John Battelle's Searchblog

I won't get into the whole song and dance behind Dipsie. I posted on the company back in early November, and for a while it was one of the most searched terms on the site, as it seemed to promise That Which We All Long For, which is to say, The Next Google.

I spent some time over the past few months talking to folks about Dipsie, and have in fact been quite close to posting Real News about the company at one point or another. But as with many startups working through the inevitable kinks, the Real News never quite materialized. Now, Gary posts that Dipsie has told the Chicago Sun Times that it will launch its public beta on May 10. There's no other news in this piece, but it does reflect the bravado of founder Jason Weiner. As Gary says, let's see what happens in May. We can all hope, of course. But me, I'm a skeptic. Prove me wrong, Jason; I'd love to be wrong....

Gary has his patent roundup posted, and it has more interesting stuff.

There's a patent application for serving ads in email - from employees of Google. Overture gets a patent for search sets. Other search related patents go to Seibel, AT&T, Yahoo, IBM, et al.

My favorite: "Method of doing business by identifying customers of competitors through world wide web searches of job listing databases" - from IBM.

A portent: The Marchex IPO, first reported here, priced yesterday and the book was oversold, according to the Seattle PI.

MCHX went out at $6.50 today and is now trading at $8.90. That's damn good for any IPO. The company plays in the paid inclusion ad space and was founded by the execs behind Go2Net.

Marchex - Hoovers

Another tool for you zeitgeist freaks, Wordtracker will tell you the top 500 search keywords updated daily (it comes as a ticker up top). It's an interesting reminder of the real world - "prom hairstyles" makes the top 15....

Now that would be something. Galbraith seems to think so. Recall he's taken a wildly successful but directionless startup to greater glory before ... Koogle is Chair of F'ster now...

Via boing boing, a very cool map visually relating what stories the newsmedia is covering, a hack on GoogleNews. You can toggle by country, pretty impressive. More on the NewsMap here. This reminds me of Map of the Market, which is now several years old but still cool too.

I better watch out, or I'll draw fire from Clay Shirky soon. But much of the debate over the semantic web clears my head by quite a distance - I'm more interested in what works and why. I just got off the phone with the GlobalSpec team -Jeffrey Killeen, Chairman & CEO, and John Schneiter, President. It seems to me that GlobalSpec is one of those innovations in search that works - at least for its intended audience - by adding context, organization, and tagging to a limited dataset. Sounds semantic to me.

GlobalSpec is a domain specific (or vertical) search engine. It got its start eight years ago as a classic IT play - take all the catalog-based information about engineering parts - sensors, transducers, etc. - and roll it into a huge, cross-referenced database, which you then distribute over the web. Make money by connecting customers to parts suppliers. Simple.

Over the years GlobalSpec has evolved into a robust community of a million or so engineering types who use it to find and spec parts. That alone is pretty cool (I mean, a million engineers!). But the coolest stuff was just launched: They call it "The Engineering Web" and it's a domain-specific crawl of the web for engineering information. And not only have they crawled the web (about 100K engineering related sites, so far), they've also surfaced invisible web databases not found in mainstream search engines - patent and standards sites, for example, which are walled off by registration and business considerations. Anyone can use the service - it's not limited to registered users. In essence, GlobalSpec has built a portal that drives traffic and intent through their original database business, in the process building an intelligent island of engineering information that lives in the public sphere. Of course this means they can add AdWord-like functionality, which of course they are working on.

My thought: If only cars.com was this cool.

OK, you don't usually spend a lot of time comparing accelerometer specifications, so why should you care? Well, GlobalSpec points the way toward the creation of hundreds of powerful vertical search engines, engines which, because they are limited in domain and exclusive by nature, can in fact offer extremely cool tools to find exactly what you want. (This idea is of course not new, nor mine, but still...) They also will create important data mines of user behavior - GlobalSpec has the parametric details of every search ever made against every product in its database - which is a goldmine for companies who are trying to fathom what the market wants. Think about that for a minute...let it sink it. Yup, Battelle's on his Database of Intentions horse again.

I wish for the day when there's a GlobalSpec for every imaginable domain, and a meta search engine which intelligently crawls those verticals...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's why GlobalSpec points to some exciting developments in search. Because of its limited domain, GlobalSpec can use relatively simple keyword-based algorithms to surface lists of ideas or terms related to your search. This allows you to refine your search in ways that simply don't scale in the Googleverse. These related ideas are inferred from the results of your initial query. For example, if you search on "aerodynamics", you will get "aircraft , Flight Mechanics, Helicopter Aerodynamics, computational fluid dynamics and Theoretical Aerodynamics" as related searches.

It's clustering without the crappy results. This stuff really only works when you are living in a gated community of sorts - out on the big bad web, there are simply too many false positives. (I'd also point out that domain specific vertical search engines in more consumer/commercial domains - such as cars.com or Expedia - are further polluted by the commercial interests of the industry they serve. They could learn a lot from the GlobalSpec approach.)

The GlobalSpec guys outlined a useful trio of attributes shared by domain-specific search engines like GlobalSpec. First is organization. This is the basic premise of domain specific engines - through organization comes efficient search. Schneiter calls his engine "parametric" - everything in the index is organized against the standards and parameters of the engineering field, making "parametric search" a reality. Second is context. Domains engines are by definition contextual, but GlobalSpec has a drop down menu next to its search box that allows you to contextualize the search even more, across a bunch of subdomains like Products & Manufacturing, Company Name, Application Notes (engineers care about this), Suppliers, and Standards. And third is access. Vertical search products, by their exclusive nature, can provide domain-specific access to the invisible web, in fact, they can enable commercial transactions that otherwise would be impossible (as GlobalSpec does, see here - at the bottom is the option to purchase an engineering standard from a company with a deep database of standards, a database which cannot be accessed via mainstream search engines). To that end, I'd argue that a fourth attribute of vertical search engines is commerce - these engines enable serious, highly efficient closed loop markets.

Come to think of it, Topix feels a lot like GlobalSpec, but for local news/advertising instead of engineering. And so on...

FWIW, GlobalSpec is backed by Warburg Pincus, and will be profitable this year. The company will not reveal revenues but say they are in a "scale position." Worth watching....

Couldn't get onto the WSJ page yesterday, so missed this interview with Eric - and it's behind a paid wall in any case. Then I noticed this free link in Beal's blog today. Eric gives some insight into his management style, the possible IPO, and how decisions are made.

When I met with Eric a year or so ago, he said that Google had gotten to the size that draws lawsuits, and he expected his legal department, already robust, would have to get even bigger. He was right. Add another suit to the pile: Digital Envoy is suing Google for violation of a licensing agreement.

Details from CNET:

Several years ago, the two companies struck a licensing agreement allowing Google to use "geo-location" technology invented and developed by Digital Envoy, said Timothy Kratz, a lawyer with the firm of McGuireWoods. The technology uses the Internet Protocol (IP) address of a computer visiting a particular Web site to determine the nearest city in order to direct specific advertisements to the computer's user.

The license allows Google to use that technology on its own site, but not on third-party sites, Kratz said. "If an advertiser is signed up under the massive AdWords program, and if its ad runs on (the Web site of) USA Today, then it's a misappropriation of our technology.

Round up of search stories at CNET here.

That's what this NY Daily News story claims. Now that would be something. I think the Time Warner guys would sooner run AOL into the ground than give it back to Case and risk his turning it around, and making them look hapless twice.

Last Friday I had a chance to stop by the Palo Alto offices of Topix, in many ways a classic internet start up – Valley-based, run by a serial entrepreneur, good buzz – but it didn’t take long for me to sense that something was different this time. Before I get into that, let me first give you a few thoughts on the service itself, and the broader role it plays in the search business.

Background: Topix was founded by six guys, four of whom went to high school together in Pittsburgh. No, I'm not making that up. Most of them are IT/Valley vets, CEO Rich Skrenta founded NewHoo and sold it to Netscape a mere six months afterwards, then morphed it into the now famous Open Directory Project. But Netscape was sold to AOL, and after a while Rich got bored (I assume) and left with the intent of starting a company he could "work into my 40s on." I like the sound of that.

Topix is an internet media play. More specifically, it’s a local advertising media play. The service takes a crawl-and-index approach to a vast array of internet news sources, then runs the resultant stew through a metadata engine which tags every news story with location and subject data. Topix then builds more than 150,000 topic- and location-specific pages, pages that live comfortably between the great gunky mass of search results, on the one hand, and the impersonal morass of most news sites on the other.

Skrenta likes to call Topix a “150,000-facet diamond,” at least one facet of which should appeal to most news consumers. But step back a few thousand feet and look at Topix’s approach, and you start to see something else at work, something instructive to anyone interested in next-generation approaches to search.

At the risk of getting mired in academic debate, one could argue that Topix is a proof point in the semantic web. Topix is not interested in every web result that might be rendered for a search “news kentfield,” for example. Instead, it searches a limited set of web pages – in this case thousands of news sites – and then annotates the content of those pages with semantic tags - latitude and longitude, for example. It then machine-generates something of an “encyclopedia page” for Kentfield, cobbling together news, weather, advertising, police blotters – a local newspaper in real time (Skrenta pointed out that Topix utilizes a newspaper-like layout on the site, because... it seems to work for the reader. Imagine that, we don't have to throw out everything we learned over the past 200 years). Topix also creates pages by subject; Skrenta argues that in fact many of their industry-related pages - Wireless, for example, or Search Engines, are among the best sources of business information in the free web.

