John Battelle's Searchblog

The RSS renaming contest has a winner: Webfeed. I don't not like it.

Background...

Google plans to raise Google's choice to raise $2,718,281,828.

From Peter Kaminski's blog:

It turns out that 2.718281828... (...and an infinite number of digits after that) is 'e', the base of the natural logarithm. Because it can't be expressed as a ratio of two numbers, it's known mathematically as "irrational" -- something some bankers might say about the way Google is going public. However, 'e' also happens to be "transcendental," another fancy property of a number that means it can't be expressed by a finite number of algebraic operations. Maybe Google is making a little wordplay -- saying they expect to transcend expectations -- to overcome or notably exceed ordinary limits.

(Thanks, Ross)

The NYT has some insights on Google's true margins, which were depressed in the S1 due to stock option grants:

Google can behave with so little regard for shareholders' wishes because its business is so attractive that investors will be clamoring to buy stock no matter what conditions the company sets. The company's sales and profits are increasing at a spectacular rate, at least for now, and its profit margins appear to be among the highest in corporate America.

In 2003, Google reported an operating profit of $340 million on sales of $960 million. But the 2003 figure appears to understate the company's cash profit margin, since it includes very high expenses related to stock options that will probably decline in future years. On a cash basis, Google had an operating profit of $570 million in 2003, and an operating margin of 62 percent.

The WSJ, which I won't link to as it's sub required, had these tidbits:

The most prominent proponent of IPO auctions has been W.R. Hambrecht & Co., a boutique San Francisco investment bank founded by longtime technology financier William Hambrecht. Google's filing didn't mention W.R. Hambrecht, but people familiar with the matter say the firm is likely to be named an additional underwriter in coming weeks. A Hambrecht spokeswoman declined to comment....
...
Despite its size, Google continues to grow like the young company it is. Revenue more than doubled last year. Google said it generated $395 million in cash from operations last year and an additional $204 million in the first quarter of 2004.

Other than the founders, Google's two biggest shareholders are prominent Silicon Valley venture-capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, which invested roughly $13 million each in 1999. Each firm now owns slightly more than 10% of the company, meaning their stakes could be valued at $2.5 billion apiece....

PlanetOut filed today also. A founder - Megan Smith - is now at Google. It was a double big day for her!

What does it all mean? Well, to be honest it was nice to be at the game, even if my team lost, while the first wave of coverage broke. I was with a great group of guys, all of whom care about the industry and who have opinions, some of them even informed, on the Google IPO. When I got home, I read through the S 1 . So herewith my first impressions, and they are only that, for I have not had time to really sit with the document, that will take days, if not weeks to really grok.

First the stuff you probably already know. Google filed for a prospective $2.7 billion (Wall St estimates) sale, valuing the company in the $20-25 billion range. Unusual aspects: There will be two classes of stock, one with supervoting rights (ten times those of regular shareholders), which keeps power squarely in the founders' hands. The symbol was not identified (ie, it's not "GOO", yet), nor was the market (NYSE or Nasdaq). There are only two banks, Morgan on the left in the power slot, and Credit Suisse on the right. Hambrecht did not make the cut, but their ideas did. Google will auction all of its shares.

Having seen how the quest for IPO glory can ruin a company, it's good to remember that an IPO is just the beginning of something, not an end in itself, though sometimes folks caught up in it can forget that. It certainly happened to us at Wired, for a while we thought we were reinventing the entire IPO process - we even redesigned the prospectus to look like our magazine. But high-minded claims of reinventing how the business world will work rarely come to pass, and it's never in anyone's interest to make such claims in the first place. I've seen it, trust me.

That thought came to mind as I read the five-page, Warren Buffet-inspired letter which opens Google's S1, entitled "An Owner's Manual" for Google Shareholders, which was written in the first person by Larry Page (full text in extended entry below). I can only imagine the eyes rolling at Kleiner Perkins, Morgan Stanley, and the rest of the veterans as the founders insisted on this, and I can imagine this letter is what broke the camel's back last week and engendered the "let's not get too cute" comment in the New York Times. The letter, which is unusual for an S1, borders on hubris. It's personal, discursive, and rather defensive in tone, and it attempts to address an investor's most pressing questions about the company. It claims, several times over, that Google is different, special, and remarkable. It also acts as something of a caveat, a pardon for future sins, claiming that going forward, Google will not act like public companies are supposed to act, because it is unique and long-term focused. "We're different, and better than others," is the tone. "Don't ask why we do things the way we do them. We know best." To be honest, the letter made me cringe a bit. "Yow," I said to myself (and now to you...). "Do they really want to set themselves up like this?"

Well, yes they do. The letter states, among other things, that 1. We don't need to do this for the money; 2. We have no plans to run our business to satisfy Wall Street's need for smooth earnings predictability; 3. We plan to give no earnings guidance, not at least as it's understood on Wall St.; 4. Don't ask us to do so, we'll simply decline the request; 5. We'll do odd things that you won' t understand; 6. We will make big bets on things that may not work out; 7. We run the company as a triumvirate, so there will not be clear leadership from one person like most other companies; 8. We bridge the media and tech industries (interesting), which are in flux, so we've chosen a two-class stock structure similar to the NYT, WashPost, and WSJ that helps us avoid being taken over by those forces; 9. We plan using an auction model, as it feels fairer and we understand auctions from AdWords; 10. Don't invest in us if this scares you at all, or the price feels too high; 11. Don't even think about asking us to cut expenses with regard to our employees; 12. We believe in the idea of Don't Be Evil; 13. It's evil to pay for placement or inclusion (a swipe at Yahoo); 14. We hope to bridge the digital divide through Gmail type free services and a foundation with at least 1% of profits and equity to help make the world a better place; 17. Betting on Google is a bet on Sergey and Larry (this was said multiple times, making me wonder if there wasn't some odd future blame being assigned here by the VCs or bankers); 18. This letter is our way of answering the questions we can't answer in the coming months due to the IPO quiet period.

While my summary of the letter may sound negative, it's my honest and initial response: to me, the letter comes off pretty strong, and likely will anger many on Wall Street. But I have to commend the founders for sticking to their beliefs, and using the IPO as something of a megaphone/soapbox. It is brave, unique, and rather commendable to very publicly state that the founders are controlling the company, and the founders will decide what is best for Google, not Wall Street. They've set themselves a very high long-term bar, claiming they will best the system, in essence. I think it will be very interesting to see how Wall Street responds. There is a chance, in the end, that the Street will feel slighted, and turn its back on the company.

However, as something of a present proof, the financials are quite impressive, though not as impressive as some had claimed. Profits are on track to break $250 million or so this year, they hit more than $100 million last year. The company has been profitable since 2001 (scroll down).

Three directors, all impressive, have been added to make the board looks robust and public facing: John Hennessy, President of Stanford, Paul Otellini, President of Intel, and Arthur Levinson, CEO of Genentech. More grist for the chip in brain conspiracy theorists, no doubt.

Also interesting: Google has an exclusive license to the PageRank patent from Stanford, but only through 2011. Then it becomes non-exclusive. And, as of March 31, Google had 1,907 employees. If you added in contractors, my guess is that'd go well past 2500. The articles of incorporation and bylaws have anti-takeover clauses, among other things. More on these details later.

As with all S1s, there is a very lengthy section on risks, with the first and foremost one labeled Microsoft and Yahoo. The risk sector reads like a response to all the criticisms of Google we've heard over the past year, from the Gmail privacy storm to index spamming.

There are tidbits throughout that will give all sorts of insights to competitors, the percent of revenues that are in the Google Network (ie not on the site itself, like AdSense), for example (18% last year, rising to past 20% this year). There are details on how they structure some deals with partners, on some accounting/regulation issues with stock options, on legal issues, and many other things. In reading through the entire thing, I realize it'd take me all night to report it all. I won't try. More as time goes by. For now, it's nice to know, the other damn shoe has dropped. Now, on with business.

Continue reading "Now That The Other Shoe Has Dropped" »

Taking off the rest of the day for meetings and...a ball game. Posting to resume Friday. By then, perhaps, we'll have news on the IPO whose name I dare not speak.

Just a thought, but when Google starts shutting down a t-shirt company's right to advertise its politically charged wares, something feels rotten in the state of paid search. (The company is Y-Que, the controversy was first reported by boing boing).

This reminds me of the cruise line issue, but for some reason, it feels worse. This is no conspiracy, lord knows I'm not claiming Google is playing politics (I'd feel the same way if the t-shirts made fun of Democrats, and in fact they do have an "anti-Kerry" shirt), but I suggest that Google review their policy w/r/t "advocacy" and "anti-" sites, and drop the whole damn thing, leaving it up to the market and the FCC nannies to figure out what is and what is not appropriate. After all, Google essentially punted in trademarks. Why not here?

The email below comes to me via Dave Farber's IP list. I quote it in full with permission of the author, I think the story he tells is quite interesting as it relates to our communications and intentions moving from the ephemeral to the eternal (the title of a chapter in my book). This email was written by JA Terranson, who is on Dave's IP list, in response to this article by Declan McCullagh on issues of privacy and GMail.

Subject: Opposing view of Gmail issues (Cypherpunk tie in)

Good Afternoon Declan,

As with much of the online community, I have been discussing this
topic since it was announced by Google, and until recently, I was also of
the opinion that this was a simple contractual choice between the user of
Gmail and Google.

My opinion was altered by a gentleman in England, who used the
following story to illustrate his point:

When Google released their toolbar, he, like most of us, installed
it. What was different was that he installed it with all of the advanced
features (including the tracking options, which Google goes out of their
way to make crystal clear *is* tracking software). He reasoning was
similar to the thoughts you expressed below: he had nothing to hide, he
believed Google really was stripping identity data from their observations
of his browsing habits, and he did not mind having them "watch".

One day he had a firewall issue when trying to retrieve a file,
and the person who was hosting it offered to put it on a "private" (i.e.,
unlinked) page for him to grab over HTTP. He accepted, downloaded the
document, and promptly forgot about it - until this document, which had
extremely personal information on it (personal to the person *hosting* it,
not the person retrieving it) showed up on Google a short time later. You
see, the toolbar had seen him go to a web page that Google did not have,
and so they indexed it right away.

Without meaning to, the user of the toolbar had helped Google to
violate the privacy of the person who went out of his way to keep this
document private. This person knew nothing of the toolbar, and had no
agreement with Google, yet he became the unwilling participant in Google's
web cache.

The senders of email to users of Gmail are in the very same
position as our friend above: they know nothing of the agreement, they are
not participants in the Gmail program - they have never agreed to allow a
third party to access *their* private thoughts and utterances, yet they
too are caught in the middle.

As much as it goes against my gut reaction, I must admit that
Gmail has some very serious privacy implications, some of which almost
definitely fall under EU privacy laws.

The ultimate solution to the problem is close to what was
suggested in the essay below: encryption. But not by Google. Encryption
by the senders. The Cypherpunk cries of "Encryption Everywhere" lands
smack dab in the middle of the plate here - email stays private,
regardless of Google indexing, government snooping, or end user
negligence. Pity that people will spend thousands of hours, and millions
of dollars arguing over the best way to protect us from ourselves, but
that we won't spend five minutes learning to use a simple encryption
system that could completely erase these very issues.

