John Battelle's Searchblog

Emerging from book haze because I can finally post on this...it's been in the works for sometime, but MSFT is, as previously reported, updating and redesigning MSN search. Chief among the changes: The company is abandoning paid inclusion. This is a big deal: Google has (rightly) made hay for years as the white hat in search, committed to editorial purity on the issue of both UI and paid inclusion. MSFT, on the other had, has been the black hat, treating its search results and its search users with near contempt, clutttering up the UI with commercial come ons and littering its organic results with Looksmart directory listings and Inktomi paid inclusion.

Now all that is gone, and MSFT can claim the high ground. The implications are twofold: First, Google has lost some of their unique competitive positioning. And second, Yahoo, which arguably might be called the gray hat, has lost a whipping boy. While I and others (notably Danny Sullivan) have argued that Yahoo's CAP program is intellectually defensible, it seems to me this move by MSFT will force Yahoo to further clarify its approach to paid inclusion.

Besides dropping paid inclusion, MSFT has redesigned search, refined its Toolbar, and introduced a "Technology Preview Site" where an early beta of its crawler results can be tested.

FT story....

Update: I should have posted the tech preview site, sorry, it's here...

Hello readers -

I'll break my silence to ask those of you I work or play with, or who have contacted me in the past - please send me an email. When my G4 died last week, so did my email and address book, and while I do have backups, they are not easily reconstructed. So if we've corresponded in the past, please shoot me an email at jbat at battellemedia dot com, so we can once again correspond. It might be weeks before I have this thing rebuilt.

Public memo to self: Run mirrored drives from now on.

And memo to loyal Searchblog readers: Thanks for the notes. I will be back. In fact, there will be interesting news soon on Yahoo's new search interface, and on Microsoft's new approach to paid search. I promise.

My laptop's fried and so am I, heading to the mountains to work on the book. Happy summer all!

Just a teaser, as I really should save the best for the book, but I had a very interesting talk with Jeff Bezos yesterday. A significant insight of his, which came up as I was pushing to understand Amazon's long-term interest in A9, was his use of the term "discovery" as an umbrella term which incorporates search. I think in the end when I use the word "search" I really mean "discovery" as Jeff uses it. What's discovery? Well, much more in the book, but in the end, it's search plus what happens when the network finds things for *you* - based on what it knows of you, your actions, and your inferred intent. Inferred intent? How might the network be smart enough to do that? Ay, there's the rub....

As search veterans go, Tim Koogle has seen a few tours of duty. He joined Yahoo back when the company had six employees and a pretty limited directory - for the most part, it was still "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" (though it was no longer on akebono.stanford.edu , at least).

Tim was the original adult supervisor (he left in 2001), and he came in in 1995 to help figure out what to do next. As we spoke he recalled many of the early conversations he, David Filo and Jerry had around how to create value and grow the business.

"We realized that if we do a great job at enabling navigation (of the Web), demand for that will never go away. And the cool thing about server-based solutions was that people come to our servers and use our directory but they leave tracks - we could, every day, see exactly what people found most important through their usage. We used that as a compass to aggregate more deeply those things they found important."

Leveraging this clickstream in turn led to a deeper directory and, ultimately, the build out of Yahoo's major destination areas - Finance, Travel, etc. It also led to the realization that the company needed search - what Koogle, using a book analogy, calls the index of the web, with Yahoo's directory served as the Table of Contents.

Chatting with Tim reminded me how much search has changed in the past five or so years. Back in the mid to late 90s, running search from inside Yahoo didn't make as much sense as partnering, because search was a very capital intensive process that had basically no business model - paid search simply had not come together yet. It made far more sense to outsource it - as Yahoo did to various players throughout its history, up until recently.

Tim didn't entirely buy the common wisdom that Yahoo missed the search train in a fit of late 90s portalmania. "It's easy in hindsight to say we took our eye off the ball," he told me. "But what had not emerged yet was a way of monetizing it."

Tim went over his early interactions with Larry and Sergey, and said they struck him, in the early days, as uniquely bright and "a ball to sit with and drill down on the tech." We forget, but Tim himself was not just a biz guy, he has a PhD in kinematics.

We discussed the bust of 2000-2001, and he argued that it was in the end a good thing for the internet industry (Tim is busy investing and working with a number of new net companies, such as Plaxo and Friendster). A lot of great ideas did not make it through that fire, but they are emerging now, stronger for the burn, he argued. I agree.

Salesforce (CRM) began trading today, finally. Priced at 11, opened at 15, now trading (8 am PST) at $15.40. A promising start for a company that had some bumps on the road and filed way back in December....

