John Battelle's Searchblog

I'm off early Saturday to Florida, visiting relatives, giving a talk, hanging with my family, and focusing on writing. So Searchblog is taking a week off, save the occasional drop in to clean up comment spam, or to note major news (like Google buying Microsoft, or something). I'll be back at it, sunburned, rested, and ready, next weekend. If you need me, drop a line at jbat at battellemedia dot com. (Yes, I've already voted, and I hope you all will as well!).

Interesting speculation from David Weinberger on what Keyhole might mean if mixmashed with the Google Browser rumors.

It would not be a Web browser. It'd be a world browser. It would find pages on the Web, of course, but it'd also find the ones on my desktop (Google desktop). It would know about my email (Gmail). It would know that my own photos are categorically different from all the other jpgs on the planet (Picasa). It would let me browse the physical earth (Keyhole) and show on a map the documents that talk about any particular place (Keyhole + Google Local).

And it wouldn't be just a browser. It would let me work with the information I've found: Manage my photos (Picasa), manage my desktop files, translate documents (Google Languages), shop...

Pleased to report that Joe and Graham's JotSpot, which launched at Web 2.0, has nearly 3000 beta users since launch, and is really starting to take off.

Silicon Beat has an overview of a recent talk given by Ram Shriram, early Google investor and Board member.

-- It’s all in the grooming. Shriram set out to made sure Page & Brin hired only the very best, or “A” people. He cited the well-known Silicon Valley tenet: Hire only A people, and they’ll hire other A people. If you hire the B person, they’ll hire C or D people. Someone asked a good question: How did Shriram decide who are a so-called “A” people? Grooming is a part of it. “I try to find out who their mothers are,” he said. If they are raised well, they’re more likely to make good citizens, employees and entrepreneurs.

Google is famous for their hiring practices, it's apparently not a picnic to get hired there, and they clearly are looking for very specific things. Russell Beattie, who is pretty well known for his chops in the mobile space, writes from the heart about his decision to bail on the whole Google hiring process. Interesting to see how Google is being viewed by those who might join it.

Jerry Yang on the future of search over in Yahoo's Search Blog. Nothing mind blowing here, save it's sure nice to see Jerry blogging.

Ten years ago, we were focused on a simple yet vast problem: finding better ways to aggregate and organize information so people can find it. Today, the challenge is different. On the one hand, there's a lot more information to aggregate and it's not just more in terms of quantity; there's a larger variety of content as well -- from products and images to news and business information. In addition, we're pulling content from more sources than ever before.

That's what is exciting about where we are today. Search as a problem is still far from being solved. The user is in the driver's seat: they want an experience that is increasingly personal, more relevant, and ties into their task more integrally. Search is just a way to get that integrated experience, but it's all about what the users want - when they want it, how they want it, and who they want it from.

Fundrace: Now this is what I call geolocation search. Search for contributors in your area to either Democrats or Republicans. All based on public records. Powerful stuff.

Update: Gary posts and points to this site as well as others...

Hat tip: Metafilter.

For some odd reason I find the Yellow Pages interesting, always have. There's something about them that just reeks of...opportunity. Apparently Google agrees. They inked a deal with BellSouth's Yellow Pages unit, a deal which let's BellSouth resell AdWords. In other words, this is a new strategy for Google - BellSouth is the first ever company to have rights to resell Google's AdWords. If it works, it may have far reaching implications.

So why did they do it? Local, local, local. It's very hard to sell AdWords to plumbers. The Yellow Pages have reps who already sell ads to them. It's all about the trenches in the Local market.

I've covered the YP before, here and here and here.

Release in extended entry. Also, see SEW coverage.

Continue reading "It's Hard to Sell Ads to Plumbers" »

Dave Dorman is a hoot to talk with. Who else would call his competitors a "leper colony"?
This interview is in this month's Business 2.0.

TITANS OF TECH
Dorman's Calling
The CEO of AT&T is on a mission to restore his company to greatness. His plan: Use the Internet to unplug the competition.

By John Battelle, November 2004 Issue

Is David Dorman a telecom lifer or a startup survivor? In truth, he's both. He started out working at Sprint, then became CEO of Pacific Bell, where he created the first regional-phone-company Internet service provider. He then took a detour into the dotcom world, where he led PointCast, a much-hyped "push" technology company, until shortly before it went under. Chastened, he returned to the business he knew best: telecom.

But as it turned out, someone who'd tried out an untested new business model was exactly who Ma Bell would need. When Dorman joined AT&T (T) in late 2000, then-CEO Michael Armstrong held a grand vision for integrating what Dorman calls the "magic five" -- local, long distance, high-speed data, wireless, and video. But things didn't turn out as planned. Instead of reigning over a vast telecom empire, Dorman ended up leading AT&T through the most perilous period in its 127-year history. Teetering finances forced Armstrong to divest wireless and cable. Factor in a recent regulatory decision that Dorman claims left him no choice but to abandon AT&T's residential phone business -- which represents about 25 percent of the company's revenue -- and it's no wonder Wall Street is tepid about AT&T's prospects.

Dorman responds by pointing out that AT&T is the clear leader in providing networking to Fortune 500 companies, and, he says, his competitors are in shambles. More intriguing, he has a strategy to put AT&T back on top.

It's clear that Dorman grasps the disruptive nature of the Internet. Right now the Net is changing voice -- Dorman really lights up when you ask him about CallVantage, AT&T's voice-over-IP service. But at some point, it could lead to video-over-IP, a potential competitor to cable. Add it all up -- the old long-distance and high-speed data businesses, CallVantage, a new wireless play, maybe even video -- and Dorman may be rebuilding AT&T into the company he once thought he would lead, one magic-five application at a time.

When you announced you were leaving the residential telephone business, your share price dropped. Why do you think the markets reacted negatively?

We don't have to have residential telephone business to be a successful company. So many of the stories I've seen say, "They're going to go away. It's over."

That question's on my list here ...

This is a $30 billion company, and consumer is $8 billion of that. I've got the best business-services franchise in the world. And I've got a leper colony of competitors. We know what MCI's been through. Sprint -- they're a wireless company, just ask them. And you look at the rest of the guys -- Qwest (Q), XO Communications, Wiltel, Level 3. Is a major company like Citigroup (C) or J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM) going to bet on someone like that vs. going with us?