Yours,

Alif Terranson

I met with Craig Newmark , founder of craigslist, a while back, but I don't think I posted about it. But this crossed my desk recently, and I wanted to share it with you. Can't say how I got it, but damn, it's powerful stuff.

Top Web Entities (English-language traffic), with employee data

Rank # Employees Company

1. 3600 Yahoo
2. 55000 MSFT
3. 1500 Google
4. 91000 AOL/TW
5. 4000 eBay
6. 2650000 US Government
7. 7500 Amazon

Etc....(removed 8-23 so as not to bore you)

24. 5100 Earthlink
25. 14 craigslist

Of course the #s will change in the top 25 (everyone always argues about who's #1-10), but....to crack the top 25 with just 14 employees! The next smallest sized company is adultfriendfinder, #17, with 150.

Cool.

For some time I've been meaning to hook up with Pierre Omidyar, the founder and Chair of eBay. We finally got together at lunch earlier this week in Redwood City, where his foundation is based. I'd heard Pierre is just about the most down-to-earth, "normal" fellow one might want to meet, it in fact it turned out to be true. He kicked out of Valley life in 1999 and moved to the desert outside Las Vegas (he also spends a lot of time in France). He comes back every so often for eBay meetings and to meet with his foundation staff, and it's this foundation that really gets him up in the morning these days. He's made news recently by announcing a new strategy for the organization, one which blends a bent for social change with capitalism - in other words, he's expanding from philanthropy into the investment game, but he plans to focus on businesses that connect people to each other to create the kind of wholesale change that eBay did. Omidyar repeated to me a very repeatable observation: that eBay has been the vehicle for millions of strangers to establish relationships of trust with each other.

Hence his investment in Meetup, for example. It's the first business Omidyar has seen with the same ability to connect folks for social good. Good for Scott!

Pierre and I had a good lunch, talking over many issues for the book. But really, our conversation always came back to community, the core driver of value at eBay. We discussed Tim's concept of the "architecture of participation" and how critical it is in the Web 2.0 world, and how much of the media world has yet to grok it. You can't outsource participation to the ghettos of discussion threads, in other words. The online media world is still looking for its Pong, as Martin says, but I think we're getting close. Publications are essentially reflections of communities. And I believe the best blogs are publications, in a very classical sense.

In any case, those were the kind of tangents we took during lunch. We did talk search and SFO and such, but I've gotta save that for the book.

Cnet reports that Lycos has retained Lehman to advise the company on the sale of its US assets. Cnet claims a possible price of $200 million. That'd be a bargain, a far cry from the billions Barry was willing to offer back in the good old days...

Diller would not need the traffic, though it never hurts. What he does need is integrative search technology. And on that count, Lycos is not a strong player. Side note to Wired News folks: If you're looking to do something new, you know how to get in touch with me...

News broke today that Tacoda (previous post here) is creating a behavioral marketing network called AudienceMatch which will compete with other major ad networks like Google's AdWords or Overture's ContentMatch. Congrats to them, and to Fred, who invested in them.

Is anyone else sick of all the Google IPO stuff? Until the S-1 or Form 10 drops, I promise I will no longer post on the IPO. I'm past the point of saturation, and I sense the rest of the world is too. As my friend John Heilemann pointed out to me yesterday, it's like the NFL draft. At the end of the day, what matters is the execution on the field. The draft is a sideshow.

I'll be on "Talk of the Nation" shortly talking about - what else - the Google IPO. Streaming audio will be up in about four hours (6 pm EST) I'm told. Other guests include Steven Levy and Lauren Weinstein.

Oh, I know, I'm not big on enterprise search, it puts me to sleep. But to be honest, it was the enterprise that got me into this game, nearly 20 years ago, at a now defunct Macintosh weekly called MacWeek. We covered "MVBs" - Macintosh Volume Buyers, and my best sources were big corporate buyers at Anderson and the University of Texas. These guys saw all the cool shit early, and then blabbed about it to me. Our fearless executive editor was a fellow named Dan Farber, who now runs editorial at ZDNet. Anyway, Dan emailed me yesterday and asked what I thought of enterprise search, which is clearly one of the most overlooked stories in search. (His view on it is now up, here). It made me think, and I realized that in fact, enterprise search will probably rise again, and end up being one of the coolest things in search in the next few years. Why? Because it sucks so badly now, fixing it will be the kind of 10X revelation we had when we moved from Yahoo to Google in 1998-99.

Germane to that, here's an interview in the E-commerce Times with Google enterprise search chief Dave Girouard that's interesting.

The funny part is it's easier to find box scores from the 1957 World Series than it is to find last quarter's sales presentation in the enterprise. While Web search has gotten really good, enterprise search has stagnated, and that's why we really believe it's a problem that needs to be solved and that Google has a unique set of capabilities to solve it."

When Google goes public, and it seems that this is most certainly a when, rather than an if, it will have to grow. And once it's hit the plateau of consumer facing businesses, it will turn to the corporate IT market (it's already focused on the problem and is cranking up that focus). That market is still nascent, and there are buckets of money there (just ask Microsoft or FAST.) Mark my words, boring as it might seem, corporate search will be a big deal. And...there will be interesting implications w/r/t transparency and the like once all those corporate documents are discovered by the internal crawler.

From time to time you might note, if you are really paying attention, that results on Google have been removed due to the DMCA, in particular a clause known as "Safe Harbor" - it has to do with supposed copyright infringement. If and when you run across such results, Google posts a notice at the bottom of the page informing you, and linking to the DMCA request that led to the result being pulled from Google's index. This is a very fine example of Google being a good corporate citizen, but Joe Hall has a good suggestion for refinement: show this disclaimer at the top of the page, not at the bottom, where many won't see it.

Also on this issue, the Virginia Journal of Law and Techweighs in with a paper entitled "Application of the DMCA Safe Harbor Provisions to Search Engines." Why do you care? Well, this paper concludes that "the burden of complying with the safe harbor procedures should not be placed on search engines. Given these concerns, a better alternative would be for Congress to grant search engines complete immunity from contributory liability for copyright infringing activities by third parties."

To reach its conclusion, the paper argues that "Internet service providers who receive notifications from copyright owners about allegedly infringing content must remove or disable access to that content in order to remain immune from claims for contributory liability. In response to such notifications, search engines have begun to remove links to allegedly infringing content from their search results. Unfortunately, application of the DMCA safe harbor provisions to search engines is problematic. Key portions of the statute refer to “subscribers” and “account holders,” making their application to search engines unclear because search engines typically do not have subscribers or account holders. Also, the lack of a subscription relationship between search engines and alleged infringers seems to make search engines more likely than other types of service providers to remove content overzealously in response to notifications."

If you're still with me, then you may realize what I'm about to say - yup, in the near future, most search engines *will* have subscribers and account holders. A9 already does, as does Yahoo, indirectly. Hate to say it, but this paper is already out of date, even if I agree with its conclusion.

(thanks, JD).

Another (this is the third in two days) big NYT piece on Google, this one is from Saul Hansell, with great artwork (see left). Saul explores the debate between staying private and going public. And it had this tidbit, which I am embarassed to say I did not know:

Google has hardly been lazy working to manage the timing of an eventual offering. Early on, it split itself into two companies, Google Inc. and Google Technologies, so that each would have fewer than 500 employees, according to a person who had been close to Google. That was important because the S.E.C. requires companies with 500 shareholders and assets greater than $10 million to file financial statements and most of the other information they would have to disclose in a public share offering.

Early in 2003, the two companies were merged, in effect setting the date of April 29, 2004, as the deadline for Google to make the required disclosure. (The law requires a public filing 120 days after the close of a company's fiscal year, in this case April 29.)

I wondered how they got away with having so many shareholders for so long. Dooh!

Read a bit over the weekend. First, the B'week cover package timed for the IPO is entirely reconstituted pablum. You've read this piece before, don't bother. However, there is an interview with Page online, here, worth reviewing if you're into that kind of stuff. Best quotes:

Q: Where is search today on an evolutionary scale?
A: People have consistently underestimated the size and importance of search. It's a very, very large space of technologies, usage, and information. We've gone from 30 million to over 3 billion documents in just a small number of years. There's going to be a lot of commercial activity in this space, a lot of companies doing things that are going to be very valuable.

Q: Competitors want to build search that simultaneously queries an individual's local computer, e-mail archives, as well as the Internet. Is that something Google aims to do?
A: Our mission is to organize the world's information. Clearly, the more information we have when we do a search, the better it's going to work. There are all sorts of details involved in different kinds of products, including privacy issues. I'd expect us over time to have access to more information.

Second, there was a big cover story on Diller and IAC last week, in the same issue of Fortune as the Moritz piece I blogged a few days ago (sub required past first page on both). The piece was written by Bethany McLean, who is credited with breaking the Enron story. And while I was particularly interested in how IAC - a non-centralized, non-consumer facing company built on a confederacy of otherwise unconnected brands - competes with centralized, software-and-analytics driven companies like Yahoo and Amazon, Bethany did not address those issues. There's a fine history of Diller and IAC, trademark analysis of IAC's numbers, almost reverential profiles of IAC execs, and classic Fortune hyping of a potential "gotcha" ("Cover tag: "What's real and what's fantasy?"!). But there's no gotcha.

The piece does have clues to what I think will drive IAC's future. In the last portion of the story, Diller talks about "eventual synergies" in his operating businesses. I think the company's long term fortunes will turn on the timeline of these "eventual" synergies. So... what drives synergies between lines of business online? Yup, search. Not to bang the search drum too loudly, but, the core asset IAC lacks most is search - a hole the Fortune piece missed, for the most part, though Diller does rue his loss of Lycos years ago. I certainly believe that regret is heartfelt. " Those dopes!" he says of the folks who fought him on the Lycos deal. "We were going to wire all out commerce to the No. 3 search engine at the time when habits were just changing. Our company would have been so far advanced!" Looking at what Yahoo, eBay, MSN, AOL, Amazon, and Google are trying to do now, I have to say I agree.

Good morning, Googlefolk: Your headache today (ain't it fun being big?) is that you're being sued by an *insurance company.* No, wait, that's not enough. A *French* insurance company, on trademark issues. Background here.

Interesting: Markoff has a source (link is CC Times, not NYT, it's not reg required) who claims Google will not file an S-1 this week (the standard IPO prospectus) but rather will file ... well...on that the story is not clear. But something. I believe the only thing they could file other than an S-1 is a Form 10, which private companies file when they surpass 500 shareholders and 10 million in assets. Markoff's story does not say that will happen, but that's the implication. There's some good stuff in this short piece:

Google, the Web search company that has developed a huge popular following around the world, is expected to take a tentative first step next week toward a future public stock offering, a person close to the company said Friday. But it is likely to stop short of filing a formal registration to sell shares, he said......

"I wouldn't call it tensions, but there are differences," he said. "I think our attitude is, 'Let's not be too cute.' "

Also, the Times runs a Page One rundown of who will get rich in the IPO. After reading it, I felt...a bit queasy, and I don't know why. (No, I don't own any shares!).