WashPost has a good roundup (reg req'd), the Times does as well. Of note: Larry and Sergey's letter has been moved from its top position, far more risk langauge has been added overall, Merrill Lynch has been dropped (speculation as to why runs from ML's inabilty to grok the tech required to run the auction to the lack of profit on the deal to ML possibly leaking info). Lastly, The Times has an interesting tidbit at the end about a recent Google bomb:

Separately, there was an indication yesterday that Google's vaunted corporate culture may be under stress as a result of competition and the stock offering. As of yesterday afternoon, typing the words "out of touch management" into Google caused the search engine to list as its first result a page describing the company's top management.

A person close to the company said that Google employees had engaged in the practice of "Google bombing." A Google bomb is an attempt by a group of people to cause a particular Web page to become the first result for a search phrase. The Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

What I find interesting is that this is not the case this morning. I have no idea if results change that quickly on their own (from yesterday afternoon to this morning). Anyone know?

As Owen points out on the 2.0 blog, Amazon switched to A9 today (I think it was today) on its homepage. Makes sense that they'd eat their own dog food...of course for now, the main ingredient in that food is Google SERPs...

UPDATE: A well placed source tells me that in fact this switch happened in early June and no one really noticed till now.

No time to grok this, but here's a pointer....also there's a S-1A I missed in May...

CBSMW alerts us to Ask's package deal - the trend of creating a editorial menagerie around certain well-worn search terms involving celebrities, current events, and the like. Some might say this is simply algorithmic dress up, but at the end of the day this is editorial, folks. The best decisions about what to show a consumer interested in Britney or Shrek will not come from an algorithm, it will ultimately come from editors. Sure, you can do a decent approximation up to a point with computers, but to really fine tune it, you need human decisions. If the format takes off, money will flow into and from this model, and it will become economical to in fact have more humans doing this. It's web search rebuilding human input, in a way.

FWIW, it is not surprising that the one company who does NOT dabble in this, at least not much, is Google (once could argue the integration of news and Froogle is a step in that direction). Editorial, in general, is not what Google does, but Yahoo has already begun the practice, MSFT probably will increase it soon, and Ask claims to own it. Excite was working on technology like this back in the day, but this is not new, in fact Bill Gross did the same thing with GoTo back in 1998, as the pic at left shows (I got this as part of my research on the book..click for full view.)

Late to this one, life got in the way, but worthy of note nonetheless. Google late last week introduced two new offerings, Google AdSense for Search, and Site-Flavored Google Search. One is a commercial product, the latter a Labs project. Both give new tools to publishers which, through their adoption, extend Google's reach into the web.

Full PR info is in extended entry.

Now, these are interesting products for a couple of reasons. From what I can tell, Site Flavored is the outgrowth of Google's Kaltix acquisition. It allows a webmaster to tailor Google's search results to a site's own tendencies (so my site, for example, would bring search engine results as opposed to headhunters...). It seems a pretty blunt instrument for now (not instantly updated, categories are pretty general) but that will change with time. Site Flavored is yet another way for Google to get you registered into a Google relationship - a key strategic imperative (in fact, once you add site flavored search to your site, the logo that Google places on your site links to Google's personalized search page). It's another neat feature that will help get Google's search results distributed across more of the web, and leverages the Google platform in a more robust manner.

Of course Google is already in the web platform biz - they serve AdSense to thousands of sites. Yup, true. And they are extending that with their other product, AdSense for Search. As far as I can tell (and I may get this wrong), this is a way of syndicating AdWords - their in house ad serving tech used on the main search site, and licensed to big partners like BellSouth and AOL - out to the masses. As Danny points out, this has been done before, but abandoned in the dot com bust.

I'll be very interested to see how much uptake these products get.

Peter Adams (CTO Looksmart) weighs in on Site Flavored.

Wired News on the news....

Continue reading "Google Extends Syndication, Adds Site Flavor" »

Look at this, a new search site "for business professionals." I'm not sure this will catch on, but it is a reflection of the trend toward vertical/domain specific search...Find.com.

So I head over there and do the typical vanity search - for "Searchblog." After all, it's business related content. And what do I see? Three of my postings are highlighted at the top as for sale by some company called "NetContent." Hmm. *My* postings, for sale on Find.com. No one asked me. Hmmm.

Well this is interesting. In fact, with a little poking around, I see blog entries by all sorts of folks are "for sale," as well as stuff by mainstream magazines like BusinessWeek. Note to NetContent: I'll be calling.

ClickZ story.