Your industry has not covered itself in glory these past five years -- MCI, for starters.

You know something people didn't understand? A big part of Tyco's (TYC) value was TyCom -- an optical network. And Enron had $30 billion-plus of its market cap based on its broadband-trading business. So the three biggest frauds in American history had a direct impact on telecom. Add Qwest and Global Crossing, and we had five major catastrophes in the industry. AT&T didn't cause that; we just have to deal with the aftermath.

Must be fun to be a telecom CEO.

It was a great thing 10 years ago. We're in a cycle. The most frustrating, gut-wrenching thing for me is, I can't tell you how long the cycle's going to last. But the overcapacity will get reconciled. If we didn't have Qwest fighting for its life and MCI fighting for its life, prices would stabilize.

(more in extended entry...read on, it's a fun one)

Continue reading "Biz 2 Column: Dave Dorman" »

Just off the phone with John Hanke, former CEO of Keyhole, now GM of the Keyhole unit of Google. We spoke about the implications of Keyhole's acquisition. A few things stand out.

First and foremost, Keyhole is in the Holy Crap That's A Lot of Data business - that alone is reason for Google to be interested. Their database stands at 12 terabytes and growing. It covers more than 50 percent of the earth's population, and includes satellite imagery, mapping data, topographic overlays, and, pay attention here, geolocation-based content tags. In fact, in his presentation at Web 2.0, Hanke showed an application, which he called geoblogging, which allows folks to fly around Keyhole's data and annotate various things they see. "They identify a spot, then talk about it, upload pictures they took there, whatever," Hanke told me. "That then becomes an icon, a point in the Keyhole database" that others can view and comment upon. (Want to check it out? Head here.)

The idea is to bring the Force of the Many and the Architecture of Participation(caveat, PDF download) to a visualization of the earth. Jaw dropping yet? But wait, there's more. Hanke also showed the overlay of real time traffic information from third party sources, like the CalTrans traffic feed. Mapping data to geography will allow for multitudes of such applications. Imagine Google scaling Keyhole to all web surfers for free, and then opening up the APIs for all to develop on.

Yowza.

Hanke told me that when he started Keyhole he and his team had a dream of building a revolutionary product that "touched millions and millions of people." Reality intervened as the bubble burst and resources became dear. But with Google now in the picture, that dream is once again alive, Hanke says. "We could have remained an independent company," he told me. "But the power of the Google brand, the infrastructure..." Not to mention, Hanke added, Google's mission, which fits nicely with Keyhole's.

Will Google let Hanke realize his dream, and keep doing all the cools things Keyhole was attempting to do? I asked Hanke if it'd be a fair assumption to make that he'd only sell his company to someone who shared his passions and his dreams. His response? Yup, that's a fair assumption.

NB: Gary notes in his post that there are other players in this field, notably TerraFly. Take note, Yahoo....

Hat tip: Jeremy for blogging the conference, thanks.

Yahoo announced a "new suite of services for the mobile user" today. More details, head here.
Release is in extended entry.

Continue reading "Yahoo Mobilizes" »

One of the most jaw dropping presentations at Web 2.0 was by the folks at Keyhole, who have some amazing technology for manipulating satellite images of the earth. The images are incredible, but the implications of their tech is what makes your jaw drop. In short, the application seems to turn the world into a searchable visualization. Hmmm.

Today, Google purchased them. More soon. Release in extended entry.

Continue reading "Google Buys Keyhhole: Mapping Ho" »

The inestimable Gary Price noodled around the MSN search preview site and found something he probably wasn't supposed to. The page has since been taken down, but Gary has screen shots (here and here too) and a summary of the MSN search interface he found there. Good work Gary!

...what I found most interesting, an option to use three "sliders" to manipulate the ranking of pages. In other words, add or reduce the weight of certain ranking factors. Some might even call it personalization since the results I see might be different than the ones someone else views for the identical search.
The sliders are labeled:
+ Updated recently--Static
+ Very popular--Less popular
+ Approximate match--Exact match

Sure, Mary Meeker raised her target on GOOG recently, which her company Morgan Stanley helped take public, but she's seen the future of search, and there's a lot of blogging in it. From her October "Update on the Digital World" (caveat: PDF download):

The Internet has become a leading source for news and information over the past decade, but we believe the emerging acceptance (by users and publishers) of Web content syndication services will drive even broader / deeper usage of the Internet as an increasingly relevant news and information medium. We see three factors that are combining to drive momentum: 1) rising usage of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) by content providers as a standard distribution platform for online content; 2) ramp in the creation of blogs and other user-generated content; and 3) Yahoo!’s easy-to-use integration of RSS feeds (including blogs) that was rolled out in beta to its distribution channel of 25MM+ My Yahoo! users in late September.

...And if there are hundreds or thousands of thought leaders and motivated, interested parties on the Internet with the ability to publish news or insights into any number of local or global issues, then it is safe to say that these blogs often become both the first source of news, a vital proving ground for authors and a source of potential community for other interested parties. For example, you’re probably going to get far more Boston Red Sox specific-content from a blog about the Red Sox made by a die-hard fan than you will from a random sports page, especially if you’re after opinions and community.

Mary then goes on to note that with blogs, the Power of the Tail comes into play (see Tim and my presentation regarding this and other trends at Web 2.0):

The mainstreaming of Web syndication technology such as RSS through easy-to-use and popular services such as My Yahoo! could create a new business model / revenue stream for companies such as Yahoo!, as well as independent freelance Web journalists / content providers. We believe that blogs represent the traditionally hard-tomonetize tail of content, and the barriers to monetization are slowly being overcome. ... By integrating blogs with search, and by making it easy for end-users to find and add blogs, Yahoo! is playing a key role in driving blog readership and RSS usage among endusers.

Meeker then shows us another chart, which makes the "more music, less Britney" point:

This is another way of saying that the internet lets thousands of "bands" flourish, each supported by their own economies of scale.