Well, Re-Find (sign up at left) is the weekly summary of what was posted on Searchblog, which may or may not be interesting to you. But it's also a way for me to know who the hell you guys are. I am stunned, honored, and scared shitless to report that Searchblog has something like 35,000 readers now, and it's nice to grok a cross section of that readership, if only through the entrails of email addresses. Plus, those who proactively vote by signing up will more likely than not get an invitation to participate in whatever it is I might do next - read chapters of the book before publication, beta test a new site, or come to a conference I'm thinking about. So sign up, if any of that sounds interesting to you. You can always unsubscribe if I get too self serving, pedantic, or hopelessly boring.

I finally got around to reading Simson's piece in Tech Review. I knew it would be worth the wait, not another me-too package on the IPO but some original reporting and thinking. And I was right. The piece points out that Akamai is in a similar business to Google - the distributed computing business. Then he thinks through the implications. Very Web 2.0, web-as-platform kind of stuff here.

Fun excerpts:

“These numbers are all crazily low,” Farach-Colton continued. “Google always reports much, much lower numbers than are true." Whenever somebody from Google puts together a new presentation, he explained, the PR department vets the talk and hacks down the numbers. Originally, he said, the slide with the numbers said that 1,000 queries/sec was the “minimum” rate, not the peak. “We have 10,000-plus servers. That’s plus a lot.”...

Leighton doesn’t think that Akamai would move into any business that required the company to deal directly with end users.....

Fortune's Adam Lashinsky has a well done profile of Michael Moritz, one of two VCs to invest in Google back in 1999. (The site is sub only, but I believe you can get the first page if you are not a Fortune subscriber. When, oh when, will Time Inc. realize that blogging is GOOD for them? Maybe when they spin out AOL...)

It's a Google News Friday. Roundup:

- Cnet reports on Google's safe search, which it claims is too restrictive.

- Google rethinks its policy on hate sites (considering labels. I say, let the community label in aggregate..but what do I know).

- Google is apparently expanding its Gmail beta to users of Blogger. (Thanks, Andy)

- More on the grandstanding California Senator who is seeking to legislate Gmail...

But it will be shortly, the Wall Street Journal reports. The article is behind a subscription wall, excerpts:

...The announcement is linked to the fact that Google will soon be required to disclose publicly more information about its business, under a Securities and Exchange Commission rule triggered after closely held companies surpass a certain size. Google is expected to have to make such disclosures as early as next week. ...

..Based on early chatter among bankers, the offering could value Google at as much as $25 billion, and spread nearly $100 million in fees across Wall Street. Last fall, some of Google's prospective advisers estimated the valuation of the company could be in line with other Internet leaders. Those include Yahoo Inc., valued at $38 billion, Amazon.com Inc. at $20 billion and eBay Inc. at $54 billion....

Here we go again, this month's Google cover: Businessweek. Oh, they timed it for the IPO, yes they did, but those pesky engineers have yet to make those editors look like geniuses. Godammit!

Well, there's time. It might happen in the next few days, or next week.

Bizweek does the full package. I'll read it, and if there's anything new, I'll let you know. (The site requires registration.)

Thanks for the tip, Jim.

Ev and Dave talk rss conspiracies...

And the are pretty solid, on first look. From their release (full text in extended entry)

MSN® reported another profitable quarter on robust revenue growth of 16% over last year driven by continued success in growing its advertising business. MSN advertising revenue increased 43% during the quarter, again showing strength in both traditional online and search-based advertising. Customers and advertisers continue to recognize MSN as a worldwide leader in online services with more than 350 million unique users to the MSN network, over 170 million active MSN Hotmail® unique users, and more than 120 million active MSN Messenger unique users worldwide on a monthly basis.

Q1 revenues are reported as $491 million, compared to $427 million last year, and $559 million last quarter. Recall, however, that last quarter is the holiday season. The company did not break out actual profits for MSN.

Continue reading "MSN Earnings Are In..." »

Tickle, the matchmaking/social networking site, announced today a new "people search" feature that lets you find people based on keyword search. The site uses the plethora of data it has on its 18 million registered users to correlate people to search terms. I spoke to CEO James Currier yesterday, and tried out the service a bit to boot. It's a neat idea, but a bit ... odd to see people matched to terms. Take a gander at a search result for "mortgage" for example. And here's what "lawyer" looks like with "everything" chosen - web, people, and sponsored results.

The search works much better if you are a member, Currier said. The engine will then search for folks based on your search term, then correlate stuff like number of degrees away, similar interests, and even scores on the hundreds of tests Tickle makes available to its members. I can imagine this to be a pretty cool way to find, say, a mechanic or a lawyer, if you're a member and have a pretty robust social network.

I think this points in interesting directions.

Full release in extended entry....

Continue reading "Tickle Searches People" »

...19 year olds can put up an engine with some nifty features. Check out FyberSearch.

Gary says:
This engine allows the user to tweak the keyword density portion of its
relevancy algorithm. I haven't seen this option from a general web engine,
I like it! You often find this feature from databases like LexisNexis and
Factiva where the searcher can specify how many times a word or phrase
must be mentioned in a document to be considered relevant. Often, the
syntax atleast(x) is used. An advanced interface and image searching are
available. You'll also notice a link (on search results pages) to
immediately reindex each page. Finally, options to limit your search to
terms in the title, meta tags, and url by simply pointing and clicking.
The default search finds your terms in page titles only. You'll need to
select "content keywords" to search terms on the page.

Three things struck me as I reflect back on my trip to Microsoft Tuesday. One, it's not wise to dismiss the company as being "at the first grade level" or "behind" the rest of the pack. Second, the fact that Microsoft came late to the search game just might be an advantage. And third, I need to get some face time with the Windows team, because I went into the day wondering if MSN isn't becoming MSFT's future interface/platform play, with Windows relegated to a supporting role (as DOS was to Windows) and, well, nothing I heard convinced me otherwise. And that certainly can't be right. Or can it?

I met first with David Cole, who runs MSN and has a long history at the company, in particular with Windows and web technology. Much of what we discussed I need to save for my column, but suffice to say we covered a broad range of topics, including Longhorn integration (yes, MSN and search are being built with an eye toward that eventuality), the Web OS meme (while not dismissive of the idea, Cole thought it was just one of many approaches to solving computing and information service problems), and of course, competition with Google and the rest of the field. Cole began by outlining how MSN has shifted to its current strategy, based on building scaled software services that break into two major buckets: communications services (MSN Messenger, Hotmail, etc) and information services (search, content, etc.). Yusuf Mehdi, who I met with next, runs information services, and we had a pretty detailed chat about the present and future of search. That conversation was for the book alone, due to timing issues. I can report, however, that Yusuf was pretty charged up about what they are building.

So why did I leave thinking that MSFT's late start in search could be an advantage? Well, think about it. The company has massive resources, and the folks in charge are pretty smart. So they get to tackle the search problem with no legacy issues and no presumptions with regard to approach. There are any number of hurdles in search - starting with how to scale your infrastructure and moving into how to integrate results with personalized data - and many of these might best be tackled by starting fresh. Plus, on the talent side, MSFT is really the only viable player that can offer engineers unlimited resources and the chance to start from scratch. I know, the Valley mill says MSFT is having a hell of a time hiring, but when I asked that question up in Redmond, I got quite the opposite answer.

I found both Cole and Mehdi personable and open, and willing to listen as much as hold forth. I did ask them any number of questions suggested by Searchblog readers, and I got a chance to talk to Scoble before I went in as well. I asked Scoble what I should ask the MSN execs, and he said he wanted to know when MSFT would launch blogging on MSN, what their RSS strategy was, how they plan to kick Google's ass, and what they were going to buy. I asked those questions and more, and while some of the answers are under embargo for the book, here are a few of the highlights I can report:

- MSN Premium, a new subscription product, already has a rudimentary blogging tool, Cole told me, and blogging will be improved and incorporated in some way across the system.
- 3 degrees, a social networking application that is in testing in the Sandbox, has taught MSN a lot and we can expect to see some version of it attached to MSN Messenger. In particular, watch the music application.
- RSS: Well, Cole was not hip to RSS, but he said he would get hip pronto. (He also was not aware of Scoble, but that's changed now!)
- Google: Very diplomatic on this front as you might expect. Respectful of how the company changed search and the internet for good. It's not often that Gates admits defeat.
- What might they buy? We didn't really get into this one - ran out of time. But I sense that MSFT is pretty into rolling its own right now. When the search platform is stable, I'd wager they might go looking for neat things to plug into it.

On the platform idea (point three), my general thesis is this: Over time, more and more of a typical user's desktop real estate is devoted to web-enabled apps. I am an extreme example of this trend (and I'd wager the same is true of most of Searchblog's readers): at any give moment, I've got ecto (a blogging tool), NetNewsWire (RSS reader), Firefox and/or Safari (browser), mail, and Office open. All these applications are web-enabled (Office is the lamest of the bunch, but not for long). Even OSX makes web calls - if only for software updates for now. So if you look at my screen, at least 80 percent of it is web applications. Compare that with five years ago, where it was just email and the browser, or ten, where it was just email.

Now, all these applications are migrating to the portals, and the portals are migrating to the model Cole described: software-based platforms replete with tools and applications - mail, calendar, blogging, rss readers, the works. At some point (and this certainly is not a new idea) the very idea of the "desktop" will become pretty old school. We're building an entirely new architecture on top of our OSes. So...what does that mean for the traditional OS? In essence, it loses the glory role, in the eyes of the consumer. The OS does the hard stuff - files systems, security, connectivity, etc., but the interface, the stuff the user sees, is migrating to the web. And MSFT's play there isn't Windows. It's MSN. At least, I think it is....

This, it seems to me, is why the company held its nose and lost untold billions through MSN'a rough patches (the service is now on a path to sustained annual profitability). And it also seems to me that this trend has something to do with Longhorn's delays and missteps: how do you build a new operating system when its interface will live on the web, instead of on the desktop? I'm looking forward to learning more.

As I watch the internet business really gain traction, I am reminded of a key player which, to my mind, remains unacceptably hobbled. Yup, it's my AOL hobbyhorse, and I'm in a mood to saddle up. Maybe it was the MSN trip, I dunno. But I've written this before, and I will say it again. The people running Time Warner, who lost their company to AOL in 2001, then won it back in bitter street fighting during 2002, need to stop punishing AOL for the damage the deal did to their net worth (don't think business is personal? Talk to Time Warner folks. Trust me, it's personal. And it ain't just the execs. It's the whole Time Warner establishment...). My prescription? Cut AOL loose to be the mammoth success it could be, if only its management didn't have to cowtow to Time Warner's rear view mirror approach to the world. I mean, could you imagine Google, Yahoo, or even IAC run by Dick Parsons?

Here's the lead to a recent Washington Post piece on AOL:

When AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller strides into the 10th floor boardroom at the Time Warner Center in New York tomorrow, he will face a difficult challenge: persuading board members that America Online can return to growth, even as its core dial-up subscription business continues to rapidly shrink.

Why on earth would someone who has 25 million paying users and a top five web property have to convince anyone that he has a growth story? I mean, really, think about that. Ads alone, he's in the pink....unless, of course, his strategic goal is to assuage the Time Warner execs whose egos were bruised when they sold their own company short to Steve Case four years ago. Let's get real here. And get over it.