If you take this approach to the web - mediating SERPs with subject-related "landing pages" - you could imagine a broad scale search engine which manages a machine-created ontology of subject pages. WebFountain comes to mind, orthogonally. In fact, such an approach has been attempted by any number of companies, I have heard that Excite was working on such a project before it fell apart in 2001. (There are others, readers, can you chime in?).

Skrenta does not shy from the semantic tag, in fact, he is one of many I’ve spoken with over the course of reporting the book who agree that the web is failing to scale, and well-documented “neighborhoods” of semantic order will help bring the web back into focus. “Whole cataegories are dead on Google now,” Skrenta told me, referring to the ongoing arms race between relevance and search spam. He's right, of course. But here's where the story turns to Topix's distinction.

The inevitable next question for Rich, is, "Sure, OK, broad web search engines like Google are starting to fail under the sheer weight and scale of the web. But Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL - they're all hard at work on this problem. Even more, all three have news products already, and are very focused on integrating local search. What makes you think a small startup like you can make it in the face of such pressure?"

A Valley entrepreneur will usually respond with one of two answers: 1. Don't Worry, I'll Sell While Small, Make A Good Sum, And Get A Good Job at An Established Company (as Rich did with NewHoo; Blogger and Kaltix also come to mind), or 2. I'll Take VC Money, Take the Execution Risk, Sell Later And Get Silly Rich (the current path of, say Friendster). In other words, when the market is dominated by large, entrenched competitors, your best shot at succeeding as a startup is to sell, either at the beginning of your life (when the LargeCo is basically buying the talent and nascent market opportunity), or after you've scaled to the point of inflection on the build/buy curve. It costs money to get to that scale, which is where the VCs come in.

I found it wonderful to hear that Rich didn't want to take either of these options. Instead, his goal was to simply start a neat service, get to the point of self-sustaining revenue (with six employees and an office over a trophy shop, that won't take long), and grow it slowly. In other words, no VC money, no dreams of world domination. Rich just wants to build a nice media business, without having to either sell it or sell out. Rich met with the VCs about Topix, he told me. "After five minutes, every one of them would tell me their vision of what I had to do to win in the market," he said. "If you take their money, you have to buy that vision." Better to fund it small, with angels and friends, and let it grow to its own place in the sun. Could it be that the post-bubble web, version 2.0, will allow for such companies to succeed?

I certainly hope so. May a thousand such flowers bloom - and I see them springing up, over at Nick's Gawker Media, for example, or the grandaddy of them all, craigslist. I've heard pretty much the exact same philosophy from both Nick and Craig: I want to run my little media company, VCs and exit strategies be dammed. Welcome to the club, Rich. May you work into your forties at Topix.

UPDATE: Rich emailed me as I posted this with this news:

"I wanted to let you know that, as of this morning, Topix.net is
now crawling over 6,000 news sources, up from 3,600. Here is an
approximate breakdown of the kinds of sources we are crawling:

24% Daily newspapers
19% AM & FM news radio stations
15% Weekly newspapers
15% B2B and consumer magazines
12% TV stations
9% College newspapers
5% Government websites
1% Weblogs

We have also enhanced our news crawler to navigate through javascript
and frames, which has increased the yield and coverage of our news
crawling.

We're also including the news source name on the attribution line,
instead of just the domain name as we were previously."

Love this hack. You have to enter your search backwards...

thanks, Seth...BTW, Seth hates the new Google interface...

Long profile of Yahoo CEO Terry Semel with integrated Yahoo back story and prediction that Yahoo will make it to the Fortune 500 list in five years or less. One intersting note: Yahoo used to be driven by the engineers, but has outgrown that approach. Sound familiar?

I believe the article may be behind a sub wall, if so, here are a few excerpts:

"Everyone talks about what he did with movies and entertainment," Yang says, "but what he really did was pioneer how to take a piece of content and get it out there. He has a distribution mentality, which at the end of the day is what Yahoo does on the Internet. And so when we started talking about Yahoo generically as a distribution company, we both just went, 'Gosh, this is going to be really cool.' "...

Worth a read it you care about the Chinese market....

Google's got a refined look, and it's rolling out a Labs approach to personalized search. The approach is distinct, it requires a lot of input from the user. It's the result, I believe, of an integration with the Kaltix technology Google bought last year. The company, in a press release, calls their personalized search "revolutionary." We'll see. The Labs implementation walks you through a step by step process which uses categories to refine and personalize your search, and uses a search for "Stanford" in the health category as the example. I changed it to "Berkeley" and got a message that "Personalized results not available for this query." But I'm not *from* Stanford...

Google also released the ability to receive search results via email (called Google Web Alerts, a lot like Google News Alerts), and made a host of tweaks to its interface, most notably on the home page (the "tabs" are now links, check out the "more" link, and also the search box seems bigger, and there's a line imploring you to "get more from Google" ); in Froogle, which now has it's own spot on the home page and gets a redesign (new tagline, but it's still in beta); and in news (incorporates thumbnails).

My first take: This is Google saying "Hey, folks, there's a lot more to us than meets the eye. Come take a look, and get into a relationship with us." More when I get back from morning rounds.

BTW, the Google Directory lost its place on the home page....

(full release in extended entry)

Continue reading "Google Says: Check Under Our Hood (Personalized Search, et al)" »

Remember when eBay went on a tear, buying auction sites all over the globe? Yahoo and search/shopping feels similar. Kelkoo, a private shopping site in Europe, sold to Yahoo for $576 million yesterday.

MSFT is claiming to be the first to focus on weblog search. I am sure the folks at Technorati , Feedster, Daypop, et al are curious to see what exactly they are talking about.

MSFT, clearing puffing out its chest, also claims it will roll out its version of news (already in beta) and, at some point this decade, a natural language query engine. Uh huh.

Thanks, Gary.

Used to be, you had your search, and you added the map/local angle. Well Mapquest has the maps, and now it's adding search. Gary reports that Mapquest has a local search beta up. Innaresting...Mapquest is an AOL company...

I enjoyed my conversation with Mike, since this interview, TiVo has announced new advertising products along the lines of what we discussed.

TITANS OF TECH
When the Network Meets the Net
TiVo's Mike Ramsay wants to plug viewers into more than cable and satellite -- and bets his digital video recorder can make the connection.

By John Battelle, April 2004 Issue

TiVo (TIVO) is under siege. From Hollywood to Madison Avenue, the word itself is almost a curse. And those who aren't muttering it are copying it. In the latter camp are most of the cable and satellite companies, which are mimicking TiVo's groundbreaking digital video recorder -- the Internet-era successor to the VCR that finds the TV programming you want, when you want it. Some 830,000 Time Warner (TWX), Comcast (CMCSK), and other cable subscribers now use cheap DVRs from Scientific-Atlanta (SFA), which has orders for hundreds of thousands more.

You'd think all of this would spook CEO Mike Ramsay. But Ramsay, a veteran of Silicon Graphics, is ready for the fight; he cheerfully mentions that TiVo has already battled Microsoft (MSFT) and won (Microsoft canceled UltimateTV, a competing DVR, in 2002). He's bolstered TiVo's subscriber ranks to 1.3 million with the help of DirecTV; half of them now come through the satellite-TV company. And he's suing EchoStar, the other major satellite provider, for patent infringement.

Ramsay's offensive plan is even more interesting. He's trying to make friends on Madison Avenue by putting tiny video commercials, similar to movie trailers, in TiVo's programming guide. (Fox and BMW are among the advertisers that have tried the new format.) Nielsen is adding TiVo viewers to its ratings panels. Despite the common wisdom that TiVo was toast, the little company based in Alviso, Calif., has thrived: Its stock has soared from a low of $4.50 a year ago to nearly $12 today.

In January, TiVo raised $74 million from big investors, and in February it cut prices on its entire DVR line. But Ramsay can't outspend his cable competitors; he knows he'll have to out-innovate them. In February he purchased secretive networking startups Strangeberry, whose engineers are working to take the DVR a step beyond, making its user-friendly interface the window into content downloaded over any wire, whether coaxial cable or high-speed Internet. Can Ramsay hook up broadcast and broadband? Expect TiVo to generate new business models, new forms of video content, new regulation, and a lot more controversy in the coming years. However it ends, we'll be replaying this episode for years to come.

Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction was the latest in a string of high-profile "TiVo moments." So why aren't there more TiVos in the world? Are you the next Macintosh, with Comcast as Windows?

We have been conditioned over the last five years with the Internet that if something's hot, it gets into millions of homes overnight. But until recently TiVo's been expensive. It's also a brand-new idea -- and history tells us it takes time for the average consumer to get used to a new idea. It's sort of like when the PC first came out.