The older, wiser Business.com.

Om Malik, who has a very good blog on all things telecom/bband and works at B2.0, reviews a new software tool that combines aspects of both desktop and web search called BlinkX. He's over the moon about it, so watch this company...

Have had a very productive couple of days recently on the book, talking at length with various folks who in one way or another have very unique views on the search world. Before I get to Tim Koogle, who I spoke to this morning, or Shana Fisher and Geoff Yang (yesterday afternoon), I wanted to talk about my visit with Danny Hillis.

On Tuesday I flew down to LA to visit with Danny, who founded Thinking Machines. After that he became an imagineer at Disney for five or so years ("The best 'real job' you can have," he quipped). Danny has a million great ideas and is something of a polymath. He recently founded Applied Minds as a way to put that skill to work (he partnered with Bran Ferren, himself a scary smart polymath).

Danny has a lot of things to say about search, it's an area he finds rich in implications, in particular as it relates to some of the long-term projects he's involved in, such as the Clock of the Long Now. We spent some time riffing on the future of search, and its current limitations, but ... I get ahead of myself. What I really thought was incredible was the playground Danny and Bran have created for themselves at Applied Minds.

You pull up to Applied Minds unimpressed. It's in an industrial area of Glendale (who knew there even were industrial areas of Glendale?) - windowless one-story warehouses with nameplates like "Airfoil Distribution, Ltd" or "Light Plumbing Fixture Manufacturing, Inc." Once inside the non-descript edifice, you're greeted by a low-ceilinged version of an internet start up - the requisite espresso maker, late-modern furniture, flat-screen displays, etc. But really, nothing worth writing home about. In fact, the place felt a bit cramped and claustrophobic.

That all changed once Danny came out to meet me. After chit chatting for a few minutes, he took me to a small room - no wider than my outstretched arms - at the far end of which stood one of those classic red English phone booths. We stepped inside - a bit cramped - and Danny lifted the receiver and dictated a passphrase of some sort. Presto - the rear wall of the booth opened, and we stepped into - nerdvana.

From a cramped phone booth into massive pure-white-lit space two-stories high, adorned with all manner of things strange and beautiful. Over to one side stood the Terminator-like skeleton of a forty-foot dinosaur, it's 15-foot pneumatic legs gleaming and exposed. Nearly blending into the walls, itself painted movie-set white, was a tricked out Hummer-like RV refitted as a communications/command center - complete with built-in kitchen and bedroom. The space was a great big project lab, with happy geeks combing over various assemblages of wiring, motors, processors and plans like ants on a summer picnic. It's Willy Wonka's chocolate factory for geeks.

Applied Minds works this way: Bram and Danny and any number of partners contract with Very Large Companies or Organizations to think outside the box and come up with solutions to problems they might have. The dinosaur, for example, was a solution to Disney's problem of overlong lines for its rides (solution: make the non-ride portions of the park more interesting by having dinosaurs roaming the streets...). Danny and Bram have, in essence, created a lab where they get paid to think orthogonal to a problem, and invent/design/prototype just about any kind of solution they can dream up. I toured at least four massive warehouses full of projects (and they have more buildings up in SF), many of which I am bound to not report upon, but all followed this basic ethic: let's imagine a new way to approach what otherwise is an intractable/frustrating/unglamorous business problem. Clients include GM, Herman Miller, and many others, including some defense contractors. The company employs a studio model, with only 50 full time staffers, but hundreds involved at any given time on dozens of projects.

So one can imagine when Danny and I did sit down to talk about search, we'd have an interesting conversation. Besides the fact that his designs for Thinking Machines are now de facto standards for platforms like Google, we ranged from his idea of Aristotle, a Primer like AI tutor, to creating an economy of ideas through a new kind of search infrastructure. It's fun to live in the future for a while, after so much reporting in the past and present.

For the details of our talk, well, the book is coming along slowly but surely...

An astute reader points me to www.milfclan.com, which sounds a lot like a porn site, till you click on it, and get a perfect mirror of Google. For reasons neither he nor I can discern, it seems they are ripping off Google's HTML. Huh.

Update: Readers have pointed out that the site was or perhaps is still a torrent site. From a reader:

Tried to leave this as a comment, oddly enough, MT refused due to
'questionable content'. Maybe the URL was in an MT-Blacklist config?

Anyway, http://latest.milfclan.com is a popular Bitorrent resource for
the latest TV show downloads. They're probably using a DNS entry
pointing to Google as some kind of obfuscation tactic?

Due to the semi-legitimate nature of the site (I pay for my TV chanels,
so I don't see a problem downloading shows), please don't quote me
directly if you post about this.