Which is why I'm interested in and excited by Feedburner, Kanoodle, AdBrite (recently renamed from MarketBanker), and the like. In her report, Mary talks a bit about the potential for all this to mean money to someone (after all, she's a Wall St. analyst) and she concludes:

We believe syndication technology is one of the tools that through a virtuous cycle should propel Internet leaders such as Yahoo! further into the forefront of all media, albeit slowly and steadily. High-quality, unique, and cutting-edge content is critical for the growth of any medium. We believe advertising and fees for syndicated content present a potential business opportunity for the Internet leaders and content providers.
...We would like to think that the popularization of syndicated content could further fulfill some promise of an engaging, useful and vibrant user-generated medium on the Internet. This does not suggest the endof mass media, either broadcast or narrowcast, but it could represent significant changes in consumption andmonetization. If the Internet is a marketplace of ideas, then the best ideas should float to the top, with traditional mass media perhaps serving as a tool for legitimizing/establishing discourse. The driver for Yahoo!, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com’s Internet successes has been their never-ending quest tocreate the perfect, seamless user experience—in other words, they do right by their users. What open syndication shows is that by doing right by their users and independent publishers, they also have the potential ability to do right by investors, in our view.

I think Mary outlines trends in this space well, her report is a must read for all of you interested in the business implications of blogging. Her conclusion: This blogging thing, it got legs. And that's a fine way to end my 1,000th post here on Searchblog.

Caveat: Totally off topic (sort of).

For some reason, I grow uneasy if I have more than ten emails unanswered in my inbox. I'll stay at my computer late, I'll forego creature comforts, if it means I can get the message queue down to ten or less before I sleep.

Lately this has become difficult, as the number of fun and/or important time requests, or reads/groks/responds, or emails that force other actions have risen to the point where my inbox often demands more of me than I can reasonably give.

A quick spin through my inbox reveals: A great paper to read from a colleague; I can't respond to him till I read it, so it stays in my queue. There's an appointment to book when I next go to New York, and a Very Important Person who's emailed me wondering if we're on. But I can't confirm till I get an email from someone else, so...it stays in the queue. A voicemail from another New Yorker (I get vmail as email, thanks to VOIP), which I can't delete till I call them back, and it's too late to call, so the email stays in the queue. There's an invitation to a breakfast panel, but I am attempting to limit my time now, as it's All About the Book. Still, the person asking is great, and I would very much like to be in the company of smart people, it always proves fun and worth the time. I can't make up my mind, so ... the email stays in the queue. There are three comments from smart Searchbloggers, each with valid and interesting points which merit followup, but they require that I think, and think judiciously, and it's late, and my kids are home so... their email stays in the queue. And so on. I'm down to 15, but I can't seem to kill the last five....

Am I insane? Does anyone else manage their life this way? More to the point... does anyone have a better way?

PS - This is post #999 of Searchblog. Cool!

Or is Shopping.com going to pop on its own accord? It priced at the top of the range today...and will trade shortly. Lead underwriter: Goldman. Ticker symbol: SHOP.

Shopping.com's IPO priced 6.87 million shares at $18 per share, the underwriter said. Earlier in the day, the company raised the expected price range of the offering to $16 to $18 per share from $14 to $16 per share.

Note that back in March, when they filed (wow, back in March!) I pegged this as a search IPO....

More on the IPO at IPOHome:

Shopping.com is the largest online comparison and consumer reviews shopping service in the U.S. with more than 20 million users per month. It is also the fourth largest online shopping destination behind only eBay (EBAY), Amazon (AMZN) and Yahoo!, and it now comes to market with a track record of growth and earnings. Over the last three years, annual revenue increased from $13 million in 2001 to $67 million in 2003. More importantly, losses have turned into earnings with 2003 marking its first full year of profitability both on a GAAP and proforma basis. For the twelve months ended June 30 2004, the company generated almost $16 million in operating cash flow (or EBITDA) on $84 million in total revenue.

Also: Hoovers and Gary.

It will be very interesting to see if this pops like GOOG did. If it does, I'd warrant it's frustrated wanna be GOOG investors, who didn't get in on that gravy train, jumping on this one... just in case. This does not feel right to me. On the other hand, it feels...familiar.

UPDATE: It popped, yup it did.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, says they won't build a browser.

But still some Slashdotters see a browser under Google's bed, after grokking this Mozillanews.org story. What if...well...what if they don't build a browser, but rather, well, lease one from Mozilla?

The juicy bits:

...after weeks of analysis, this is where we think Gbrowser is headed.

There are other, extra-browser features that will most likely come with it, and tie into the browser, such as Google Desktop Search, Picasa (with links to the browser for web-related sharing, searching, etc.), and Google Toolbar features that IE users currently enjoy...

Yahoo and Adobe announced a partnership to incorporate Yahoo search into Adobe products. The most important part of this? What SEW Blog noted Tim Cadogan saying in the AP Story:

For San Jose-based Adobe, the partnership will add online features to one of the software maker's core products, Acrobat. The program is used by more than 500 million people and has become a common format for viewing documents over the Web and in e-mail attachments.

"We call it being available at the point of inspiration," said Tim Cadogan, Yahoo's vice president of search.

In other words, search is breaking out of its box, so to speak, and moving into applications far and wide. This will not be the last such announcement you hear in this vein.

Hat tip: SEWBlog.

CBSMW: Google market cap is now larger than Yahoo's.

Hat tip: Andy.

Many of you may recall my comments in the past about RSS and business models, I've brought the topic up a lot over the past few months. More than half of many blogs' traffic comes from RSS, and most of that traffic is blind - we don't know who is reading or why, or how much. Also, unless you stick ad postings onto your site (a practice I'm not really into), none of that traffic sees your sponsors or advertising, should you have any. Net net, not a great business model for serious publishers.

Feedburner is an application that promises to change at least some of that. (Dick Costolo, the CEO, had been a prince helping me set it up. He's the guy who co-led our RSS Business Models workshop at Web 2.0). I'm playing with it starting this weekend. For every second post over 50 words, Feedburner will burn in an Amazon advertisement. If anyone actually buys something from clicking on those ads, I get a few coppers in my affiliate account. Loyal Searchblog RSS readers don't have do do anything to see this new feature, it happens automatically.