This is a company with the largest installed paying base of internet users in the world! Hello? Time Warner execs, get over the fact that you sold yourselves short in the AOL deal, and let this company do what it must. And what must it do? Well, frankly, it must become a software-based information services company, as Google, MSN, and Yahoo already are. It needs its own R&D labs, its own world class engineers and product managers. It needs to stop forcing good people to work in New York and Dulles. In other words, it needs to be the kind of company Time Warner has no idea how to run or manage. My opinion? The AOL deal was smart, but you lost faith almost immediately. You decided the internet economy was just so much hooey, then you damaged both the AOL and the TW brands as you backpedaled and blamed those sneaky new economy folks at AOL for selling you a false promise. Well, it's 2004 now. As they say here in California, let it go. Go buy more cable networks, lick your wounds, and prepare for the next time you do something massively dumb. Or, alternatively, get behind AOL in a major public way, and play the game along with Barry Diller, Terry Semel, the Google Guys, and Bill Gates. Because trust me, these are the folks who will own the equivalent of network television for the next decade.

But, I don't think you buy that idea - you bought it once, and it didn't pan out. So you want to get the most out of AOL? Clean it up and spin it out. Enough said. Move on, Time Warner. The AOL mess is no longer Case or Pittman's problem. It's yours. And if you don't want to run this company, let someone else do it.

Well, OK, if you're Matt Wells, you can do it yourself. Gigablast is amazing, in that it really is just Matt. Here's an interview that I read on the plane on the way to MSFT yesterday. Talk about dissonance. Matt Wells, one guy in New Mexico. MSFT, well, MSFT. My report on MSFT by the way is held up a bit as I clear some PR issues as to what I can and cannot report right now....stay tuned.

The recent announcement of Mozdex, which is leveraging the Nutch open source engine, reminded me to ping Doug Cutting and see how things were going with the Nutch project. He replied that while Mozdez only crawls a few million pages, it's a start, and he was pleased to see folks starting to use Nutch. He also pointed to ObjectsSearch, another site which uses Nutch.

But Doug said that his focus these days with Nutch is not to try to get a major, open source alternative to Google or Yahoo out there, though that remains a long term goal. Instead, he reports:

I'm opting for organic growth: get some users and developers
will follow.

Combined, these efforts should continue to push Nutch's scalablility at
the same time as build an installed base, all without having to first
find a sugar daddy.

Salesforce seems to be finally going ahead, an amended filing is here. They apparently had to deal with a bunch of SEC stuff, but it's on again. Lead banker: Morgan. Revs in 2003: Close to $100 million. Profits around $3.5mm.

And Navteq filed while I was at MSFT, the docs are here. Navteq, you say? Who the f*** are they? Well, the provide the mapping info for Yahoo, auto nav systems, et al. The CDDB of maps! OK, revs in 2003...ready? $237 million. HOLY SHITE! But wait, they have operating income of nearly $65 million. And some odd tax stuff (any CPAs out there?) which put their net income at ... $235 millon! Oh my goodness....Bankers Credit Suisse and Merrill.

Lindows. Go, Linux, Go.

PS - Astute readers point out, Lindows is a WRHambrecht deal...Open IPO...Way to go, Hambrecht!

Going to MSFT today (well, early on the 20th) to meet with David Cole, who runs .net and MSN, and Yusuf Mehdi, who runs search and most of MSN for David. Should be darn interesting. Scoble, you around? If so, email me jbat at batellemedia.com.

Anyone care to suggest questions for these two gentlemen? Post away on comments or email me....thanks!

Well, if you had bought Ask Jeeves in early March, and sold it today, you'd be twice as rich as when you started. It helped that Piper upgraded its stock today in advance of earnings...the stock has gone from 20 to 40 in less than 60 days. Sign of the times.

Then start here, with the paper describing it. And here, with a blog entry that describes the virtues of having a product platform.

Excerpt:

We have designed and implemented the Google File Sys-
tem, a scalable distributed file system for large distributed
data-intensive applications. It provides fault tolerance while
running on inexpensive commodity hardware, and it delivers
high aggregate performance to a large number of clients.
While sharing many of the same goals as previous dis-
tributed file systems, our design has been driven by obser-
vations of our application workloads and technological envi-
ronment, both current and anticipated, that reflect a marked
departure from some earlier file system assumptions. This
has led us to reexamine traditional choices and explore rad-
ically different design points.
The file system has successfully met our storage needs.
It is widely deployed within Google as the storage platform
for the generation and processing of data used by our ser-
vice as well as research and development efforts that require
large data sets.

(Thanks Ross!)

Blue Nile. Bankers Merrill, Weisel, Bear Sterns. 2003: $128 million revenues, $11.3 million profits (not including an odd $15 million tax credit, which takes profit to $27 million). They sell jewelry online.

Prospectus here and here.

Today I finally got to talk with Mike Giles, the fellow behind Furl. He's based near Amherst, Mass, but used to work out in California, most recently at Vitria, a businessprocessenterpriseapplicationsoftware (ie, BigBoringButImportant) company. He started there when it had 20 employees, rode it out as it went to 1200 and went public, then bailed (it's now at about 300 or so). Before Vitria he founded a startup, then, closed it. In other words, he's one of us - he's been through the roller coaster, and he's wiser for it.

Something tells me he's pretty happy in his current gig. He's the only full time employee, but works with a small cadre of contractors and friends. He's got between 5-10K users since announcing the beta in January.

Mike started Furl about a year ago to solve a problem he - and a lot of us - had with bookmarks. Namely, bookmarking is a lame, half-assed, unsearchable, flat, linkrotten approach to recalling that which you've seen and care to recall on the web. Now, a lot of folks have made stabs at solving this particular problem, but Mike's got a lot of very cool features built into his beta, and more on the way.

And from my conversation with him, he's got one more thing that others might be missing: a clear sense of what Furl could do if it were part of a massively scaled platform like AOL, Yahoo, Google, or MSN. If I'm reading him right, he's smart enough to realize that what he's built will probably be a feature set on everyone of those platforms before the end of 2005, and he's also smart enough to know that by launching Furl, he's forced all of them to consider him as the person to watch in the space.

So what is it about Furl that made me write that past paragraph? After all, it's just a web page-saving application. Right? Well, yes and no. Furl does a good job of helping you manage your web browsing. It adds several features that others don' t have - full text search on your saved pages, for example. But Furl saves the entire web page you've "furled", not just the URL, which prevents link rot, on the one hand, and creates what I'll call a "PersonalWeb," on the other.

Now, having your own PersonalWeb is a very cool thing. Every page you care about is now saved forever, and is searchable. How I wish I had Furl while I was researching my book for the past year. This application was inconceivable before the cost of storage and bandwidth began to fall toward zero.

But wait...there's more. You can share your PersonalWeb with others. And Mike just added a recommendation engine, so you can see links the service thinks will be interesting to you, based on what you've already Furl'd. Now, let's play this out. Imagine Furl on, oh, Yahoo, for example. Or Google. You now have a massively scaled application where millions of people are creating their own personal versions of the web, and then sharing them with each other, driving massively statistically significant recommendations, and...some pretty damn useful metadata that can be fed into search engine algorithms, resulting in...yup, far better search (and...far better SFO (Search Find Obtain) opportunities).

Speaking of SFO, imagine the business model. (Mike has, trust me.) If you have a system that has stored millions of people's PersonalWebs, webs they have literally voted for by *taking action* and *saving* or even *annotating*, then it's not such a trick to apply some contextual advertising mojo to the whole lot. After all, Web 2.0 is built on the premise that taking action - voting, in effect - can create scaled value (the best known expression of a scaled "voting system" is Page Rank- a link is a vote.) With Furl, saving a page is a vote. Apply a bit of Gmail-like ad play to the PersonalWeb, add in a bit of A9 SFO juju, and presto, it's Really Contextual Advertising and a Really Useful Shopping Service to boot. BTW, Amazon groks this, of course, it's why the A9 Toolbar has so many Furl-like features in it. (I'm not claiming Udi and his team stole from Furl, the ideas are out there for anyone to leverage.)

I have to run to a meeting, or I'd rhapsodize a bit more (personal Database of Intentions, anyone?). Suffice to say, there are probably scores of biz dev folk banging away on Furl build/buy spreadsheets in Seattle, Palo Alto, and Dulles. Bravo Mike. Keep up the good work.

...at either home or work. This is important. Pew study here. (hat tip to Gary).

A sort of consumerized version of MS Research, MSN Sandbox is where they roll out social software and search-related betas for test runs.

(thanks Tara)

AOL might have some play left after all. According to this Infoworld piece (hey, didn't there used to be a NetscapeWorld?), AOL is planning to release a new version of the browser, based on Mozilla, and, to quote the piece:

In addition to a browser suite update, AOL has quietly started beta testing a new product called the Netscape Desktop Navigator that offers access to localized Web content -- based on the user's zip code -- through a round user interface that resembles a coaster. The beta version of the Netscape Desktop Navigator is available for download at: http://navigator-stage.netscape.com/.

The content in question will be from AOL and partners. Mozilla is pretty good stuff, especially the browser. I wonder....will this be the start of AOL having a true play in the browsing/search/local ad space?

Last year Barron's reported that it appeared that Google would have to file statements with the SEC by April 30th of this year, because it had more than 500 shareholders. SEC rules require that private companies with 500 or more shareholders (including option holders) have to file within 120 days of the year after the 500 mark is reached. The deadline is approaching, and the curtain raising has begun. The Merc has the first one I've seen.

Google may not want to undergo the cultural shift that takes place in companies when they have to meet analyst and shareholder expectations every quarter. Google may turn out to be the rare company that willingly files public financial reports but doesn't publicly trade its stock.

Another option is for Google to dodge the public reporting requirement. In 2001, the SEC detailed how companies can do so: by disclosing their financial information only to shareholders

If Google chooses this latter option, it will be interesting to see how long it takes for an employee to leak his or her statements. I'd wager about a day.

Amen to this, brother.

Getting caught up, in case you missed it:

MSN Newsbot has new personalization features, including search history (hmmm!). (CNET) (Gary has details...)

Lycos' HotBot has a new toolbar that incorporates desktop search. Cool! But...will it gain traction? (SEW)

University researchers are hacking up 3-D image search. (CBS)

Tim Berners Lee gets a cool million .... (Guardian)

Mediapost reports fresh search engine loyalty numbers, concluding that "Google gets the gold again" - 65 percent of Google users use only Google, as opposed to just 55 percent of Yahoo users. I'm not sure I buy the whole search engine loyalty thing. I think folks aren't loyal, they're lazy. As Yoda might say, not until a compelling choice they have, switch will they.

Which brings me to A9. Over at his blog, Rex points out I missed the most compelling potential A9 feature, that of collaborative filtering.

To me, A9 is not designed as an Internet search engine, but as a knowledge-searching tool to end all knowledge searching tools.....As you look for information, Amazon will provide you the results that "people like you" have found most helpful when searching for the same information, product, place, answer, etc

He's right, of course, and I should have made a bigger point of this, but I sort of presumed that was the sex in A9 to begin with - it's Amazon, after all. A knowledge-searching tool is exactly what a search engine should evolve towards. But I disagree with this:

I don't think Amazon wants to compete with Google. Google admitted recently that it was a content business. Amazon has no such designs. Amazon, rather, wants to connect you with something you can purchase.

