level of review and transparency strikes me as insane. In my own classes, i'd never force my students to use such a system. But then, perhaps it would have helped the NYT in the Blair case....

So perfect is this, that I must simply quote from the release, and let it speak for itself. SEO has come to PR!

Converseon Launches First-of-Its-Kind Search Engine Reputation Management Service

"Search engines have become the primary resource for journalists and other constituents to gather information on a specific company," says Robert Key, President & CEO of Converseon. "Yet, while many companies may pay close attention to how the traditional media portrays them, most companies are completely unaware of what information is appearing when search engine users type in a company's name." He points to examples like McDonald's and Nike, where users typing in the companies' names on Google are exposed to highly negative information, including McSpotlight.org, a "protest site," and the "Boycott Nike Homepage."

I wrote this in November, about two months into my NetNewsWireLite conversion, so if it feels dated, well....there you have it. But I think the meme still has traction.

THE MESSAGE
Why Blogs Mean Business
Today they’re lousy media experiences for mere mortals. But that’s about to change—and so is the way you gather information for your work..

By John Battelle, January/February 2004 Issue

The buzz on weblogs is becoming unbearable. Not because I think they don’t merit the attention—they do. But the mainstream discussion on the subject misses the point. Nearly everything you read says either that blogs are ill-defined harbingers of a long-foretold Internet media revolution or that they’re irrelevant, the ephemeral scribble of teenage girls.

Folks have forgotten that blogs work because people have something to say and others find what they say valuable. Our business culture works the same way—it runs on the currency of influence, authority, and relationships. People who have strong and well-informed opinions command respect and become influencers; they win deals, drive decisions, and ultimately determine the fate of companies. The thirst for high-end business information—the kind that makes people feel like influencers—has created a $15 billion professional publishing market in the United States alone.

So here’s my prediction: Blogs will soon become a staple in the information diet of every serious businessperson, not because it’s cool to read them, but because those who don’t read them will fail. In short, blogs offer an accelerated and efficient approach to acquiring and understanding the kind of information all of us need to make business decisions.
For example, Robert Scoble, a Microsoft marketer, maintains a blog where he comments on just about everything, including his views on Microsoft’s role in the industry. You can bet his views are studied by the folks who make decisions over at AOL, Google, and Yahoo—and in Redmond.
(more via link below)

Continue reading "Current Column (Finally!): Why Blogs Mean Business" »

Predictable, as I said earlier, Google has sent a bigfoot letter to Booble. Full text here.

But for how long?

Andy Beal points out in his blog that Google has been blocked from performing Whois lookups by Network Solutions. The "Whois" feature (which lets you find out who owns a web domain) was one of many added recently by Google in its continued quest to "make the world's information accessible." Alex S. at BizWeek pointed out in a piece blogged here that there's a business model behind this intent (I'll take disintermediation for $500, thank you very much). We had a back and forth about it in the comments as well.

In any case, it's significant that Network Solutions is pushing back. Andy, who writes in large part to the SEO community, comments:

There's some hypocrisy here. Google publicly chastises anyone who run ranking reports on the Google Index, claiming that it is a drain of their server resources. Yet they seem quite happy to launch a service that has the same impact on Network Solutions...

As I think Andy implies, I'm not sure this has anything to do with drains on servers and bandwidth. I think it has a lot more to do with who owns the customer. Network Solutions knows Whois is a major draw for customers, they use that draw to convert Whois lookups into paying domain registrants. In this particular case, the argument that Google was, in effect, stealing their customers at the point of conversion holds some water. If I do a Whois lookup on Google and see a bunch of ads for registrars that are not Network Solutions, well.....that ain't good for Network Solutions. And if I'm Google, and thinking about doing registration at some point (like Yahoo does now)....well, having this feature didn't hurt. Network Solutions had to do something.

I wonder if others - airlines, UPS, etc. - will follow suit.

Remember when everyone was calling Amazon the Walmart of the Web? That was so 1990s. But...after reading Marketing Wonk's interesting take on this article in Internet News, Walmart certainly came to mind, and not because they both sell a lot of shit. The commentary:

It might have taken warehouse store price pressure 300 years to develop and begin to put out of business Main Street bricks and mortar stores, but on the Internet, Jeff Bezos hopes the process will take merely a few years. In comments to financial analysts, Amazon.com CEO Bezos said the corporate strategy will remain to lower prices - even at the expense of gross margins - in order to gain share, prevent competition and create more power to put pressure on suppliers.

It's not easy to market marketing to marketers. David Galbraith points out a funny contradiction...

Back in the day, everyone was going to spin out and go public, even the digital unit of the New York Times. Then the crash came. The press (that which even bothered to cover the sector, or was left standing) beat everyone about the head in a fit of schadenfreudian pique, and the game was called over.

Well, game's on again. I've said this many times, and I will keep saying it. What happened in the late 90s was a warm up, and the main event is upon us. I hope we're not headed back to the mania of that period, but certainly many - if not most - of the bets of that era are proving prescient, if not financially rewarding in the short term.

Case in point: The New York Times' earnings, announced yesterday. In essence, the NYT's digital business (NYTD), run for years (including the late 90s) by the remarkably adaptable Martin Nisenholtz, is the story of the day. The NYTD is now on an earnings run rate of $30 million a year, and it's only going up. Were it not for the NYTD's earnings doubling this past quarter, the entire NY Times Corp's earnings would have stalled compared to last year. I am sure shareholders are quite pleased with Martin, and he deserves the credit. I've no idea if NYT execs wish they could have spun NYTD out, but I am quite sure they are pleased they stuck with it after the crash. They are only beginning to reap the rewards of that foresight. (Not many publishers had it.)

PS - The Times has Google to thank in part for these stellar results.... NYTD is one of Google's premier AdWords clients.

This one from SE consultant Bruce Clay. It includes overviews of all the majors. If you stare at this for more than five minutes, ping me. We have at least that much in common. (Thanks, Kottke).

Gigablast, still the work of one mad scientist (Matt Wells), now directly links search results to the Wayback Machine (link via Resourceshelf). This is pretty cool - I've always wondered why other engines don't crawl history, so to speak, or at least offer it as an option....

TiVo disclosed late last week that it has purchased Strangeberry, MediaPost reports. Strangeberry was the company founded by key ex-Marimba employees to do home networking/broadband stuff. So far no clarity on how the peanut butter and chocolate will mix, but I sense it will be pretty cool. Strangeberry was doing a lot of work using Apple's Rendezvous wireless networking technology. Blog rumours say look for a kick-ass home-server kitchen-sink type box.

TiVo's SEC filing w/r/t the purchase. More via PVRBlog...

Markoff writes in the NYT today that Google has completed an internal audit of its compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. This is no small feat, the law requires an audit trail of every third party transaction, and Google has millions of them a week in its PPC engine. According to the Times:

Google's board has been awaiting the report before giving the final go-ahead for the company to file a formal stock registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to several executives involved with the process....

The company has not yet picked a lead underwriter for its stock market offering, Google executives say, but several people involved in the process say that J. P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the only real candidates to manage the deal. Google is still weighing whether it should offer some shares through a public auction, in part to deflect potential criticism over whether the many investors eager to own a piece of the business will be treated in an equitable fashion.

The "dutch auction" approach popularized by WR Hambrecht is worth a longer think as it relates to Google specifically and others more generally. I'll post more later.

Kottke posts on the Sundance audience-award-winning film The Corporation, which asks why a corporation has the same rights as a human being in our culture. I believe this question is important, and will continue to gain relevance. I've long wondered how it is that many corporations act like such selfish, amoral assholes, while the people in them are often so wonderful. This film explores that question. From Kottke's site, quoting material explaining the film:

Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a "person" in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

This may seem too pat for some readers, but I think these are core issues folks at Google are struggling with as they determine whether or not to go public. "Don't be evil" and "amoral pyschopath" are not exactly compatible MOs.