I'm proud to say that Boing Boing has launched a new design, one that incorporates sponsors and a cleaner look. I was down visiting with Danny Hillis today (man, talk about mind blowing) and I was very happy to hear that he reads Boing Boing regularly. My role with Boing Boing is the equivalent of "band manager" - I helped them round up the wonderful sponsors - Wired, Google (Blogger), and O'Reilly - and work out the details of how they can take the site to the next phase of it's ongoing evolution ("brain candy for happy mutants since 1988!"). Take a look!

Innaresting.

Baidu is China's biggest independent Internet search engine and is one of Google's strongest rivals in China. Its music search tool is considered one of the country's best.

"From Google's perspective, it saw Yahoo acquiring 3721 and may have felt prompted to make a move," said Duncan Clark, managing director of the BDA China Ltd. consultancy in Beijing.

Well, the ante's been upped in the user registration - er - mail wars. Yahoo will announce Tuesday that it has revamped its mail products, increasing the storage on its paid and free products to 2 gigabytes and 100 mbytes, respectively.

Is this a big deal? Yes. Why? Well, it's the first shot in a long war of attrition that will benefit consumers and pave the way toward a true platform web. It's very exciting, in a way, if you're into this kind of stuff.

Yahoo mail chief Brad Garlinghouse (OK, formally, vice president, Communications Products ) gave me a quick overview of the strategy shift and said that Yahoo Mail is "getting a new coat of paint" on the UI side, and that "basically, storage is now a commodity." He notes that this is consistent with Yahoo's "life engine" theme - that mail is now a main way many manage their life, and Yahoo wants to create a mail program that understands that mail is more than text - it's photos, calendar, etc.

The upgraded premium product will cost $19.99 a year and include 2 gigs of storage. This doubles Gmail's one gig limit, I am sure quite intentionally. Also, the premium product will lose graphical ads...

A full list of features is in the extended entry of this post, or I imagine by the time you all read this you can just search Google - er - Yahoo News for more. Well shit, I was told to embargo this till midnight, but the frigging world already has it...The Times story misses the search piece altogether...but does point to an issue Yahoo is testing in a trial ballon fashion - that of privacy.

The main thing I think is missing from this ante-upping play is full featured search - the release simply says "Faster search – Yahoo! Mail inboxes are easier than ever to manage, thanks to even better search capabilities at faster speeds." That sounds like a whole lotta nothing, compared to what Gmail does. I'll ask for more details and post on it here when I hear.

Continue reading "News: Yahoo Says: 2 Gigs to You, Google" »

That last post made me think about this one, in which I predicted, at the beginning of the year, what 2004 might bring. How am I doing, I wondered, six months in?

Well, in the preamble, I thought I'd be done with my book by about now. That was pretty damn funny. Now I hope to be done by Fall, and with luck I just might.

My listed predictions were:

1. The Web becomes a platform (again). Thanks to commerce and service APIs, RSS, and the ubiquitous interface of search, geeks around the world are again leveraging the web as a platform for cool new tools. 2004 will be the year these tools break out in something of a pre-cambrian explosion, reminiscent of the Mac in late 1980s, or CD-ROM in the early 90s. Only cooler. Examples: Grokker, Bloglines, Amazon API.

UPDATE: I think this is not entirely proven, but it feels on the right track. Hey, we even started a conference on the subject...

2. Along those lines (and no surprise to this readership, but still and all...), blog ecologies of like-minded folks will garner increasing cultural and social power. We've seen this happen first in the technology and media space, and recently politics has figured it out too. 2004 will see the rest of the world join in, especially in natural communities where power is projected: think professional verticals of finance, law, medicine, marketing. Folks who you never thought would ever blog will be coming online and claiming power. As a result, more blog ecologies will impose registration and/or subscription (the money kind, not the RSS kind...).

UPDATE: I think this is well on its way.

3. The Dutch auction/OpenIPO model will be validated. Not that it isn't already alive and working - WR Hambrecht is proving that - but 2004 is when a major player (and it need not be Google) will take the lead and fly the bird at traditional Wall Street approaches to going public.

UPDATE: Auction, yes, Dutch, not entirely, and it was indeed Google.

4. Speaking of IPOs, we'll see a major IPO ($100 million+ sold to public) in search that isn't Google.

UPDATE: Tom Online, net proceeds $174.9 million, March 10, 2004. Not in the US, but...soon. Marchex doesn't make the $100 million threshold (market cap is about $250 million).