TiVo is a hard-to-explain thing. When you first describe TiVo, people say, "Well, all right, that's great, but isn't that just like a VCR?" And you go, "Well, no, actually it's not." Then there's a five-minute conversation. You can't describe TiVo in 30 seconds. You need TiVo to describe TiVo. In the past we've gotten a lot of mileage and effectiveness out of PR and product placement, generating word of mouth. Today there's a whole lot more elasticity. Bring the price down, sales go up. Get the word out, do more promotions, sales go up. In February we unveiled a $50 rebate. And you'll see more of that going forward.

To protect their advertising and pay-per-view business, won't cable companies create "TiVo lite" -- DVRs that they control, in essence?

Yes, but they are motivated by satellite -- they are scared that satellite is taking business away from them. And to the extent that satellite has embraced DVRs, they have to respond.

Is the 30-second spot dead, and is TiVo responsible?
(more via link below)

Continue reading "New 2.0 Column: Mike Ramsay, TiVo" »

Sorry for the light posting day. I spent all day in meetings, and then an hour on an NPR program. There is lots to get caught up on, in time, I will. I met this morning with Rajeev Motwani, one of the professors who mentored Larry and Sergey during their Stanford days. I then had lunch with a source who wishes to remain anonymous, but who shed a lot of light on the ongoing search and ecommerce wars. Then on to meet Rich Skrenta, whose latest creation is Topix. More on that in an upcoming post. Then the NPR show, "On Point," which was, as one might expect, obsessed with Google obsession.

Lots of news over the past 24 hours, expect posts on that as well. And if you want the weekly newsletter, a reminder to sign up in the box at left.

Have a great weekend.

CNET reports that MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer got animated when the subject of search came up at the company's recent advertising forum.

"People say that Microsoft does it all, but this is the case where we didn't do it all," Ballmer told an audience of marketing and media executives on Thursday, here at the software giant's fifth annual advertising conference. Then, like an eager football coach pumping up the team for the second half, Ballmer reasserted that Microsoft is still in the game and plans to win.

"You'll see a lot of good competition in the area," he said emphatically, at one point throwing his pen.

In other news, the Merc reports that the recent EU ruling against MSFT may stymie the company's plans to integrate search into Windows.

How? Besides my own bias that all of ecommerce is driven by search, see this excerpt from a story on Shopping.com's $400 million IPO:

Shopping.com's biggest customer, responsible for 38% of its revenue, is Google. Shopping.com's agreement with Google is expected to continue, although the market is highly competitive. The Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) e-commerce site has launched a new price comparison service, and Google is planning to launch its own price comparison service, Froogle.

And, ahem, let's not forget Amazon...

Here's the Shopping.com filing....(BTW, they filed in 2000 but never got out...)

Matt over at The Standard points me to this parody of Yahoo's CAP program, which gets just about nothing right in terms of the presumptive pay for performance approach that it parodies, but is a pretty funny riff on what would happen if News Search was opened up to any bidder...

Organizations that are willing to spend the most will achieve the most prominent positions on the news pages, remaining in place until they are outbid by competitors. Although there will be no revenue payoff for news stories that rank high up the pages and gets lots of clicks, the program is certain to touch off a "share of mind" battle among news organizations--and, for the first time, allow the man on the street to tell his story without interference from editors.....

...Historically, professional journalists who were trained to separate wheat from chaff and remain utterly objective have decided what constitutes news stories and which ones deserve the most prominent "play" in newspapers, newscasts, and increasingly, online. That is, when they are not making up news stories, because it is easier than gathering the facts--and with some creative flare, can lead to prestigious journalism prizes. The Yahoo! "News Search" program essentially eliminates editors as gatekeepers to what constitutes news.

The piece includes some funny false headlines:

GIRLS SMARTER THAN BOYS - A study today released by Wellesley College is said to provide the first incontrovertible evidence that..

PEEWEE GOALIE TURNS AWAY 12 SHOTS - the son of billionaire George Soros yesterday turned away 12 shots on goal in a 23-4 loss to the..

Someone over there (I assume) is having fun at Google's expense - check out the top result for a search on "Out of Touch Executives" on Yahoo's Search page...

UPDATE: The Register has a story on this bomb, which clearly affected Google as well as Yahoo, and was perpetrated by Daniel Brandt, of GoogleWatch (and now Yahoo!Watch as well...he's a busy guy).

(thanks, Phillip)

This time, it's his employer's travel service (that'd be Yahoo) that gets the honors...who hasn't had this experience online?

Good to see major papers getting on board with the "broadcast is dead" meme: Media Giants Need To Learn to Sing A New Tune (reg req'd).

Excerpt:

....it is only a matter of time before millions of consumers will be doing things like creating custom concert videos of their favorite artists. They'll mix and match video from TV shows and DVD recordings which they (hopefully) will have acquired legally -- much as music fans have been creating custom music discs and tapes for years.

But as with music, it's also possible that the rip-and-mix generation will actually wind up buying more recorded video than before, all the better to fuel their digital creativity.

Resourceshelf has culled the upcoming WWW conference for selected references to search. There's also a whole track on the Semantic Web.

The complete list is a Who's Who of search stars and a telling map of who's doing interesting research in the area. Included: Intel, University of Washington, IBM, Yahoo (Understanding User Goals in Search), National University of Singapore, MIT, Microsoft. A9's Udi Manber (who I did meet with, but can't go into our talk quite yet) is giving a keynote.

OK, I think I have to go to this.

Interviewed in ZDNet, Craig suggests that voice-activated search is not so far away. Recall that his model was, at one point, Star Trek. Google Labs has a rudimentary application based on this idea here. And, as I noted yesterday, Opera has integrated it already into a version of their browser (using IBM speech technology).

Silverstein said he believes that within a few years Google could have a voice interface for everything from driving directions to help you finding the aisle for a particular food in your local supermarket.

"That's something you would never think to ask a search engine. You're not likely to be using your laptop in a supermarket, but in the future I think search will be far more accessible -- you won't be tied to your desktop, you will be able to do it from your mobile phone or PDA -- and you'll start to see search used in fundamentally different ways. The kinds of things people want information about when they are walking around or sitting in a bar is very different to what they want while they're at home," he said.

Thanks, Beal...

Sex, and....this. (Warning, not for the feint of stomach).

(You will thank me for NOT including an image, as is my custom).

(hat tip to Phillip)

Kanoodle announced that is has snagged MSNBC.com distribution today, here's the press release. Earlier it announced "ClickFactor" - a new ranking system for its ContextTarget paid search system. Forgot what Kanoodle's deal is? Here and here....

Microsoft is readying its own entry in the news search game, according to this Mercury News piece on "Newsjunkie," the latest purposeful leak out of Microsoft's research labs. Features sound cool, and certainly point to some common themes I've heard cropping up in discussions of next generation search engines.

Using principles of artificial intelligence and information retrieval, NewsJunkie keeps track of what a reader has already seen. It reorganizes news stories to rank those with the most new information at the top and push those with repetitive information to the bottom, or filter them out entirely.

NewsJunkie can help improve news alerts beyond key words to offer only new information, the researchers said. Dumais is working on a similar project to make search happen behind the scenes to recognize what you're working on, search your hard drive and automatically present related files. ``In this day and age there's such replication around,'' Horvitz said. ``As Google's news site says, `There are 1,400 other news articles on this topic,' but there's no guidance for what you might look at next. You have to say, `How can I cut to the chase?' ''

The Newsjunkie research paper will be presented at the 13th annual WWW conference in NYC in May. Yow, cool agenda. I want to go.

The future is getting closer....

(hat tip to Gary)

Following on my earlier post: Two classic NY Post fame and foible stories, with photos, on the man who conned many into giving him money allegedly earmarked for purchase of "pre-IPO" google shares.

EMarketer has an interview with Bob Rosenschein, founder of GuruNet, which bills itself as an "answer engine." GuruNet has been around a long time, as these things go, and is worth a trial. It works by organizing licensed information into some 700,000 topics, which are accessed via a keyword-activated desktop application. In essence, any word or phrase you see - in an email, web page, Word doc, whatever - can be Alt clicked on to produce a GuruNet answer (as opposed to a list of SERPs, as with a search engine). Since it has a Mac OSX trial version, I plan to try it out....

If you want to track the commercialization of search, watch Yahoo. Yahoo has created new commercial search attachments around the theme of cars. MediaPost reports.

After nearly a year's worth of consumer and advertiser research, Yahoo! has relaunched its Autos section, aiming to build loyal audiences throughout the entire car-buying process and offer advertisers more refined ways to target them....

...After nearly a year's worth of consumer and advertiser research, Yahoo! has relaunched its Autos section, aiming to build loyal audiences throughout the entire car-buying process and offer advertisers more refined ways to target them....

From what I can grok, seems Yahoo has taken a page from Amazon's book and will create a deep and rather intimate portrait of your car buying preferences, and make suggestions along the way. I plan to use this service as I happen to be in the market, if I learn anything, I'll let you know...

There are a lot of new toolbars out there, and I can't keep up (especially since I am on a Mac). But Gary Price can....here's his review of HotBot's new toolbar. It has local search...and RSS search...

And, speaking of RSS, Dogpile launched an RSS enabled toolbar as well this week...

