John Battelle's Searchblog

Just finished listening to the Kleptones' A Night At The Hip-Hopera (mirrors are there for downloading). Oh...My...God. Do people seriously want to make this kind of art illegal?
This clearly will stand with Danger Mouse's Grey Album as a Declaration of Something New and Important as the entertainment world traverses its way from old to new models. It's just...really really good. Powerful. Thoughtful. You know, all that stuff that ... music is supposed to be.

(Thanks Hank and JH)

Microsoft researcher says paid search model may self destruct (CRN)
I disagree. It will just move on to more sophisticated models.
Joe on MSFT in 1995: Search has no business model.
Yeah, I thought that then too.
IBM's Marvel to Scour Net for Video, Audio (Cnet)
IBM does search? Yup, remember WebFountain?
Google follow up on the GLAT.
I'd fail, is all I know.
WashPost buys Slate (Rafat)
That makes sense. Slate is moving from a s'ware-driven owner (MSFT) to one more suited to the content biz (WashPost).

You know I am distracted when it takes me this long to post on Vivisimo's new consumer facing search engine, which launched today. (I love a catchy name, but Clusty?) The folks at Vivisimo were kind enough to ask if I wanted a tour and talk with their senior brass, but I am so slammed getting ready for Web 2 that I just couldn't break away. Fortunately, plenty of folks are covering the launch. From the AP story:

Online search engine upstart Vivisimo Inc. is setting out to persuade the masses that Google Inc.'s vaunted technology isn't the most efficient way to find things on the Internet.
The little-known Pittsburgh company is taking aim at Google and other industry leaders like Yahoo Inc. with a new search engine called Clusty.com, scheduled to debut Thursday after four years of fine tuning.
The search engine's name refers to the clustering technology that Vivisimo has refined to sort search results into different categories related to the initial search request.

My only problem with the engine is that they are clearly staggering under the weight of being today's "next Google" - I couldn't get on the site.

Other sites covering the launch:

Greg
ResearchBuzz
SEW

Update: I got through now. Will post more as I use it.

I'm interviewing Jerry Yang Thursday next at Web 2.0, and in the process of preparing, Yahoofolk dug up this homepage screenshot, from 1995.

Yahoo turns 10 years old this Fall. Whoa.

From Reuters via ABC:

Part of the Patriot Act, a central plank of the Bush Administration's war on terror, was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge on Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marreo ruled in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the power the FBI has to demand confidential financial records from companies as part of terrorism investigations.

Next stop: Appellate, then Supreme Court...

Slashdot thread.

Don Park has some search ideas, and he wants to put em in the public domain before he goes up to MSFT for some advisory board meetings on search. His first, the Search Hat, is neat, and groups into the personalization category. I'm not sure it's a feature for the masses, but the ability to "go modal" while searching - "I'm searching as a reporter, not as a shopper," for example - would be very cool for advanced users. (We could use "Tivo Hats" and "Amazon Hats" while we're at it....)

For example, if I search for 'Eclipse' while wearing the 'Software Developer' hat, I should get Eclipse IDE related links before links related to the astrophysical phenenomon.  If even I was interested in the later, results I get back should be different depending on whether I am wearing a Physicist's hat or a Photographer's hat.

Like Dr. Seuss's magic hats, there are hats within hats so seachers can browse for the right hat that suits them by diving into hats or grabbing one of the hats returned as part of each search result.  Over time, a user's hat collection will be refined and adjusted to meet the user's search needs.

Getting hard numbers on Google is always, well, hard. Andy has a few in this post, summarizing a Google manager's presentation at a recent conference:

28% of Google searches are for a "product name", 9% are for a "brand name" and 5% are searches for a "company name".

Astute (or perhaps merely bored) readers will note that I've moved my ad service from AdSense to MarketBanker, a new service that is still scaling, but shows promise. As I've said before, I'm going to try out several services here, mainly to learn them in real time, and get a sense of what works, what's needed, and what's even possible. Unlike AdSense, Market Banker allows advertisers to actually buy the site directly, which is one of my pet peeves. So, if you want to sponsor Searchblog, click the link on the right. You'll have to register as a Market Banker advertiser.

So what did I think of AdSense? Well, it wasn't right for this site, as I expected. This is not a knock on the service, but truth be told, if you do mostly analysis and fast moving stuff with lots of disparate contextual hooks, the crawler is simply too slow to stay up, and the ads don't really match well enough. My potential endemic advertisers, meanwhile, can't really get to this site from AdSense. Most of the time I had pretty lowest common denominator stuff up there, and the clicks weren't that great. I do know it works great for others, like Kevin and Matt.

Soon, I think I'll be trying out FeedBurner's RSS/Amazon service. Just off the phone with Dick Costolo, and man, there's a lot to talk about in his RSS Business Models workshop at Web 2.0.

Read Paul Graham on What the Bubble Got Right.

The fact is, despite all the nonsense we heard during the Bubble about the "new economy," there was a core of truth. You need that to get a really big bubble: you need to have something solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in. (Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift both lost money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.)

Now the pendulum has swung the other way. Now anything that became fashionable during the Bubble is ipso facto unfashionable. But that's a mistake-- an even bigger mistake than believing what everyone was saying in 1999. Over the long term, what the Bubble got right will be more important than what it got wrong.

...reading Adam Rifkin's post about the Google Labs Aptitude Test, which is included at the bottom of his post. Sample question:

6. On your first day at Google, you discover that your cubicle mate wrote the textbook you used as a primary resource in your first year of graduate school. Do you:
A) Fawn obsequiously and ask if you can have an autograph.
B) Sit perfectly still and use only soft keystrokes to avoid disturbing her concentration
C) Leave her daily offerings of granola and English toffee from the food bins.
D) Quote your favorite formula from the textbook and explain how it's now your mantra.
E) Show her how example 17b could have been solved with 34 fewer lines of code.

This is what I'm talking about, right here. I posted on Blender's prototype earlier, but looks like FeedBurner is on it too.

This is very interesting, and very worth watching.

Hat Tip, Linden.

From their blog (and the first post of any consequence, IMHO):

For last week's launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC. Naturally, we want to present as broad a range of news sources as possible. For every edition of Google News, in every language, we attempt to select news sources without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. For Internet users in China, we had to consider the fact that some sources are entirely blocked. Leaving aside the politics, that presents us with a serious user experience problem. Google News does not show news stories, but rather links to news stories. So links to stories published by blocked news sources would not work for users inside the PRC -- if they clicked on a headline from a blocked source, they would get an error page. It is possible that there would be some small user value to just seeing the headlines. However, simply showing these headlines would likely result in Google News being blocked altogether in China.

We also considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all. It was a difficult tradeoff for us to make, but the one we felt ultimately serves the best interests of our users located in China. We appreciate your feedback on this issue.

"It is possible that there would be some small user value to just seeing the headlines. " No, I disagree. It's more than possible, it's a fact, and it's not small, it's all. The value is in knowing that you're not seeing All That's Really Out There. I wish Google would take a stronger public stand on this, as this rather fence-sitting statement could well strain the company's credibility in otherwise untainted areas of its endeavors, and that's too bad.

I'm not claiming Google should have tempted fate and forced China to shut them down (thought that would have been pretty f*cking cool, I have to say). And while I am sure this clarification was quite considered, it's not exactly what I and others counseled. On the other hand, who the hell are we to judge? It's a good start - they copped to the real situation, which is that if they added the blocked sites' headlines, they'd most likely lose the service altogether. In the end, that's why they did what they did. The user experience hoo-ha, while defensible in a Letter of The Law kind of way, is political legerdemain. I respect and agree with Google's main decision - it was hard to make, I am sure. Yet I still wish they'd be more open with us over here in the Free World - let us know that they understand the value of what they had to take away from Chinese users in order to provide them Google News. Maybe even lodge a formal, if diplomatic, protest to the Chinese government in some way. What, no other company does that? Well, sure, but no other company opens their S1 with a statement like "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one."

With time, the company will get there. It's not easy learning to be public, I am sure. Plus, it's got to be hard to be the one everyone looks to for leadership. And it's doubly hard when you set the bar for yourself at a subjective (though admirable) goal like Don't Be Evil.

Mark over at Bloglines sent me a note about his company's new web services, very cool. He's working with FeedDemon, Blogbot, and NNWire to support a new open standard that reduces RSS bandwidth demands. More here and here. Release in extended entry. Way to go, Mark!

Continue reading "Bloglines Bows Web Services, Addresses RSS B'width Issue" »

Co-lead underwriter CSFB says GOOG will hit $145.