$11, if you believe that eBay provides a perfect market....(Thanks to Bo)

I found Grandaddy by using Amazon's collaborative filtering technology - when I bought a Flaming Lips album on the advice of a friend, the Amazon filter said "folks who bought 'Yoshimi...' also bought..." I bit, and am glad I did. Now, take this idea to search, at least in a way. Thanks to Scoble for this gem: MusicPlasma. More proof of what can be done on top of a search platform. This takes a Grokker-like interface to show how your musical tastes relate. Type in one band you love and it will show you others you'd like. You can drill down in sort of a Venn diagram-driven search - say "Radiohead" then "The Shins". As far as I can tell, this is built on the Amazon API (perhaps someone more astute than I can figure this out?). This is why, as I will say again, Yahoo and Google should really rev up their API programs.

Dow Jones reports that MSN has added a search toolbar. What took so long?

Until now, organic search was a one-horse race - Google. But with Yahoo coming online soon with its own search technology, based largely on Inktomi, the optimizers and marketers are focusing on Inktomi with the kind of ardor once reserved for Google. Will be interesting to watch how the two compare in the judgment of this world, once Yahoo takes off the wraps.

A newly named "intermediate" research service from Hoover's founder Patrick Spain, integrating eLibrary, Researchville, Alacritude, and encyclopedia.com. The idea is interesting - to target the individual info-seeker who wants more than Google can offer, but does not want to pay the enterprise pricing of Factiva or Lexis/Nexis. Rafta Ali's PaidContent has posted an interview with Spain.

You know that sense of vague hope which comes from entering a query into Google that will mostly likley return tens of thousands of results? And that vague sense of hopelessness that comes when those results turn up, and there's literally nothing that matches what you are looking for?

In such a case, have you ever scrolled down to the bottom of the page, where the Goooooooooooooooogle is, and randomly hit, say result page #21, just to see if that might help? Yeah, me too. Steve Nelson knows our pain. A while back, he hacked up a Google API-based application called BannanaSlug that adds a bit of whimsical serendipity to your searches. It takes your search and adds a random word to it, just to see what happens. It's kind of fun to check out...

When Friendster started, it was something of a first of breed. It was a club that you had to know about to get in, I'm told (by Scott Rafer, with whom I shared coffee and chat yesterday afternoon. Scott was one of the first few hundred or so into that particular club). It wasn't like a million people rushed to sign up - no one knew about it unless they were told by someone else. It was a true Friend of a Friend network, growing organically. There was no need to put a velvet rope at the door - only those who knew where the door was could get in anyway. Friendster remains a place you can sign up for without an invitation.

Now, fast forward to today. There's simply no way that Orkut could launch with the same approach. Too many folks would rush the door, and they'd swamp the system, which has to scale up from somewhere. Hence, Orkut is by invitation only, and in the past few days, an invitation into Orkut has been a something of a quiet wish for many in the Valley.

Now that I've poked around for a couple of days, it's quite interesting to see how the network is growing. Not surprisingly the folks with the largest networks are nearly all employees at Google, who must have been testing the system for some time. This makes Google the Eden, of sorts, the point from which the entire network will grow (yes, for those of you reading closely, I chose Eden on purpose). It makes for an interesting anthropological study, in particular to watch how Google employees' networks metastasize outwards to the Valley and beyond. I hope for history's sake, someone is recording this progression.

PS - As one might expect, Orkut has a messaging and email interface. Should Google make good on the rumours of getting into the email business, it seems in Orkut they already have a pretty strong play.

PPS - As many have noted, including MSFT employee Robert Scoble, Orkut is built on MSFT technology. Odd, for Google to do this. It's a different kind of site - registration-based, as Mark Fletcher points out - but still, why use MSFT stuff? Can anyone tell me?

This application, built on the (rather limited) Google API, gives an inkling of the services and innovations which might prosper on the web should Google decide to become a true platform for developers. (To learn more on Google Alert, read SEW's write up here). In the FAQ, for example, the developers of Google Alert note that "Google Alert is a free service but bandwidth and CPU time cost money. Google's API terms prohibit commercial use so you can't even pay Google Alert for more results. In the future, Google Alert hopes to launch a premium commercial service with much greater capacity. Negotiations are currently under way with Google to arrange a license for this. "

My guess is that a quick witted developer over at Yahoo might just decide to open up their API for this kind of service, and the thousands of others which might flourish if they put a couple of big brains and some developer evangelizing behind it.

A major case threatening to rain on the paid search party has been settled out of court by the parties - AOL/Netscape and Playboy. Terms were not disclosed. This takes some air out of the issue, but Google still has action pending.

Today was a meet-with-interesting-folks day, starting with Louis Borders and Doug Herrington, Chair and CEO, in that order, of KeepMedia. Doug and Louis last worked together on WebVan, which I loved as a service. "We overexpanded," Doug confessed. I can relate.

KeepMedia has some grand visions of where it might be headed (think learning and communities), but it's quite busy focusing on its current model, which is providing what I'll call a "clean and well lit space for magazine search." OK, so I see most things through the search lens, but really, when you think about it, folks who use the KeepMedia service are looking for content that matches their particular interests, and the KeepMedia service has some interesting search and personal filtering technologies to meet that intent.
(more via link below)

Continue reading "Louis Borders and KeepMedia" »

And does a fine job, noting interesting, lesser known examples. Sheesh, Circuits might actually be getting better - this week anyway they seem to be more focused on culture/policy and less focused on gadgets. Good move.

The piece covers the SEO world, quotes Danny, talks about other engines as well. Apparently some libertarians are hard at work making the IRS the #1 SERP for the phrase "organized crime." They have a way to go.

An interesting meme in the piece: The growing popularity of Google bombing can't be a welcome development for a company that is expected to begin selling stock to the public in a few months.

Nice column by Alex on the trademark controversy that is clear and concise.

Of this much I'm sure: Google will be forced to look a lot harder at its keywords in the near future. Take a Google search for Hallmark. It now returns three AdWords listings. One of them links to Speedycards.com, one of Hallmark's competitors in the greeting-card business. If every trademarked company made its name off-limits for use as a keyword, it would mean significant potential for disruptions in the online-ad marketplace.

Kevin Lee over at Marketing Wonk noticed that Overture has changed its terms for advertising to include email as a third party venue where its PPC advertising might end up. This in response to Google's apparent move to do the same.

Nice piece in the NYT today, in Circuits no less, about finding stuff you've seen online before. The author speaks to researchers working on the cluttered and useless Bookmarks feature found in most browsers. (One researcher compares Bookmarks to a messy closet no one wants to open). Researchers found that "some people try to keep track of Web sites by sending themselves an e-mail message with the link and a note of why it might be useful. Others print pages or use sticky notes. Some people, the researchers found, make no attempt to save a page, counting on being able to find it again with a search engine." Sound familiar?

The article references the MSFT Research project called Stuff I've Seen, which automatically watches sites you've been to and recalls them based on keyword searches, regardless of whether you bookmarked it. A good idea, I think. MSFT says it is considering adding it to Longhorn, but will probably not break it out as a separate utility.

PS - Dave Winer points to a new beat application that addresses this problem: Furl. I like the premise: Furl is a new web browsing tool that lets you save and organize thousands of useful web pages (you know, the ones you want to save for future reference but then can never find again) in a personal "web page filing cabinet".

Once saved, you can effortlessly find any page again later using a powerful full text search tool. With Furl you can forget trying to save and organize dozens of bookmarks, forget saving web pages to your desktop, in fact forget everything except how to find a useful web page again next time you need it.

Play with this first. AdSense Sandbox. A great idea.