Not sure the issues discussed in this piece are Google's problem alone. In fact, I'm quite sure they are not. But, often the press can't tell the difference. In any case, the set up of the piece:

"Google kind of makes it easy to connect all the dots together," said Richard M. Smith, former chief technology officer at the Privacy Foundation. "I think Google is the biggest privacy invader on the planet, no doubt about it."

But interesting and good to hear Larry quoted in this piece responding to the privacy concerns thusly: "We're not experts on all possible topics," Page said. "These (privacy issues) are hugely controversial, and I don't think it's a good idea for us to set policy." And...
"Do you not want Google to make information available that's available to other people?" Page asked. "I want to know it's out there on the Web. I don't want Google to censor it."

May we live in interesting times....

Check it out, new UI, and more features....congrats to Dave, who is sitting behind me (a bit bleary eyed) with a grin on his face.

Dan Rosensweig (COO Yahoo, at far left) and Jonathan Miller (head of AOL, near left) have joined Eric onstage. A pretty lengthy discussion of the role of social networking in their businesses, including Orkut. Eric acknowledge that Orkut was strategic to Google's ability to know more about its users so as to provide better service to them, and when it comes out of beta, it'll be integrated in some way into Google. Miller says he sees social networking as not having its own business model, but rather as BASF - making other businesses better. Dan (and later Eric agreed) said that social networking is a way to make sense of a world that has 10-20 billion pages that are all indexed and available - providing a context for better and more intelligently filtered information. The entire conversation is pitched in the context - provided by Esther, who is very engaged this year so far - that these companies are playing in a market that is several orders of magnitude larger than the IT business - what Eric called the information/media business. Architecting the information space is their main product, they agreed, and that is a huge business which is in the early innings.

Listening to Eric speak here at PC Forum. He's already made a few interesting comments. First, he dodged the IPO question. Then, in response to a question about Google's business model, he made an interesting declaration: He went on a practiced riff about the media business, how large it is, and how many "platform players" can thrive and no one approach will win. In other words, Eric views Google as a media company, or at least that's the take I came away with. That is new, last time we spoke, Google was a technology company driven by media revenues...

Eric also told an anecdotal story about the "Don't Be Evil" mandate at Google. Early in his tenure, when he still felt it was a bit odd for a company to be run by such a rule, he was in a meeting where a (unspecified) idea was tossed out, and one of the employees yelled out "That's Evil!!" A lengthy debate ensued. Eric pointed out that Google's culture has built in DNA around what is and is not evil, and when something comes up that might be evil, employees bring up an "evil alert." I dunno. I still think it's potentially dangerous for this kind of ad hoc, socially driven morality to drive cultures within large media companies.

At least, that's what Google Local Search says, according to Gary Price....(see this link...I live in Kentfield...)

Update: More less than ideal results from Cambridge...

Newsweek couldn't help themselves. In fact, I think there are more Google covers this past year than Jesus covers. Jesus!

Steven Levy (a friend) does a fine job summarizing that which we already know from reading the last dozen or so articles. And Sergey and Larry play along, giving him lots of time at the 'plex. The angle: Google has competitors now. Google isn't that worried. Best quote: From Anna Patterson, late of the Internet Archive, new to Google:

"(MSFT search engineers are) a bunch of people at the first grade," she says. "Eight junior programmers who don't know anything about search."

Yow.

This is interesting: Man 'Googles' Himself, Sues for Libel

His lawyers blame PageRank...and want it taken offline.

LOS ANGELES -- An accountant who said an Internet search engine returned "alarming" information about him and his firm sued Google, AOL, Time Warner and Yahoo! Friday for libel.

This just in, from the folks at MSFT PR: Today MSN will announce that beginning July 1, MSN Search will clearly delineate paid ads from organic search results, with the result being that organic (or algorithmic) results will be above the fold (the top half of the page) for the first time since...well since recent memory.

This is clearly an opportunistic announcement (timed as it is in the wake of the Yahoo CAP dust up), but I must say, it's a welcome one. Bravo, Microsoft, and I hope the execution lives up to the context and timing of this release. I've complained over and over about how crappy MSN search is, mainly due to the fact that you can't see the organic forest for the commercialized trees. According to an email I received from MSFT PR informing me of this, "The changes are being made to allow better positioning of sponsored links based on relevancy. These changes are a result of a series of consumer testing to determine user satisfaction and search relevancy with various UIs."

If I'm reading this right, MSN tested the idea that clearly labeling ads equates to more ads being clicked on and a better overall experience for the consumer, and found out - Holy Shit! - the hypothesis proves out.

Other highlights (again, quoting the email):

- MSN’s Search Featured Sites (SFS) and other paid listings will be outlined and the background shaded, and designated at “sponsored.”
- The number of paid links in the SFS will now number up to three (reduced from up to 4).
- MSN will now have up to one Editor’s Featured Site (EFS) below the SFS
- The right rail will continue to include up to 5 Overture paid search links.
- Overture continues to have sponsored links in the right rail

I'm off to Pasadena Friday to spend the morning with Gary Flake, who runs Yahoo Labs (he was Chief Scientist at Overture prior to the acquisition).

Posting will be light, I suspect, till the weekend. Sunday I head to PC Forum, where I'm meeting a whole lotta folks. If any readers are coming out that way, ping me at jbat at battellemedia.com.

Finally, a reminder. If you want to receive the next copy of "Re-Find", the treble entendre-entitled newsletter that summarizes a whole week of Searchblog in one simple email, put your email in the box to the left of this post. Thanks to all who got last week's first issue and bothered to send me "Hey I Like It" emails. Much appreciated.

Happy Weekend!

The details are out: AOL owns warrants to exercise 1.9 million or so shares of Google at a price of $22 million. A quick calculation says that's a price of roughly $11.50 a share. This is due to a deal the two companies struck as part of their 2002 partnership. It came to light in Time Warner's recent 10-K filing.

So...if Google goes all Priceline on its opening day and stays there (there's probably a lock up on selling), that stock just might be worth ten times that amount, or more than $200 million. About as much as AOL is spending on marketing this year....

Note: Yahoo also owns shares - a lot more - in Google.

Cnet story.

All hail Gary for the 10-K URL.

Launched: "Ask A Librarian" - a new service in Florida that puts the reference librarian online. Cool. ResearchBuzz reports.

Viewpoint launched today. Beal reports a cool feature is the thumbnails in the bar itself...

Feedburner purports to solve a problem which I noted here. Should a blogger know who is reading them via RSS? As a publisher who has had loads of email newsletters, I like knowing who is subscribed. But shouldn't RSS readers have the right to anonymity?

Feedburner, which I heard of from Fred Wilson, creates a feed which provides information on readers back to the publisher. Seems to me, publishers can give the reader a choice, and provide more service if the reader chooses to declare the relationship.

From the site:

What is it?

To learn more about how FeedBurner works, check out the FAQ.

...Important enough to tell the EU to go pound sand, or so claims a Dow Jones report (via Wonk). The short of it: A main reason settlement talks with the EU broke down was that MSFT wanted rights to "tie" (that's the term that sunk them in the US browser case) search to Windows.

Dow Jones story here.

See here for more.

Jeremy (yeah, he works at Yahoo) says: Google local needs work...

Just off the phone with David Gerlertner. A very interesting chat, he is one of the few academics who have both developed a new vision for computing, then attempted to create software that in fact realizes it. I'll post an update to this post later, I have to run to meetings all day. Best quotes: "The most underused resource in the universe is human brainpower," especially when it comes to search; "We've been looking forward to RSS coming for many years, we're thrilled it's here;" "I don't want to use Google if I can avoid it...to use it I have to know the right question to ask, and that is often not the case I know that question..."

Bill Joy is comfortably into his new role of not having a role, to judge from our meeting last Friday morning. We met at the Depot, a Mill Valley cafe which pretty much defines Marin casual. Bill is in the middle of what he termed a "three year move" - moving out of his Sun offices, which contained more than 20 years of research, notes, and assorted papers - moving as well from his Russian Hill home in San Francisco, and into new digs in Mill Valley as well as his ranch in Aspen. In essence, transition has been Joy's job for the past few years, and he seems content in it.

Our talked ranged over a pretty open space, and touched on his talks with Google (he confirmed them, but they are not ongoing), his sense of where Sun is going (tough road ahead but he wishes them well), his continuing thinking along the lines of his now legendary Wired article (still figuring if he has a book in him on the topic, and if so, when), and his thoughts on better search solutions (we touched on the work of David Gerlernter more than once). In fact, I have an interview scheduled with David Gerlernter this Thursday morning, stay tuned for that.

As to what he might be doing next, he seemed happily indeterminate. A fine place to be, it seems to me.

So Yahoo has made its News Search feature more robust...but, I wonder, where is the fresh angle that Yahoo brings, unique to Yahoo? Google has the "not touched by human hands" angle. Yahoo could do so much here...and I hope it does. For now, the news is this: the News search feature now sources 7000 sites, adds a "also try" feature (related queries), and some other nifty features. I'd like to see a "make this news search an RSS feed" feature...

PS - Rich Skrenta and others point out, use the beta URL...