From The Street's coverage:

Contrasting with mixed reviews for Google already published by analysts from firms that didn't participate in Google's IPO, CSFB's report, along with initiations from fellow joint book-running manager Morgan Stanley and underwriters Thomas Weisel Partners, WR Hambrecht and J.P. Morgan, all assigned Google ratings equivalent to a buy.

GOOG responded with a rally, up more than 6 so far today to $124.

Mary Meeker, who I interviewed here and who will speak at Web 2.0, also came out with a positive report on the company. From her report:

Initiating coverage on Google with Overweight-V rating -- Google has helped change the direction of the Internet and has built impressive market share and an especially strong business model.  We believe Google should continue to help pace the growth in the still early-stage online search market and benefit from related revenue growth.  Google shares could have upside as implied by a variety of valuation methodologies, most notably our DCF, discussed beginning on page 56.

Estimating strong financial results for C2004E and C2005E -- We forecast net revenue growth of 93% and 60% in C2004E and C2005E, respectively, with 76% and 42% operating income growth (excluding stock compensation expense) driving estimated levered free cash flow of $394MM and $908MM in C2004E and C2005E, respectively. 

Her report is, as usual, very comprehensive, and I'm still reading through it. But I have to say, it reads well, in the meta view - she mentions that Google is well positioned to be the front end to audio and video content (as I've said before, TiVo + Google = VOI), and ends her opening section with this very Web 2.0 passage:

Particularly, with the launch of Gmail, we became intrigued at the possibility that Google could create a distributed computing model layered over user-generated content. Right now users can have 1GB of webmail storage—but with potentially tens of thousands of servers, and commensurately cheap storage space, we wonder about the possibility of Google providing a thin application “desktop” that resides on the browser, where users could jot brief notes (GWord?), do basic calculations (GExcel?), and of course, search. The April 2004 registration of gbrowser.com by Google could lend some credibility to this line of thinking. Ultimately, we believe the company could have a significant opportunity ahead of it in Search / Find / Obtain well beyond the Google.com domain.

Now the hard part - execution - begins.

A new My Yahoo is now in beta, and it really gives RSS the big bear hug. Here's Jeremy on the launch....

Instead of "you can add anything you want, as long as it's on the list of My Yahoo content" you can now add pretty much any public RSS or Atom feed. In other words, the content model is open.

Let me say that again, just for dramatic effect: the content model is open now.....
This not only makes My Yahoo relevant in the modern wave of syndication, it does something else--something that Yahoo is in a unique position to do: bring RSS to the masses.

It also integrates local content, if you're registered, and...yup, Local Search will be there too. Coooool.

PS - Here's Yahoo's overview.

In preparation for Web 2.0 next week, I spoke today to Gian Fulgoni, founder of Comscore. He's giving a great talk on the things a major research house knows about the web. One of the slides he showed me I just had to steal to give you a sneak preview (click on image for a larger view).

What this tells us is pretty interesting: the heaviest users of search, who are a minority of total search users, account for the vast majority of search queries. This seems a case where the tail is not as powerful as the head....And clearly, the more folks use the web, the more they use search. What happens when the majority of us are heavy users of search? Time to buy more servers....

I spent some time today talking to the founders of Fathom Online, a SF- and NY-based search marketing firm. I wanted to get a view of the search economy from a firm that makes its livelihood betwixt and between - optimizing campaigns for advertisers, employing software-based analytics and database mining techniques to eek out the best possible performance from paid search. As many of my readers know, Fathom represents a booming industry, one that will only prosper as performance-based marketing gets more and more complex. I spoke with Chris Churchill, Founder and CEO, Rob Middleton, Executive Vice President New Business, and Jay Webster, President and Chief Technology Officer. Between them they have a boatload of experience in traditional and online marketing, search, and the internet industry.

Our discussion ranged (headline: The Big Agencies Still Don't Get It), but the meme I found most interesting was their take on contextual advertising. I pushed on this piece, both because I feel traditional ad networks fail to take advantage of the endemic value of an audience/author relationship, and because I've heard over and over that AdSense performs miserably compared to AdWords/Overture. But the Fathom guys saw opportunity in my line of questioning. Instead of agreeing that contextual advertising was something of a low-end, low quality option, they said that contextual would benefit from the next wave in marketing spend.

Why? Simply put, the margins on "quality" PPC - search-related keywords on the major engines - are getting too low. The competition is fierce, and there's less money to be made optimizing in those areas. Instead, there's a whole new landscape to navigate, a landscape opened up by AdSense, but which, to date, has yet to benefit from the full attention of the market. But Kanoodle, Quigo, and many others are beginning to play there, offering solutions which, at first blush, are performing far better than AdSense, and for far less cost than AdWords. In fact, Chris said that Quigo was his best performing network last month, so he bought a bunch of inventory there to resell to his clients.

So I then asked the obvious question, at least for me: When would ad networks be able to price both on the keyword/PPC model, as well as price in a "premium" for a particular site, so that an advertiser could say "I'd like to spend up to X dollars to acquire a customer for this particular campaign, but I'll spend X plus 1 dollars if that customer comes from (name your site here - say...Searchblog, for example, or, alright, the New York Times)."

I took comfort in Jay's response: If it can be turned into math, we can do it.

The bottom line: I still predict that within 3-5 years, we'll have ad networks that combine the best of CPA/PPC networks with the best of CPM/Endemic buys. We really are in the early innings.

There are a raft of reports lately talking about how short sellers are moving in on net stocks, Google in particular (one story notes that 21 percent of Google's shares are shorted). This CBSMW piece rounds up the others, stating that the short interest in Google is in fact 15 percent.

Also of note: The Google underwriter's quiet period lifts tomorrow, meaning that those banks which helped the company go public can now start coverage.

(Where VOI = Video Over Internet)...
Gary points us to a Journal piece (sub required) in which Comcast chief Brian Roberts has this to say:

We're approaching seven million users on Comcast's high speed Internet service... We also have video on-demand and a very exciting arrangement with Sony and MGM to get lots of movies and a deal with the NFL. In fact, we think eventually 10,000 hours will be available on demand. And if you then overlay that with access to the Internet, there is virtually unlimited content that consumers will be able to access on a television, a PC and perhaps on a mobile device. There is constantly going to be a need to make it easy for consumers to access what they want when they want it. Call it a search engine. Call it a portal. Call it an on-screen guide or navigation device.

Gary points out that Comcast is starting to think about search, and yes, that's important in and of itself (caveat: I am not a fan of Comcast's gatekeeper business model). What I find interesting is why they decided to think about search: they are seeing that soon the world will have PVR+Web-based delivery, and that means Comcast's "we own the means by which video enters your home" model is hosed.

I've long fantasized about having a web-like search interface to video (who wouldn't want to type "The Office" Season 2 into a Google video search, and get all the episodes listed, ready for download or drizzle?). But a Comcast version sounds, well, like a Comcast version. If they decide that those 7 million plus broadband users must play by Comcast's rules when it comes to video, well, implosion ho!

Add to that the fact that others are competing on both sides of the equation: the RBOCs for the broadband pipe, the satellite guys for video, and this battle is shaping up very nicely. I spent a couple hours talking about this with David Dorman, the CEO of AT&T last month, and it was a revelation. The interview will be published soon, but I for one very much hope Comcast decides to play in search. The rules are different out here on the Web - and I hope they stay that way - you can't control who uses you, or when. If you try, you lose.

I was on the Google campus when the AP's Google News China story broke (it's been followed by the Merc and others). I've been hanging back and not commenting as it percolated earlier in the week (ie this Slashdot thread), waiting for something which advanced the story. David Krane, who's been helping me with my interviews on the campus, mentioned the story and I asked where things stood.

David explained that Google made the decision to omit a small number of Chinese government banned sites (about eight) because to include them would create a damaged user interface experience. Google China users would see results and links, but be unable to click through to the actual pages, because China in fact filters those sites - they can't be seen behind the Great Firewall of China.

This line of reasoning is echoed in the Merc's coverage:

Google acknowledged that headlines from government-banned Web sites were intentionally excluded from Google News because they are inaccessible within China's borders. The company said that providing links to inaccessible Web sites would degrade the ``search experience'' of its news site.

``Google has decided that in order to create the best possible search experience for our mainland China users we will not include sites whose content is not accessible,'' the company said in a statement, ``as their inclusion does not provide a good experience for our News users who are looking for information.''

I think this is half an answer, to be honest. It's always best to know that you are not being shown something, even if you don't know what that might be. Clearly the best approach, in a perfect world, would be to show links to that which is censored, even if users can't click through. That way, at least they'd have an inkling of what they're missing (Google already has a practice like this in place through the Chilling Effects website for stuff like the Scientology dustup and DMCA requests). At the very least, Google could acknowledge to Chinese users that there are results which can't be seen due to government restrictions (sort of like what they do with duplicates and such - "In order to show you the most relevant results....").