Again, as with the advertising on the upper right of the site itself, I am not doing this to get rich (any profits made will be given to schools), but to learn about the options and get smarter on the whole new ecosystem. It won't be long, I predict, before Feedburner and services like it start rolling Overture-like ads into feeds. Then, perhaps, we can change this lame "headlines and summaries only" RSS approach taken by most of the mainstream publishers.

So, feed on, and let me know what you think of the service, and if there are any problems with it. I think the approach of affiliate PPS (Pay Per Sale) is interesting, and we'll see if it pans out.

MSFT will soon launch its own desktop search tool, thank you very much.

Hat tip: SEW Blog.

BTW: There's much afoot in the developer community, banging on the GDS. Very interesting.

As I've promised in the past, from time to time I will test your collective patience by running some sketches up the flagpole and seeing what you all have to say. So this post will be a bit longer than usual, but I'm trying to imagine a scenario where search's business model infects television, and for whatever reason the Google Desktop application gave me an idea as to how. So here goes (remember, this is a *future* scenario)....

Compared to the unpredictable and untraceable value of a magazine ad or television spot, search looks pretty damn compelling. But at the end of the day, three lines of text sitting next to a set of results is a pretty meager way to declare your brand or inform a consumer about your new products or services. Clearly, there is room for both kinds of advertising – intent-based (search), and content-based (TV). But what if the two were to merge?

Before you dismiss the idea as mere speculation, let me lay out a scenario in which such a beast exists. First, imagine that a majority of households have a digital video recorder of one kind or another (such an event is predicted to occur by the year 2009, according to Forrestor). Further, imagine that this DVR has a “search history” of everything you’ve watched and are planning to watch (this is already done by most DVRs). Further still, imagine that this history is – with your tacit approval - blended with an edited profile of your online searching habits, forging a marketing precise of your likes and dislikes, your wants and needs (doing this is a matter of a marketing deal between DVR providers and search engines). Perhaps you use Google Desktop Search, or A9, or Ask, or Yahoo - it matters little, all of them create a search history already.

Now, let’s set this scenario in motion. Let’s say you are a young father to be (as I’ve been a few times). It’s 9 pm and your wife has settled, uncomfortably, onto the living room couch. Clearing her throat, she politely reminds you that you’ve been a bit distant lately, that you haven’t done a hell of a lot to help her around the house. You cringe. She continues: she’s eight months pregnant, for God’s sake, and when are you going to get around to reading that copy of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” that she’s left none to subtly in your briefcase six months ago?

Now, you’re in your den, avoiding dealing with the sheer terror of becoming a father by checking your email for the tenth time in so many minutes, but a pang of guilt finally reaches your venal heart. So you start searching the web, trying to get smart quick. You Google “pregnancy baby” and head to the first link, Babycenter.com, where you read up on the eighth month. You then find a link to an article that lists ten things you can do to be a better husband. The fourth suggestions reminds you to read the books your wife has purchased, so you head to Amazon and buy another copy of What to Expect…, as you left the one your wife gave you next to the Gideon bible on your last business trip.

“I’ll read it, I promise,” you tell your wife, and then add – “I’m on Babycenter right now, in fact.” Pleasantly startled, your wife springs off the sofa – well, lumbers, perhaps – and peers over your shoulder. In a flash of inspiration, you intuit that there might be something you could watch together on TV that relates to the whole parenting thing. “Let’s see if there’s anything on TV that might be good,” you say.

You click over to your Tivo homepage, which lets you manage your television service much as you manage your weblog reading – through a search-based interface. You search on “parent childbirth newborn” or somesuch and find that there are five shows in the next week that focus on the course of pregnancy, three of which are on the Learning Channel. You tell Tivo to record them all, noting that the first one will be available to download tonight, in half an hour, no less.

In the background of your computer, as you jump from site to site and page to page, several marketing-related actions are occurring. A cookie previously set by your local cable company notes that you’ve visited several sites that trigger “marketing potentials” – Amazon.com, Tivo.com, and Babycenter.com, all sites that indicate significant intent to purchase products or services. You’ve also alerted the system that you intend to download five new programs, and the system takes note of content tags associated with those programs, cross referencing them with your recent search history.

The cable cookie shares this information with a marketing application running in the background of your computer, perhaps as part of that Google Desktop Search program you recently downloaded. Alerted by the marketing potential that your recent surfing has created, GDS instantly uploads these potentials as database entries in Google’s central advertising marketplace – a marketplace that looks and works an awful lot like AdWords works right now.

Up on Google’s ad marketplace, millions of similar entries are aggregated and presented to hundreds of thousands of advertisers for sale in a computer-mediated real time auction. Most of those advertisers have preset their spending levels, demographic preferences, and most importantly, intent-based targeting profiles. In the time it takes for an average Google search to complete – less than a second – three advertisements have already been sold against each of the five programs you’ve selected.

Half an hour later, you and your wife turn on your television to catch the Learning Channel show. As it starts, a small box appears on the bottom of the screen, alerting you to several advertisements that have appeared in your programming feed. You know that should you decide to watch them, your local cable bill will be reduced by a buck or so (or, alternatively, you’ve selected the programming option that gives you free cable, but requires that you review ads at preset intervals). No matter, that’s not really the reason you might want to pause the show and check out the ads. Turns out, you rather like watching them, as they are often extremely relevant to your wants and needs, not to mention informative, linked as they are to robust websites and interactive features. So you pause the show, hit the ads button, and scan the commercials. Only, they’re not just commercials, they’re offers as well. The first is from Gerber for a free month’s supply of formula (pass, you and your wife have agreed that breast feeding is the way to go). Next up is a Pampers ad offering a free box of diapers (sure, why not, you accept that one, click the box which allows the system to send your details to the Pampers marketing machine). Then comes the killer ad: “Click here for $50 off a Peg Perego Stroller. Ships in 24 hours!” Huh, you think to yourself. That’s the one my wife said was the “Mercedes of strollers.” Maybe I can afford one after all.