PPS - Turns out, this news is a couple of months old. Sorry....too busy lately.

I'm tired of the prideful, ignorant, and painfully slow death over at AOL. How can you have the largest ISP/content site in the world, at a time when the entire sector is boooming, and manage to fuck it up so masterfully? The stink is starting to rise not from AOL, but from the folks really calling the shots, the top brass at Time Warner. And that means something must give, and soon. Time Warner is starting to realize, they can't do any better with AOL than Case and Pittman could back in 2001.

It seems to me like the Time Warner execs, who clearly are still pissed that AOL bought them in the first place, are either killing it through supremely benign neglect, or are trapped in a morass of their own pride. Let me state what seems obvious: the right thing to do is call a spade a spade, and spin AOL out. The folks running Time Warner have other things to do, and they clearly are the wrong people to be driving strategy at AOL. The folks who report to them and run AOL on a day to day basis need independence - otherwise they simply will not be able to compete with Yahoo and Google. Note to the TW Board: swallow your pride and cut AOL loose. Just do it.

Via Google Blogoscoped, I found this tool that tells a URL's PageRank. This is handy if, like me, you don't use a PC and can't download Google's Toolbar, which tells you the PageRank of the page you're on. I've never known this site's PageRank, and of course the first thing I did was a vanity PageRanking. battellemedia.com is a 7 out of 10. I think that means the site has a decent ranking. Or, it could mean the site ranks a C-. Who knows, really....

Sure is..."eBay Enhances Stores for Search Engine Optimization "... for more, see my talk with Monier here...

Readers know I distrust Comcast. Salon today runs a roundup of why. It's sub required, but I think you can also get in by watching an ad....

This just in...Google takes local search and integrates it into main index...it's not a tab, following instead Danny's invisible tabs stategy....Have not had a chance to really play with this, though this link is for "Pizza Kentfield" and shows our local pizza joint first. Gary has done some testing, and he reports it needs more work.....Press release in extended entry below. (Reuters story here)

Continue reading "Google Takes Local Out of The Labs" »

The ever-alert Gary Price points out that Diller has made another move - buying the travel search engine TripAdvisor.

Want to grok Diller's company, IAC? Me too. Gary points us to the recently filed 10-K...

Mark Cuban, as entertaining a fellow as you might ever find in sports or technology, revealed in a filing yesterday that he owns more than six percent of Mamma.com. The stock is up nearly 30% today.

PS - Mark has a blog and discusses his investment here....

(all hail Gary)

As I pointed out earlier, Kanoodle is a company formed essentially in opposition: It was founded by the execs behind About's Sprinks contextual advertising service, after that service was bought and then discontinued by Google. eWeek today has a good overview of their plans. Excerpt:

ContextTarget, and its upcoming expansion, determines the placement of ads on the bidding for particular content categories rather than on keywords in the content, Josephson said.

"The way we look at the world is that the Googles of the world are great search companies that are trying to put the same model on ads," Josephson said.

I say, competition is good....(though like everyone else, they're stealing Google's holiday-theme logos!)

Wired News runs an AP story that covers some of the fuzzy stuff going on in ARDA, DARPA, and other spooky places w/r/t data mining. Upshot: When TIA was killed, as we know, much of its work was redistributed to other agencies. But one portion stayed dead: the privacy guarantees.

I've pinged MetaCarta before, when they got more than $6 million from Sevin Rosen, but Shore points me to a good overview of MetaCarta's technology in Directions magazine. Geo-located content/search has been something of a blind spot for me, reading through this helped a lot. Seems MetaCarta does something akin to WebFountain, but only for location-specific information. Geolocation unlocks all sorts of interesting applications, in fact, the concept came up several times in my conversations with Bill Joy this past Friday. Watch this space.

Gary points me to the news that Yahoo now has its own sex parody site, YaSexHoo! Parody, my ass. But, this is funny, read the email addresses...

OnGoing to Sun...

Announced today, Onfolio. Written up here. These kind of applications are discussed in some detail in the comments here (includes Furl, Save This, etc). Thanks to Hylton for the tip.

You'll see a few changes on the site (they always happen on the weekends)...I've moved some stuff around on the left, added a list of search engines, and I've introduced a newsletter subscription box. If you enter your email at left, you'll receive "Re-Find," a weekly summary of posts. (I'm shooting to do it Friday, but it might come over the weekend, as it did this weekend.) Yep, I'm a sucker for entendres. Thanks for reading....

Coneteq, the next Google...from Lebanon. I'm thinking of creating a section on my site for engines which claim to be the next Google...the "US consultant" who is pushing this new engine points out w/r/t Google:

“Their pre-tax profit last year was $350 million. That’s not bad for a couple of guys,” he said, reiterating the often-cited fact that one of the founders, Sergey Brin, is a Russian émigré while the other, Larry Page, is a hippie.

That's how we win! Call em hippies!

This story may as well have been published two years ago, it's a complete retread of every story you've ever read about Google (Vanity Googling! Date Googling! Google is really big and cool and new and important! Google has a chef who worked for the Dead! Google's not the answer to everything, but it sure seems like it is!). At least this time they are talking to some interesting folks, including Larry Lessig and Brewster Kahle. I know I'm way too inside baseball to have a clear view of this, but...this story has run in the Times before. I guess now we know, it will run again, and again, and again.

Jerry visits his hometown (Taipei) and sits for an interview with the Taipei Times. Interesting to hear Jerry, who is not often in the press, talk about competition with Google, Yahoo's strategy, etc. Excerpts (sounds a bit like it's been translated from English to Chinese to English, though I have no idea...):

As Microsoft also uses our technology, it means that nearly 50 percent of all searches in the world use Yahoo technology. This coverage gives us the advantage of learning more about consumer behavior and what they want to find, which is a foundation for us to improve ourselves on...

I think I will be a Yahoo lifer, since I still have a lot of passion for it. The Internet is becoming the most important medium, because it is unrestricted from time and space. The Internet revolution has, and will continue, to bring profound influence on people's life and culture, making it more potential than the time I established Yahoo. Therefore, I will keep contributing to this field to explore the potential of this technology, as well as my own brainchild, until I'm too old to move.

Good cocktail party tidbit from the Register: Dutch fellow posed as a Kleiner partner and scammed folks into "investing" in pre-IPO Google shares. He took in half a million before he got caught...

Among the victims were several financially successful and sophisticated members of the international technology and business community, the FBI says. These include a New York investment banker, the chairman of a global telecom company, a brokerage firm executive and counsel for a telecommunications company.

I'd like to see that list...

Had a nice chat earlier in the week with Yahoo's Tim Cadogan, who in the face of the paid inclusion dust up has been given, or perhaps even has willingly taken, the role of Explain It, Then Explain It Again Yahoo. Tim knows from controversy and market overreaction, he was at Overture before paid search was cool, and there are some similarities to how the market is reacting to Yahoo's CAP program. Namely, he believes, the whole content acquisition program, misunderstood now, will eventually be seen as a rational approach to the market, and, ultimately will lead to a much more robust search experience.

Now, I stand by what I wrote earlier, that CAP forces the issue of trust and transparency to the fore, and most small business owners (arguably those most affected by this program) are not yet ready to trust a big company like Yahoo. They feel coerced to pay up, mainly by fear of missing something if they don't. Tim said he understood these sentiments, and said that only time will prove that CAP has no influence over ranking. He also points out that CAP is entirely optional, and that Yahoo's goal is to crawl the entire web as throughly as possible, regardless of paid inclusion.

I pointed out to him that if Yahoo could simply state that its organic crawl and resultant index was as comprehensive and fresh as Google's, then perhaps folks would see that CAP is simply an added value service for URL submission, reports, and the like. Tim responded that indeed, Yahoo stands by its index and results as the equal of Google, and again time will tell.

In any case, whatever your view on the paid inclusion issue, it's clear Google will make hay on this for sometime to come. Over time, what matters is results, and this is where Tim thinks CAP will bear fruit. He makes the point, echoed by Gary Price and others, that the press pretty much overlooked what he thinks is a huge differentiator for Yahoo: CAP's ongoing program to index the deeper, structured web, in particular CAP's work to surface databases at the University of Michigan and Library of Congress. I agree, this is a big deal, and in the long run will matter a lot as the web gets more and more structured (to good end, in my mind).

I noted that perhaps the LoC and other deep web efforts were discounted by much of the press as so much PR to cover the paid inclusion portion of the CAP program, and Tim said he hoped the press wasn't *that* cynical. The press, cynical?!

PS - if you want to hear Tim talk about Yahoo in the pre CAP days, a webcast of a talk he gave a year ago (thanks for the correction, Brad) is available here.

PPS - Look who has the #1 result on Yahoo search for "Yahoo CAP". Given the minor fracas that post started about bias in algorithms...that's pretty funny.

PPS - I forgot to ask Tim, and wish I had, about the fact that when you sign up for SiteMatch (that's the name of the paid inclusion portion of CAP), you agree to pay .15 to .30 cents a click for anyone who clicks on the URLs you submit. That's basically embedding Overture into the main listings, and it could get quite expensive (or lucrative, depending on your business), and it strikes me as...unusual. In other words, it adds the very distinct ka-ching of commerce into organic results (yes, I know, paid inclusion already has that ka-ching, but it's not so transactional - it's not *on the click*...). A post over at this new search marketing site, The Pre-Commerce Blog, got me thinking about that...