While I agree that Amazon wants to connect you to a purchase, I disagree with the implication that Google does not. The advertising business = the marketing business. and the marketing business = the ecommerce business. This loop, somewhat blurry in the physical world, is nearly seamless online. As I said in my posts, it's two ends (search, commerce) to the middle here. That's what makes it so interesting. And I am pretty sure that Google spiffed Froogle up and put it on the home page last month for a reason...and that the announcement of GMail, which will offer a compelling user lock-in, was not a coincidence. Rex points out, and I second wholeheartedly:

If A9 incorporates the collaborative filtering algorithms that power Amazon's predictive recommendations to customers, it will (and I know this from very, very expensive first-hand experience) produce search results that will astound the user. Just think about it: Your search results will be filtered first by Google algorithms and then through Amazon's collaborative filtering algorithms. In the simplistic metaphor we used at smallbusiness.com, "Your search results will be based on those results found most helpful by people like you. It will be cool. Promise."

Damn straight. That sounds like one hell of a search engine, and if I were Google, I'd be most attentive.

It's been a while since I've beaten one of my favorite dead horses, network television advertising. But this ClickZ story (thanks Pam) had the grist for my mill: I've been wondering what the stats look like for the Seinfeld/Superman film, I figured if they were low, we'd hear very little about it (no reason to trumpet it), but if they're high...

According to the story, which quotes Comscore data, the site is drawing upwards of 30,000 visits a day, which is about what a major blog pulls in. The traffic trend is building, the story notes, and Amex claims it's had more than a million viewers so far.

These are not huge numbers, by any measure. In fact, I expected them to be far higher. Amex is hyping the site in any number of ways using more traditional marketing. What I wonder is what the numbers are that makes this a success. If traffic keeps building, and as they release the next installment it will, the site will certainly cross 2, 3, and probably 5 million viewers. WIll it be a success then? From a traditional ad buy perspective, most likely the answer is yes. You have 5 million viewers who all *opted into* watching your message. You'd need to buy Superbowl ads to get such a devoted audience. Your message is five minutes long (ten times longer than the 30-second spot) - buying that kind of time on network TV is prohibitive. The branding experience is far better. Etc. etc.

But what I really like about this play is how it points the rest of the moribund mass marketers to the next frontier of advertising. "Hey guys!," Amex is saying, "come on in! The water's fine...."

Try searching for "what is my destiny"...this is a nod to the Onion spoof, posted here...

The Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, where I have taught for the past few years, is sponsoring a conference April 30 and May 1 on "China’s Digital Future: Advancing The Understanding of China’s Information Revolution." More information on the conference is in the extended entry below, but I wanted to let this audience know about it, as I helped the school create China Digital News, a blog covering these issues, and will be moderating a panel. Admission is free.

Continue reading "China Internet Conference At Berkeley" »

Obscured a bit in the A9 vortex is this announcement that Google is providing a much more granular tool for local advertisers interested in limiting their AdWord buys to specific locales or cities. I find this interesting as it points to Google's willingness to be responsive not only to users, but to advertisers as well. Of course, offering users more relevant, localized ads can also be considered a service.... MediaPost, CNET, and the NYT report. I'm quoted in the NYT piece, seemingly beating on Google, but it's not quite in context - I was saying that Google Local (not the local ad product) is still beta, and that Yahoo has been more aggressive in commercial search than Google to date.

Apparently Google's move to aid local advertisers will really help merchants in Europe, who previously could only target at the country level. Now they can literally target by distance - say within 20 miles of a place of business. This kind of lat/longitude-driven metadata will open up a $12 billion local advertising market (US alone). And it soon will be integrated into the aforementioned Google Local, which was rolled out (as a beta) last month.

Alibris. Here are their S1 and other SEC docs. Alibris is a sort of high-end Amazon with the spin of hard-to-find and used titles....they filed their original registration statement more than a month ago...it's an WRHambrecht Open IPO deal....

No need to repost it here, as my interview with Udi is up on Business2.com without subscription walls (thanks 2.0!). Includes an intro which gives an overview of the service and the implications. Good for those of you who don't want to wade through my last two posts on the subject...and gives a bit of insight into how Udi's mind works.

UPDATE: The link apparently is now behind reg, so the column is posted in extended entry. (6/21/04)

Continue reading "Interview with A9's Manber up on B2.0" »

A few weeks ago I spent the morning with Gary Flake, who heads up Yahoo's R&D efforts (Yahoo Labs). He's got some pretty cool stuff in the works over there, though most of it is still in the "I could tell you but then my publisher would kill me" category. One thing he did say which stuck with me had to do with search interface issues - how to solve that intractable problem of figuring out what the user wants, without forcing that user to jump through UI hoops all day. "We just need one more datapoint," Flake said, referring to the original query as the first datapoint. "Just one more interface element to make search better." The problem, of course, is depending on a million factors, that second input might be any number of things, from a "Did you mean...?" clustering question to flicking on a personalization tool that filters results through your zip code, Amazon purchase patterns, search history, social network...etc.

Anyway, this all came up when I saw this eMarketer report today, proving at least the trends are heading - a bit - toward complication. It shows, as has been the case for the past year or so, that searches are getting more complicated - the percentage of searches that have just one word in them is declining, and the percentage of multi-word searches is ever-so-slowly increasing. The graf at the bottom of this post is last year, at the top, this year.

The blogosphere continues to chew away on A9, and I think it will take some time for the new service to fully reveal its more interesting features. Gary, for example, gives it a less-than-rave response here, and summarizes many of its features in the process.

I wrote about the implications of A9 w/r/t business models in my last post, but I wanted to say a short bit about why I'm so interested in its approach.

To me, the core feature that makes A9 interesting is what Udi Manber calls a "history server" - the technologies behind A9's search history and personalization features. Having your entire search and click history, and if you use the Toolbar, your entire browsing history as well, available on a server side application opens up all sorts of new approaches to solving search, research, and recall problems. Combining that history with what Amazon already knows about you (no, A9 does not do that...yet) creates even more powerful possibilities. Yes, it brings up massive privacy issues, but then, we've seen this movie a few times. Those who don't want to watch can opt out.

(As an aside, I have to say the idea of a complete, lifetime record of a person's searches and browsing history - which by the way that person can edit - is an extraordinary concept. It's taking the idea of the database of intentions to the utmost granular level of history - the individual. What, I wonder, happens to a person's search history when they die? Do they have a right to own it? Does it get passed down as a keepsake to his or her children?)

What gets me thinking is that for those who commit to A9 as a search solution, new and continuous improvements in search are likely to be hacked up, based on the fact that the personalized history can be analyzed and leveraged. For example, Gary and others have noted that the service does not allow you to keyword search within your searches, and display, for example, just those pages you've browsed in the past. I'd wager Giants tickets that will be in the feature set by the end of the year.

A minor example of the power of the history server: when you repeat a search, A9 will show you what links have changed and what links you've clicked on before. This might seem like a minor deal, but it's a pretty effortless feature for A9 to serve up. Imagine what else might be done with the history server. If you can imagine it, you can probably do it - again, I'll wager that Amazon will figure out a way to make the A9 interface API friendly, so that its platform developers can cook up even greater feats.

On the interface side, I am a fan of the collapsable columns for search history, web results, and books (which you can imagine will be all things sold on Amazon and its affiliates before too long). But I do agree that the color scheme is a bit...dull. It lulls me toward sleep. Or maybe that's just my lack of sleep talking.

Manber is quite insistent that A9 is a very early piece of work, the result of 30 folks banging away for 90 days, but that it's quite robust, and will evolve very quickly in the next year. From what I've heard about him from others in the field, and what I can see so far, I am sure it will worth watching very closely.

A9, Amazon's much discussed skunk works search project goes live today, so I can finally write about it. I saw it last month (caveat: unbeknownst to me until recently, Amazon targeted me as their conduit to break this news - I think they wanted it to move from the blogosphere out, as opposed the WSJ in) and had to keep the damn thing to myself, it was hard, and here's why: On first blush it's a very, very good service, and an intriguing move by Amazon. It raises a clear question: How will Google - and more broadly, the entire search-driven world - react?

My gut tells me the public face will be one of partnership: After all, A9 uses Google' search results and displays at least two paid AdWord listings per result (I've requested comment from Google, you can imagine I'm not the only one...). But I have to wonder: What business is Google in, after all? Is it still in the business of just search - as it was back when it was cutting search provisioning deals right and left, with Yahoo (already ended), AOL (arguable imperiled due to Gmail and other trends), Ask, and Amazon? Is it really still in the business of being an OEM to others, a strategy which allowed it to steal those portals' customers? Or...has it evolved, to a business where it owns a large customer base, one it must now position itself to defend?

It seems to me, Google's position in Amazon's A9 implementation is at best a step backwards. If A9 is as good as it seems to be, every customer that uses and/or switches to A9 becomes an A9 search customer, and, more likely than not, a deeper and far more loyal Amazon customer. (The service incorporates a personal search history and many other really neat tweaks, including a wicked good Toolbar.) In essence, Amazon seems to be making a play for Google's customers. Or it seems that way to me, anyway. Sure, Amazon isn't in the AdWords business. It's happy to outsource that to Google and focus on the entire US retail GDP instead...

Udi Manber, the head of A9 and one of the leading lights of the search community, is understandably evasive when asked about this subject. Google and Amazon have always been friends and partners (despite the fact that "Work at Google" is the top paid link when you search on his name on Google). But as I point out in the introduction to my Business 2.0 interview, to be posted any moment now, one-time partners can quickly become serious competitors in the Search Find Obtain market. And judging from the look of it, A9 is a very direct statement from Amazon: We are now officially in the search business, so get used to it.

One could argue that A9 is a pure commerce play, not a search portal. After all, that's what the folks at Amazon insisted when they founded the company and located it in the heart of Google/YahooLand (ie, Palo Alto). But that argument is disingenuous. First off, take a look at the A9 interface. Where's the commerce? (Answer, it's there, but it's hidden, more on that later when I post on the service itself). And second, I'd argue that you can't really be in the commerce business without having at least a strategy for owning search. The reverse also holds true. It's two ends toward the middle, and by the way, that middle ground is getting damn crowded - AOL, Yahoo, MSN, eBay, IAC, Amazon, Google...

Of course anyone who’s been in this game for a while will tell you that the internet industry is rife with cat and mouse games of cooperation turned to competition. Netscape’s outsourced its early search traffic to Yahoo, thereby ensuring Yahoo’s success. Yahoo paid the favor forward by outsourcing its search to Google, a practice it ended only last quarter. Microsoft built Overture, and crushed Looksmart. And AOL’s advertising business is on the rise again, due in large part to a deal with Google, which just announced a stunning new email service that pretty much decapitates one of AOL’s core differentiators (oh, Yahoo and MSN as well...).