Via Search Engine Guide I came across this: SearchLimo. You know how Google employee #1 and supergeek Craig Silverstein used to always say he wanted a search engine to "be like the computer on Star Trek"? Well, this is a step in that direction, though I am in no way qualified to judge if this company has the goods to deliver. So what is it? Simply put, voice-driven search.

Now, I *hate* the metaphor used here - a limo - and they've made it worse by beating an already dead horse with the tagline "The Web's Luxury SE." Gawd. And it's damn near impossible to find out who is behind this. All the links and About pages are about...how to advertise. The only reference to who is responsible is this: "(SearchLimo) ...was developed and built on a freeware VRU platform designed by a prominent institution of higher education..." OK...so...which one? By whom? Can't find anything. Anyway, it launches officially on Feb 15.

I wrote about this a month or so ago, but it's ready for media prime time - Eurekster launched today. There's got to be a better name for socia-networking-driven search (er..Searchster?). What's news: Eurekster has a deal for search results from Overture, but as MediaPost notes, So far, only the "natural" search results a user clicks on are added to the list of sites recently visited by the user's community of friends. "The current version of the product offers no re-ranking of sponsored search results," notes Steven Marder, Chairman, Eurekster Inc.

I'm going to quote liberally from the Eurekster "about" page for you, then ask a question:

See how eurekster personalizes search results
Type in a search term e.g. your name
Click on a search result that you think is best (this can be on any page of the search results). Stay at that website for at least 1 minutes (or we will assume that it wasn't useful for you). Repeat this as often as you like.
In 3 minutes do the same search again and you will notice that the results you preferred will be at the top of the list of search results (excluding sponsored search results).
We remember the result you liked so you never have to repeat trawling through a long list of search results again!

How this helps other eurekster users
* After you sign up to eurekster and get your friends using it, when one of them does the same search as you then your preferred result will appear higher up their list of results. So everyone can learn from the search activity of people they know and trust.
* eurekster takes care of sharing the quality results around social networks to allow groups of people to learn from each other, while protecting identity and allowing the option for complete privacy.
* If users try to boost poor or inappropriate results they will not be spread to other users. The only people affected by this will be their direct contacts that they have invited to join their personal network. This social network filtering of search results works just like word of mouth that we count on in everyday life.

My question: is search a strong enough attractor to get folks to create new social networks, outside of those they may have already created with LinkedIn or Friendster? Put another way, isn't it easier for Friendster or LinkedIn to add search, than for search to add Friendster or LinkedIn?

Now that Eurekster has launched, I guess the answer is: we'll know soon enough. (Let's not forget the raging rumor some months ago that Google tried to buy Friendster, but was rebuffed.....)

PS - I am not sure that delimiting a site's usefulness by forcing someone to hang out there for a minute or more is a good idea (though I do like the idea of tracking the path folks take out of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and rearranging subsequent searches based on that input). Many folks who come to blogs, for example, stay for less than a minute. It takes about 35 seconds to read a blog post. Except this one, of course, which has gone on for too long.....

As I've said many times, it's always good to see something you care about live on, no matter what the form. Matt is now bringing guest bloggers (so far, all were connected to the old Standard in one way or another) to The Standard. Don't get all excited (or don't sharpen your knives, whichever works for you), it's still under the control of IDG.

On some level, you have to love this: A porn search engine. If only it worked. I crashed it on a search for "sex," tried again, and got 291 results - 291! Don't even try more sophisticated fare, there are few results to speak of. It's a great idea, poorly executed, and with a terrible name - Booble - that's derivative *and* sophomoric. The lawyers over at Google must be sharpening their knives, because the trade dress ripoffs alone warrant a bigfoot letter, if not more. Booble's put out a press release, lightheartedly claiming they are parodying Google, but they also claim the engine actually works. It's a directory of sorts - the release claims they've added 6000 sites that are vetted by human editors, but ...really. Note to Fleshbot: This is a good idea poorly executed - get on this asap!

(Thanks to the folks at Boing Boing for the pointer).

It keeps coming. PubSub is a RSS-based aggregator that allows you to sign up for search-term-based alerts, then emails you (or updates your RSS reader) when something is posted that matches your search. Signing up is painless, as it should be. It's Google News Alerts for the RSS-osphere. Cool. Does Feedster or T'rati do this? I am starting to feel like keeping up with this stuff is a full time job. Man, we need a publication covering just this space...thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer.

What with Yahoo pointing to Nutch as one of the centerpiece projects in its new Labs, perhaps the stars are aligning for open source search. I recently got wind of another project in the works. It's called Sprawler, and it's in "pre-alpha" over at SourceForge. The man behind Sprawler is Eric Anderson, who is a systems analyst at a large unix installation in Austin, and came to search via an interest in physics. It's early - Anderson does not expect to start indexing until later this Spring - but its good to see more and more interest in the space.

If you've never checked out Technorati, now's a good time to do so. The service hoovers up blog links and postings and offers a search engine which does a great job of monitoring the zeitgiest, and your (or any other) blog's place in it. The possibilities of such an engine are extremely interesting. In any case, Sifry & Co. have taken the wraps off a new beta release. David Sifry, the CEO and man-behind-the-curtain, blogs the changes here. He concentrated on infrastructure: "We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine - essentially taking a volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in." This means faster indexing and querying, and a more scalable back-end database. There's still bugs, and still open questions (I love this one, for example), but go bang on it for yourself...

I just got Ronco spam! This marks a special moment in the the maturation of the Web - Ronco has taken its marketing tactics to email. Sure, I know they've had a site for a while, but man, ain't it great to see it shine online? The spam was lame, the site is lame, the marketing tactics are lame - it's simply wonderful!

It was bound to happen - Yahoo announced today its own research labs. The labs live here. Seems this is the old Overture research warmed once over, their too-short list of research projects include Nutch, which was supported by Overture (I wrote an early piece on Nutch here). I've been on Yahoo for a while, even back before the Overture days, to take a leading role in search and internet technology innovation. I'm not entirely wowed by this unveiling. The second project, Cluster Graphing, linked to a 404 error. The "Concept Discovery" research is important, however. Let's hope this is more than just a press release...though at first glance, it kind of looks that way.

Google Labs, for comparison....

Check out Topix, another new news aggregator (in Beta), this one from a handful of DMOZ and Netscape refugees. What makes Topix special? From an email sent to me by Rich Skrenta, one of the founders:

Our project is a news aggregator that reads all the news, everywhere, and sorts it into thousands of categories depending on what the stories are about. One kind of sorting we do is geographical, so we produce an online news rollup for each of 30,000 towns and cities across the US. We also track every mention of a celebrity, sports team, health condition, country, music group, public companies, and some other stuff...

The geographic sort makes Topix a local news player, which is potentially a major source of revenue once local search gains full traction. Take note, media investors.

For another Topix grok, here's what Tara of Research Buzz had to say...

Check out this example he sent to me, a rollup of news associated with the Search Engine Industry....

Now, why doesn't Topix support RSS? I asked, update when I hear.

David Weinberger today reports on Findory, a personalized news site that requires no registration and no personal information, it simply watches what you read and builds a profile via your information habits and those of others who also have viewed the same articles as you. Very cool idea. No idea if it works, but worth a pointer....

Relatively deep in John Markoff's piece "Plaintiffs Say Microsoft Still Behaves Badly" these charges are related: In a separate report, filed with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, which is the lone holdout from the antitrust settlement, stated that its investigations "portend badly for the efficacy of the Nov. 1, 2002, judgment."

The Massachusetts report said that the state was reviewing allegations that Microsoft is "engaged in a campaign against various Internet search engines similar to the campaign it previously waged against Netscape's Navigator browser."