As I wrote a last Fall, there's flowers poking through the Silicon Valley snows. Latest case in point: Tim Bray posts that he's got a Big Idea, and this has made him Happy. Oh, do, please tell. Is it this?

Talking with Bill Joy, Shelby Bonnie, and James Hipkin (runs an ad agency here in town). Back with reports over the weekend.

Gary points us to this speech by the CEO of Northern Light, David Seuss. (Gary also links to Suess' ppt slides). Interesting, Suess says the future of search is intelligent, human edited databases that are subject specific. The Google approach will stop scaling, if it hasnt' already, he predicts. (Recall that Northern Light was an early innovator in search which Suess bought out of bankruptcy last year).

Stata Labs' Bloomba gets a rave, of sorts, in Fast Company. The company Demo'd at Demo last month. Demo guru Chris Shipley called it "the Google of email."

The bottom line: Bloomba 1.0 is an incredibly innovative product that turns the way we think about email entirely on its head. Searching, not power-foldering, is probably the wave of the future for serious email communicators. But it's not yet ready for prime time

(thanks, Hylton)

Another roundup on the search landscape over at the Herring (registration required). Most interesting find: iPhrase, which provides intelligent "self service" search for corporate clients interested in creating better experiences for their customers online. Schwab apparently is using it to good end. And Gary points out ha tif you want to demo the tech, head over to Lycos's stock screener application...

The NYT has caught onto web video ads. (For my initial report on this, read my column in 2.0 from last year). The news: The ads seem to be working....The caption from the Times piece says it all, in terms of how Big Media views this: "Such ads have annoyed far fewer viewers than expected." What do you know!

An online survey of 1,700 Internet users who saw the full-motion commercials, which ran from late January until late February, showed that viewers found them less annoying than some marketers had expected. Indeed, just 28 percent found them annoying - compared with 38 percent of TV viewers, on average, who found commercials annoying in three separate studies. The survey on Web commercials was paid for by the advertisers.

Looksmart is trading higher today after revising its numbers upwards. Fact is, there's room for plenty of players in search right now, even one that lost its biggest client, MSN. (Interesting, but Looksmart recently signed a deal with MSN to supply it with results on a sporadic basis, according to Dow Jones.) In fact, LOOK is in a good position to be the comeback kid, given it's long history in the space. Odds are things will only get better, in this market anyway. I'm meeting the new CEO soon, look for a report then.

(Hat-tip to Beal)

Dan Gillmore has been working on a book for some time now (on new media and journalism), and he's bravely posted his introduction and first chapter (with more coming) for the world to review and critique. Very cool.

CNET weighs in with a roundup piece on various companies nipping at Google's heels, both in pure search, interface, advertising business model, and the like. Industry Brains, Quigo, Eurekster, Grokker, Vivisimo, et al are discussed...

When I met with Erik Matlick of Industry Brains last week, he mentioned that the company was about to get much stronger in the financial publishing vertical. The news is now official, IBrains has added The Motley Fool, Kiplinger, Zacks, and Salary.com to its portfolio. I certainly am encouraged by this, and hope the company and lots more like it flourish. Press release in extended entry....

Continue reading "Industry Brains Beefs Up Financial Network" »

Dan Gillmor points to a thoughtful article on search and security, published on The Register today.

In it the author points out how easy it is to use Google's more advanced search features to find sensitive data left carelessly in the clear by webmasters (or, as the author puts it, by Bob in Marketing who has no idea he's even publishing to the public web). The article is full of example searches, which is rather fun, and includes a pointer to an entire site of hacks that is worth checking out, called Googledorks.

Excerpts:

Often Web servers are left configured to list the contents of directories if there is no default Web page in those directories; on top of that, those directories often contain lots of stuff that the website owners don't actually want to be on the Web. That makes such directory lists prime targets for snoopers....
...Once you start to think about it, the potentially troublesome words and phrases that can be searched for and leveraged should begin to multiply in your mind: passwd. htpasswd. accounts. users.pwd. web_store.cgi. finances. admin. secret. fpadmin.htm. credit card. ssn. And so on....
Google and other search tools have made the world available to us all, if we just know what to ask for. It's our job as security pros to help make the folks we work and interact with aware of that fact, in all of its far-reaching ramifications.

MSN Money columnist Michael Brush takes a look at the search space from an investment standpoint and says the exuberance is justified. There's a very fine line between exuberance and "irrational" exuberance, a line that is quite hard to draw. Clearly the indications are quite healthy, as my last post points out. And we've seen irrational behavior in the past, so (I hope) we'll hold ourselves back this time. If nothing else, many of us just don't want to go back there again. Once is enough.

(thanks, Beal)

According to this Kelsey/ConStat report. Those that do quickly put 23% of their marketing chips in the PPC basket. I can't do the math this early in the morning (what would happen if, say, 3 in 9 small businesses put 23% of their chips into PPC), but ...there's a lot of upside left in this particular market. Not to mention what happens to average CPC as more and more competitors get into the market.....

(via Wonk, Internet Retailer)

This is rich! At issue: The Broadcast Flag. Posted on Boing Boing...background from this site...

Alex Salkever's latest column on BusinessWeek online gives the Oceana/Google case a good once over (my posts are here and here). But even as he makes the point that Google serves as a public information space, and therefore should at least disclose the editorial choices it is making, he does not bring in a discussion of the CBS/MoveOn tempest. To my mind, that's a prime example of similar (and far more inexcusable) behavior.

Excerpts:

Legally, it seems that Google and other search engines have no clear obligation to accept such ads -- or any other type, for that matter -- so its actions didn't violate Oceana's right to free speech. Even so, the Oceana brouhaha highlights key issues for Google and other search engines that will only become more inflamed as such sites grow and prosper. Namely, commerce and conflict sit poorly on the same Web page. Likewise, control and transparency often exist as opposing forces. How Google, the world's No. 1 search engine, balances these tensions could change the shape of the Internet....

... With spending on political advertising looking to set a record this election year, Google's editorial policy will have a big effect on what information voters do and don't receive via Web advertising. According to McCaffrey, Google's policy allows side-by-side policy comparison, but it bans attack ads -- something major TV networks and large newspapers have been unwilling to do. That laissez faire attitude toward the political free-for-all may or may not be correct, but I find it a little disturbing that Google can be the arbiter over a key information source for voters.

Got my first SEO spam today promising I could be "#1 On Yahoo." That was in fact the subject header. The email sent me to a place I don't think I'll bother to link to. I'm not in the bullseye for this kind of spam, but it's a sign o' the times....

For readers of my earlier (and overly long) post on Webfountain, this chart makes a first attempt at outlining some key distinctions between IBM and Google's approach.

I've come across a few oldies but goodies, worth a laugh. I hope the folks at Google keep their sense of humor as things get more and more ... serious.

Google's "PigeonRank" explained

"MentalPlex Search" defined...

...and MentalPlex "April Fools" search...and illustrations...

Yahoo's integrated location/place search into a visual map interface at maps.yahoo.com. It's intuitive and cool. The image at left shows my neighborhood - local restaurants are highlighted on the Yahoo application, but not emdedded in the .gif, unfortunately.

(Thanks, Beal.)

MediaPost reports that "Moms" view the internet as the most important medium in their lives. 84% said they'd miss it the most if they had to give it up, more than TV. That tells you something about today's moms... Certainly true in our home.

This is pretty inside baseball, and I certainly don't claim to understand all the nuances of the ongoing battle between Google's Atom and Winer's RSS, but in this post Winer claims that RSS is basically winning, but that it's time to work together with Atom. It'll be curious to see if this is taken seriously by the Atom folks, or dismissed. In any case, Winer is putting himself out there...

So here's the chance to do something good for the Internet, something not evil. Let's go Google, let's go SixApart, it's time to bury the hatchet and move on. Joi Ito, you're famous for being an advocate of peace. RSS is here to stay and so are Google and Movable Type. Let's all acknowledge that and stop this fight now.

Sub-required overview of the issues inherent to the deep web, including access to government files and the implications for mediators. Tim Bray is quoted (always a good sign). I missed the author's call, though I'm not sure I'd have added much...Excerpts:

As new search spiders penetrate the thickets of corporate databases, government documents and scholarly research databanks, they will not only help users retrieve better search results but also siphon transactions away from the organizations that traditionally mediate access to that data. As organizations commingle more of their data with the deep Web search engines, they are entering into a complex bargain, one they may not fully understand.

Somewhere inside that complex apparatus of desire and fulfillment, a transformation is taking place, one whose effects we can barely foresee.

(nb: long post, subject to revision…)
To quote Dylan, it’s been buckets of rain for the past few months around here. On my way down to IBM’s Almaden research campus a week ago this past Friday, I crossed the San Rafael bridge and tacked South into yet another storm. The guy on the radio joked that we should all stay calm if a bearded fellow shows up leading animals two by two onto an oversized boat. But not ten minutes later, as I passed Berkeley, the rain relented. I have no doubt it will be back, but on that fine morning, the sun took a walk around the Bay area hills, peeking between retreating thunderheads and lending an air of Spring to the drive.