5. There will be a "Tylenol Scare" in search. One of the majors - AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Google - or possibly more than one will be caught up in a major privacy and/or corporate responsibility crisis. The press and consumers will freak as they realize how important - and imperfect - this thing called search is. There will be much harrumphing, then everyone will calm down, learn from the incident, and move on.

UPDATE: Ding ding ding ding ding.

6. Once a month, a new search player will be crowned in the press as "the next Google." One of them, in fact, could be the next Google.

UPDATE: Well, maybe not once a month.

7. Second generation blog/RSS aggregation sites will come close to combining directory functions with LinkedIn- and recommendation-engine-like features - think Amazon+Yahoo for the blogosphere....

UPDATE: Not yet, unless I've missed something.

8. ...at about the same time Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and Google will build or buy second-generation blog/RSS aggregation sites.

UPDATE: Give it time.

9. The world will realize the importance of our digital artifacts, and takes further steps to to preserve them.

UPDATE: So far wishful thinking.

10. Cable companies will control more than 75% of the PVR market, but a backlash/new TiVo-like device (possibly from Apple) will develop by the end of the year.

UPDATE: Developing... and I should have said "Cable and satellite"...

11. Microsoft will have a surprise hit product that has nothing to do with Office or Longhorn, causing a minor fire drill in Redmond.

UPDATE: I guess Channel 9 doesn't count...but there's still time.

12. I'll finish my book, try to stop writing this blog, but find it impossible to do so. Meanwhile, a deeply cool, once-in-a-decade-magazine-I wish-I-had-thought-of will launch.

UPDATE: Not yet...

Back when I was at Wired, I noticed that the NYT always seemed to run a "trend" story that pretty much repeated our own treatment, but about a year later. Now, I notice, the same is true in the case of B2.0.

In the Times today, Jim Fallows (I am a big fan of his, he was a columnist for The Standard) points out that AdSense may be the next big thing in advertising models for the Web (not exactly news):

NYT piece

Back in June of 2003, 2.0 ran this:

2.0 piece

A year later, it seems that AdSense has heralded a new approach to advertising that will incorporate pure algorithmic and metadata-driven solutions that, I hope, will drive value back toward endemic solutions.

Both Greg Linden, of Findory fame, and Gary Price pinged me today on Blogory, Findory's new blog reading/finding service (in beta now). The idea is simple: Blogory will watch what you read and suggest new stuff based on that. The layout is interesting, sort of a Topix for blogs (OK,OK, a Findory for blogs!). And since Kinja didn't have a recommendation engine (though I'm told Bloglines does), I think I'll take this for a spin and see what's what...

Enough said.

(Thanks, pre-Commerce)

Dan Gilmor has posted a clip of a spinning earth emanating rays of light which represent Google searches around the world. Google showed it at D, though I must have left by the time it was shown. Sort of like their streaming query hack, but in 3D. I'd love to know more about when and how this was made, and why. It reflects an interesting world view.

A News.com article, and subsequent Slashdot post, note that Google is "considering renewing support" for RSS. Now that's interesting in itself, but not interesting enough to rouse me out of my book-induced torpor. What *is* interesting is that the CNET story quotes an internal email from Google that threads through the main players at the company. The RSS/Atom feud is not hugely advanced by this leak, the email is not definitive in any way, at least as reported in the CNET piece.

But what is noteworthy is that an internal email on any subject made its way into the hands of a reporter during the quiet period. One would expect this is *not* an intentional leak, as such a move would be dangerous given Google's desire to avoid pulling a Benioff. So that means something else - that someone at Google is going around company policy to give this to CNET, or, that CNET has an in that Google can't stop. For a company that is notoriously good at keeping its cards close to the vest, it's something of a new development.

Scoble notes that eBay has in the past learned from listening to those who criticize eBay, then figuring out ways to include the naysayers and their insights into making eBay better. To put that to good end, Scoble is using tracking phrases across Feedster, PubSub, and T'rati to see who is saying "I hate (Scoble, Longhorn, or Microsoft.)"

In other words, he's using conversation search to get smarter and better. Good idea.

They must have known I'm a Cal guy: Looksmart has done a deal with Berkeley for an "Affinity" search portal, along the lines of affinity credit cards, etc.You use their search engine, and a portion of the proceeds benefit Cal sports (they need the help!). Not a bad idea, but if anything says "commodity" it's this kind of deal. In any case, the details are here, and here's a summary from their PR folk:

Looksmart is pioneering “affinity search” with Cal, applying the same principles that business organizations such as the credit card company, MBNA, which has developed credit cards that will directly give back $$ to the specific group (such as the Sierra Club, etc.). By identifying groups of avid supporters (college alumni, fans, students, members of conservation organizations, etc) who will switch from Google or Yahoo to search on a site that produces revenue for the organization or a cause they're passionate about, the “affinity program” brings $$ back to the group. As an example, MBNA has been able to recruit 5,000 organizations and 12 million cardholders with this approach. This is the first program of its kind in the nation where a higher education institution has tried this sort of partnership.