“Sweetheart,” you ask her, “What do you think, should we go for it?” Her eyes light up (you had said no to this exact request twice - $300 for a f*cking stroller?!! – were your exact words) and you click to accept the offer. Your wife snuggles into your side, pleased that for once, her husband actually gets it. You return to the program, and…scene!

Is such a scenario possible? While the details will inevitably vary, I honestly think this scenario is not only plausible, it’s inevitable. And it is the infrastructure of paid search as we understand it today, coupled with tiny desktop apps like GDS - that will make it happen.

Via Greg. Expect a MSFT search office in the Valley soon.

Sure, the earnings were great. But a 24 point jump in morning trading? This is starting to feel bubbly.

Old news, but much happens when you leave your keyboard for half a day to venture into the real world. Yesterday Yahoo bought Stata Labs, which I've written about here and here.

You may recall my conversation with Raymie Stata:

"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."

Our conversation focused on what search might teach us as we think about a post-Windows interface. Now Yahoo is clearly thinking about this as well (Google sure is). Seems to me this was a person and technology acquisition, rather than a product one. Yahoo does not plan to support the Bloomba product past next year.

Ross has more, as does Jeremy.

I'll be away in meetings when GOOG reports earnings, but if it's after 1.30 PST, click here and here for details....webcast can be found here. Stock is up to nearly 150 on anticipation. Yikes.

Update: Press release in extended entry.

Continue reading "GOOG Earnings" »

This short piece in MediaPost is a reminder of how important mobile is to Local search.

This will be announced officially later today, but Yahoo Image Search has upgraded its service, now sporting more than a billion images.

I'm a William Gibson fan. Back at Wired, I even got to work with him a bit (this piece got us banned in Singapore, which was sort of our goal...). Gibson restarted his blog a week or so ago, and today he reports that Pattern Recognition, his latest novel, may well turn into a film by Peter Weir. Yippee! Finally, something to look forward to out of Hollywood!

But Gibson warns (perhaps remembering Johnny Mnemonic, which Keanu aside I actually rather liked...):

I should warn you, should you happen to bump into me in the meantime, that I don't regard films of novels as being the ultimate form in which a novel may be lucky enough to manifest. I regard *the novel* as the ultimate form in which the novel manifests. And if I should suspect that you think otherwise, I'm liable to snap at you.

As I was reading Fred's post on Digital TV, it reminded me of the recent Jon Stewart/Crossfire phenomenon (see here for more if this is news to you). As I've pointed out lately with regard to print, the same goes for TV: You don't want to make "Must See TV" - you want to make "Must Point To TV". Television will be driven by the conversation, just as will print.

More thinking about GDS. When I read Stefanie's short piece on Google fixing the security flaw in GDS, it rang another bell. How much does this sound like the drumbeat of stories we've heard about Microsoft over the past few years? Change the names, and it's spooky. Welcome to the OS world, Google.

According to a report posted to the Bugtraq Security Focus list on Wednesday, (insert target company name here)'s new (insert target company application name here) tool did not prevent a hacker from inserting JavaScript, a programming language, into the Web address of its page image, or logo. That vulnerability could have allowed any rogue third party to change the appearance of (insert target company name here)'s Web page to ask for personal data such as credit card numbers from its visitors, what's known as a phishing scam, according to the warning.

(insert target company location here)-based (insert target company name here) said it has fixed the problem.

Today marks the one year anniversary of my first post on Searchblog. As I posted on October 20th, 2003:

I'm in New York, seeing old friends, interviewing folks for the book. In some cases they are one and the same.
I suppose this first post should outline the goals of this blog, but to be honest, that feels far too forced. Suffice that here I'll post this and that which I find noteworthy or interesting, in particular as it relates to search, the subject of my first book, and secondarily as it relates to the warp and weft of traditional media as it intersects with technology.

Well, it's been nearly 1,000 posts since then, and I've learned more from this conversation than I could possibly have imagined. I thought, when I started, that this site would be a huge success if I could pull a few hundred kindred souls together in a semi-regular way, to talk about search and media. Turns out, according to the stats my webmaster gives me, that nearly 60,000 people visit this site each month, at a rate of about 9-10,000 a day. Last month Searchblog passed the million pageview /month milestone (at least, that was a major milestone for us at Wired and thestandard.com). This kind of attention is not only a great honor, it's also a responsibility I take seriously, though never so seriously (I hope) as to get all up inside my head. After all, I've already been there.

Along the way, I've written something on the order of 200,000 words here on this site, and another 65,000 or so for the book. And honestly, there is simply no way I could have even begun the process of writing the book, which is now about two thirds finished, were it not for the public sketch pad this site has become.

But in the end, what I've learned in this first year is how important it is to be in the conversation, as opposed to dictate it. Thank all of you who lend me your ears, voice, and insights. I hope you'll keep visiting, and I'm excited about what the next year might bring.

One day before Google is set to announce its first public quarter, the SF Chronicle gets a hold of leaked internal documents which allege that Google has internal forecasts which show the company nearly tripling its advertising base over the next five years.

Google, a company that refuses to make financial forecasts, expects to add 372,000 advertiser accounts over the next four years, according to internal documents obtained by The Chronicle.

Coming as it does one day before earnings, I have to wonder about the how and why of these documents being leaked. The numbers are credible, in that the kind of growth Google is allegedly forecasting is reasonable, if you add together all possible new local, email, AdSense, and AdWords advertisers (plus more for whatever they come up with next). But how did the reporter get this info? I wonder, was this leak intentional, or a mistake?

Update: Google claims the numbers are "inaccurate."

Good piece on how Google and Yahoo differ in their approach to local search.

I think that there is a significant difference from when one wants to search for a research paper on World War II, and when one searches for an Italian restaurant in D.C.

In the former, you want a pretty wide swathe to ensure that you aren't missing something or you are trying to expand your investigation. In the latter, you want to know what Italian restaurants are out there, where they are, how much they cost, and whether they are right for you. Locally, precision is key.

In Mark Glaser's OJR piece covering how major online publishers are dealing with what I've come to call "joining the conversation," I was pleased to see that Mark asked Bill Grueskin, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal's online site, about my post suggesting the Journal allow deep linking.