However, to do either would clearly irk the Chinese authorities, and Google, like every other company that wishes to do business in China, has to play by those authorities' rules (the Slashdot thread was, in fact, quite balanced on this point.)

I think the company might consider avoiding the "we're trying to make the best search interface" excuse, which has some intellectual defensibility, but feels rather cold, and rather admit that they find it frustrating to have to keep this information from Chinese users and would prefer to at least inform them that the information they are seeing is not complete. Then admit that they have to play by Chinese rules, which honestly are the real culprit here. In the process, Google could and should point out that on balance, they do far more good than harm by making all the rest of Google News, and Google writ large, available to China's burgeoning internet population.

If you want to track this story, I'd wager CDN would have the latest.

Update: Worth reading: this piece by a editor at a paper that has been blocked by China, and therefore Google News.

When you Google Omid Kordestani, Senior vice president, world sales and field operations
at Google, you get the AdWord ad I've pictured at left.

Posting will be light, as I am on my way to talk to folks in the Valley, first to Cambrian Ventures whose partners have quite a record of investing in interesting search related companies (Mobissimo, Kaltix, Junglee...), then to Google for the afternoon. I'm looking forward to my first visit to the 'plex post IPO.

JD Lasica takes a long look here. He asks:

Google News: Unintentionally skewing to the right?

He then goes on to analyze Google News results, which are driven mainly by algorithms, and Yahoo News, driven more by editorial judgment. Interesting. I don't have a dog in this fight, so please folks, let's avoid the Goon Shadow smackdown.

Back in 2001, I was named a "GLT", which is short for Global Leader of Tomorrow, by the lords of the World Economic Forum in Davos. I felt just a tiny a bit sheepish about the honor, and still do, as I imagine the decision making process might have gone something like "Who's hot in the internet space? That Battelle guy sure has a great magazine, let's get him." Then my magazine bit the dust. Dooh!

Anyway, I got to go to Davos that year, and I still get invited, but since then I haven't found either the coin or the time to attend. But man, what a meeting it is, the world's entire power structure laid out in one large, wonderful, and ostentatious display, nearly everyone promenading, certain of their self worth, the fragrance of shared self-congratulation hanging thick in the air. And, in fact, it's true: Everyone there *is* important, from the heads of most every major state, to the heads of every major corporation. The World Economic Forum, more than any meeting I have ever been to, is about power, baby, raw power dressed in impeccable french shirts, cufflinks, and hand-tailored suits. (OK, there are also a few poorly dressed geeks, and some rather boring German industrialists, but for the most part, the agenda is set by the suits).

All this came back to me as I read this post from David Weinberger, who was asked to participate in one of the Forum's many seminars held around the world. This one was in NYC over the past few days, and his portion of it focused on the media business. The post is chilling, if you care about what the overlords of Big Media are thinking about, give it a read.

Excerpts:

First, these people are thrashing. They're floundering. They're desperate to find a way in which their organizations still add value. They are in denial but, it seemed to me, they know that there's just about nothing that the market wants from them. For example, at one point someone said, "Content is king." I replied that judging from the content they're producing, marketing is king; that's where their real value is. Further, I said, on the Internet, connection is king. But then they want to know how to "monetize" connection. There's nothing wrong with that, so long as you understand how monetizing it can kill it. The most convincing case I heard for real value was that only Hollywood can afford to make blockbusters. But beyond that...?

We are doomed.

But then David tells us he got a chance to present, and what he said made me proud to know him.

I said that I understand that to them the Net looks like a medium through which content passes, some of which people aren't paying for. But, (sez I) their customers aren't "consuming" content. We're not consuming anything. We're listening to music, We're watching video streams, We're talking with friends. To call it content is to miss why it matters to Big Content's customers.

So, we need the leeway, both to be able to continue as a culture, and — more important from their point of view — to continue to get value from what the Big Content folks produce. It's our ability to absorb and reuse that gives their product value.

Way to go, David. I only wonder, though, who was in the room with you?

I'll update this in the morning, but as I predicted (or rather, intonated, here and here), Furl has been sold, to Looksmart. There were other bidders, but founder Mike Giles went with Looksmart for a number of reasons, he tells me. One, they did not force him to move to California. And two, they seemed comfortable with allowing him to continue the company on the path he wants to take it. Congratulations, Mike!

This of course is yet another paving stone in the path toward clickstream-based search, a path A9, Ask, and Yahoo are all busy blazing. More soon.

Update: Release in extended entry.

Continue reading "Furl Sold to Looksmart" »

Interesting interview with Ramesh Jain in the ICM journal Ubiquity came across my desk. In it he refers to the idea of a "steering wheel" for search - he longs for another mechanism by which he can control his searching and finding. This is consistent with the emerging meme of new search interfaces that I've pinged on A9 and MyJeeves. Jain is professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founder of Virage, among other companies.

JAIN: Current search engines like Google do not give me a "steering wheel" for searching the Internet (the term steering wheel was used by William Woods in one of his articles). The search engines get faster and faster, but they're not giving me any control mechanism. The only control mechanism, which is also a stateless control mechanism, asks the searcher to put in keywords, and if I put in keywords I get this huge monstrous list. I have no idea how to refine this list. The only way is to come up with a completely new keyword list. I also don't know what to do with the 8 million results that Google threw at me. So when I am trying to come up with those keywords, I don't know really where I am. That means I cannot control that list very easily because I don't have a holistic picture of that list. That's very important. When I get these results, how do I get some kind of holistic representation of what these results are, how they are distributed among different dimensions.

JAIN: Two common dimensions that I find very useful in many general applications are time and space. If I can be shown how the items are distributed in time and space, I can start controlling what I want to see over this time period or what I want to see in that space.

(Thanks, Vuk.)

Jeremy asks what folks might want from his employer should they decide to open up Yahoo's APIs. I've been encouraging them to do this for a while now, unleash the Force of the Many! Speaking of which, there are already many comments, a neat view into what the web wants.

I've said before that Google's opaque approach to policy - in particular with regard to its editorial policies surround AdWords - could not stand. Now Danny has the scoop on Google's intention to clarify and expand its advertising guidelines. Great news.

Forget the debate over what exactly Google will allow. A core issue to me has been why doesn't Google simply publish its rules? Why can't advertisers know from the start what Google allows? The guesswork has been infuriating to some who have been rejected on the basis of unpublished policies in the past, plus it has fed into the secretive nature some accuse Google of having....
...Google's planning to greatly expand the editorial guidelines it publishes online, providing everyone -- advertisers and Google users alike -- a better idea of what it accepts on the advertising front.

"We're in the editing phase of what that page will look like," said Sheryl Sandberg, vice president of global online sales and operations for Google. "It won't be up in the next few days, but if we're not done within a few months, I'll be disappointed."

Look, I couldn't resist. This is pretty orthogonal to search, but...I do have more than a passing interest in how we are tracking and searching folks we consider to be potential terrorists, and in the Patriot Act in particular. But this item from BoingBoing was too funny not to note: Cat Stevens, who pretty much defined high school lovesick treacle for me, forced a plane to divert from the US to London when US Customs decided he was a terrorist threat (he converted to Islam some time ago.) I just had to make the pun.

Over at O'Reilly, Tim's posted his thoughts on why Web 2.0 is a meme with legs, and he's inviting feedback from his readers on what they'd like to see asked of all the speakers we have coming to converse. I'd like to do the same - you guys have always kept me honest, and the conference is really shaping up to be something else again. As Tim puts it:

I'm talking about the emergence of what I've started to call Web 2.0, the internet as platform. We heard about that idea back in the late 90s, at the height of the browser wars, but that turned out to be a false alarm. But I believe we're now starting the third age of the internet -- the first being the telnet-era command line internet, the second the web -- and the third, well, that tale grows in the telling. It's about the way that open source and the open standards of the web are commoditizing many categories of infrastructure software, driving value instead to the data and business processes layered on top of (or within) that software; it's about the way that web sites like eBay, Amazon, and Google are becoming platforms with rich add-on developer communities; it's about the way that network effects and data, rather than software APIs, are the new tools of customer lock-in; it's about the way that to be successful, software today needs to work above the level of a single device; it's about the way that the Microsofts and Intels of tomorrow are once again going to blindside established players because all the rules of business are changing.