So I was in just about the right mood to accept the rather surreal juxtaposition of Almaden with its surroundings. The center is sculpted into what must be at least a thousand acres of pristine Bay area hillside; to get there, you must navigate three miles of uninhabited parkland. It’s an escape from the strip-mall infested Valley, land of soulless architecture where community is defined by employee ID badges, up a two-lane road winding to an unmanned and entirely unimposing gate. For all its context, it may as well be Norman Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth (fittingly, at that). Nearby, Hollywood set-piece cows chew Hollywood set-piece cuds.

The gate opens and you drive a quarter mile to a four-story slate-gray building, which looks rather like a Nakamichi preamp, only with windows (and landscaping). Inside are 600 or so pure and applied researchers who are …well, mostly thinking about about NP-hard problems. And this center is just one of eight that IBM supports around the globe, in Haifa, Switzerland, Japan, China, and India, to name just five. It’s quite impressive, and reminds you that while the media can get carried away with one company at one moment in time, some firms have been hiring PhDs and putting their brains to good use for longer than most of us have been around.

I met with a couple of these scary smart guys, Daniel Gruhl (at left) and Andrew Tomkins, the lead architecht and chief scientist, respectively, of IBM’s WebFountain project. I’ve heard a lot about WebFountain, and what I gathered sounded promising – it’s been called an “analytics engine” by none other than the IEEE, which honored it in a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum. I wanted to see what it was all about up close.

(more from link below)

Continue reading "WebFountain, the Long Version" »

Fine summary of the trends at SES at ClickZ by Rebecca Leib...

Another nifty API-based hack: RankPulse. This site tracks popular keyword terms (glasses, camcorders, etc) and shows what sites have moved up or down Google's rankings. It has tons of interesting charts and lists.

From the site's FAQ:

Whenever you visit Google and enter a search term or phrase, Google's system must decide which sites to display first. Some terms appear in Google's database hundreds of millions of times, but the first page of results displays only ten websites. Google works very hard to ensure that the top results are the most relavent to your query.

Google, along with other leading search engines, rely on complex algorithms to determine which websites to list first; they tweak their systems daily. As a result, the rankings fluctuate, and that is where RankPulse comes in - we track and chart the daily fluctuations of 1,000 keyword searches at Google.....

(Thanks again, Philipp)

The beta has been up for a while, but today marks the official launch of Topix, Rich Skrenta's latest creation. From the release:

Topix.net today launched the Internet's largest news site (www.topix.net), and the first site to localize disparate audiences through content. Topix.net features 150,000 topical news pages and local news for every US ZIP code. The Company‚s patent-pending artificial intelligence (AI) categorization engine provides a concept-based method towards aggregating news, which is unlike other vendors‚ keyword-based search techniques. The proprietary technology from Topix.net provides readers with micro-targeted news and intuitive navigation that improves search relevance and overall search experience through the delivery of localized, targeted news. Furthermore, Topix.net's content reaches users that can be specifically defined by their locality, profession or interests. As a result, businesses that advertise on Topix.net can maximize their online advertising budget by ensuring that their messages are directed to their desired target demographic.

Congrats, Rich! (Also, Gary Price has an Interview with Rich ....)

Thanks to Philipp for a pointer this interesting toolbar. It lets you create up or down site rankings on the fly and mixes in community filtering. Another example of using search and the web as a platform....and it even has a Mac version.

Re-reading Simson's wonderful rant tonight (in Tech Review, he gives a good overview of why the broadcast flag is evil), I got to thinking about Mike Ramsay, TiVo, and the possibilities of net-based television. As I posted earlier, Mike said that one of his goals with TiVo is to make television searchable and discoverable over the net, in effect, combining broadband with broadcast. To my mind, this makes it possible (though not inevitable) for independent producers and creators to route around the Comcast-DirectTV distribution chokehold by simply creating websites that are tuned for TiVo-like devices. This would also makes it possible for producers to create "broadcast-flag-free" television - to release programming free of that dunderheaded regulation. I wonder, will they? Could the broadcast flag be irrelevant, and will television route around bad policy? If enough folks want their TV from broadband, if enough want to share and manipulate those programs as digital objects, and if enough demand those rights, the market will respond. Right....? The only problem is...the largest provider of broadband in the United States is....Comcast. Sigh.

I'm not sure I buy this, but I really like Mike Ramsay, and I sure love my TiVo....We can dream...

Desktop search (ie searching your own hard drive) is one of those things that seems to have gotten worse in the past ten years (why Yahoo, MSFT or Google don't do it is a mystery, imagine the goodwill...). Back in 1987, I had a great utility (why do I think it was called Gopher?) that rummaged around through my 20 meg Macintosh hard drive and found any text string, anywhere. Now I've got 40 gigs, I think, but no desktop search utility (Sherlock doesn't have text string search, far as I can tell). My email, for example, is a thicket of badly organized folders. Today David Weinberger raves about X1, a utility for Windows that searches email, docs, etc. But I'm on a Mac. Anyone know of something similar for us OSX folk?

While the column format would not allow a full discussion, I was thinking about blogs and social networking sofware while composing this piece. The focus is on "influencers" and marketing for this column, which by the way is the last of this kind. Next month I'm switching to an interview format (first up is Tivo's Mike Ramsay...)

THE MESSAGE
The Net of Influence
Influencers are critical to business success. But the last thing you want to do is treat them like a mass market. Instead, do the hard work of cultivating them in a personal network.

By John Battelle, March 2004 Issue

The era of carpet-bombing your brand into existence through a shock-and-awe network TV campaign is over. So what now? Marketers struggling for meaning in a post-mass-media world are turning to the concept of "influencers" -- people in a position to shape others' opinions. Get them to give your product great word of mouth, the theory goes, and your business will flourish.

Push a bit on this particular noodle, though, and it feels all wet. According to The Influentials, a 2003 book from market researchers Jon Berry and Ed Keller, you can target a cohesive set of influencers -- 21 million strong -- as a single group.

But the idea that one large überclass of community leaders determines the fate of all products seems utterly silly to me. So allow me to posit a different approach: For any product you're selling, there is a unique set of roughly 150 such leaders, each of whom you can and should get to know personally.

Hard to believe? Paul Rand is developing proof. Rand, an executive at Ketchum Communications, is launching a program to identify the folks critical to a business's success and target them with intimate and relevant programs and messaging. What Rand has found, time after time, is that the number of influencers for any given product is about 150.

This reminded me of a concept advanced in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. We tend to max out social networks at about 150 individuals (it has to do with group dynamics and how our brains are wired). Below that number, a group is small enough to operate on personal relationships rather than rules and hierarchy. This rings true for villages, military units, corporate divisions, and, I'd argue, communities of interest. A smart marketer will capitalize on that fact.

(more in extended entry below)

Continue reading "March 2.0 Column" »

Ask is buying the company which owns Excite, along with iWon and a few other sites.

Ask Jeeves Inc. will buy the privately owned Interactive Search Holdings Inc. (ISH) for about $343 million in a move that the Emeryville, California, company expects will double its search market share, it announced Thursday.

Very interesting....Ask will have 7% share if the deal goes through...

The market LOVES this deal, its stock is up 31% as of this writing.

(Ask's press release)

This sure feels familiar. Owners of large database businesses, who have been coining cash for decades based on the model of aggregating freely available information, then monopolizing access to and distribution of that information, have finally realized that their business is imperiled by search engines and the web. So they're pushing shitty legislation through Congress, just like Hollywood did with the DMCA. This is an important issue, well summarized in this Wired News story.

In essence, a bill winding its way through the House (HR3261) would redefine databases in such a way as to extend the owners of those databases far more power over how information could be used. This is a very bad thing. It's part of the same creeping copyright chill driven by the MPAA and RIAA. This time, it's Reed Elsevier and Westlaw, et al. Instead of figuring out new distribution and business models, these old line businesses are forcing Congress to do their bidding so they can sue their way into continued existence. It's depressing, but it's not surprising. From the story:

Imagine doing a Google search for a phone number, weather report or sports score. The results page would be filled with links to various sources of information. But what if someone typed in keywords and no results came back?

"The law of unintended consequences in this case has the potential to be huge," Brodsky said.

If this bums you out, then get smart on it, and do something about it...

(thanks, Cory)

In Search Engine Watch today, a personal tale of how a memorial website was defaced by spambots posting PageRank-gaming comments.

OK, now I really have taken a shine to Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein. I always liked him, what with his oft-repeated quip that search engines ought to be like the computer on Star Trek, but in a SES speech this morning, apparently in a bid to outdo himself, he conjured up the idea of "search pets." Damn, I wish I had stayed for this! From WebProNews, Silverstein speaks of a future some hundreds of years from now in which:

These search pets would not necessarily be like a pet dog, but more like "a genetically engineered beast."

"We'll still search for facts," he says, "but in all likelyhood the facts will be contained in a brain implant."