Now, run of the mill charges that MSFT is trying to kill Google et al are not new. But this portends more significant allegations are at work. I'd be damn interested to know who Assistant Attorney General Glenn S. Kaplan is hearing from.

I hate to crow. Well, no I don't. When a monthly beats the NYT to a story, it's kind of fun. Anyway, the Times picks up on the web/TV advertising meme, which I wrote about a few months ago in 2.0.

Utilizing Unicast technology, a slew of sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and others, will run ads from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, and several others. This is real marketing. More than 100 million ads will be run in the six week test, with an estimated reach of 50-75 million folks. For those of you who don't read 2.0...here's the last line of my column (edited a bit for clarity):

"There are any number of problems with selling television advertising on the Web, of course. Will Web surfers accept it? Will they hit the fast-forward button (or will they be able to)? Will advertisers see the Web as a valuable medium? Can they even buy it in a way that makes sense to them -- using the same reach and frequency metrics they apply to buying television and print? Can they let go of their decades-long dependence on the up-front and learn to love the Web?

I'd bet that the answer to all these questions is yes. But don't take my word for it. ... we're going to find out sooner than most people think."

I'd be very interested in reader's reactions to these commercials, should you come across them.

Ross Stapleton Gray, who in this site's short existence has challenged and extended my thinking on search, has started a blog of his own on a topic near and dear to him: RFIDs. It's called Surpriv (a very cool name.) I think of RFIDs as an extension of search, he thinks of search as an extension of RFIDs. Check it out....

Loads of folks have commented already on this, but I wanted to add what I could to the meme, if only to insure one more protest is lodged in this particular record in the database of intentions. It boggles the mind how deeply lame CBS's decision to deny MoveOn's ad is. CBS claims "the network has had a long-term policy not to air issue ads anywhere on the network." Uh huh. Lessig comments that somehow a War on Drugs ad from the Bush White House, a blatant piece of "issue advocacy", made it through the CBS filter. Not to mention all the presidential advertising lucre CBS will be happy to suckle over the next 10 months. You're telling me an RNC- or DNC-funded attack ad won't be an "issue ad"? Did CBS refuse the Willie Horton ad back in 1988? What the fuck is going on here?

Folks are up in arms over this, but we don't know what to do about it. We should make a concerted effort to air the ad online to at least as many people as would have seen it on the Superbowl, only for free. Get the ad from MoveOn.org, and put it on your site, or at least link to it, over and over. Maybe MoveOn can count or estimate how many folks have seen it and prove that the net can route around this mass-media market insanity. If anything proves network television is in a death spiral fueled by ignorance and blinkered reasoning, this is it.

Policy against issue ads my ass. More like policy against losing White House access, policy against sticking one's neck out, policy against standing for anything. Pathetic CBS. The Tiffany Network has fallen, hard, long, and with abandon.

Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, Ross Mayfield, and many others are gathering virtually to discuss RSS and its implications at the RSS Winterfest Jan 21 and 22 (agenda). I'm particularly interested in the conversations around the future of RSS, and how it will evolve to support subscription and advertising models (yes, a publisher's question - how can we monetize this!?).

Dex, the newly named Yellow Pages unit (formerly of Qwest/US West), announced Friday they have made all 240,000 of their listings - covering a major swath of the midwestern and western US - searchable online. Said Dex President and Chief Executive Officer George Burnett, rather defensively, "We think our product is better than any portal."

MediaPost has a story on it here.

This piece (via Forbes.com) explores the idea, which Google does not deny or confirm. Says Google may do its own branded email service.

From the piece: Google last year purchased an e-mail management software maker and in 2001 registered the domain name googlemail.com.
Some in Silicon Valley also believe Google could be preparing to launch free e-mail to compete with offerings from Yahoo and MSN's Hotmail.
"If they were to go the e-mail route they'd have to provide an offering that competes with free (e-mail). Anti-spam is one form of strong differentiation," said Jim Pitkow, chief executive of Moreover Technologies, whose personalized search company Outride was acquired by Google in 2001.

"SEO" stands for "search engine optimizers," an oft-maligned class of businesses who specialize in helping companies rank better in organic - aka "pure" - listings. In other words, these are the folks who will help your site get in the first page of results in Google, as Google is (for now) the only game in town when it comes to pure results. And as we all know, getting on the first page of Google results can mean a massive amount of traffic and business to your site. Plus, you can avoid having to spring for paid listings.

Now, SEOs have a long and rather mottled history, and it's not my goal in this post to revisit it. Suffice to say that many SEOs use tactics which fail the integrity sniff test, and most observers of this space would agree that the overzealous use of search-engine optimization has created a massive spam problem for Google - crap results which clog up otherwise relevant SERPs (search engine results pages). In fact, it's not at all uncommon to call the dance between SEOs and Google's programmers an "arms race" - wherein Google will shift its algorithms to thwart obvious SEO deviousness, and the SEO community will respond with new and ever more crafty techniques to foil Google's algorithms.

But many SEOs perform a honest and valuable service - they play by the rules, and they help sites organize themselves so they rank just about where they reasonably ought to. Optimizing for Google is not a new idea - nearly every good site does it, from CNet to Amazon. The SEO industry recently took a major step toward becoming an industry with standards and practices when it self-organized SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (though I can't yet find the equivalent of SEMPO Member Guidelines, which I imagine is still a pretty hot potato within that nascent community).

All of this came to mind when I saw this link via Google Blogoscoped: The Google SERPs SEO Competition. Far as I can tell this is an open call for entries for SEOs to prove they can push a particular page (in this case, the #1 SERP for the term "SERPs") to the top of the heap in Google. No rules, winner takes all (which I think in this case means basically bragging rights). I'm pretty sure this contest will be less than warmly received over at Google, but I wonder what SEMPO thinks? I'll send a note and be back when I have an answer....

Because I can read a Yahoo employee ranting - in public - about the disingenuous behavior of his CEO. Thanks, Jeremy!

OK, that's a stretch. But via Mediapost we learn that Washington Mutual, a major bank, is using an eBay auction to set interest rates for its CDs. This is a stunt, certainly, but an interesting one. I've always been fascinated by the use of eBay as a "meta" pricing mechanism for markets outside of individual items. For example, Dale Dougherty over at O'Reilly recently turned me onto the idea of using eBay to create markets that might predict the half-life/value of new gizmos by comparing what past iterations sell for in aggregate on eBay.

From the story:

In a promotion beginning today, the bank is using eBay to auction interest rates for its certificate of deposit accounts. But instead of posting a low rate and letting consumers bid them higher, Washington Mutual will offer the CDs at a relatively high interest rate, which eBay members will bid down. .... Aside from being a radical form of banking, the promotion is the latest in a series of innovative marketing deals to come out of eBay's new Strategic Partnerships Unit, which also developed such surprising stunts as Seven-Up's "Liquid Loot" and Hasbro's "Jedi Knights" promotions.

More on eBay's SPU here...

Not directly tied to search, but I was fortunate enough to get an early copy of Stephen Johnson's new book Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life, which is now out. As Cory points out, it's from a guy who many of us revere for elegantly relating Big Ideas. The book does a superb job of relating new thinking about...thinking, and in particular emotions such as love, fear, and joy. A very worthy read, and an inspiration for folks like me struggling to write a book related to Big Ideas.

This news came more than a day ago, and I decided to hold off on discussing it, as it felt like a nuisance suit. But the more I think about it, the more I sense this could be something of a big deal. Way back in 1999, Playboy sued Netscape, which was at that time still a major player in the web advertising wars, for misuse of its trademarks. At issue was Netscape's advertising model, known then as keying - the practice of selling specific advertising that would appear when users typed in certain search terms (basically paid search, but an earlier form). Netscape, and later Excite, were selling keywords to companies capitalizing on Playboy's trademarks. The suit was dismissed, then appealed, and yesterday we learned that the Ninth Circuit has upheld Playboy's right to sue.