Time and again as I report in this space, I'm struck by how different this time round is from the late 1990s. For example, today I spoke with Jeff Weber, who runs USAToday's digital publishing efforts, and we had a robust conversation about publishing models, new and old. I was part of the first wave of "new media" in the 90s, and we were convinced that the world was changing, but wrong in the timing and execution. Now, a whole host of "lightweight publishers" have sprung up, and they are challenging and undermining the entire cost structure and business model of old line publishers. This time, it's real. Weber pointed out to me that Yahoo News, which is twice as big as USAToday.com, and has just 11 employees. Then there's craigslist, with more traffic than nearly anyone, and only 20 or so employees. How do they do that? They've got a very Web 2.0, lightweight business model, that's how (and Yahoo aggregates content, then creates interfaces, of course). Over and over, in so many aspects of industry, we see this happening - travel, finance, media, entertainment, retail. It's exciting, and it's fun.

At Web 2.0, we're going to talk about all this, and (this will be the last time, I promise) I'd really like to see you all there. I still have a limited number of discount codes to dole out, first come, first served (jbat at battellemedia dot com). The event is October 5-7, in San Francisco at the Hotel Nikko.

Even if you can't make it, check out the program and let me know what you'd like to see asked of the speakers. I hope to see you there!

UPDATE: The Web 2 team sent out a release today with all sorts of info and goodies, and I should have at least pointed out the hightlights. Quoting from the release:

The Web 2.0 Conference has been chosen by several leading companies and entrepreneurs to debut their businesses and new products. Special announcements will be made by Web 2.0 Conference founding sponsors eBay, Morpheus, NetSuite, PayPal and Sxip, along with the introduction of new companies by industry leaders such as Marimba Founder Kim Polese, Internet entrepreneur and Excite founder Joe Kraus, IdeaLab CEO and Overture founder Bill Gross, StreamCast founder Michael Weiss and Red Herring co-founder Christopher Alden with Kevin Burton, creator of the NewsMonster aggregator. The Web 2.0 Conference is the first-ever second generation Internet business conference that brings together the leading Internet industry figures and companies to discuss and debate the most important issues and strategies driving the Internet economy and will take place October 5-7, 2004 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco.

Web 2.0 Conference program segments will include keynote-level talks and relaxed dinner conversations with industry luminaries such as Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com; Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon; Mark Cuban, CEO, HDNet and owner, Dallas Mavericks; John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers; and Jerry Yang, Yahoo! Co-founder. Web 2.0 sessions and workshops will feature special seminars moderated by experts who will demonstrate how the Web’s leading businesses such as Amazon, eBay and Google have gained extraordinary success by leveraging Web development in their own business practices. Web 2.0 will also include participation from industry figures such as Marc Andreessen, Chairman and Co-founder, Opsware; Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley; Mitch Kapor, Founder, OSAF; and Lisa Gansky, President, Co-founder and Chairman, Ofoto.

Matt McAllister has been a busy dude lately. His InfoWorld site has been doing all sorts of interesting things, the latest being a deal with Feedster to integrate Feedster searches into InfoWorld's IT Product Guide. If you scroll down on this link, for example, you'll see Feedster's results have been aggregated in a section called "Weblogs and Feeds." I'd say expect more of this, in particular as Feedster has recently added an advertising and/or subscription model to its feeds through a deal with Kanoodle. All I want to know is how much of that is going back to the feed owners, Scott...

InfoWorld also announced a deal with OSTG, which is the parent company of Slashdot among others, to create and extend these product guides.

Ask Tuesday is launching several new features on its site (release in extended entry), but none more interesting to me than its "MyJeeves" play. What is MyJeeves? Well, it ain't MyYahoo. It's more like MySearch. Call it A9 meets Furl meets Ask, if you will.

This space is getting hot and heavy, and from the stuff I've been briefed on that is coming from other players, it's only getting more interesting (in other words, look for related news from other search engines in the coming days and weeks).

With MyJeeves, Ask is laying the foundation for a very serious play in what I've called the PersonalWeb, In fact, when I was briefed today by Jim Lanzone, the VP of Search at Ask, he used that very term over and over to describe what MyJeeves creates for its users. In short, MyJeeves allows you to save results, annotate them, and then manage them in your own personal folders. Those results (and the annotation) are then searchable (as they are with A9).

Unlike A9, you can start to use the advanced features of MyJeeves without signing up for the service, though you'll probably want to. Once you do, you get unlimited storage of saved results, and...pay attention here...your search history. Yes, that's right, Ask becomes the second major company (and the first major search player) to lay out search history as a critical new feature of its site.

Lanzone calls the PersonalWeb the "coup de grace" of MyJeeves. "It's like creating your own web index," he told me, adding that once MyJeeves is in place, Ask has visualized "where we go from here: we have a significant roadmap around MyJeeves and we view this as a first step of a long staircase."

So, I asked, does MyJeeves save just the URL of a page, or does it archive a copy of the page, like Furl does? Well, for now, it just saves the URL, but Lanzone told me in the very near future, it will save a copy - meaning that one of my holy grails - the integration of search with perfect copies of what I've seen on the web - will soon come to pass.

But wait, there's more. Ask also announced that its anticipated desktop product, (acquired when the company purchased Tukaroo) will launch in the fourth quarter, and that it will be incorporated into the MyJeeves interface environment. That means another one of my holy grails - integrating web search with my hard drive - is also on the march at Ask. Cool.

Ask has a lot of other news packed into today's announcement. Besides MyJeeves, the company announced "version 3.0" of Teoma, its indexing technology. Ask claims improved relevance, freshness, new internationalized support, and an expanded index (more than 2 billion English web pages, climbing to 2.5 billion later in the year). Version 3 will also include caching, which is required, of course, to support the Furl-like qualities of MyJeeves.

Ask also announced "new and improved" local search, with a major score by our buddy Rich Skrenta, whose Topix.net will power local news results for Ask Local. Ask also confirmed widely reported news that Citysearch listings are now integrated into the Local index.

And lastly, as you can see from the image above, Ask's butler is back. He's been put on a diet, hit the gym, gotten a tan and scored some better clothes. Svelte, baby.

So what does this all mean? Well, this is a big deal, certainly. It marks yet another major step in the progression of search from the C prompt days of yore toward a more robust platform for navigating our increasingly complicated information-drenched lives. I only hope that Ask, A9, Furl, and all the rest keep on keeping on, and are content with singles and doubles as we move forward. There won't be any home runs for now - none of these features are big enough to warrant a Google Moment like we had in 2000-2001. However, they all point to an incredibly robust future - and by the way, a future in which personal publishing is very much integrated into search, and vice versa. Just a thought, but once a critical mass of folks are saving searches, search results, annotations, and the like, sure as shit they'll want to share them, publish them, and cite them (and sure as shit, engines will want to crawl em for relevance mojo). Just watch as search, blogging, and RSS start to feed off one another. It makes my brain hurt to think of the possibilities. But in a good way, of course....

Continue reading "News: Jeeves Stretches Out, Gets Personal" »

The industry is a-buzzin' that Terry Semel may leave Yahoo to go run Disney. Here's my prediction: No f'ing way. Or put another way: Only if he's insane. Yahoo's running on all pistons, has significant upside potential, and points toward the future. Disney, well, Disney isn't doing any of those things.

We've seen this picture before, it was called "Barry Diller Isn't Really Serious About the Internet, Is He?"

Well, turns out, he is.

H'wood is all about power, and sure, Disney is a power play. But who do you think is going to be more powerful in five or ten years, Disney, or Yahoo? A silly question five years ago, but now?

Semel made his bed when he decided to leave H'wood, and now he's sleeping very well, thank you. If he leaves, it would be a huge surprise to me, and a big mistake for him, IMHO. Leave the dinosaurs to fight over theme parks, lame network sitcoms, and bad films. Companies like Yahoo are in the pole position for the next big wave in media.

Had a nice chat Friday with Raymie Stata, of Stata Labs. Several folks reccommended I speak to him for my book, and I'm happy I did. Stata is the man behind Bloomba, a search-based email client, but he has broader ideas about where search is going, and how it will play out on the desktop and beyond.

Stata has worked at the Compaq Research Labs and the Internet Archive, among others, and he's well versed in the meta concepts of search. He points out that search is not really the big trend of the decade, it's the proliferation of data in the first place. I quite agree, search is our response to the extraordinary info-abundance in which we're all awash. Stata is particularly interested in the "my stuff" problem - integrating search into what we believe is "our" information, and designing interfaces that take that point of view out to the web.

"I see search as falling behind," Stata told me. "So much is accessible now." He continued: "I don't see how traditional search - crawl, take a 2.5 word query, and display ten results - can get much better."