What makes this particularly noteworthy is that A9 is built quite literally on top of Google. In short, Amazon has taken the best of Google, and made it, to my mind, a lot better. Sound familiar? Yup, it's what Google did to Yahoo, Yahoo to Netscape...you get the picture.

It all reminds me of a quote in a recent AP story from Google employee #1:

(The ongoing threat of competition) has helped keep Google from becoming complacent, said Craig Silverstein, the company's director of technology. "If someone should come along and do a better job than us, we know people will switch in a heartbeat."

Something tells me the hearts are beating a bit faster at Yahoo and Google HQs today. Will Google renew its deal with Amazon? Will Bezos and Schmidt put a good face on it and call this a partnership? I have no idea, but man, things are certainly getting interesting in this neck of the woods. More after I talk with folks and get a second order view of the landscape.

(I'll also have a much more complete posting on A9, including a tour of its features and a discussion of its strategic implications later tonight.)

PS- for a tour of what's cool in A9: Click here.

Spam. F*cking spam. Last night I got hit with about 150 or so comment spams from "http://www.emmss.com", some Chinese site I can't even read. I'm on it, but I don't have the time to hand-delete all these spams, and my mail is down to boot, meaning my Blacklist ain't functional. Even if it were, that's hundreds of clicks. Anyone know a way to batch delete comments in the MT backend?

One of my largest gripes about the web is that it has no memory. But I think this will soon change - at some point in the not too distant future we'll have live and continuous historical copies of the web that will be searchable - creating, if you will, a time axis for the web, a real-time Wayback Machine (only there'll be no broken links). In other words, in our lifetimes we'll see our cultural digital memory - as we understand it through the web and engines like Google - become contiguous, available, always there. And barring a revival of the Luddites or total nuclear war, this chain will most likely be unbroken, forever, into the future. Historians looking back to this era will mark it as a watershed. At some definable point in the early 21st century, the web will gain a memory of itself, one that will never be lost again. Most likely, this will start as a feature of a massively scaled company like Yahoo or Google, much like Gmail or search itself is now. But it's coming, and the implications are rather expansive.

If the web had a time axis, you could search constrained by webdate. You could ask questions like "show me all results for my query from this time period..." or "Tell me what was the most popular results for XYZ during the 3rd of May in 20XX." How about "show me every reference to my great grandfather, born in 2050," asked by a great grandson in 2150? Impossible? Yeah, seems that way, but...so did a free gig of mail and the concept of the entire Internet in RAM. Thanks to the dramatic decrease in the cost of storage, 64-bit computing, abundant memory (jesus, there's an entendre), and the scalable business model of paid search, I think this day is not far off. The web is just ten years old, for the most part, but think what it might be like when it's 100 years old. That's a lot of data to search.

I was reminded of this idea (I had written it down a while back while musing for the book) when Gary sent word that Daypop is archiving its Top 40 back to 2002. It's fascinating to see what was the buzz, say, two years ago today.

Hard to keep up with all the Gmail news, CNet rounds it up here. Upshot: CA legislator is threatening to introduce legislation outlawing the product, Google announced it was in a 3-6 month test phase and might make changes to the product based on response (opening the door to possible changes to protect or enhance or at least address privacy issues).

NYT today has an overview of the ongoing JewWatch.com case. The case reveals the bind Google faces when asked to remove offensive search results, in this case, the first result for the word "Jew" is an anti-semitic site. I am sure that does not leave many "feeling lucky."

The company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., said it had no plans to remove the site from the search results list because it trusts its automated program to rank Web sites accurately. The search engine has been listing "Jewwatch.com" as the first-ranked site for three years.

"We find this result offensive, but the objectivity of our ranking function prevents us from making any changes," said David Krane, a spokesman for Google, adding that an exception is made only in cases where a site is illegal. Mr. Krane said the company has, for example, removed sites from its rankings that promote pedophilia, which is illegal.

The issue here, it seems to me, is the fact that Google is taken as the first and last word on what our culture believes to be important w/r/t any given term. That jewwatch.org is the first result for "jew" seems counterintuitive to nearly everyone, and clearly offensive. But somehow it has gained the highest ranking - it is a directory, with hundreds of links. Perhaps that is one reason why...and this controversy is only giving it more links...an interesting phenomenon. (I've not linked to it in this post for this reason).

Links into Jewwatch.com, according to Google.

According to Technorati.

Apparently, some folks are organizing a counter Google bomb, by linking to the wikipedia entry, which currently ranks at #2. There you go, I just added my pagerank to the cause...

Update: Google has posted an explanation of why this occurs here...that they responded so quickly is cool, I think.

They must know something, because late last week they notified their advertisers that it was open season on trademark keyword buys (CNET story here). Yes, this is the long simmering issue that is still in the courts - trademark owners don't want third parties bidding on their trademarked terms (the most well-known case is Playboy).

In any case, this is a bold move, akin to "waving a red flag at the bull" as one source told CNET. But is it? At the end of the day, the law favors clarity and consistency, if it can. Seems to me this move forces clarity: It's all or nothing. Google is, by its action, declaring what it thinks is the appropriate approach - let the market decide. LImiting *some* keywords forces the courts into a never ending cycle of litigation around where the boundaries w/r/t fair trademark use are.In the current political climate, such an approach will probably prove futile in the long run. Google is playing this move against what they believe is the end game, and they may not be far off in their estimation of the courts.

Mozdex launched recently, it's an open source search engine that uses DMOZ as its seed corn.

Cool: Every result has an "explain" button that shows the ranking code. Now that's interesting.

It's a tad slow, and new so it's incomplete, but I hope takes off...and I hope Nutch will as well. (My 2.0 column on Nutch here...)

UPDATE: Gary, ever alert, notices this:

A quick check shows that the owner of GetHitsfromUS.com owns the
Mozdex.com domain.
http://www.whois.sc/mozdex.com

This may be a pure ad play, in other words. More when I know for sure.

A great Cramerian rant on why the Google IPO could be a "train wreck."

Excerpts:

And Google could be worth every penny, at least the pennies that the investment bankers are pitching it for, although it may not be worth what it ultimately ends up trading for. That’s because the disparity between where the bankers price the IPO and where it opens could be the largest gulf in the history of IPOs, in part because neither the government nor the industry has done a thing to fix a system that broke down and descended into corruption and stupidity during the dot-com heyday. Put simply, Google could end up being the biggest IPO, and the biggest IPO train wreck, in history....

Google, the company, may be the real deal, but Google the stock may just show us a return to the bubble days that we all thought had mercifully been put behind us. Or, to put it another way, Google, now synonymous with “to search,” could, the moment it opens for trading, become synonymous with “to fleece.”

Newsearch engine Findory is profiled in this Seattle Times article. Like Topix, this engine creates personalized news pages based on your interests. Findory watches what your read and presents related stories. The founder, Greg Linden, cut his teeth in Amazon's personalization foundry...

Many have pointed me to this NPR series on search...I was interviewed for it but have no idea if my ramblings made the cut...

This BusinessWeek article, which I missed but an alert reader pointed me to, takes the thesis that MSFT is facing middle age with uncertainty.

The piece runs down the threats: Linux, slow growth, bloated core product that hasn't had an update in years, anti-trust suits....then runs down how they are reacting.

So check this out: They keep a list.

While Ballmer drives day-to-day operations, the 48-year-old founder is taking personal control of the technology charge. He has put together what is now called "The List" around Microsoft's Redmond (Wash.) campus. It's a priority ranking of 50 or so initiatives that cut across product lines and are critical to making the next generation of products successful -- everything from security software and the user interface to Web search and telephony. The List is so important that each item has been assigned to one top executive, who is responsible for driving it throughout the company. "We're using a lot of IQ to go after these things," says Gates.

Sound familiar? Yup, that's how Google has been doing it for years.

Also interesting, BizWeek seems to have a scoop on what's going on with Longhorn and the integrated search/file system:

The most important change (to Longhorn) is to the file system -- the way information is stored on the PC. Microsoft is creating a new design not just for Windows but for all of its products that makes it easier to retrieve photos, documents, songs, and e-mail. That's important as users stash more and more files on their computers. If Microsoft gets it right, it will be simple, for example, for users to zip through thousands of pictures and sort them by date or by the people in them.

But Longhorn won't do everything Gates first envisioned. BusinessWeek has obtained copies of two internal e-mails showing that Microsoft is cutting some of the most ambitious technologies to get the product out the door. For example, Longhorn will now ship with a scaled-back version of the file system. The current plan, in practical terms, means people will be able to search their PCs for documents and information related to each other, but they won't be able to reach into corporate servers for similar files.

I wonder, does this mean web-wide search integrated into Longhorn will be delayed?

And on the mid life crisis meme - Google may not be worried, but beware a company in midlife crisis - it might just try to buy the equivalent of a $100,000 sports car. And MSFT can afford some very nice cars....

(Thanks, Rohit)

Greenfield Online. They filed before, have filed again. They do online surveys.

Our culture often counters success with the rebuke of pridefulness, the font of tragedy. News.com reports from a Stanford MBA panel, where a Google exec (Salar Kamangar) gave the reporter, search beat veteran Stefanie Olsen, the sense that he was "downplaying the looming threat of search competition from Microsoft, saying his company doesn't expect to see a credible product from the software giant for years."

I dunno if this was a misinterpretation, but...this reminds me of what Marc Andreesseen said lo so many years ago (the famous quote where Windows was dismissed as buggy device drivers...). Also, new Google recruit Anna Patterson dismissed MSFT's search in this story a month ago. A trend? Probably not. But it's not beyond many to call it so.

Lawyers lick their chops at the chance to prosecute a mesothelioma case. That's why the rare form of cancer caused by asbestos is a high-value keyword. Apparently the term has hit $100 a click, according to this UPI report.

I've decided to add a new category to Searchblog, and with it a new facet of coverage, which I'm calling The Web As Platform. For reasons I hope to make clear over time, I think search represents critical binding for this particular erector set. This meme has been around for a very long time, in various flavors, but any number of circumstances are gathering which have given it significant traction and I find it important and fascinating. I've been doing a fair amount of work in this space, work I'll be announcing later in the year, but for now, I hope you agree this is a space worth watching.

Back in 1998, February to be exact, I shared a stage at the TED conference with Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLab. Richard Saul Wurman, TED's founder and impressario, introduced us both. I went first. I gave a short overview of my new magazine to a polite and curious reception. Gross then got up and in ritalin-starved fashion began a manic pitch. Imagine, he told the incredulous audience of tech and entertainment influencers, an entirely new search engine model, one driven not by editorial results, but by the raw metrics of the market itself - a pay-for-placement search engine, where the highest bidder wins top spot.

Afterwards a number of folks gathered around to congratulate me, and at the same time to ridicule Gross's vision. After all, I was starting a magazine predicated on principles pretty much diametrically opposed to Gross: objective and high-integrity journalism. Pay for placement? Bah! It will never work. Keep up the good work, Battelle.

Well, what Gross presented six years ago was GoTo, nee Overture, nee AdWords. What I was pitching was The Standard. Enough said.

This was on my mind earlier this week as I chatted with Doug Stevenson, CEO of Vibrant Media, the company behind IntelliTXT. This is the service that has been much maligned by journalists for its inline advertising solution, ads which pop up from inside editorial content when you click on a word or phrase which is double underlined in green. (An example of the ads in action is here (doesn't work on OSX).)