Now, the defending parties are either gone (Excite) or mere shadows of their former selves (Netscape), but Playboy intends to pursue the suit anyway. This case is not an anomaly, as Stephanie Olsen points out in her piece covering it. Google, among others, has been the target of several suits, and has recently asked the courts to clarify this issue, one clearly central to its business model. Late last summer, Google acquiesced to portions of an eBay request that Google not allow its advertisers to bid or buy on keyphrases that included the eBay brand.

The question here is of balance. Where and how do you draw the line as to what is a misuse of a trademark, and what is not? If we have to depend on the courts every time someone wants to use a word that also happens to be trademarked, the chilling effect on paid search could be significant.

Chris Sherman over at SearchDay (SEW) gives Metrobot, a new kind of local search engine, a rave review today. From his piece: "Metrobot is one of the most useful specialized search services I've seen in a long while. It also shows how thinking outside of the (search) box can lead to a creative yet incredibly useful solution to the local search problem all of the major search engines are throwing a lot of resources at. Here's hoping they all take a close look at what Metrobot has to offer."

I tried the San Francisco search, and was not impressed - I searched by "type of business" and could not find a bike shop or a dry cleaner. New York was better populated. The service is very new and the CEO promises to add listings as fast as they can. I'm inclined to listen when Chris or others at SEW say nice things about a new approach to search, and the map feature is really cool (here's an example here). It's surprising, in a good way, to see local businesses in context of what else is on the street nearby.

Yesterday Yahoo CEO Semel gave a timeline for when his company would drop Google for Yahoo's own internal search technology: this quarter. This has a limited effect on Google's revenues - Yahoo paid Google less than $10 million a year to license its organic search listings, and has never used Google's AdWords, where the real money is. But the effect could be argued to be more psychological, and oddly, good for Google.

Google is widely understood to be the 800-pound gorilla of search, and whispers of "monopolist" have begun popping up from time to time (not particularly well-thought-out whispers, but real nonetheless). Certainly whenever journalists cover search, they quote the "Google owns 80 percent of the search market" meme. With Yahoo's distribution gone, Google may well benefit from the sense that there is more balance in the market. Once it is perceived to be battling much larger companies like MSFT and Yahoo, companies that have as large if not a larger share of the organic search market, Google may again become the internet's underdog, a position I sense it might very well prefer.

I can't - or don't want to - make that much sense of this. But...this search engine lets you search for family connections through DNA matches. This is very sci-fi, but it's also very real. As the site says: "Many thousands of people have tested to find family connections as well as family origins. Since then, other labs have entered this market, and the number of tested individuals is growing as the use of DNA is becoming more and more accepted as an important tool for family research, enhancing traditional genealogy research methods.

In order to allow people that have tested with the different companies to make their results available for comparison, Family Tree DNA is offering Ysearch as a free public service."

The searchable genome. I sense Cory Doctorow or Denise Caruso might have smart things to say about this. Thanks to Research Buzz, which does a fine job of grokking the engine, for the refer.

Yahoo announced its earnings after hours today, profits were inline with analysts expectations and revenues were a bit higher than expectations. The stock sank a bit in after hours trading, apparently on concerns over TAC (traffic acquisition costs) - a metric that is a relatively new concept for Yahoo. Overture, which as we all know was purchased by Yahoo late last year, lives in the world of TAC - the costs associated with splitting advertising revenue between the ad service (Overture) and the portal (Yahoo). Increasingly, Overture was in a no win situation, as it had to give more and more of its margin up to its partners. Now Yahoo is in the same business, and analysts, used to pure revenues, have to grok Overture's more complicated model. A good summary of this is in Jim Hu's Cnet piece posted yesterday.

As a onetime first timer, I agree with Fred...you're only a first time CEO once. Thank God.

Wired News rounds up the usual suspects (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) today, going so far as to quote Danny saying "this is not news." More proof that anything related to Google gives editors the urge to assign a story. However, one can always find something of note buried in me-too news - for example:

According to Kelsey Group program director Gerg Sterling, '2004 is going to be the Year of the Search'..."

2004?!! I better get my book done and quick....

Also...

When analytics firm Nielsen/NetRatings last measured search habits in March 2003, the company found that the number of unique visitors to Yahoo Search trailed Google by a mere 10 percent.

That's less of a gap than I thought.

One of the purposes of my book is to expand the concept of what "search" means in everyday life. We've come to think that search = Google, and Google = search. But what of luggage? Of inventory? Of....Rental cars? In this disturbing NYT piece, Christopher Elliott tells the tale of Byngsoo Son, who rented a car in San Francisco, took a 12-day road trip with his family (Grand Canyon, Vegas, etc), and got a bill for over $3,400. Why? He crossed state lines, which he didn't realize triggered a $1-a-mile clause in his contract. How did the car company know? Payless (oh, the irony!) had a GPS unit and "telematics" installed in the car, and was tracking its movements. In other words, they could search for the car at any point in its journey, so they knew when it triggered the Make-A-Shitload-of-Money clause. Did they call the hapless Son, and let him know that he might consider buying a used BMW instead? Of course not! Ah, the power of search....

Remember The Big Lebowski? No? Well, the main character, played perfectly by Jeff Bridges, was named "The Dude." He lived, loafed and bowled in LA, circa the late 90s. I'm not sure if the movie inspired "Dude, Check This Out!", a new web-based application I found via Boing Boing, but it certainly seems so. While they have picked Charles Atlas as their icon, I think they'd do better with Bridges' character. In any case, the Dude (that's what they call themselves) is a recommendation engine of sorts. How it works:

"You can use the Dude to store cool links that you find. Once you store something, you can send it to others, both inside and outside the Dude universe....

Your collection of cool links is anonymously related to other link collections in the Dude database, and the Dude then suggests other links to you. It’s sort of like the Amazon suggestion engine for books based on “people who bought this book also bought…”, but for links instead. Cool, eh?....

Item suggestions are connected to a profile, so as you discover new information, you’ll also connect with new people. It's social networking with a purpose: You connect with others because you share interests."

I continue to believe, until someone convincingly argues otherwise, that RSS-cum-Feedsharing-cum-personal newsreading will ultimately take off when a great recommendation engine is grafted onto a great feed aggregator, then married to some third cousin of social networking. Amazon+Feedster+NetNewsWireLite+Friendster. Or something. The Dude points in that direction.

I have not had a chance to read through this all yet, and will post an update when I do, but Tim has created quite a piece of work over on his site: The Technology Predictor Success Matrix. Check it out.

I've been watching as the predictions for broadband go higher and higher, and now this....Jupiter claims broadband home penetration in the 35% range in 2004. And for high income households, it soars way above that, to nearly 50%.

PS - My ISP went down today, till now. Sorry for the light posting day...

It seems every day Google, and now Yahoo as well, adds more features to its search - first it was phone numbers , then tracking packages, then patents, now it's whois, flights, UPC codes, VINs, and God knows what else. Read a few pages of Google Hacks, and you'll realize, you never use even 2% of Google's power, and, most likely, you never will.

This leads me to wonder, where is this all going? I mean, the fact is, most searchers simply don't use advanced search features *at all* - not even simple operators like quotes (" black jaguar" cat) or negative inclusion (jaguar -cat). So why are these search sites loading up on features that, honestly, nearly all their users will never take advantage of? Do they think searcher's habits are going to change? I doubt it. I'd be interested in why you these features are being added with such abandon. Just because they can? Maybe they think folks will be building applications on top of the search platform, or will they do it themselves? Are they expecting that a layer of expert searchers will develop who peddle intermediary services (ie Google Answers)? I mean, I can get as excited as the next guy about the addition of the tilde operator or the "*" function, but....it feels like there is something in aggregate I am missing. Must be the varathane on the floor in the next room, keeping me from grokking the grand plan in all this. Help me out!