Stata believes search has a user interface problem, to put it rather simply. In this space and elsewhere folks have pointed out the now careworn (among Searchblog readers, anyway) metaphor that search is the C prompt of the internet, and that the interface is due for an upgrade. "Search is a metaphor," Stata claims, one that users have come to understand, much as they understand nested folders on a computer desktop. Stata is asking, through his products and his company, what might the implications of that fact be for software?

Stata's got some interesting answers to that, but they are not yet ready for public consumption.

On Internet.com (image credit to them as well). Interesting to note that ever Sir Tim breaks the web into pre and post Google eras. Speaking on the state of the Semantic Web, he says:

I suppose it's a lot like where we were in 1992 and 1993. Back then, the Web wasn't stable, but we knew it was there and it held a lot of promise. We knew it would grow and mature, but there were a lot of things that we needed but didn't have. This was pre-Google. Around 1991, you would go on the Web to look for something that wasn't there. Today, that information is there and we can find it easily. So, I think that's where we are with the Semantic Web. We know it will mature, but we're not quite there yet.

(Thanks, Gary)

ContexAd launches today, meaning there's yet another ad network to grok. I skimmed its Terms & Conditions, as far as I can tell, this one will accept bloggers, and has less onerous terms than Google. I am waiting for word on how large their advertising network is and confirmation on the blogging acceptance deal.

The company which runs ContextAd, called ContextWeb, claims in its press release to be faster and "4-6 times" more accurate than AdSense. It's first round was funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson to the tune of $3 million. Release in extended entry.

Continue reading "YAAN: Yet Another Ad Network" »

New numbers from the IAB and PriceWatherhouseCoopers this morning on Q2 2004: Spending hit $2.37 billion, search was $1 billion of that, or 40 percent. Spending for the first half of 2004 is pegged at $4.6 billion, which means 2004 is on pace to exceed 2000 as the biggest year ever for online advertising.

Mediapost coverage.

In a (somewhat) related note, Overture will announce today that it is expanding paid search to five new markets: Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Also, the SF Chronicle gets some internal Google documents outlining plans for international expansion and frustration over cumbersome internal systems.

Over at Yahoo Search Blog, some ruminations on the popularity of Live Journal and Xanga. Hmmm...

When you think about blogs, search may not be the first thing that comes to mind. I find most blogs end up staring back at me from the browser window thanks to links from other blogs. But people search for blogs on a variety of subjects -- in the past week, we've seen over 3,000 different search terms with the word "blog" in them -- everything from "Dream Blog" to the more philosophical "What does blog mean?"

Tools that help a person establish a blog presence on the Internet are insanely popular in search. Xanga and LiveJournal are the top two spots for those looking to start a blog. Both of these services are firmly ensconced in our top 500 search terms.

Now, I've wondered for some time when Yahoo was going to up and buy a blogging site. Or start one of their own. Oh, I know, they have Geocities....but this blogging thing, it just...might...have...legs....

This MetaFilter Item was too good to pass up. A 1954 vision of the home computer, circa 2004. I mean, check out the steering wheel!! STEERING WHEEL! And all the readouts, the dials and gauges. The old dude in the three piece suit.. I love it. This has got to be a hoax...

Greg and Jeremy discuss the idea of making search a dialogue - asking the engine to listen to you as you attempt to find what you're looking for. The software might ask, as many do now for spell checking, "Did you mean...", then it would refine what it presents to you based on your input. Together you and the software can zero in on the perfect answer for you.

I've asked folks about this* in the course of my reporting on search, and always gotten the same response: It's really hard to do. Such an approach to results works particularly well with limited and/or structured data sets (ie "I see you're looking for a movie. Did you want a comedy or a drama?") but not so hot with horizontal, unstructured data.

However, that doesn't mean folks aren't working on it (or that some engines, like Teoma or AllTheWeb, don't have some solutions already, and Yahoo's "Also Try..." is close as well). The problem is that it's hard to make the choices presented relevant enough of the time - so that overall, the service is really, really useful, as opposed to often right, but often also wrong.

(*And I also asked how come it was that "Did you mean..." works so well for spell checking. Turns out it's relatively easy to write an algorithm that takes note of common misspellings and maps them to properly spelled words. The same is not true, however, for concepts.)

Slashdot: New Firefox gets to 1 million downloads in 4 days.
Cnet/NYPost: Former IE developer/current Avalon dude heads to Google. (Here's his blog).
Earlier: Bosworth leaves BEA for Google. (He'll be speaking at Web 2.0, BTW).

Update: Slashdot points out: gbrowser.com is owned by Google.

Hmmm.

...of another kind. Executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, which I've used in the past, apparently took part of its compensation for a 2001 executive search at Google in options. How they cut this deal I'd like to know, but they got 1.2 million shares at .30 each. They recently sold for $129 million. That is one lucrative search....

Forums and such are buzzing with news that Ask has major new local stuff on the way. I'm planning to talk to them Monday, will have more of a report then. For now, check out this thread over at SEW.

In my earlier post I mentioned that Amazon planned to market A9 this time round, but that they were not telling how. Now the first piece of the strategy seems to be out: Amazon is giving discounts to users of its A9 engine. I'm waiting for confirmation, but several sources claim this email to have come to A9 users from Amazon:

”[User name], since you’ve been using A9.com recently, virtually everything at Amazon.com is automatically an additional p/2% (1.57%) off for you. Collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout (it will happen whether you use the shopping cart or our 1-Click Shopping). You don’t need to do anything to get this discount except keep using A9.com as your regular search engine.

“We don’t advertise this additional discount that we give in exchange for using A9.com, so if you want your friends to know about it, please tell them. It is probably the only way they’ll find out. All they have to do is use A9.com as their regular search engine. They should make sure they are signed in to A9.com (it should be recognizing them by name) so that we can be certain they get credit for their visit.”

I didn't get one, but then again, I haven't checked my spam filters.

(hat tip to Search Engine Journal)

A hilarious send up of the Ask butler, the patrician tighty-whitey who recently has gone missing from Ask's home page in some kind of PR stunt. Not work safe, and some might argue it's racist, though I imagine that depends who's behind it, and I have no idea who that might be (the site says "Mung 2003" and is based off I-am-bored.com).

Hat tip: Beal.

The venerable newsletter bows a blog. Now *there's* some monetization, on the right side!

Joe Kraus, a co-founder of Excite, has started a blog, which will focus on lessons learned from a life of entrepreneurship. His first post is here. Joe is speaking at Web 2.0 - introducing his next company, in fact. Welcome to the personal publishing world, Joe!

Long discussed, the idea of rolling phone leads into paid search comes closer to mass market reality with FindWhat's announcement this week. From MediaPost:

Advertisers who use FindWhat.com don't even need a Web site, because the company creates business profile pages that load when users query keywords relevant to an advertisers' business. Yahoo!'s Overture offers LocalMatch, a product that makes a similar hosted contact page available to advertisers in its network.

...FindWhat.com is the first major ad network to offer the new advertising technology, which belongs to tech firm Ingenio, Inc. The FindWhat.com partnership is a major win for Ingenio, which needs distribution if pay-per-call is going to get off the ground.

But here's the interesting market data, for you infoporniacs:

According to local market research firm The Kelsey Group, 98 percent of the roughly 22 million businesses in the United States fall into the category of small- to-medium-sized enterprises--the precise targets for the local offerings of large ad networks like Google, Overture, and FindWhat.

Currently, only 350,000 advertisers participate in paid search worldwide. Tech providers and industry evangelists hope that the number is small because business owners don't advertise on the Web unless they have a site; only about 30 percent of small or medium-sized businesses have a Web site, according to Kelsey.

SFGate interviews Bill Hambrecht, whose firm was an innovator in the auction style approach that Google pursued in its IPO. Google's quiet period lifted earlier this week. Excerpts:

"That everyone who bid 85 or higher got the shares is a remarkable achievement in a world where hot issues are doled out in a favored way," (Hambrecht said)....

...Neither Hambrecht nor Corbus would disclose what the clearing price was for the entire auction, citing a confidentiality agreement with Google.

Chris Sherman gives Pluck, a kind of Furl-meets-aggregator-meets-search toolbar, a fine review over at SEW. Windows only....

It is always a happy thing when someone seems to have found their bliss, and I'm thrilled that seems so with Meg, a co-founder of Blogger who has moved on to new pursuits outside the realm of tech. Good luck, and have fun!

