MSFT Drops Paid Inclusion

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...

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:41 PM
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A Plea As I Rebuild...

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:14 PM
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Vacation, not a Moment Too Soon

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:04 PM
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A Call With Bezos

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....

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:12 AM
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A Talk With Tim Koogle

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:33 AM
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Boom! Go Salesforce Shares

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....

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:50 AM
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Document Compare on Google S1

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?

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:47 AM
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Amazon Switches to A9 On Home Page...Still Google, In the End

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:23 PM
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Google Files Amended S-1 (S-1A)

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:38 AM
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The Ask Package Deal

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.)

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:41 PM
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Google Extends Syndication, Adds Site Flavor

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....

Google announced two new innovations today that enable web publishers to
enhance their websites by adding a Google search box which provides their
users access to billions of web pages through Google's advanced search
technology. These two separate programs also give web publishers a choice of
sharing in revenue generated from ad clicks or customizing their user's
search experience.

Google AdSense for Search

The first innovation enables web publishers to place a Google search box on
their websites and provide their users with Google search results and
keyword-targeted advertisements. Through this new online program, Google
shares the revenue generated from ad clicks with the web publisher.

Websites in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese,
Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish are eligible for the
program. Web publishers apply for the program through the online
application for Google AdSense available at www.google.com/adsense/.

This program is an extension of the combined Google WebSearchT and Google
AdSenseT for search programs, previously offered exclusively to larger
websites and portals such as AOL, Earthlink, and BellSouth. The search
results served through this program are hosted by Google and require no
additional resources from the publisher. These search results pages can
also be customized with logos specified by the publisher and color schemes
that complement the website. Web publishers can also track the number of
queries, clicks, clickthrough rate, and earnings through a web-based account
interface.

Site-Flavored Google Search

Google also announced the availability of site-flavored Google Search, a
Google Labs project that provides websites with a "flavored" search box that
delivers search results customized to reflect the content of the website.

With site-flavored Search, webmasters select from a wide variety of
categories to specify the interests that describe their website. For
instance, a computer site owner might select [computers > hardware] to
describe their site. A user searching for the word "mouse" from that site
will see results more relevant to the computer peripheral than the animal.

With this technology, webmasters and site publishers can enhance the overall
experience of their website(s) by connecting users with search results that
are relevant to the website they are visiting. The program is free and
available at http://labs.google.com.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:58 AM
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Find.com Launches, Raises My Eyebrows

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:32 AM
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Om Sees BlinkX

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...

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:04 PM
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A Morning With Danny Hillis

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...

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:30 PM
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Ripping off Google?

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:51 AM
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A New Boing Boing

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!

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:06 PM
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Huh. Google Buys Into Baidu.

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:11 AM
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News: Yahoo Says: 2 Gigs to You, Google

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.

Yahoo! Announces “New and Improved” Yahoo! Mail,
Introduces Major Increase in Storage Space,
Makes 50 Million Additional E-Mail Addresses Available

Yahoo! Mail Gets a New Look and Feel,
Continues Robust Security and Commitment to Privacy,
Filters More Than 95 Percent of Spam

Sunnyvale, CA – June 15, 2004 -- Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today unveiled a new and improved Yahoo! Mail (http://mail.yahoo.com), the No. 1 e-mail service in the country, measured both by reach1 and by the percentage of people who identify Yahoo! as their primary personal e-mail account2. Yahoo! is leveraging years of customer insight with key innovations to deliver a product that responds precisely to what consumers want and need in an e-mail service.

Yahoo! is introducing a number of exciting enhancements to Yahoo! Mail including a major increase in storage space for both free and premium users. Free e-mail subscribers will automatically be upgraded to 100-megabytes of storage, 25 times more than the prior free offering. Premium customers, including subscribers to SBC Yahoo! Dial and DSL, will have virtually unlimited storage at 2-gigabytes, far in excess of any major e-mail service and 200 times the amount offered by most other Internet service providers. All users will benefit from the new design and improved search capabilities, and graphical ads will be removed from Yahoo! Mail Plus and SBC Yahoo! Mail, all of which make Yahoo! Mail easier and faster than ever. Additionally, the company is opening up more than 50 million Yahoo! IDs, giving consumers more address options for their e-mail accounts.

The company is focused on continually innovating and improving Yahoo! Mail, and a number of additional product enhancements are expected to follow in the coming months.