Cnet's Stephanie Olsen notes that several portals are considering following Google into the taskbar world...effectively increasing pressure on MSFT to get its Longhorn act together. This is a significant threat to the mindspace that Windows occupies: If Windows becomes a layer that is built upon by others...where is the margin for Gates & Co? Hence their massive efforts to get into search...

Advertising Age has a headline today that sounds familiar: "Superbowl Ad Prices Set New Record." On first blush, it'd be easy to say that the $2.25 million marketers are paying for one 30-second spot proves how robust broadcast television is as a medium. In fact, I'd argue it proves quite the opposite. Broadcast television continues to bleed out as niche cable, the internet, and gaming take hold, creating a a significant shortage of Major Marketing Moments. Back when Laugh In or the Texaco Theater was king, average ratings hovered above 50 for hit shows. Now a show is a hit if it cracks the teens. Hence, when something like the Superbowl creates a mass marketing opportunity (a rarity today), marketers naturally bid it up. So here's a new law: The price of a 30-second Superbowl spot is inversely correlated to overall network television revenues. I'd wager Major Marketing Moment revenues won't make up the overall network decline year to year. I'd love to do the stats on this, but I'm supposed to be writing a book, so I'll leave it at that.

Because your company's employees can use it to punk you on your 40th birthday: type "old fart" into Amazon's search box (today only, I'd wager) and you'll see this... thanks to D. Weinberger for the pointer...

Dan Gillmor nails it when he says:

The post-broadcast culture is a democratization of media, and it comes at things from the opposite stance. It says that anyone also can be a creator, not just a consumer. There's a world of difference.

Video has taken longer to hit the sweet spot financially and technologically. But now, in the early 21st century, it's arriving for real.

The post, which is also his Sunday column, has started a great back and forth in the comments section as well.

Thanks to Google Blogoscoped for pointing me to this Reason interview with Bruce Sterling. In it he opines on media, tech, etc., and has some words of wisdom on search in particular. Excerpts:

There is a Google blindness. It’s a kind of common wisdom generator, but it’s not necessarily going to get you to the real story of what’s actually going on.

Sterling: It is a form of literacy that’s really peculiar. Socrates used to talk about this: "The problem with writing is that no one memorizes the Iliad any more. You’ve got to just know all of it. And how can you call yourself an educated man if you cannot recite Book Three, not missing a single epithet?" He’s got a point there. It has a profound effect on literary composition. I’ve got Google up all the time. It gives you this veneer of command of the facts which you do not, in point of fact, have. It’s extremely useful for novelists but somewhat dangerous if you’re pretending to be a brain surgeon.

Google is well known as a poster child for Linux - it's got clusters of some 10,000 Linux machines happily cranking out hundreds of millions of searches a day. SCO is well known to be a sore loser in the Unix OS wars - it's suing IBM, claiming Linux (which IBM is pushing hard) violates their intellectual property rights. Folks have speculate for weeks that perhaps SCO would go after Google, given its high profile and imminent IPO. Google would capitulate, the reasoning went, since they'd prefer to pay off SCO and insure a big IPO payday, rather than screw up an offering with a messy legal battle over some of the most important technology they use.

Well, Rueters is reporting that the other shoe has dropped, if somewhat softly. In the story, which has been commented on widely in the Linux/blog world, a company representative says that "SCO has had 'intermittent, low-level discussions' with Google, which is well-known for harnessing Linux technology to run its popular search service." Some wags say that means SCO called Google, asked the receptionist for money, and were hung up on.

Now, I am no expert on the SCO suit - it smells wrong to me - but I'd count on the opinions of Larry Lessig. He says the suit is crap. If and how Google responds will be important. I'd wager they'll simply ignore it as long as the suit is only against IBM. If SCO sues Google, I imagine the company will join IBM and fight hard. That feels like the right thing to do.

The First Monday peer-reviewed journal recently published "Do Web Search Engines Suppress Controversy?" by Susan Gerhart, a software engineering professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Driving the paper is this sentiment:

"The dilemma of controversies is that the searcher beginning to explore a topic doesn’t know the search terms to investigate a controversy unless it is revealed with reasonable visibility, e.g. not item number 879 in search results, nor buried three links away from result number 30."

In other words, if you are just starting to research a topic, and have no idea if there are any controversies surrounding said topic, how will you ever know if the search engine has a bias toward not revealing those controversies?

This paper explores the hypothesis that, as Gerhart puts it: "A given, well–known specific controversy will not be revealed in the top search results." She then creates an experiment to test this hypothesis, by outlining both a broad topic, and a related controversial subtopic. An example is "Albert Einstein" as the broad topic, and "Did Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Maric, receive appropriate credit for scientific contributions to Einstein’s early work" as the subtopic. The question is, do search engines leave out the more controversial bits, the stuff that, taken as a whole, provide texture and context to any searcher's understanding of a topic?

For the many examples she tested, Gerhart found proof on both sides of the ledger, and the paper left me disappointed that she could not come to a more decisive conclusion. She did note that in fact most search engines were roughly equal in their performance in the experiments. And she has some interesting thoughts on how controversies are integrated (or not) into the web at large, and some suggestions as to how various actors on the web - site authors, researchers, search engines - might better organize themselves to portray a more relevant set of SERPs to any particular query.

All in all, I liked this paper, as it forced me to think about the politics and architecture of search engine results. She introduces the idea of "sunny" vs. "dark" search results, and concludes that "sunny" results - those that do not include controversies, tend to float toward the top. Her final conclusion:

"Web search engines do not conspire to suppress controversy, but their strategies do lead to organizationally dominated search results depriving searchers of a richer experience and, sometimes, of essential decision–making information. These experiments suggest that bias exists, in one form or another, on the Web and should, in turn, force thinking about content on the Web in a more controversial light."

The one thing Dr. Gerhart left out entirely is the effect of blogs. As most of us certainly know, when the blogosphere latches onto a controversy (or just a politically-driven meme), that aspect of a topic usually shoots to the top of the SERPs. As with most good papers, this one left me feeling like there is much work yet to be done.

Over at Boing Boing Cory's got a good rant on TiVo's attempt to free video from the opaque prison most commercial PVRs have become. But he finds the DRM TiVo has imposed too limiting.

From his post: What's funny about this is that it's the exact opposite of the traditional way of running a disruptive technology business: no one crippled the piano roll to make sure it didn't upset the music publishers, Marconi didn't cripple the radio to appease the Vaudeville players -- hell, railroad barons never slowed their steam-engines down to speeds guaranteed to please the teamsters.

While I was down in the Valley Weds. I heard word that Yahoo's aggregator was up and running. But then I couldn't find it when I got home. Seems they put up a brief beta in MyYahoo, then brought it back down again. Internet.com has a story on it..."Insiders at Yahoo confirmed the plan to add an aggregator as a module within the 'My Yahoo' section but described the public appearance of the beta Wednesday as an accident."

Also of note, NewsGator has a new service to push RSS onto mobile devices.

As a curtain raiser for CES, John Markoff gives the ever morphing MSFT strategy w/r/t search/MSN a good once over in light of recent video/access/search biz model shifts.

From the piece: The Microsoft executive who heads the MSN service, Yusuf Mehdi, said that Microsoft generated $1 billion annually in online advertising revenue and saw growth opportunities in creating a Yahoo-style Web portal and Google-style search-based advertising.

For more context, here are columns I wrote on both MSFT's search strategies and video/advertising strategies...

Comes, as usual, from Search Engine Watch. My posts will be brief for the next day, as I am taking Friday off, but this is worth a read if you care about why local search seems to be a big deal...