(thanks, BB)

Monday I went down to Palo Alto to meet with Udi Manber, CEO of A9. He wanted to show me the next release of his engine, and I was eager to see it. I knew Udi had a number of improvements up his sleeve, and tonight A9 plans to launch them. That same day, Josh Quittner, my editor at Business 2.0, asked if I wanted to write up the A9 news for his site - turns out that this time, Amazon was briefing a lot of journalists, not just one humble blogger (as they did with me in April.) Sure, I said, happy to write it up, but I don't want to write two entries - could I just post what I would have written here, over on his site, and point my readers to it? No problem, he said. So my write up is over here, on the Business 2.0 site, out on the "front porch" as Josh likes to call it, open to all. Come on back here to discuss the new engine once you've read my initial impressions.

PS - I don't write the headlines, I am afraid. Why editors can't help but focus on Google, I dunno....

Update: Stories from NYT, BusinessWeek Online, Cnet, Slashdot (where I get banged for saying A9 "raises the bar". Hey, so be it. I like the service, and if I didn't, I'd say that too.)

I'm trying very hard to write this f*ing book, my posts will remain light. However, there's much news in search land lately.

First, Yahoo bought MusicMatch.

Second, Google rolled out improvements to its Local Search - the note I received from Google PR is in the extended entry. (This space will REALLY heat up in the next few quarters). Last week it also updated its Alerts service.

Third, AOL announced a shopping search.

Fourth, Danny Sullivan takes a bow over at Yahoo Search Blog. This has provoked some commentary on whether this is getting a tad too close. I think Danny's the best, but I'd probably take a pass on this one (then again, they didn't ask!).

Continue reading "News Day..." »

ThomasB2B.com, a niche publisher, is launching an online advertising network that is focused only on the B2B marketplace and uses categories and content, rather than keywords, to drive adjacencies.

Others have taken the category route - Industry Brains, Kanoodle - but this is the first time it's been verticalized, that I am aware of. Should be interesting to watch. Story is here, in Infoworld, though I just broke IDG's lame linking policy by pointing you to it. (Incidentially, I'm told, by sources that are reliable, that IDG is reviewing the policy and has determined that it will force registration from offending linkers, as opposed to threatening lawsuits. That's progress...)

Update: This is fun: a writer at eWeek, which competes with IDG, sent me a mail saying he'd be happy for some link love, and that his employer, Ziff, won't sue me! So here you go, eWeek's story on ThomasB2B....

(Hat tip to Gary)

From yesterday. It popped Friday, up more than three bucks, on news that Fidelity owns more than 15% of the public float of the company. Here, Bloomberg says in fact it's more like 23%. That's significant institutional mojo. Hmmmm....

Gary found that Lycos UK plans to do Gmail one better and will go ahead with plans to allow its users to treat Lycos' servers as a virtual desktop. Gary's thread on the matter is here, more coverage here.

Last year I was fortunate enough to attend the first Foo, the "Friends of O'Reilly" gathering up in Sebastapol. It led to a column a few months later about how I believed the geeks were starting to once again drive innovation. Foo led to Web 2.0, in a way, and I met a whole bunch of great folks who have helped the book, this site, and the conference. Today I'm heading up there again, and I'll report again on the goings on, but on this blog, rather than in the column. This time it won't take three months...but it will probably be a bit quiet on this front till I get back. (Image tip o' the hat to Jeremy).

Toni Schneider, of OddPost fame, points me to the Blender Prototype, which is a unique approach to monetizing RSS feeds through affiliate links automatically inserted into customized RSS feeds. The prototype (caveat, it's just that, not a robust commercial implementation) uses Amazon to create related book links in your RSS feeds. Worth checking out, it points us in neat directions. As Toni points out, this idea need not be limited to books...the prototype points to my earlier post on RSS business models as context. Cool!

I'm trying it out, but so far can't get it to insert book links into my Boing Boing or Searchblog feeds. But then again, I'm probably doing something wrong...

Blender is from the guys behind Nav4, a nifty-looking contextual navigation tool.

Forrester: 92% of Ads Skipped by DVR Users.
(via I Want Media)

Q: How do we get people to use Movielink?

A: Do a deal with Howard Stern.

(image from Scientfic American - thanks ID:entity)

I am writing the final chapter of my book (no, not the last...just the last one, I'm writing them out of order, don't ask....)

In any case, I got the utterly lazyweb idea of asking all the folks I've interviewed, in particular the professional thinkers and Big Idea folks, the relatively simple question of: What might the world look like if we had perfect search?

Now, in the process of putting the book together, I've been mining my blog quite a lot, and I've noticed that the comments section is always better than my posts. As Dan says, our readers always know more.

So I thought I'd ask you guys to indulge me once again. Here's the email I sent out:

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

Battelle here, contacting you one last time about search (well, perhaps not the last, but at least I'm close.) The last chapter of my book is entitled "Perfect Search", in it I run through the many developments in search which might lead us to the Holy Grail - a perfect (or at least the best possible) answer to every question.

From the early draft, I write:

Imagine the ability to ask any question and get not just an accurate answer, but your perfect answer – an answer that suits the context and intent of your question, an answer that is informed by who you are and why you might be asking. The engine providing this answer is capable of incorporating all the world’s knowledge to the task at hand – be it captured in text, video, or audio. It’s capable of discerning between straightforward requests – who was the third president of the United States? – and more nuanced ones – under what circumstances did the third president of the United States foreswear his views on slavery?

That’s a long way from the typical search engine of today, but imagining such a service no longer falls in the realm of science fiction. It’s the stated goal of nearly major player in IT today – be it IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and scores of others.

I then go on (and on...) describing various interesting forays into creating more perfect search - domain specific, federated, semantic, personal, local, etc. etc. etc.

But the real payoff is toward the end. This is where I want to stretch out and imagine a world where perfect search exists, and conjure up the implications of such a place. What opportunities arise when knowledge can be so easily gathered? What threats? How might this change our social structures, our politics, our economy?

I am sending this note to a special set of thinkers and visionaries with whom I have conversed in the course of writing this book, and beyond. Because you have suffered me to date, I ask you to suffer me once more, so that I might gather your insight, and those of your peers, into a special section of the book.

Please accept my thanks in advance for asking this of you, any response, no matter how trivial or considered, will be most appreciated and recognized.

My best,

John

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

So, what do you think?

Andy points me to Danny's lengthy review of the trials and tribulations of SEMPO, an organization founded at Danny's August 2003 SEW conference to further the search marketing industry. I was at that event, and as they announced it, I wondered if they could ever agree on anything, from a code of ethics for SEM/SEO members, to how the board would work, to dues. Well, the truth is, no, they have had some trouble.

The organization is a reflection of the scattered and still immature state of the search marketing industry. When I was researching my "Search Economy" chapter I contacted the group and asked them why they did not have a standards or principles policy, something that all members would agree to. Given the sometimes shady practices in SEM/SEO (link farms, etc.) I figured this would have been a no brainer. (No one responded to me - though with authors this happens a lot, and I didn't take it as a sign of anything at the time.) In his post, Danny brings this up, and notes SEMPO is reviewing the issue. I'd strongly urge them to act. They don't have to police the world, that's not the point. The point is, whoever joins SEMPO, agrees to act by some basic fair play rules. That's not policing, that's common sense. It'll be good for the industry, good for SEMPO, and good for search.

Andrew Goodman also has some words on this here....

Well, so far, no response from Mike at Google, save what I updated in the previous post. I did just now get an answer to my tech question, in two days - not bad for a company with millions of such questions, I guess. Long and short: It sometimes takes up to 48 hours for Google to index new posts.

In the meantime, readers have pointed me to many sites with non-compliant wording above their AdSense ads, including at least one that has "Paying the Bills" as its header, just as I did. I'm not going to name them, as that might get them busted too. I have also learned, through reputable sources, that Mike from Google is in fact a person, though clearly he's employing cut and paste email forms.

Which makes me wonder about consistency with a service as vast as AdSense. The site with the same offending title as mine has clearly been around a long time, but I got dinged in the first 24 hours of life. Why? I doubt there's any clear answer to that, and that, for a company which prides itself on algorithmic distance and evenhandedness, is an inconsistency that should be addressed.

One last note: As predicted by many of my pals, from my reports, it doesn't seem like my site is ideal for AdSense. The ads don't change much and focus on the same thing - blogging and ad networks, for the most part. Why don't more SEM/SEO companies show up, I wonder? The endemic advertisers seem unable to find me. Ah well, we'll see how it goes....

UPDATE: Was contacted today (Friday the 10th) by a real person at Google, Joel, who was very nice and had this to say:

I apologize for not getting in touch with you sooner.

I can assure you, your case was handled by a human being. In order to
protect our publishers by keeping a high quality of network as well as
protecting our advertisers interests, we take all of our policy violations
seriously. Because we have such a large volume of publishers, it is hard to
negotiate minor infractions and we sometimes give somewhat robotic replies.
We are constantly working on improving how we handle these cases. And yes,
we are also scrutinizing our policies to make sure we are doing what is best
for our advertisers, web publishers and the viewers of these ads.