Here's his response, with additional thoughts from Jay Singh, EIC of News.com:

Grueskin told me there's a balancing act between opening up a couple stories and giving away the whole store.
"It's more an issue of at what point are you providing so much to people that they don't feel they need a WSJ.com subscription," Grueskin said....."Ultimately, if our journalism fails to meet the first criteria -- is our own content worthy of even coming to our site? -- if we fail at that, then it doesn't matter if we have Extra or not," Singh said. "Over time, if you feel that we're saving you time and hassle, if we're helping you with the signal-to-noise ratio, then you'll come back again."

Well, yes and no. To clarify, I did not suggest the Journal give away the whole store, I suggested it allow bloggers to point their readers to one story at a time. The Journal currently makes one story a day (ie, one story to all, not one per) available to bloggers, a practice I find a bit imperious - it misses the point of this multi-faceted conversation - the power is in the tail, not the head, and the tail needs more than one story to power it. I've been talking to a lot of folks lately in the newspaper business, preparing for a talk I'll be giving next month to the Online Publishers Association (and finalizing the portion of my book that talks about the impact of search on traditional media models). And I've come to the conclusion that any publisher who is building their site as a destination is working under the wrong assumption.

Sure, you want your readers to read your stuff, and you want your site to be well visited. But if that's your main goal, you're missing the - er - point. Editors should not be worried about whether their content can "bring people to our site" - that's simply not a realistic approach anymore. The goal is to make content that is worth pointing to. If you're feeding the conversation, as I said in my post, the rest will then follow.

(By the way, RSS as disaggregator problem, I think, will be solved by feed-based advertising within a year.)

(illo courtesy of Sifry, who presented this and more at Web 2.0)

Jason notes that of the top 100 sites on Technorati, just 16 are ad free.

As someone who has had a hand in this (at BB), I can only add that I hope we get this right. What do I mean by right? Well, that we pursue ads that are endemic and respectful of the conversation between author and audience. It's early, very early, and many models will be tested and fail, and many "types" of sites will evolve. Net net, however, I very much believe that we're well on our way to new, lightweight publishing models that point the way toward a very compelling future.

Oh, and of course, many of the most interesting sites are in the tail, as opposed to the top 100 (the head...).

From Boing Boing:

BoingBoing reader Adam says,
There's some idle suspicion that Google intends to expand their functionality to include sharing of desktop files. This seems pretty likely given their acquisition of Picasa, which included something called "Hello" - an IM-like application for chatting and sharing pictures. Moreover, if they decide to merge this with orkut, to allow file sharing just with your friends network, then that's a pretty compelling offering.

HOWEVER... The orkut terms of service are still extremely unfavorable to the end user. This is not too bad when it just applies to your profile and to chats on their message boards. It is REALLY bad when it applies to other forms of personal content that may be shared using the system.

For some reason I found myself thinking late last night about what it means when there are millions of local google HTTP servers running on millions of individual PCs, yearning to be connected. What kind of innovation might spring from such an ecology? Of course uploading your local content - just that which you want to upload, of course - to Google's index is one possibility. If you could do that, you could pretty much wipe out hosted solutions for micropublishing (ie blogs), for example. Your machine, given advances in broadband and computing power - would become your web server, just as it was in the beginning, when there was so little traffic on the web (before the hosting business took over...). GDS could also lay down the framework for some killer distributed computing hacks, stuff that Google has demonstrated an affinity for in the past (Google Compute is built into the Toolbar).

But thoughts fail me. What comes to mind from you all when you think of a world where all our hard drives can seamlessly be connected to the Mother Index/Platform?

I can't quite put my finger on why the word "irony" comes to mind here. But in any case, from a Mozilla press release:

Firefox Web Browser Advocates to Buy Full-Page Ad in the New York Times

...

On the other hand, I'm all for Firefox, and pleased as hell I can now make the GDS work, for the most part, on a Mac due to it....

Bill Hambrecht (founder of the firm credited with popularizing the Dutch Auction system) calls the big bankers out in this Bloomberg piece:

Hambrecht says Google underpriced its shares in the Aug. 18 offering, which at $85 raised $1.92 billion, a record for any Internet company. Google allowed big investors, with Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston Inc., the banks leading the IPO, to dominate the bidding, he says.

``Before they announced the price reduction, our bid stack predicted the stock would sell between $110 and $120,'' Hambrecht says. ``After the price reduction, the mean of our bid stack was $97. Our bid stack clearly showed that the price could have been higher.''

Hambrecht does allow that Google achieved its aims with its IPO, however.

Hambrecht says the offering achieved Google's objectives even though it was underpriced, because the auction allowed customers and other small investors to buy shares.

``It was never their objective to get the highest price,'' says Hambrecht. ``The company is awash with cash. They wanted marketability. They wanted access to their customer base.''

Here is a slide from Gian Fulgoni's presentation at Web 2.0, which can be found here.

The folks over at the Alarm Clock IM'd me and ran the transcript as a feature on their site. Neat idea - IM as interview. Subject is Web 2.0....

...as he always has a scoop somewhere in any story he does on Google. This time, it's at the end, where (after he quotes some guy who runs a blog - really, a "Cambrian explosion"!?) he quotes a source:

"If you drive by the Google buildings in the evening," said a person who has detailed knowledge of the company's business, "the lights that are still on are the ones on the floor where they are working on the browser."

So maybe there's life yet in the Google browser rumors, despite protestations from very senior folks at Google (sources of mine and others) who claim Google is not interested in fighting that particular battle.

Last Friday was the second annual Google Code Jam. I find it interesting what tasks (as well as who) the company chooses to reward. Last year they announced it was a geolocation hack, as I recall. But this year, far as I can tell, they didn't announce the actual hacks, just the winning hackers. Hmmm. A bit more research (and a reading of this Slashdot thread) has me thinking that this year they didn't look for hacks, but rather had a standardized set of problems that folks coded against. That sounds far less interesting, IMHO.

I'm resuming my writing-the-book myopia, so posting will be light over the next weeks. However, when I find fun facts and such from my writing/research, I just have to share it. This graph comes from Mary Meeker's research report on Search. It shows how PPC on particular terms has rise, and the raw potential of paid search against mutliple-word keyphrases.