Via Reuters, Forbes reports on another Chinese search company planning to go public, this one called Baidu - the name "comes from a Song dynasty poem about a man searching for his lover." The company claims to be profitable, and to serve 30 million searches a day ("one seventh that of Google") - the largest in China.

In a recently published article, an analyst at the Pacific Research Institute argues that social networking sites pose serious privacy risks, and that in fact Friendster and its kin may well be building a private sector version of the much derided (and currently unfunded) Terrorist(nee Total) Information Awareness Program.

Bah. Unless terrorists are using Friendster to declare their intentions, I doubt this is where Poindexter and his sucessors will be looking. On the other hand, there is a shitload of personal data on these sites, and it will be abused under the blanket provisions of the Patriot Act(s), of this I am sure. This is worth remembering. Also, the analyst points out a TIA-like private/public partnership called MATRIX (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange). How tone deaf can you be, to name your government information/control program MATRIX? I mean, didn't they see the movies? Don't they get how stupid that is? Following that logic, let's rename everyone in the FBI Agent Smith and just get it over with...

To be honest, I wanted to post this item mainly for the graphic. I mean, who would have ever thought that social network logos swirling around the TIA's all-knowing eye/pyramid would look so...dope?

From Boing Boing I learn that the Internet Archive is releasing its crawler for free under a LGPL license. Why is this news? As I've argued in the past, it's not cheap or easy to innovate in the search space, but the search space desperately needs innovation. If key components like crawlers can be snapped in place relatively easily, new ideas heretofore unthinkable become possible. I also like the philosophy behind the crawler, which is named Heritrix: "Heritrix (sometimes spelled heretrix , or misspelled or missaid as heratrix / heritix / heretix / heratix ) is an archaic word for inheritess. Since our crawler seeks to collect the digital artifacts of our culture (my emphasis/link) for the benefit of future researchers and generations, this name seemed apt."

Way to go, Brewster!

Ever wondered how local search is going to work, really? Or how the government might associate particular documents or databases with specific geographic locations? MetaCarta makes a business of wondering just that, and just got $6.5 million in a series B round, led by Sevin Rosen. This company has clearly stepped into a significant role in "geographic search." It's customers include intelligence agencies, the military, and energy companies (Chevron is an investor.) What do they do? From the site: "With MetaCarta Geographic Text Search™ (GTS), analysts accelerate their efforts by searching text documents in a geographic context. MetaCarta GTS turns text documents into geographic data layers.  This accelerates decision support and analytic workflow."

Had a day of talking to folks about the book, including lunch with Marc (I've been meaning to talk to him about the book for months, as Netscape pretty much fired the search-driven starting gun, and Marc generally has a lot of really interesting things to say). I then went over to Friendster's new offices for a good chat with Jonathan Abrams and a few of his colleagues. Good crew, a lot of level-headed enthusiasm (interesting concept, eh?) evident there. Then I spent some time on the phone with the CEO of Dipsea (remember them? I pinged them back here). Then my site went down. All in all a busy afternoon.

Marc had great stories to tell about the early days of Netscape, and lessons to be drawn from managing extraordinary growth. Folks forget that they sold Netscape - a company with something on the order of $600-800 million in revenues - for $10 billion to AOL. Marc drew an interesting set of graphs showing how browser revenue imploded when MSFT came in, but how portal revenue - OEM'ing traffic, essentially - grew to nearly the same size, about $200 million. We also spent some time on the future of search as it relates to media models. Good stuff.

Jonathan was busy hiring folks when I stopped in, as were many others I met at Friendster. A good sign, overall, for the Valley, that smaller and younger companies are hiring, as well as folks like Google. F'ster had none of the bling bling associated with fresh VC money adorning the office, which was refreshing. All I can say about our conversation (remember, I have to keep some stuff for the book) is that they are quite serious about expanding the offerings there, and it ain't just dating...

Dipsie, well, watch this space. I hope to have real news soon.

A number of readers have emailed me recently, concerned that my site had a/turned into the blog of a Chinese human rights activist, b/was now run by a fan of Charlie Parker who also is one of the best web hosting guys in the universe (my pal Scot at birdhouse.org), or c/is going text-only, as the images seemed to have disappeared. Never fear. All is back to normal, for the most part. Just had a rough changeover to new rackspace over the past day or so. Thanks for caring enough to send me email about it. Nice to know someone is noticing....

I noticed this item on the "Google Blogoscoped" site, about how MSN Search is hiring. The buzz around the Valley is that MSFT is having a tough time hiring folks to work on their new search initiatives. I'm not sure how true that is, but I do know that many of the best engineers are happily toiling away in pre-IPO heaven, or are happy campers at the newly energized regime over at Yahoo. In any case, what's interesting about the MSN Search Job Opportunities page is its use of the "Top Ten Reasons to Work In Microsoft Search." This is a direct rip off of Google's longstanding page "Top Ten Reasons To Work at Google." Let's compare, shall we? They paint remarkably different pictures. ....

Microsoft:

1. Work on one of the largest scale computing projects.

2. With 80M+ users worldwide using MSN Search, your contribution makes a difference.

3. A rapidly growing team offers many opportunities.

4. One of a few very successful businesses on the Internet.

5. Work in a challenging work environment.

6. Work in a very competitive landscape.

7. Located in the beautiful Microsoft RedWest Campus.

8. Collaborate with Research and other teams at Microsoft.

9. Learn what people all over the world are looking for on the web.

10. Finally, a job your friends and family will understand.

Google:
1. Lend a helping hand. With more than 82 million visitors every month, Google has become an essential part of everyday life—like a good friend—connecting people with the information they need to live great lives.

2. Life is beautiful. Being a part of something that matters and working on products in which you can believe is remarkably fulfilling.

3. Appreciation is the best motivation , so we've created a fun and inspiring workspace you'll be glad to be a part of, including on-site doctor and dentist; massage and yoga; professional development opportunities; on-site day care; shoreline running trails; and plenty of snacks to get you through the day.

4. Work and play are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to code and pass the puck at the same time.

5. We love our employees, and we want them to know it. Google offers a variety of benefits, including a choice of medical programs, company-matched 401(k), stock options, maternity and paternity leave, and much more.

6. Innovation is our bloodline. Even the best technology can be improved. We see endless opportunity to create even more relevant, more useful, and faster products for our users. Google is the technology leader in organizing the world’s information.

7. Good company everywhere you look. Googlers range from former neurosurgeons, CEOs, and U.S. puzzle champions to alligator wrestlers and ex-marines. No matter what their backgrounds Googlers make for interesting cube mates.

8. Uniting the world, one user at a time. People in every country and every language use our products. As such we think, act, and work globally—just our little contribution to making the world a better place.

9. Boldly go where no one has gone before. There are hundreds of challenges yet to solve. Your creative ideas matter here and are worth exploring. You'll have the opportunity to develop innovative new products that millions of people will find useful.

10. There is such a thing as a free lunch after all. In fact we have them every day: healthy, yummy, and made with love.

A busy day in marketing land, with loads of stats and trends. First, a study shows that "cross-channelers" - folks who use both a website and a second medium to interact with a brand, do it more with television brands than with magazines. Does this mean magazines are doomed? No, it means magazines are deeply lame when it comes to the web, IMHO.
Marketing Wonk also notes more proof of a strong, search driven Holiday season, and the increasing trend of media buys favoring online and cable over network and magazines....

Media analyst Tom Wolzein has made this statement in the past, but I thought he caught a clue and stopped spreading the meme. But he's back with it: "The protection of commercial-financed television is both a logical, and an essential place for near-term government legislation," Wolzien says in a Broadcast and Cable article.