While the knee-jerk reaction of the press to this invasion of their hallowed editorial space is understandable, it's hardly nuanced. And some nuance is required to grok this particular beast.

That the IntelliTXT approach violates one of journalism's most sacred conventions cannot be denied. The ASME guidelines covering new media, in which I played a minor role as an ASME judge, do not specifically prohibit an IntelliTXT scenario. But that very fact belies how deep the nerve IntelliTXT has touched truly is: No one ever imagined that advertisers and publishers would have the temerity to turn a journalist's very words into an advertising opportunity. The section covering this territory reads as follows:

Hypertext links that appear within the editorial content of a site, including those within graphics, should be at the discretion of the editors. If links are paid for by advertisers, that should be disclosed to users.

It's almost as if we knew that IntelliTXT was coming, but in fact, we did not. What we meant by "hypertext links" were the ad units already extant at the time - in particular, paid text links at the bottom of the page or to the right, which were proliferating when these guidelines were created (circa 2001). We presumed they'd be discrete, we did not imagine they'd be the actual content itself.

The guidelines also state:

All online pages should clearly distinguish between editorial and advertising or sponsored content. If any content comes from a source other than the editors, it should be clearly labeled.

A case could be made that the green double-underline format is sufficiently distinguishing, and one could argue back that the opposite is also true. I'd like to move past that. If this approach can in fact make money for publishers, some version of it will be adopted. So now what?

Stevenson, the Vibrant CEO, was quite flummoxed by the negative press IntelliTXT has garnered. He said that Vibrant has been around quite a long time, had built a strong online advertising business with tens of millions in revenues, and was very deliberate in its approach to rolling out IntelliTXT - he had solicited the input of publishers and journalists, and built the product in a way that he thought was both appropriate and cutting edge. He argued that the system was created to be unobtrusive - the only way the ads show is if the user actively rolls the cursor over the keyword, then clicks. In a sense, he argues, he's giving control back to the user, they can ignore the ad if they'd like; the double green underline is far less intrusive than pop ups, and far more relevant than contextual paid links. If you're reading a travel story on Paris, for example, and the words "Paris hotel" are underlined, you just might choose to click on that link, and be offered an advertisement for a Paris hotel booking service. (Note I did not choose the Paris Hilton....) If you do choose that link, the ad is a service, not an intrusion, Stevenson points out.

Stevenson's other point is even more direct: It's the publishers who decide which keywords are linked to, and when. The entire system is controlled by the publishers, so if anyone should take the heat, it's the publishers, and not the IntelliTXT system. While this argument ranks up there with insoluble polemics such as "Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People," Stevenson does have a point. So why might a publisher want to employ such a system?

I can think of many reasons. One, the publisher has no ostensible editorial boundaries. Cargo - one of a raft of new magazines that are essentially cataglog magazines ("magalogs"), or most of the Seven Sisters (Glamour, Vogue, etc) come to mind. These magazines pretty much exist to move product, and they don't pretend otherwise. A system like this would work quite well for the online kin to these kind of publications.

Second, there are an entire classes of content-driven sites which claim absolutely no pretense of editorial objectivity. Whether they are fan sites, directories, blogs, corporate advertorials, for-profit domain-specific portals, you name it, the tradition of sites which carry their biases proudly or are baldly commercial in nature is rich and growing, and IntelliTXT may well give these kind of sites a new monetization model.

When it comes to true editorial sites, I think IntelliTXT portends an important opportunity for publishers to control and manage relevance, service, and context for their readers. But I think both readers and journalists are not ready for the context-jarring concept of ads directly in editorial text. It crosses a line that should be respected. But what if it were possible to break out keywords for a given article in a separate box, for example, and run that box at the end or to the side of the article? This addresses the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup problem (your advertising peanut butter is in my editorial chocolate....) but retains the power and reader service of the system. Stevenson replied that in fact such a hack would be possible. Should IntelliTXT prove a viable advertising medium, I'd expect publishers to try this approach almost immediately.

Now, I won't get into other issues this service raises - that editors might start writing to high-value keyphrases, for example - but they exist, as they do for anyone working with AdSense or even standard print advertising, for that matter.

To conclude, I think journalists jumped all over IntelliTXT because it was easy to leap, just like we did with GoTo back in 1998. But we'd be wise to not dismiss so quickly ideas which might portend new approaches to monetizing our work. In this marketplace, a few minor tweaks can yield historic shifts. Witness Overture: Gross and his team ended up adopting an OEM model and outsourcing their pay for placement engine to others, who put the ads on the right of editorial results, clearly marked for readers (well, in most cases). The rest is history.

IntelliTXT backgrounder is here.

A reminder to sign up for Re-Find, the email summary of the week that was on Searchblog, in the upper left hand corner. If you're into that kind of thing, that is.

Perhaps I was being a bit too off the cuff in my last post on Claria. Full disclosure: A good friend went to work for them recently. This person admitted the company's past, but said that in fact it was mending its ways. New management has come in, folks with a good track record at Excite, pre-bust. I'm looking forward to learning more soon. On that note, look for my post on IntelliTXT shortly.

Change your name from Gator, get the books in order, put happy smiling people on your website, and file. OK, Marchex, Advertising.com, BrightMail, Shopping.com, Salesforce, Claria. Do we have a trend yet? Do we have a problem yet?

Bankers: Deutsche Bank Securities, Piper Jaffray, and Thomas Weisel Partners.

The S-1 is here.

Not sure entirely what they're on about in this eMarketer report, as it's an excerpt, but the suggestion is made, after lengthy throat clearing, that Google create its own online currency so as to compete in the SFO (Search Find Obtain) space. The article correctly points out that Google lacks muscle in the Obtain part of the equation, compared to Amazon and EBay. But then it says Google should get its own currency. I don't think so. But, what do you think?

Yahoo announced earnings (PDF) just now, and the numbers were stronger than expected. The company earned $132 million on revenues of $758 million ($550 excluding TAC), up from $55 million on $283 million a year ago. EPS came in at .14, the street was expecting .11. The stock is up more than 10% in after hours trading. If you want to download their presentation on their earnings, click this link. The company posted strong gains across nearly all the core metrics - uniques, active users, cash flow, international revenue ...etc.

To add to the euphoria, Yahoo announced a 2 for 1 stock split, and boosted guidance. The conference call is slated for a half hour from now.

(Thanks for SEC nod, Gary)

In a letter released yesterday twenty eight privacy experts and civil liberty organizations urged Google to suspend Gmail. This is quickly becoming a significant test of not only Google's ability to communicate its intent to the world, but of what it means to live in a web centric world where your data is out there, with all the consequences, good and bad. One company cannot solve this problem.

PS - Gmail also has some trademark issues...

...with this post from Kottke. The concept is further pushed by Danny Sullivan in a post here and in an AP piece in which yours truly is quoted.

Excerpts from Kottke:

They have this huge map of the Web and are aware of how people move around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfect place to store this map (one of the world's largest computers that's all but incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading this map. Google knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop for, they know who wants to advertise and how effective those advertisements are, and they're about to know how we communicate with friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.

Google isn't worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft's search efforts...although the media's focus on that is probably to their advantage. Their real target is Windows. ....

From Danny:
After all, even if you do have a great way to search through desktop-based e-mail, you might like the idea that all your mail is backed up, stored offsite, and easily searchable from anywhere.

As broadband expands, such an idea becomes increasingly more feasible. With it, the notion that Microsoft might trump Google with desktop lock-in becomes less of an issue.

As I've muttered privately more than a few times, and have begun to shout to anyone who will listen now that I'm writing in Word - if Google could do to Word what it intends to do to Entourage, well, that would sell me. F*cking Word.....

A lawsuit at the heart of the trademark/paid search issue will not be tossed out lightly, a judge ruled yesterday. CNET reports.

Funny Onion spoof (is there any other kind?):

"A soul search often required backpacking trips across Europe, disastrous long-term relationships with incompatible lovers, and years of expensive therapy," Semel said. "Worse, the search process often included depression, lowered self-worth, and intense doubt."

"I was skeptical, I'll admit," said former Boston-area investment banker Royce Creighton. "But after two minutes on Yahoo Soul Search, I found that being born into a family of bankers didn't mean I had to be a banker. Half an hour of advanced soul-searching helped me find a buyer for my house, an alpaca farm for sale in Wyoming, and a highly recommended acupuncturist in Cheyenne. I've never been happier... and I found all this inside myself through Yahoo!"

Yesterday's SEW (yes, I'm behind, was on deadline on a story that is so damn good, but...damn, it's under embargo) has a good story comparing Yahoo and Google referrals, using WebSideStory data. This chart shows that Google still has the lion's share, and in fact grew a bit year to year, but that Yahoo has not slipped during the changeover from using Google to using its own search. The chart is for March, 2004.

Computerworld does the honors this time and has some interesting new stuff, including a crawler that is domain (ie, subject) specific. This could help build the Specific Web, which I sort of outlined in this post on GlobalSpec. Thanks to Gary for the tip, and a good summary of the article here.

Interesting and funny. Some tidbits on Google exces "personal question" for password recall purposes.

Tiny Mac-related hosting site is giving away gig of free email. No idea how. Stefanie Olsen reports...

Journalists have a problem with IntelliTXT. Not only is its name rather difficult to spell, its technology takes words within editorial stories and turns them into sponsorship opportunities. This is not going over well with the ink stained classes. I'm talking to the company later this week, stay tuned.

Safa Rashtchy predicts strong earnings this past quarter, starting with with a good quarter from Yahoo this Weds.

Driven by continued strong fundamentals, the first quarter of 2004 will bring mostly upsides to the estimates and only a few in-line performances. In fact, we believe the Q1 earning season will be characterized as a strong quarter with two trends: On the one hand, companies like Ask Jeeves, Netflix, and LookSmart have already pre-announced a much better-than-expected quarter. On another category, companies like eBay and Yahoo will have strong upsides to guidance - much of it already known and reflected in at least some of the Street estimates, including ours. We do believe, however, there will still be upside even to our raised estimates for Yahoo or eBay. The upside to guidance is likely to be the trend even for the smaller companies such as DoubleClick and Cnet - in general, all ad-based models should report a solid upside since the growth trend in advertising noticeably accelerated in Q1. Similarly, search not only stayed strong but showed very solid pricing for a seasonally weak Q1.

New model in an emerging market. Big name investors. Strong management. Product launched today. Big name customer, too (WSJ...) On my To Grok list.

Update: Fred points out that Tacoda was in this space first and, to my mind, sports Big Name Investors as well, namely, Fred and Jerry...

(thanks, Gary)

My friends at boing boing are asking their readers to help them figure a way to pay the bills yet stay true to their roots. They've asked me to help them, and I'd love your input too. Many of Searchblog's readers are well down the path of figuring out how to support blogs with advertising or sponsorship revenue. You can chime in via the comments below, or at bb's comments page, here.

...has filed. That makes yet another net advertising-based filing - Marchex clearly helped. Story here, S-1 here(re req'd). Goldman will lead with Deutsche and Piper holding the wedding train.