Also files intent to sell as much as $400 million in stock. My my. It's getting interesting, eh?

Tukaroo does desktop search. The URL is blank right now (not the best way to manage your 15 minutes of fame, in my humble ....). The Google cache ain't doing much better.

Here's an old press release on them...

UPDATE: Of course Gary Price found more!
This from the Yahoo cache
and
this too...

You read about it first here...and now it's official: TiVo announced today that they will support recording over the internet, allowing folks to bypass traditional distribution systems (ie cable and satellite.) Meanwhile, DirecTV sold its TiVO shares and left the TiVo board.

Related? I think perhaps.

Yup. From his weekly newsletter:

Our detailed analysis of historical valuations of over 50 Internet companies as well as several other sectors including media, software, and retail has produced a very interesting outcome. First, to lay out our methodology, we were seeking to answer two questions: how does the growth-adjusted valuation look like for Internet compared with these three sectors that are the closest in their characteristics, and second, how do current valuation levels of Internet stocks compare with historical levels. From our own experience, we know that the valuations at their peak in 1997-2000 were significantly higher than the current level, in fact orders of magnitudes higher in some cases. But to get standardized data, we used PE and PEG ratios that are available for all the companies and go back sufficiently to give us some results. We used pro-forma EPS estimates as those are most widely reported to First Call. Finally, to get a sufficient number of companies with earnings so that our averages are meaningful, we had to go back only to 2002 and not earlier.

Internet Sector Cheaper Than Others. The results show that the Internet sector is currently trading at a discount on a growth-adjusted basis compared to the software, retail, and media sectors, as shown in the table below. The Internet companies are trading at a median PEG ratio of 0.6x 2005 estimates, while the other sectors trade at PEGs of 1.0 for retail, 1.4 for media, and 1.5 for software. The results are similar even if we use 2004 PEGs. The average earnings growth of the Internet sector is 40% compared with the average of 22% for the other three sectors.

In an earlier post I referred to this piece (on a keynote at a B2B trade show) and ranted a bit about trade magazines, the internet, and the like, but it seems the Ad Age story missed what I think is the key piece of blinkered thinking that came from the speech. Rafat points it out:

Trade Companies To Block Google and Other Search Engines?: It is an idea floated by International Data Group CEO Pat Kenealy, no less. He gave a speech recently at American Business Media conference, and also talked about Google's effect on trade media companies and magazine industry...
In the latest issue of Media Business magazine (it is available as a PDF and rather cumbersome to download, as the whole magazine in split into two PDFs...the Google story is broken in the middle), a story discusses the Google conundrum for magazine publishers...and quotes Kenealy on his speech at the ABM conference: "Kenealy has floated the idea that American Business Media member companies should agree to block Google and other search engines from crawling their sites. Together, these business media companies could develop their own search algorithm, or they might cut a more favorable revenue-sharing deal with an existing search engine, he said."

Rearrange the deck chairs, boys! Let's all get a good view of our asses as we sink to the bottom....Sure, you can put your site behind registration, I mean, many do, though they're learning that even pages behind registration should be visibile in some way to engines. But block search engines? How about next you go off the power grid and start churning butter by hand? And whoa boy, do I want to see the search algorithms these guys might come up with.

Cut a deal with search engines to get revenue for inclusion? Yeah, but it flows the other way in this market. B2B, meet CAP or AdWords. Get the engines to pay you for the honor of searching your content? Er...no. But you might start to think about getting into the domain specific game, where instead of circling wagons, you add value (something most B2B publishers have long ago forgotten about - how much do they really care about high quality editorial, past lip service?). Here's a place to start....

Meanwhile, note this: Startup TechTarget, which is based entirely on the internet, just got $70 million (that's Seven Oh) in venture. It's main competitor besides CNET? IDG. I wonder if it's interested in blocking search engines. I know from talking to Shelby at CNET that they certainly aren't, in fact, they're optimized for search - they want to be found, they think what they have is worth knowing about. Indeed.