Yeah, they've got one, got it when the bought Picasa. InsideGoogle has the details. (Good review of Picasa too).

Picasa and Google's little secret, and it sure as hell shouldn't be. Picasa is a way of storing and indexing your photos. Hello is about interacting. Hello was created as a way to share those photos Picasa spent so much time indexing, but it does so much more. Do you want an instant messenger from Google? Well, Hello is an instant messenger, complete with buddy lists and bots and smilies and sounds. The difference is that Hello is optimized for sending photos. It can automatically resize a photo so it sends properly. You can jump back and forth from Hello to Picasa to send your photos and share your albums. But most strikingly to most of my readers, it is an instant messenger in a Google product, and its a good bet that as Google integrates Picasa better with the rest of its services, Hello will be its chat client, with full feature support for Gmail and Google Desktop. And if you are worried about security, Google claims it's more secure than AOL Instant Messenger.

Long rumored, AOL has been spurred to declaration today by the ever increasing noise in the desktop search/personalization/browser space. Cnet has the goods:

America Online on Thursday confirmed that it is testing a new search engine that scans for files on a PC's hard drive, mirroring a similar product unveiled this week by Google.

AOL spokeswoman Anne Bentley confirmed that the desktop search tool is being tested alongside the AOL Browser but declined to elaborate further. She said the AOL Browser will launch as early as November.

The site itself got a makeover today as well, though you need to be a member to see it.

Rael has a great write up:

The Google Desktop is your own private little Google server. It sits in the background, slogging through your files and folders, indexing your incoming and outgoing email messages, listening in on your instant messenger chats, and browsing the Web right along with you. Just about anything you see and summarily forget, the Google Desktop sees and memorizes for you.

And it operates in real time.

Great detail. Also, Danny rounds up a bunch of coverage here.

And many, many folks have emailed me reminding me that LOADS of other folks play both in desktop search, as well as the "Stuff I've Seen Before" arena. All true. Copernic, X1, Microsoft, Ask, the list is very long...

Also, check Scripting News for some interesting questions raised, though net net Dave seems to like it...

An open architecture desktop search app is a requirement. I must be able to write a plug-in that teaches it how to index formats it doesn't understand.

Erik makes a good point. It only indexes Microsoft mail data. I would like it to index my object databases, that's where all my content is. This could all be solved if they had a driver architecture that allowed us to teach it how to index file formats they don't understand. Now that we're on the desktop this becomes possible, as does a richer API. Google's concern for server bandwidth goes away when the software is running on my desktop.

(thanks, Scott...)

I have not had a chance to play with this, as it is limited to Windows/IE, but that's OK, Danny has, and his very thorough write up is here. What I'm interested in is what this all means for the big Chess Game That Is Search, and frankly, this is A Very Big Move on the part of Google.

Recall, if you will, about a year ago, when Google launched the Deskbar, which integrated into IE and allowed for search from within that environment. Recall further the rumours of a desktop search tool (back in May, broken by Markoff at the Times.) All of this fed understandable speculation about a Google browser. Well, the other shoe is dropping this morning. It's not a browser, but it is a significant desktop client application: Google Desktop Search. With this launch, Google is focusing on placing a desktop application on your computer that *makes your browser seem smarter.* The browser (IE only for now) becomes the interface front end to a major Google incursion into the PC hard drive, a space that heretofore has been owned by Microsoft. Google isn't competing with Microsoft on the browser front - that would be madness. It's competing with Microsoft on its own terms and its own turf: by integrating the desktop into the web browsing experience. More specifically, but integrating it *into the Google experience* as understood through search.

This is the part that's important: As far as the user is concerned, Google's Desktop Search seamlessly integrates your hard drive into Google.com. "Desktop" becomes another tab, right next to "Web", "Images", and the like (your data stays on your hard drive, of course, but to most mere mortals, it might seem like in fact it lives "out there on the web.")

Yes, this is a Big Deal. For many reasons. Assuming you download the client and use Google Desktop Search:

One, it means Google will have a major beachhead on users' computers - an index of *everything on your hard drive.* Yes, this raises privacy concerns, but Google has outlined their stance on this in the documentation, and (compared to Gmail) seems ready to handle this issue this time.

Two, it means that index will be viewed *in the native Google interface* - for all intents and purposes, it treats your hard drive as an extension of the web (or, vice versa...it hardly matters which). MS Word, Powerpoint, Excel files? Just results in the Google interface. How's that for a lightweight OS?***

Three, it means that Google can build upon that knowledge of your personal data to make *all* search more relevant for you - this is Google's first major foray into truly personalized search.

Four, it means that everything is now searchable: your email, your Word documents, your music, your IM sessions, and - pay attention here - your SEARCH HISTORY. That's right, the Google Desktop Search automatically hoovers out *every site you visit* from the IE logs and adds it to you overall searchable index as cached pages. "Take that, A9, Yahoo, and Ask," Google is saying. "We're playing here too...Oh, and by the way....we're Google."

And Five, this provides Google a major new platform to build upon - a client application that integrates with the web. Can I imagine upgrades to that app that include spiffy new features like - oh - a lightweight word processor so you can take notes on your searching, or a calendar? Better yet, can I imagine Google opens this platform up to third party developers, to do what they do best? Yes, I sure can.

As I intonated before, Google is playing to its strengths, leveraging its power as the defacto interface for finding things on the web over to the desktop. Once it begins to know more about you (recall that John Doerr hinted at this just last week at Web 2.0, saying "Google will become the Google that knows you"), expect a hell of a lot more innovation from Google on this front. Yup, that means, eventually, lessons learned from millions upon millions of aggregated individuals' search histories (and desktop usage patterns) will start to inform Google's overall approach to relevancy. How could it be otherwise?

I reached Google's director of consumer web products Marissa Mayer at 9 pm last night as she was catching a red eye to New York, where Google is announcing Desktop Search at the Digital Life conference (a consumer-focused event starting today). Marissa is known as a superwoman at Google, she works constantly, and only travels on the red eye so she won't miss a business day. (Yikes....I remember those days...).