From the piece: Wolzien has a plan: Regulate the DVR so consumers have to watch the commercials. It's the only way to prevent the technology from destroying a $60 billion business. The government mandates all sorts of things in TV sets, after all—from UHF tuners to closed-captioning to HDTV. He sees networks feeding their signals with codes that tell DVRs whether the commercial can be skipped, giving "control of playback parameters to the content provider who sells the bulk of the revenue-producing advertising that funds that content."

This is just the most blinkered piece of reasoning I've heard in many a moon. If you want to really kill "broadcast" television, force consumers to watch commercials when they have other options - and they will have other options, like HBO and scores of other channels that will have gotten with the PVR program and figured out other ways to bring advertising into television beyond the lame, dead-end 30 second spot format. (Not to mention internet video, for more on that read this). Harrumph.

Two Yahoo items this morning: First, the Journal (sub req'd) reports that Yahoo is set to drop Google (this is not a surprise, but rather the other shoe of the Overture/Inktomi purchases dropping). Second, CEO Semel promises many more innovations (and profits) from Yahoo search in the next year at a conference in NYC (link via CNet/Search Engine Lowdown.) The plan is to create personalized search products and beef up paid inclusion, a controversial practice, certainly, but one that is quite profitable. Google refuses on principle to do paid inclusion.

Neat: Winer has created a feature that allows folks to see who subscribes to their blogs via RSS. I've always wanted to know who cares enough about Searchblog to check it regularly via RSS. In fact, I think such a connection is one of the cooler things about blogs and the web - the two-way conversation is declared and nurtured, the community is known. It's like an email subscription, but more intimate. But some folks prefer anonymity with their RSS habits, and I respect that as well. How do you all feel about it?

This is not confirmed by any parties, but Bloomberg claims to have an inside source. If this means the bakeoff is final, then the IPO is 90-120 days away, maybe sooner depending on the SEC. Exciting times for all concerned, and possibly and end to all this speculation. WR Hambrecht (the Dutch auction folks) is named as a banker on the deal, but not as a lead, and there is no immediate news on whether an auction or online distribution scheme will play a part in the deal. Slashdot has hundreds of comments on the deal already, for those of you with a lot of time on your hands...(Thanks to Ross for the tip!)

According to this Register story, which quotes a new study from broadband researcher Point Topic, the answer is yes. In under four years, broadband has reached more than 100 million installs worldwide, which beats cell phones - they took over five years. (Funny, but I recall having DSL before 1999, but...never mind). If you want to read the study, it's here... Of note: China is poised to eclipse Korea in broadband growth...if you want to track China and tech, I highly recommend China Digital News - I was one of several midwives to it at Berkeley last semester...

Salon has some fun at Google's expense.

Shopping.com doubled its holiday traffic this past season, DM News reports today. Execs from the site are quick to claim that online shopping (or, as I like to call it, the shopping search vertical) has hit critical mass. It's hard to argue. From the piece:

The San Francisco company doubled the number of unique visitors in the 2003 holiday season to 58 million and the number of shopping sessions to 69 million. Leads referred to merchants listed on the site grew 123 percent in holiday 2003 to 29 million, and sales for them rose 132 percent to $181 million. ...

Not much you haven't seen before, but a fair roundup of a few more focused search tools, including TouchGraph, which I had not previously grokked.

I was going to let this one slide, but I thought, what the hell, this is what a blog is for. So perhaps some of you readers might have an answer to this query and its associated hypothesis (as yet unproven or even tested), and, if true, the related problem I have with it.

Query: Why, on New Year's Eve, which my wife and I spent blissfully housebound with a newborn and our two other young'uns, were NONE of the news channels, not NBC, not CBS, not ABC, not even CNN or MSNBC, running the traditional "New Year's Around the World" fare? The stuff you see every single New Year's Eve? You know - It's New Year's Eve in Paris (ooh - fireworks behind the Eiffel Tower!), then New York (the ball drops!), Chicago (revelers drinking), etc? This stuff is usually shown live around the world. It was very very odd to see re-runs of Aaron Brown's evening program on CNN, instead of live shots from world capitals. And on the networks, only ABC had a New Year's special, and it was clearly canned and overly produced (Dick Clark, from beyond the grave), with no live shots (at least, not to us in California).

Hypothesis: It seems to me that this had to do with the heightened terror alert level. I can't think of any other reason. Television news didn't want to potentially broadcast an attack live to the world, and wanted terrorists to know that the opportunity to strike live on television would not exist.

Problem: If this is true, it seems to me that it's a violation of broadcast news' responsibility in any number of instances, but most significantly, in the news outlet's duty to the viewer to keep them informed as to why they are or are not seeing what they are seeing. This reeks of baby steps toward collusion beteen the press and the government (don't worry, we know what information is good for you). It disturbs me greatly to think that the entire television news corps decided, collectively or not, to abandon its long-held tradition of reporting New Year's Eve as a live news story - and then simply not tell us they were doing so. It strikes me as doubly troubling if they did this at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security, and then didn't tell us about it.

My only possible proof of this hypothesis was a piece I saw on New Year's Day. I forget which channel it was, but the perky reporter said "Now that New Year's Eve went off without a hitch, we can show you some pictures from around the world...."

I'm not against the premise of this - that the network news, in times of crisis, collaborates with the government to help prevent a terrible tragedy (though I could argue this was not such an instance). I am, however, against the idea that the public is not informed about such a collaboration, and that journalistic watchdogs aren't at least discussing the implications of same.

Did I just miss something? Did all the networks run disclaimers before I tuned in? Was there a widely publicized New Year's Eve Media Blackout that I missed word of? Did the NYT or anyone else run a piece on this I missed? I can't find a thing about this on Romenesko...if this were in fact true, one would think journalists would at least have a robust debate about it, right? Does this bother anyone else, or am I rambling wildly off the mark? I'm going to email my friends in network news and ask em, but I figured the blogosphere would probably have a better answer, quicker...so let me know!

Via Jeff Jarvis today I came across Plink, an experimental "people link" search engine built on the "Friends Typelist" and/or blogrolls of Moveable Type users. It is explained by Anil Dash in the Six Apart blog here. This is a neat implementation of search based on FOAF ideas. Basically, Plink (cool name) lets you search for people you know, and then see who they know, and who knows them. To be included, you have to create a FOAF file, which I have not done, and honestly, am not sure I want to deal with. Those that have, however, are pointing the way for applications that eventually will do it automatically. Might this auger the future of Friendster or LinkedIn, where the intelligence and relationships built into those closed networks become part of the open platform of the Net?

No, more like a home video/entertainment server with some TiVo-like capabilities, according to rumors reported at this Mac news site. Thanks to Scoble for the tip off. Maybe one of my dreams (see #10) will in fact come true....

I suppose it had to happen. "Ungoogle" is a meta-search engine is that uses the "major search engines besides Google." I can't find anything else on the site to tell me who is behind this, save a reference to the "Hound Internet Family of Search Engines" which a quick Google search shows will return you to the same page with a few different URLs. (Found via the Google Blogoscoped site.)

Jeremy has an interesting proto-meme brewing over at his site on the concept of FriendRank. Worth a good JAM session or two. (And it smacks of whuffie, no?)

If you're like me and you want to understand what IBM is up to with WebFountain, this overview from IEEE Spectrum is as good a piece on it as I've seen anywhere. WebFountain is clearly one to watch in 2004, I'll be talking with them early this year and will have reports back shortly....also, I'll be watching this joint venture with Factiva, which will be one of the first commercial executions of the technology.

The Google Zeitgeist for 2002 helped to spark the idea for me that I had to write a book on search. Here is the 2003 version, fresh off the presses. It barely scratches the surface of what the Database of Intentions has to say about our culture, but it's a fascinating scratch nonetheless. Also, Yahoo, Lycos do the same...