NYT Monday had this story on a "trend" in search - pay per call. Idea is that marketers will create a market in which calls become the performance metric. I can see it, but not devoid of a website and not without some troubling implications for organic search results. I do think the integration of search, voice and web is a big story, especially w/r/t mobile platforms. ...

I doubt it, but that's what Marketing Wonk suggests. In any case it's rich to see that Yahoo is buying AdWords on Google for the keyword "RSS". Maybe next Google will buy "Atom" on Overture...

I'll be at the D conference for the next day or so. Reports will be sporadic, as there is no wireless net - I'm told Walt prefers his ballrooms blog and keyboard free.

In any case, Gates was the featured luminary after dinner tonight. Furthering previous announcements about cleaning up MSN's search practices and clearly biting his tongue (or sitting on his hands, take your pick), Bill Gates tonight parried Walt and Kara's spirited questions regarding MSFT's search strategies with a bit of guile, some well chosen words, and a dash of humor, in particular as it related to Google ("Oh, there's nothing they can't do!" he joked in a mock fawning voice), a company he recently acknowledged had kicked Microsoft's collective butt when it comes to search.

Tonight he was not as charitable - at one point saying MSFT's goal was to be the best in search. He jokingly advised the crowd to buy Google stock and coyly refused comment as to whether he thought Google's advantage lay mostly in marketing. He did note that the Google and MSFT culture were pretty similar (is he reading my blog!?). Some tantalizing hints came as Walt asked him about paid inclusion and the like. He repeated that Microsoft will clean up its search practices, but he seemed to hint things would go a bit further than that.

"They have a way of formatting things that has had some appeal," Gates said. "It will be matched."

"Web search is a incredible business," he continued. "(But) If you want to find things that are local...it's terrible today. If you want to find things that are of particular interest to you, it is quite terrible today."

Gates blamed search's shortcomings on its keyword-based approach, and argued that natural language and contextual semantic approaches will be the next leap forward.

Gates also reviewed the Longhorn strategy, at one point saying that the oft-delayed OS would be the most significant shift in Microsoft's computing environment since the jump from DOS to Windows (the core shift being in data structures - the file system - Gates long-standing dream of having a more robust file system, which of course is a truly searchable and transportable file system.) He also mentioned that RSS and blogging was an area of particular interest within Microsoft.

UPDATE: Walt emailed me to take issue, in a nice way, with my statement about his view of blogging. He doesn't want a blog or keyboard free ballroom, he reminds me, he wants a Wifi free ballroom, as he wants his audience to focus on the program as opposed to surfing the web or checking email. And he's all for blogging, just not during the sessions.

My friend and past co-worker Andrew Anker has taken a role at Six Apart as EVP, Corp. Dev. This means a lot to me, not only am I a big fan of both AA and SA, I take it as a sign that SA is getting serious about building out their a platform to grow as this nascent industry grows, and that's a good thing. There is tons of work to be done on both the revenue and product side of blogging, and it's heartening to to know the team at Six Apart will be on the case.

Remember that period of time in the history of search? As I review my notes from talking to folks like Monier, Gross, Cutting, and others, I'm reminded of just how terrible search was back then. Spam - mostly porn - was rampant, and search was pretty much ignored in favor of stickiness. Search was considered "good enough" - and of course it was not. That opened the door to innovation - Google and Overture launched in 1998. So here's my lazyweb request for the day: any readers have great stories of search engine spam, or frustrations with corporate bosses missing the boat over search in the late 90s?

Gary Price of ResourceShelf interviews Gary Flake of Yahoo Labs. I've spent a number of very interesting hours with Flake, the interview makes for a good introduction to his way of thinking. Also see the extended interview, here...

Excerpt:

RS: Now, an obvious question. What's wrong with web search today?

GF: It's easier for me to point to what web search should be and then highlight the differences. If web search was perfect, then it would produce an answer to every query that would be as good---or better---than if the smartest people in the world had as much time, data, and contextual information (about the user) required to fulfill the query; and it would do all of this in a split second. In other words, the search engine would be an artificial intelligence (AI) so smart that if a correct answer could be found in theory with close to infinite resources, then it would find it. If a correct answer did not exist, then the search engine would give you the next best thing: an approximation, or perhaps even an explanation as to why your query has no perfect result. (And by the way, if we realized all of the above within my lifetime, I would consider myself lucky. That should give you an idea of what sort of time frame I am talking about.) 

Alternative interfaces, like cell phones, voice, and snazzy graphical results are all nice, but in the end they represent relatively easy technology problems when compared to the challenges involved in realizing our hypothetical search engine. What really matters is what is under the hood.