Yahoo will launch a new brand marketing campaign this week, according to a lengthy report in Media Daily News. It's the first major effort by the new CMO, Cammie Dunaway. The theme is "Yahoo is the life engine" and it features a number of "minor celebrities" like former CA governor Gray Davis.

Perhaps the most charming of the initial group is a spot featuring former California Gov. Gray Davis paired with a junior high school student who uses Yahoo! mail to convince her schoolmates to elect her as eighth-grade treasurer. With "Hail to the Chief" playing in the background, Davis introduces himself and says he's using Yahoo! to look for an agent, suggesting that if a former actor can be governor, maybe a "former governor can be an actor," although he doesn't think "action/adventure" would be his genre. The spot closes with Yahoo! as a "Job engine, mail engine, life engine." The creative strategy presents the audience with two different demographics, each using Yahoo! to achieve a task or to enrich a passion.

In other news, Yahoo and its Overture subsidiary won some new business last week, including stealing CNN's search biz from Google, and adding a deal with the WSJ and renewing and extending its deal with ESPN. Release in extended entry.

Continue reading "Yahoo: New Brand Image ("Life Engine"), Distribution Wins" »

Yahoo and Google have agreed to stop take online gambling advertising. Lycos already has.

I'm not sure I like this, for the precedent it sets. I don't like the lack of clarity by the companies about why they made this decision, and I don't like the perception that the threat of government action was behind it all. In essence, it feels this was done behind closed doors, without a clear signal as to why the action was taken. Again, I don't like the precedent. First this, then? Don't Be Evil can cut both ways.

Buddy just invited me into this new social networking app: share your music library (info only) and see how FOAF plays with tunes. Plan to sign up and see how it goes.

Some very smart thinking in here about how Google is a massively distributed platform with its own OS, and how that has given Google the competitive edge to roll out cool stuff like Gmail. Very Web 2.0 stuff here - the Platform Web.

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

PS - read the comments in my Gmail post. Seems some Gmail beta testers are hanging out there...

PPS - Gmail is reviewed here by a beta tester...thanks Eric...

Methinks.

The Guardian:

As it is, Google's plans to embrace the public market and all that entails seem to have slipped. Too late for the pre-summer flotation window, there are also no jungle drums beating for an autumn offering. It is as if the search engine's owners have tested market receptivity, found it to be OK in principle but now have to make the hard decisions about the merits of a listing before they even get to the issue of its timing.

Hey Folks -

Reminder, if you want to get a week's worth of Searchblog in your in box each Friday, toss your email into the box at left. Will send the next one - version 1.04, shortly.

Google is blocking a small web developer from scraping Google News, which itself is a scrape of a bunch of other sites. The developer admits his scrape breaks Google's TOS. Rich, how do you feel about this over at Topix? Will you let him scrape you?

Developer's lament here...

(Thanks, Beal.)

AdSense is Google's contextual ad product for publishers - the one folks can sign up for and have up and running on their own site in minutes. Google's advertisers have long complained that AdSense ads are far less valuable to them than AdWords ads (the ones that run on Google's site), as folks who are reading content on any given site have far less intent to buy than folks who are actively searching for something on Google's site. Google steadfastly mixed the two and would not offer variable pricing, until now. But their plan is not to split the purchase, but rather "monitor performance" and offer a better rate if conversions are low. Cnet reports. Overture already offers a split pricing service.

This move is widely seen as "Google giving in to advertiser demands." Interesting. Jarvis sees it another way: He says publishers - in particular bloggers - are getting shafted by an ever more powerful Google. He's hoping to drive interest in alternatives via his session at Bloggercon.

The meme most media outlets have given to their second day coverage of Gmail is that it gives folks "the creeps." In essence, the idea that machines will be reading folks' email freaks a lot of observers out. Privacy advocates are connecting the dots on mailing lists like Farber's IP, and Cnet, the LA Times, and Wired News have written stories turning on this angle.

I think the jury is out on this issue. If people willingly give up their privacy to get a gig of storage and the ability to search their email (email search is one of the biggest search hairballs out there, IMHO), who's to say that's wrong? On the other hand, this does create a lot of potential for trouble, given how much information can now be connected. If you get on the wrong side of the government, for example, and use GMail and Google search (and Orkut...), you had better hope the Patriot Act has been repealed. But this is true if you're using Yahoo, AOL, or MSFT as well. All these companies would have to give up your personal information to a government demand. It's just that with Google, the power of that information working together is so obvious, and is, in a way, made available to you via a business model which - thanks to contextual advertising - makes it economical for you to have a gig of storage and a whole new interface to mail (search). Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. But I do think it'd be very wise for Google to lay out a white paper explaining all of this in intricate detail, a link to which is prominently displayed to all Gmail users.

Trust me, Google may be the first company to show the general public the power of personal information leveraged against search, but they won't be the last. Think about Amazon for a microsecond...

Of note:

Phillip points to a GMail screenshot. He also rebuts the privacy issues in this post.

Now that we know Google's Gmail is for real (though my God, what a joke it was...) and - blush - I went out on a limb and called it a hoax - I have unconfirmed news that Yahoo has already responded to some users with an upgrade to 100MB of storage. Here's what a Yahoo mail user claims was sent to him, no idea if this is confirmed. Will attempt to find out for you all...

UPDATE: Yahoo PR sez: This test was in the works well before Gmail rolled out, and was sent out prior to the GMail announcement...

-----

Yahoo! Mail
Service Notice

Dear Yahoo! Mail User,

We've made changes to your Yahoo! Mail account -- we've upgraded your email
storage quota to 100MB, at no cost to you. As a loyal Yahoo! Mail user, you've
been randomly selected to receive this free benefit effective March 31, 2004.
You'll also be able to attach up to 10 files to an outgoing email message
(increased from 3); and your outgoing message size can be up to 10MB
(increased from 3MB). It's just our way of saying thanks!
You can keep these benefits as long as this Yahoo! Mail account remains
active. For your email account to stay active, you must sign in to your Yahoo!
Mail account at least once every four months and comply with all applicable
Yahoo! Terms of Service and guidelines. If your email account becomes inactive
at any time, you will no longer have the increased storage capacity.

If you purchase a Yahoo! premium service in the future that includes
additional email storage*, you will be charged the then-current price for that
service. After the purchase, your storage quota will be the level that
accompanies the purchased service or the level granted to you as part of this
offer, whichever is greater. Storage will not be additive. For example, if you
purchase a Yahoo! Mail Plus account with 100MB of storage, your total Mail
Plus storage quota will be 100MB. You will not receive any refunds or future
credits with your service upgrade.

Thanks again for using Yahoo! Mail. If you prefer not to receive this free
benefit for any reason, simply reply to this email and let us know.

Sincerely,

Yahoo! Mail

*These include SBC Yahoo! Dial or DSL, Yahoo! Plus, Yahoo! Mail Plus, or
Yahoo! Mail Extra Storage.

-------------------------------

Ask has sense of humor too....

(thanks Gary...)

Meg and Nick's creation launched today. It's a "blog of blogs." A "blog portal." AN "RSS reader (of sorts) for people who don't know what RSS is..."
The Times has a piece here.
Nick blogs the background here.
Congrats to them both!

Google announced GMail late yesterday, and the media, Wired News and CNet and the New York Times, bought it. So did The Register, which said that the company is using April Fools to launch the service for real. The Times' John Markoff - no slouch he - wrote up the story totally straight citing unnamed sources "familiar with the service." AP and Reuters moved wire stories....

But one can seriously debate whether this is a joke, folks (this is, of course, as is this Google job posting). Sure, there may be seeds of truth, like the patent application the company filed to serve email ads, or the fact that such a service makes a lot of sense for Google, and has been widely rumored. Or even the one gigabyte storage approach - never have to delete an email again - (sounds like Mirror Worlds...).Slashdotters are having a field day debating this one...turning up the fact that Gmail.com is registered to Google, for example...(this has been known for a while...)

But this has got to be an April Fool's Joke. A very believable one, one that in the long run may come true, but a joke. Note an employee's posting on his blog, under the subject "haha" and noting "I love this time of year." And the release itself is simply too sophomoric to be anything but a joke. If indeed this is an elaborate ruse (including fake quotes and interviews from Wayne Rosing) I imagine the press will be most unhappy with the folks at the Googleplex. Journalists these days tend to have no sense of humor when it comes to their own gullibility. Unless, of course, they were all in on it...which has its own set of issues. Fun, no matter how you slice it...

UDPATE: OK, maybe this *is* for real, because Danny Sullivan of SEW is playing it straight. If it *is*, then...what's with all the hat tips toward April Fools? Ahhhh, who knows.

If Google published its S-1 in book form, it'd be #1 on Amazon for weeks. But you can read it for free here, because today, Google filed for the IPO of the decade. The details:

- Big News: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and VCs Sequoia and KPCB together own 95% of the company. The remaining 5% is split between early angels and a lava lamp wholesaler who "management admits got a pretty good barter deal back in 1998."

- The employee stock option plan, long believed to be the impetus to a public filing, has been dumped in favor of a private shadow equity plan modeled after the Economist magazine. "It's the only magazine we read that hasn't put us on the cover," Page explained. "We kind of hoped this hat tip might change that."

- Google will be taken public by Morgan Stanley (no surprise there) but with a twist: To win the Google business (and estimated fees of $300 million), Morgan has agreed to purchase Dutch auction innovator WR Hambrecht for an undisclosed sum (wags estimate it at nearly $150 million), to be paid in pre-IPO shares (apparently the ability to "sell on the pop" was a deal clincher). Morgan and WR Hambrect, in a joint release, have promised to "incorporate WRH's innovative approach to fair market valuation" in the secondary market at some point in the "near future."

- Eric Schmidt, while participating in the Economist-style plan, also has options to buy up to 20% of the company directly from the founders at a strike price 20% above the opening trade "should certain conditions occur." A close reading of these conditions include: 1. Upon a tender offer for the company by Microsoft which values Google at no less than $100 billion (such a transaction would net Schmidt $15 billion, conservatively) 2. Upon a "reasonable" tender offer for the company by AOL (literally, AOL, the offer is void if tendered by Time Warner) 3. Whenever a quorum of Google VPs stipulate under oath that Larry and Sergey have become distracted and are no longer interested in the business 4. The day Google accepts paid inclusion or 5. The moment Sales has input into Product Management. One can only imagine that a sixth condition may as well be: Should hell freeze over, an option to exercise his shares forty five days thereafter, assuming that, in fact, hell remains frozen on the forty-sixth day. One senses this portion of Eric's compensation is some kind of elaborate joke between the three famously tight-knit leaders.

- Google lists as its main market competitors Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, that pesky butler in Emeryville, neighborhood garage sales, and, interestingly, Udi Manber.

- The S-1 lists an extraordinary cavalcade of "material pending legal matters." Of note: An ongoing dispute with Stanfurd University, holder of the PageRank patent, on the exact definition of "in perpetuity" and a slow burning lawsuit brought by Overture Inc., the gist of which seems to be "Material and Adverse Damages Related to Generally Getting Credit For Our Idea, Goddammit."

More as the press wakes up to this extraordinary news...

Light posting today, as I am out in meetings...Happy April Fools!