With regards to labeling ads, we could not have an open ended policy that
only restricts certain language around the ads. Instead, we have come up
with a short list of allowed language. Unfortunately, "Paying the bills" is
not one of them. For your readers that would like to support you, this
brings attention to the fact that if they click on the ads they will help
you pay your bills. This can quite possibly lead to readers clicking just
because they want to make you money, with no interest in what is on the
other side of the link. This is not good for our advertisers or the AdSense
network as a whole.

Nice to get the human touch. Thanks, Google.

It's hard to know, as a Mac user, what to think about the software world these days. Many innovations are, understandably, only built for Windows. But wasn't the web supposed to change all that, make OSes secondary, less relevant? Problem is, if you have to download client software, folks don't like writing for the Mac's tiny installed base. But the folks who do use the Mac have always been early adopters and influencers, at least, that what Nat Torkington points out. I noticed in his post that I was the only person among a very long list of very smart geeks (caveat: I consider myself unqualified for those modifying adjectives, as well as the noun) who he reads who blogged either FareChase or Picasa. Why? Because all the others use Mac OSX, and can't use those services. Interesting point. I blog those services because I sense my readers might be interested in them. But alpha geeks only blog that which they can touch.

Well, Day one with AdSense has been a learning experience, but that's why I decided to try it, right? Noontime brought this email into my box from Google:

Subject: Google AdSense - Program Policies

Mike
The Google Team

Hmmm, I thought to myself. Was "Paying the Bills" really encouragement? So I replied:

I'm not encouraging anything. I'm clearly labeling the commercial area of my site as such. It's my voice and my site. I politely request you take another look at this and think about it in context of the site, and review your request.

I then thought about it some more, and added:

And besides, there is no consistency on other sites. Over at Fred's blog (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/), he calls your stuff "Google Adsense" which is neither "Sponsored Links" nor is it "Advertisements". Can I do that?

Came the rather robotic reply:

Hello John,

Mike
The Google Team

Yikes! I had now gotten my buddy Fred in trouble (and I was not "in compliance," which I think means I'm not getting paid...). This sucks! So I shot off this (most likely too strongly worded) missive:

"Mike":

John

No response so far, though, as you probably have noticed, I *DID* change the title over on the right to "Sponsored Links." Why? Couple reasons. One, I don't want my AdSense learnings to end in one just day, and second, well, I thought maybe if I showed them *I* can compromise, they'll in fact review my request and be open to my wording, and then I'll change it back. After all, I suppose I am in technical violation of their policy, as stated here:

Incentives

Web pages may not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. This includes encouraging users to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as "click here," "support us," "visit these links," or other similar language that could apply to any ad, regardless of content.

I guess "Paying the Bills" does "apply to any ad". Anyway. It's not that it's such a big deal, it's that ... well...my interaction so far has made me feel like Google doesn't really understand who I am, or what my site is about. And that, as I have mused in the past, is what is wrong with most ad networks in the first place.

Lastly, I also sent a technical email to the AdSense folks late last night, as some of the ads are not showing up on my permalink pages. No response on that so far...

Net net, my AdSense experience to date has been less than good. But I'm optimistic it will get better. I've read many posts about folks grumping that AdSense is inflexible, and now I kind of understand what they're talking about. On the other hand, I grok why Google must have policies in place - and why allowing exceptions is difficult. Sometimes, however, it's the policy that must change.

In any event, this is great fun, learning what it's like to be an AdSense publisher. Can't wait for the next response!

UPDATE: Got a response, which makes me quite convinced that I'm talking to a robot:

Hello John,

Mike
The Google Team

Thanks for all the comments. Yes, I should be nicer, and yes, I should realize I'm dealing with the front line troops here. Will do.

Now granted, I might have my own rather biased reasons to beat a tired old horse, but really, Loosely Coupled nails it in this post about IDG's deep linking policies. They are blunt, dumb, and tone deaf. I understand that there may be cases where others are making hay off your content and you have to respond (I deal with this from time to time at Boing Boing), but this policy is not the answer.

In short, IDG's policy states: You may not link to our site if you sell ads on your site or you charge a subscription fee to use or access your site. So I just broke the policy by linking to them, I guess, now that I take AdSense. Loosley Coupled notes they've broken the policy about 1,000 times. In this world of personal media, its nothing short of ridiculous to ask folks to NOT link to your content. It's suicide.

(Thanks, Dan)

Today Google is celebrating its sixth year with a modified logo. It's a milestone for any company, but a major one for an internet play. This year marks Yahoo's tenth birthday, and Ask's eighth, and AOL's...er...well AOL is like 20 something now. We're getting grayer...congrats Google.

Well that didn't take long! Not a month after I (sort of) broke the story that Yahoo bought travel search engine FareChase, its going live with a first iternation of yahoo.farechase.com/.

Mind you, this will not be live until tonight, and is a "prototype," so Yahoo wants you all to break it for them, then tell them what you broke, thank you very much.

From the note from Yahoo's PR folk: "The prototype will enable Yahoo! to conduct research to determine the best way to deliver a more comprehensive and relevant online travel search user experience. During the test phase, users can provide the critical feedback necessary for developing an effective travel search engine."

Unfortunately, I can't test this, as it's limited (for now) to Windows systems.

Now, once again, with gusto: what do you think the state of play is between Yahoo and their current travel partner, Travelocity? Rather like Yahoo and Google before Yahoo brought search inhouse?

Noticed that Google is pushing Picasa in advertisements at the bottom of all image searches. Seems like a rather tentative approach, IMHO. Clearly he who gets metadata attached to photos first, wins. Stewart, what do you think of all this?

As you may have noticed by now (or sometime soon, as servers update), Searchblog has a new look. While I'd like to take all the credit for this (I will take all the blame), all due plaudits go to Scot Hacker, my webmaster, who rocks. (If any of you want amazing hosting with truly personal service, you should check out birdhouse.org). In any case, Scot suggested my color scheme was getting a bit tired, so we spruced it up with the new greens. Also, we went to three columns, which I rather like.

Speaking of green, you will notice my great Searchblog Ad Experiment has begun. I am starting, after listening to a lot of your input, with the easiest and most ubiquitous solution of them all, AdSense. I expect to try this out for a while as a level set, then try others as we go along. AdSense does not allow you to place any other kinds of ads besides AdSense on the page (except for hand rolled sponsorships), but others will, so I'm starting with AdSense and moving to the others - I expect to try out MarketBanker, BlogAds, and Kanoodle, if they'll have me.

Yes, I was worried about accepting checks from Google even while writing the book, but the fact is, I'm not really expecting to make a lot of money here, and the firsthand experience will allow me to write about this stuff in a more thoughtful manner. If the money comes in faster than my expenses running the site, I will be donating a significant portion of it to my favorite charity: My kids' school, where I am a trustee.

Thanks to all who helped me grok this move, and supported it. And please, send feedback on the new look, and whether the ads are bumming you out, to the comments below or, alternatively, to my email at jbat at battellemedia dot com.

Those of us who've lived around the Valley for some time know of the correlation between autism, Asperger's syndrome (called autism's "milder cousin") and geek culture. The connection has been the subject of lengthy pieces in both Wired and Time.

One of the principle characteristics of autism is what might be called face blindness, the inability to "read" people's faces for emotional cues (resulting in what most would call anti-social behavior). This and other Asberger-like traits have often clothed the body of geek culture in our popular culture - the tireless focus, the need to classify and order everything, to control and to name, to identify and to sort, to count and compute.

These observations were percolating in the back of my mind as I read Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," one of the few books which has been universally recommended to me, and honestly, one of the very few non-search related reads I've allowed myself as my deadline looms.

The novel chronicles, through the voice of a young autistic boy, the murder of a neighborhood dog and the resulting human fallout. But even as I was enjoying what seemed to be a non-work related escape, the author, in the voice of the autistic boy, describes how his memory works.

My memory is like a film. That is why I am really good at remembering things....when people ask me to remember something I can simply press Rewind and Fast Forward and Pause....
...this is how I recognize someone if I don't know who they are. I see what they are wearing, or if they have a walking stick, or funny hair, or a certain type of glasses, or they have a particular way of moving their arms, and I do a Search through my memories to see if I have met them before.

He goes on, giving examples of how he uses Search to deal with everyday situations - helping someone who is having an epileptic fit, or understanding the nuance of a idiomatic phrase.

For example, if people say things which don't make sense, like, "See you later, Alligator," or "You'll catch your death in that," I do a Search and see if I have ever heard someone say this before.