Marc A. and a number of other notables gathered for a panel last week sponsored by USA Today, and one thing Marc said neatly summarizes one of the key trends that makes Web2.0 so different from Web 1.0:

Andreessen: In the middle of what was a pretty horrific recession we now have 10 times more people on the Internet now than we did five years ago. We've got 10 times or a hundred times more broadband. We've got Internet advertising, which is a real phenomenon. We have a whole generation of citizens now used to doing business online, used to buying things online, and used to communicating online.

All that's really adding up. The economics of the Internet have undergone something like a thousand-times swing. If you're going to launch an Internet site or an Internet business today, it's probably going to cost about a tenth of what it would have cost five years ago, but you're going to have 10 times more consumers you can address and probably 10 times the advertising revenue. There's a seriousness and commitment and dedication and effort and investment going into it now that is a lot more interesting and a lot more real than what was happening in the '90s.

Also, scroll down for Jurvetson on search, he mentions an interesting sounding company called Tacit....

Now this is interesting. Scott Sassa, one of the few Hollywood guys who "got it" back in the 90s (we featured him in Wired, for example), once golden boy of Turner, then NBC, has taken the CEO job at Friendster. (WaPost, reg rq'd) .

Sassa is "shaking off comparisons to Semel," but there they are. He mentions that advertising will be a core revenue source, but that he has many other ideas.

(Thanks, JH)

What's with this post? Why is "Jakob Nielsen, Holiday Mixer" *the* post of choice for a panoply of comment spammers? I've had like 100 different comment spams on this post, and for the life of me, I can't determine why, save one thing: I linked to Cory. No....wait. I linked to Shona Brown's book. No... I linked to pictures of Mt. Tam too, and a picture of Berkeley. And to Jakob's site. And...oh God...to Joi as well. Is there rhyme or reason to this?

If I deleted this post from my archives, I'd have about 25% less spam than I do now. At least, until they chose the next favorite post.

So in the spirit of Dan Gillmor's maxim - "My readers know way more than I do" - what gives?

(Yep, I've repeated the links, for anyone keeping score...let's see if this post attracts them too...)

Safa Rashtchy's weekly newsletter makes two good points: first, online advertising will grow faster than most think, as major spenders migrate to the web in the next year, and second, paid search has become a distribution network, not just a advertising buy. In other words, as Google VP/Advertising Tim Armstrong pointed out to me in an interview for the book, search has moved marketing from the "expenses" side to the ledger to the "revenue" side - through paid search, marketing becomes sales.

From the newslettter:

The growth in online advertising is the most interesting one since it is rapidly accelerating and we expect it to continue to grow at a faster rate in 2005. Currently, we expect the 2004 growth rate to be at least in the range of 20%-25% and a faster growth rate in 2005, as more advertisers move online. We expect the combination of the three factors will be pushing this growth rate to 30%-50% over the next few years: 1) increased allocation of ad dollars from existing advertisers, 2) addition of new online advertisers, and 3) price increase. Currently, we estimate prices are in approximate parity, on an average basis, with offline media but we expect that overtime, online inventory can get a 20%-50% premium over comparable reach from traditional media.

Search, which we continue to believe must be regarded separately from advertising because of its unique dynamics, should continue to grow at 40% rate in 2004 and very likely maintain that rate in 2005, driven by international growth. Paid search has become the most effective direct marketing technique ever developed and has become a distribution network, not just a form of advertising, for tens of thousands of small merchants, as well as countless major online businesses. In fact, search's ability to aggregate supply and demand has effectively made the search destinations as online shopping malls. The local search initiatives are likely to create another leg of growth for search in the 2005-2006 time frame.

...thanks to the quiet period. So instead, Google's chef talks about buttermilk fried chicken, and gives away the recipe. This just might be the most specific piece of information to come out of Google since Page and Brin published the first paper on Backrub.

Despite the trumped up charges in Ad Age, Google will not kill specialized, niche publications. There will *always* be a market for them. Any executive in the trade publishing business that fears Google ought to take a hard look at the value they are creating and see if he isn't blaming the wrong actor. The world needs editors and analysts. But paper? In many cases where paper has dominated in the past, the answer is no.

The question is whether that market needs or justifies the expense of paper. Paper has graduated to the place television was a couple of decades ago - simply too expensive a proposition (in a wholistic view - to manufacture, print, distribute, etc. ) save for very specific economics - mass market (ie the recent surge of celebrity crap) or highly adapted to execution in the particular medium (ie portability (daily newspapers), or design (Wired), or long form (TNY)). You knew this already, but the new paper - cheap, ubiquitous, malleable - is the internet.