Oh man, if that doesn't give Andrew Orlowski all he needs to go apeshit, I don't know what will.

This time it's analyst Charlene Li, whose commentary runs on CNET today. In the piece she gives a fine overview of Google's weaknesses vis-a-vis MSN, Yahoo, and presumably AOL. Her overview is good, but I disagree with some of her conclusions.

In summary, she argues that Google can't compete with the portals search offerings, in particular once the portals have integrated search across their sites. Portals, Li argues, are in the best position to incorporate personalization, contextual searching (ie a search for "price delta" within Yahoo Travel yields different results from the same search within Yahoo Finance) and the like. Li further points out that when MSFT integrates search into the desktop qua Windows, Google will really be hard pressed to compete.

Li concludes that Google's only true advantage lies in its independence as a non-publisher: In a choice between Yahoo, which competes at multiple levels with publishers, or Google, which is focused solely on search, publishers have and will continue to sign up with Google in droves. As contextual marketing makes inroads, Google will evolve its ad network into utilities that will enable the contextual placement of display ads--and siphon a portion of traditional branding ad dollars away from the portals.

Here's where I think this analysis misses a few key points. One, Google is already a portal, but a loosely joined one. It has Orkut, Groups, Blogger, and - rumored to be coming soon - email (well, they already have email - it's in Orkut). If for some reason they have to move in that direction to compete, they can and they will.

Second, Li bases much of her analysis on the interface presumption that Google will always take the "blank slate" approach to search - that is, the user comes to a blank box, with no context to guide the search results. While this is true now, it need not be in the future. Page was recently quoted saying "it takes five seconds to type in a zip code" - and I am sure the folks at Google can figure out a way to make sure that zip code (and any other personalized information) only has to be typed in once. In other words, if Google feels compelled to add personalization, they will (and if you're an Orkut member, my guess is you'll be able to personalize your search pretty darn soon).

And lastly, Li assume that publishers will prefer Google over the portals, because the portals are competitive with publishers. In fact, publishers will go with whoever sends them profitable traffic, end of story. If Yahoo or AOL can do that, the publishers will work with them.

In any case, I'm glad to see this kind of business model thinking out and about on the web. It's a refreshing change from the party lines we see so often in the press.

In his most recent research note, Piper analyst Safa Rashtchy says based on conversations with advertisers and industry executives, the average "click charge" (or cost per click - CPC) could double from where it is now, at about .45 cents. He points out that advertisers are getting more sophisticated in their approach to paid search, and in fact are willing to "go negative ROI" in their campaigns, in order to gain a lifetime customer.

(Bray weighs in here - as Mark Pilgrim said, ouch...)

According to Beal, Yahoo's new CAP (paid inclusion) program is not going over that well at the SES show. I can't imagine it would - after all, Yahoo is asking folks to pay where before they didn't feel they had to. The boards are negative on the move, though at least Yahoo is out there explaining itself (and Jeremy adds his two cents here). This might all blow over as the market adjusts to the realities of capitalism, but...

...before Yahoo made this move, I suspect that many marketers could get by on organic Google crawls and targeted AdWords/Overture buys. Now, because Yahoo is in a duopoly position, the stakes are raised, and marketers feel like they *have* to be part of the Yahoo club. They fear, I am sure, that if they do not pay, somehow they will be treated as second class citizens by Yahoo's Slurp! crawler. Yahoo insists that its organic crawler is going to be "aggressive" and that paid inclusion is an add on of sorts, it insures that your site is crawled thoroughly and in the manner you choose (in particular, you can specify dynamic content, get fresher crawls, get reports, etc.).

But the company seems a bit tone deaf to the more primal forces at work here. First, the timing. Yahoo got a lot of mojo for the new engine it rolled out recently. Why taint that credibility so quickly with this announcement? The company could have waited a month or so, prepared the market for this in stages (for example, it might have cultivated an influencer network prior to the announcement, as I point out in my current 2.0 column). Secondly, it's predictable that marketers would feel like they have no choice, that they are being forced to enlist in CAP. That is not good for a company's reputation long term. If I were Yahoo, I'd monitor this closely, and adjust a bit if need be. Perhaps soothing words and assurances will be enough while the market swallows this new dose of medicine. But Google can and will make a PR killing portraying Yahoo as the Big Evil Biased Bully. Ask Jeeves already has: yesterday it cancelled its paid inclusion program .... I am sure the timing was pure coincidence.

As, er, a thought experiment of sorts, take a look at what each search service (Google and Yahoo) bring up when you search for "yahoo "content acquisition program"":

Google
(top two are webmasterworld board posts, questioning the program)
Yahoo
(straight news stories, not nearly as controversial)

Algorithms have no bias? Draw your own conclusions.

Update: Resourceshelf has direct quotes from Ask spokesperson on why they ended the PI program here...

It must be the SES show, but there's a lot of "online advertising rocks" stuff out there of late. Jupiter released a study with figures claiming that 7 of 10 paid search advertisers plan to increase their spending this year. Also, the percentage of marketers buying 100 keywords or more increased from 18% last year to nearly 50% this year. (via Wonk)

More data supporting the decline of television and print, and the rise of the web as an advertising vehicle. Self serving though it is, Doubleclick's "Touchpoints" survey has some pretty impressive findings, according to Mediapost (scroll down to sixth item):

The survey analyzes how media affect initial product awareness (First Learn), research and information gathering (Further Learn), and the final purchase decision. Consumers were asked about their purchases during the last six months for products in the following categories: Auto, Credit Cards/Retail Banking, Electronics, Home Products, Mortgages/Investments, Movies, Personal/Household Care, Prescription Drugs, Telecom Services, and Travel.

The Internet is most important later on in the buying process, during the Further Learning and Purchase Decision stages for products in the Travel, Auto, Credit Cards/Retail Banking, Consumer Electronics, Mortgages/ Investments, and Prescription Drugs categories.

One of the news items buzzing here at SES is Yahoo's announcement of its paid inclusion program, covered by the Times here. That they intended to shift to paid inclusion index-wide is not news (discussed in more length here), but it is a clear signal that Yahoo has no trouble being labeled as the "commercial" search engine. Google continues to differentiate as "pure." More later on this...(meantime, good and deeper overview at SEW here).

BTW, posting will be light today. On a plane later, traveling home. SES continues apace for the next three days...I'll have to cover it remotely.

I know, I know, you're all waiting breathlessly for my report on WebFountain, but to be honest, the stuff I saw there last Friday was rather complicated, and it's going to take me a bit more time to figure out how to relate it. Given that I'm swamped at SES, I'll hope to get to it sometime later in the week. Meantime, I did get a chance to swing by Google's NYC offices, which are near Times Square, in the old About.com space (you gotta love this trend of taking over space from once-highfliers). I met Craig Nevill-Manning, the engineer responsible for Google's 30-odd NYC-based engineers. Craig is the man behind Froogle, and we had a good chat about approaches in the shopping space. Net net: watch the space. Work continues apace. My old colleague Patrick Keane, late of Jupiter, who now works in the NY office, was out with some nasty food poisoning. Get well soon...

The NY office is dominated by a large sales force, mainly late 20s, busily hawking AdWords or its variants. Clearly a happy group, but a very different feel from the Googleplex in Mountain View. The colors scheme and lava lamps are the same, but this is New York, after all. Sell, sell, then...sell some more.

Another press release, promising a revolution, this one from "AOMI," a Fort Worth, Texas company that will "revolutionize the way we search" by using "behavioral profiling, predictive modeling, and Neuro Intelligence...rendering existing search functionality obsolete." Oh, please. They're even code-naming the product "HAL." They promise, PROMISE, that "a prototype of this product will be completed in the coming months, and the public Beta will be released soon thereafter."

The site is "under construction" and all I have is the release, which is in the extended entry below. The company is a division of Markettrix, which from what I can tell is an SEO/marketing services holding company (their site is very sketchy on details). So here's my question: If you're about to revolutionize search, why not just wait till you have the goods and open up your site to all comers? The word of mouth will get around in about a day, if not an hour. Why huff and puff in a press release? Why? Oh, yeah, now I remember.

Continue reading "Google Beware, AOMI Stalks You" »

Contextual search company Quigo today announced $5 million in financing from Highland Capital, ie, Lycos founder Bob Davis. They plan to "take on Google" in contextual advertising. Them and Kanoodle, Overture and whoever else might have a go at it. Go get em, guys....

It's not easy to post from here, as the show does not have wireless coverage (I am sure by the next one, they'll realize the importance of wireless to coverage of the blog/press kind). Anyway, missed most of the sessions today due to other meetings, but I did run into an old friend in the media investment banking business. His presence marked an interesting development in this homegrown industry - the money folks are starting to pay attention. Today there was a session track devoted to the financial side of running a SEO/SEM business, with titles such as "Coping With Growth," "Valuing Your Company," and "Cashing Out." My investment banking friend, a media business specialist, said he got plenty of leads and interest after he spoke, and he mentioned more than one person had approached him with the idea of rolling up the SEO space. It's happening already, and will continue apace - maybe this time we can avoid the Razorfish/USWeb/Sapient syndrome...