In essence, the boy is describing his mind as something akin to an index of experience through which he searches.

I'm not entirely sure why, but this really hit home with me, after a year or so of interacting with the engineers and mathematicians who drive innovation in search. It's not that, as a group or even as individuals, the geniuses behind search are autistic. But as a culture, and in particular, as a product, search certainly can be understood to be face blind in the very least - unaware and/or unable to discern the cues we as users give it.

And there is a certain...coldness to search, an aloof, detached, and passionless side to it, where all things which can be indexed, are indexed, and a certain arrogance with regard to those things or people who don't understand how to retrieve that which is in the index.

I can't put my finger on it in this passage, nor will I try any more than I have, but, in the end, this is why we read novels, to feel that which otherwise we might not even notice.

As David Weinberger notes. In particular, the Dewey Decimal System has inherent religious biases. I've done some research on Mr. Dewey as part of my book, and he was quite the bigot, it appears.

I wonder, 100 years from now, when folks are writing the history of indexes like Google and Yahoo, what biases will emerge?

For the book, I've been reporting the Google IPO story for what feels like years, so I expected there to be some tick tocks (journalist jargon for minute by minute accounts of an event) once the thing finally occured. Here's the first (at least that I've seen), from CBSMW via IBD. Nothing that surprising in here, lot of whinging from bankers, early investors, and a few tasty morsels from the folks at Playboy, who claim Google did not try to get them to pull the article. But if you're a GOOG junkie...

UPDATE: Apparently the link was changed and now does not work, CBSMW has it here.

Geico's trademark infringement suit against Google and Yahoo has cleared a legal hurdle, and will proceed to trial, barring settlement.

Interesting commentary on the basis of the case to be had over at Techdirt:

As long as the ads in question don't try to trick users into believing that they are Geico, there's no trademark infringement. It's no different than trying to get yourself on the same super market shelf as a more popular brand. You want to be in the same place when someone is looking for your competitor. If anything, Geico should be focusing on specific ads that confuse users into believing that the ads are for Geico instead of a competitor. Speaking of which, Google and Overture should have nothing to do with this case. They're not the ones who created the ads, but are simply the vehicle for delivering them. If Geico has a problem with the ads, they should be suing the advertiser in question.

Cnet's coverage:

The unpublicized Aug. 25 decision by Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia delivered a blow to the two Internet search giants in their efforts to defend ad sales of trademarks as fair use. It could also ultimately threaten their livelihood: Google and Overture make money by selling ads linked to keyword-triggered search results, and many commercially driven searches are tied to trademarked brands such as Geico or Nike.

Judge Brinkema denied Google and Overture's motion to dismiss six charges brought by Geico, which alleged that the search companies' use of its name to trigger search-related advertisements was trademark infringement, unfair competition and dilution of its marks...

Doug Cutting reminds me that his Nutch open source engine is powering a beta version of Creative Commons search. This is a great example of a domain specific search application, in this case, the engine crawls and indexes all CC licensed sites and lets you find stuff by how you might want to use it. As Doug points out, there's no way the Creative Commons could have built an engine like this had it not been for open source. Cool....

Again with the Web 2.0 plug, forgive me, but this has been an obsession lately.

As you may recall earlier I posted about the Web 2.0 lineup and asked for feedback on potential workshops. Well, I'm very pleased to say you really responded and we've got 10 already lined up, and they are truly amazing. They'll run from the morning of the first day up till the main sessions start. From the Web 2.0 site:

Web 2.0's workshops are designed to be conversations, not lectures. Each is led by a moderator with expertise in the workshop topic, but no formal presentations will be given. Instead, the workshop will address open questions and explore the latest developments in each of these very Web 2.0 subjects.

The subjects include:

RSS: Syndication Strategies and Business Models
Dick Costolo, CEO, Feedburner

Journalism 2005: A New Era for Newsmakers
Dan Gillmor, Columnist, San Jose Mercury News

Design for Web 2.0 Business
Jeff Veen, Partner, Adaptive Path
Jason Kottke, kottke.org

Consumer IS The King: Going Direct To Consumer For Revenues
Rafat Ali, Editor/Publisher, Paid Content

Emerging Democracy: Building API's Into Government
Zack Rosen, Co-Founder and Director, CivicSpace Labs

Lightweight Business Models
Marc Canter, CEO, Broadband Mechanics
Jason Fried, 37signals

eBay for Businessfolk
(Moderator TBD)

Dialing on the App Tone: How the Early Web OS is Shaping Up
Stewart Butterfield, President, Ludicorp

Enterprise Social Software
Ross Mayfield, CEO, Social Text

Publishing 2.0
Christopher J. Alden, Co-Founder & CEO, Rojo Networks, Inc.

In addition, we've got at least half a dozen new companies and/or major products that will be debuting at the conference, including from Bill Gross, Kim Polese, Chris Alden, Michael Weiss, Joe Kraus and some soon to be announced. I hope to see you there!

Yesterday I hung out with Chris Alden, a founder of the original Red Herring who has moved his focus to publishing in a Web 2.0 world (in other words, a fellow traveler). He's putting the finishing touches on a new publishing platform/feed reader called Rojo (think "mojo") that he and his team have been working on for quite some time now. It's moved into invitation-only beta recently, and he gave me a tour. I liked it quite a bit. Think of it as a second-generation RSS aggregator with some subtle social networking, recommendation, and republishing juice.

Chris has asked me to not give away the store, but he plans on introducing the company and its product in full at Web 2.0 in the workshop sessions (more on those in a subsequent post). Chris said he'd try let as many Searchbloggers as he could handle into the beta, so if you're interested, head to the site and submit your email.

Beal's company is launching a SEM conference in Raleigh, NC later in October. Sounds like a great place to learn the ins and outs of a booming and critical business...

Steve Ballmer is on a mission to beat Google. This article summarizes a speech he gave in Massachusetts. His main focus: MSFT is "Hell-bent" to lead in search. "I see a world of incredible possibility and opportunity," in the online ad biz, he added.

As I've noted elsewhere, MSFT is quite focused on search, and while Longhorn seems a far way off, this is a long term game. When they feel challenged, they respond. The decision to clean up their act with regard to paid inclusion, which probably cost them tens of millions in near term revenues, is a good indication of this.

Over at the Yahoo Blog, they posted some zeitgeist (sorry Yahoofolk, but it's a good word) showing that people want to know about the Bush twins and the Kerry girls. Now...I hear the Bush sisters blew their speech. Like father....anyway, anyone know of a video of it out there anywhere?

An update from the WSJ (paid sub) on the Great Chinese Firewall, quoting the China Internet project I played a small role in starting at Berkeley. The piece includes a list of keywords that are banned in China, a list that was first published by the China Digital News blog we launched last year.

It's interesting to note how critical search is to the process of censorship in China and other countries. From the WSJ article:

The research project by the three universities, known as the OpenNet
Initiative, routed requests through computers in China to Google, Yahoo
and Chinese search engines Baidu.com, in which Google Inc. is an
investor, and Yisou.com, which is owned by Yahoo Inc. Searches with
sensitive terms like "Falun," for the Falun Gong spiritual movement that
is banned in China, or "Free Tibet" were routinely cut off, without
sending back an error message, the report says.

The result, the foreign researchers say, is that the Internet in China
is very different from the relatively unfettered medium enjoyed in the
West, with implications for the creation of a seamless world- wide Web
of communications.
Mr. Zittrain says Saudi Arabia, for example, vigorously polices the
Internet in that nation, but unlike China, Saudi authorities make public
their general criteria for banning Web sites.

The banned list includes:
-- Democracy
-- Christian
-- Falun Gong
-- Hu Jintao
-- Human rights
-- Multiparty
-- Oppose corruption
-- Underground church
-- Overthrow
-- Prostitution
-- Riot
-- Sex
-- Taiwan independence
-- Tiananmen
-- Traitor

Update:Wow - CDN got Slashdotted....

One of my favorite pieces on the future of the web is Paul Ford's "August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web." (You haven't read it? Go read it! Now!)

He's at it again: Ford's just posted a new riff entittled The Banality of Google. Clearly, Ford is a teeny weeny bit sick of all the Google talk. From the piece:

Of course, you don't arrive at a morally profound motto like “don't be evil” without some serious thought. Here are some of the mottoes that Google tried out and rejected:
• Google! Dance with the devil, but go home before it gets serious.
• Google! We won't commit genocide in most circumstances.
• Google! Don't eat no babies.
• Google! We could do good, but we're like, whoa.
• Google! Begone, demon!

A fun mid morning break from whatever serious sh*t you're dealing with today....