“Our unique experience as an e-mail pioneer and innovator in the communications space – coupled with insights gleaned from our tens of millions of loyal customers – helps ensure we are delivering the best e-mail product possible,” said Brad Garlinghouse, vice president, Communications Products, Yahoo! Inc. “With the new Yahoo! Mail, consumers won’t have to think about mailbox size. When they judge webmail value, they’ll continue to look at all the things that make Yahoo! Mail No. 1 – including privacy practices, superior spam and virus protection, and integrated calendaring and alerts.”

Yahoo! Mail: No.1 and Now Better Than Ever

The overall goal of the improvements are to extend Yahoo!’s position as the market’s leading e-mail product – which means adding useful new features, while maintaining and even improving the experience for the company’s millions of loyal e-mail customers. Key elements of the new features being introduced today include:

§ Streamlined design – Although still comfortably familiar, the new look of Yahoo! Mail is easier than ever to use. Yahoo! has developed an even cleaner design that allows consumers to quickly and easily read and compose e-mail while eliminating graphical ads for premium users entirely.

§ Increased storage & message attachment size – Leveraging consumer insights around what users want and need, Yahoo! has introduced new storage levels. Yahoo! inboxes now allow message sizes up to10-megabytes, and 100-megabyte mailboxes for free users and virtually unlimited storage for premium customers with 2-gigabyte mailboxes. The new mail storage sizes follow last year’s changes to Yahoo! Photos, when the company began to offer unlimited free storage for photo files.

§ Faster search – Yahoo! Mail inboxes are easier than ever to manage, thanks to even better search capabilities at faster speeds.

§ More account names – Yahoo! is releasing more than 50 million Yahoo! IDs allowing consumers more freedom to pick the Yahoo! e-mail ID that best suits them. These Yahoo! IDs include a number of highly sought after names that have been dormant for many years and are just now being put back into circulation.

Safer, More Secure Inboxes

These enhancements supplement Yahoo!’s industry leading virus and spam protection. Protecting people’s inboxes has been a key priority – and as a result, Yahoo! Mail automatically scans e-mail attachments to help protect consumers from viruses and consistently filters more than 95 percent of spam3 thanks to SpamGuard, Yahoo!’s proprietary spam filtering system.

“We know that the longer a consumer has an email account, the more likely they are to be targets for unwanted e-mail, which is why we are constantly fine tuning our spam controls to tighten the noose around the necks of spammers,” continued Garlinghouse. “We don’t think consumers should or will accept an e-mail experience that degrades over time. Yahoo! Mail enjoys high regard among tens of millions of long-standing and loyal customers and we think that is thanks in part to our unending vigilance in protecting their inboxes.”

About Yahoo! Mail

Launched in October 1997, Yahoo! Mail (http://mail.yahoo.com) is one of the Web’s largest, most popular free e-mail providers. Yahoo! Mail helps people stay in touch at home, at work or while traveling for business or pleasure. Yahoo! Mail is fully integrated with Yahoo!’s many other popular services to make it easy to access all the Internet services people need. Yahoo! Mail has received a variety of prominent industry accolades including “Best Free E-Mail” for three years by PC World, and CNET Editors’ Choice awards.

About Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading provider of comprehensive online products and services to consumers and businesses worldwide. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and the most trafficked Internet destination worldwide. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo!’s global network includes 25 world properties and is available in 13 languages.

Contacts:
Helena Maus, Yahoo! Inc., 408-349-7085, helena@yahoo-inc.com
Jessie Anderson, Westhill Partners, 212-994-3831, janderson@westhillpartners.com

1 Nielsen//NetRatings, May 2004
2 IPSOS-Insight, Sept 2003
3 Internal Yahoo! data

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:11 PM
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A Year Of Predictions, Six Months In

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...

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:20 AM
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A Year Ahead

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:54 AM
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Blogory

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...

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:27 PM
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F*cking Google It

Enough said.

(Thanks, pre-Commerce)

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:32 PM
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The World Emanating Googly Rays of Light

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:11 PM
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Oh So Quiet We Leak

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:01 PM
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Search as a Window

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:31 AM
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Go Bears, Search Looksmart

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:40 PM
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Ask Adds Desktop Search: Tukaroo

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...

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:07 PM
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TiVo: Net Recording Ho!

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:12 AM
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Safa: The Internet Is Undervalued

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:49 PM
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Idea Dumb, Guys

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:26 PM
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Pay Per Call: Bypass the Web, Make the Call

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. ...

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:44 PM