After she caught her breath, I asked her these questions:

- Why did you develop this product? Did this bubble out of the labs like News, or was it more deliberate?
We view this as an important development and it's just the start of many new innovations. Our users have been asking us for this feature from us for five years. We started working on it about a year ago. Steve Lawrence is the lead researcher. (So no, it was not a Labs project).

- Was this a response to all the other competitive announcements in personal and desktop search?
No. The technical details of this product are stunning. It only uses of 8 megs of RAM to run. It's a 400 Kbyte file! Our first build was in February, and we had a lot of testing and revision. We targeted launch for October because we are sponsoring Digital Life and this is perfect product for that conference.

- Do you think this will quell all the Google browser rumors?
We were trying to fulfill a user need. In 1995 the browser model worked fine - you could find what you were looking for by browsing a directory like Yahoo. But over time as the web scaled that model didn't scale. It broke, which is why search (became the metaphor for finding things on the web). We are seeing the same thing happening now on personal computers (which have far more storage than even five years ago). The distinction between the hard drive and the net is becoming blurred. We want this application to be a sort of photographic memory for your screen. (She ducked this question...but then again, she was running to catch a plane...)

- How does the Google Desktop Search do ranking on a person's hard drive?
The default rank is by date. (When we tested, we learned that) people understood the context of "when they did see this"? The results list the last time you accessed any particular document. However you can also sort by relevance. The desktop relevance scheme lacks Pagerank (of course), but it does incorporate the other 150 factors (Google uses on the web) - factors like are the (keywords) together, in bold, related, things like that.

- How will you incorporate what you learn from this into overall relevance drivers for Google?
As we see the distinction between the hard drive and the net blur, people don't want to have to choose between the desktop and the web. You can issue your regular search and to the extent there is relevant information on your desktop, we'll write it to the browser. (Again, she didn't really answer that one...)

Net net: This is a major initiative for Google (they ain't rolling this one out quietly through Labs!), and it will be very, very important to the company that this be widely adopted by millions and millions of users (privately, Google employees have told me they were disappointed with the number of their Toolbar downloads over the years). If it is, it will set the stage for a very Web 2.0 battle for the hearts and minds of searching consumers - and that means all consumers - everywhere. In the end, if search becomes the interface for how we navigate our computing space, regardless of where that space is, there is no doubt the power of Microsoft will be diminished. On the other hand, there is no way Microsoft, which bought a desktop search company earlier this year, or Yahoo for that matter, will stand still. This move, I sense, is the true starting gun of a major race to win in search, and at the interface level for all of computing. It should be a fun few years!

PS - Let's not forget that Google laid down policy on desktop applications a while back. This is worth re-reading in light of this announcement...

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

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

UPDATE: Even though an ad for the Google Desktop appears when you search for the term, so far the site is still not up. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 2: An astute source of mine who works for one of the other Big Portal companies points out that while Google's announcement is a big deal, companies that allow folks to search across their data on servers and services - ie MyYahoo, Amazon, social networks (or implied ones), etc. - may have a leg up in the long run.

OK, so now AOL is getting back into the browser wars, says eWeek. And the speculation about Google entering the game is overwhelming. Well, Doerr said at Web 2.0 it ain't gonna happen, and I don't think it will. At least, not in the way the traditional narrative might have it. I've concluded that the point is not the browser, it's the platform, and Google already has one to build on. It's the web (and IE, in fact).

SEW blog points to Google's strategy: building on top of the browser.

From an Indian web site pointed to by SEW:

Internet search service company Google today said that it was engaged in developing technology that was aimed at bringing about improvements in web browsers.

''Today's browsers are doing a pretty good job, but they can be improved. What we are looking to do is to enhance the quality of the browsing experience,'' he said.

What does that mean? It means that the browser is a commodity. Note while the journalist said "improving the browser", what Sergey said in fact was "improving the browsing experience." This is an important distinction. Google will build something else, something which will presume the browser as a starting point, and make *what is being browsed* more valuable. There are already plenty of folks who are making the browser valuable. Google's play is in what the browser shows you, not the browser itself. That was the brilliance of Google 1.0, and I'd warrant the same will be true of version 2.

And start using paid text ads. Goodness, it's about time.

Again, I'm late on this but...Via Mamamusings, Elizabeth Lane Lawley's blog. She was one of the "Search Champs" invited up to MSFT last week to see what's on there.

Susan Dumais from MSR is our first presenter today, and explicitly released what she’s showing from the NDA. Yay!

She’s showing some really nifty stuff, including a personalized search tool that lets you do a web search, then drag a slider to make the results more customized based on what your local computer knows about you. It’s a split screen result, so you see the original results on the left, and the increasingly personalized results on the right. Very, very cool.

(Thanks, Pete)

News and fun items from the past week that I missed:

Cops use Google to ID hit and run victim (AP). Neat anecdote, not very interesting in reality. Any cop who isn't using Google already should be fired.

Google announces code jam finalists (Google PR). No details, but the big competition is October 15.

Google's Print DRM is breakable, here's how (Boing Boing). Slashdot has some tips for those with time on their hands.

Kayak travel search engine launches beta (ClickZ). "Google-like objectivity." Where have I heard that before? Gary likes it.

PPC information from Fathom Online (MediaPost). Average PPC for finance category: $3.17. For telecom: $1.09.

Yahoo has a good quarter (Bloomberg). Some of that has to do with selling Google stock...otherwise it would have had an inline quarter.

Yahoo streamlines its home page (Yahoo PR). Jerry and I talked about this at Web 2.0, he says UI is a big big deal at yahoo (coverage here at BWeek).

Astute readers of this site (are there any other kind) may note that I've implemented permalinks for all comments. Thanks to Eric Case for the pointer to doing this, and to Scot Hacker, my extraordinary webmaster, for making it happen.

As many have already noted, last week at Web 2.0 Peter Norvig, Google director of search quality, demonstrated word clustering, "named entities," and machine translation technology to the audience. The translation software was impressive, but somehow lacked zing - "good enough" translation doesn't seem like much of a revelation anymore. That in itself is an extraordinary achievement - Norvig showed translations from Arabic and Chinese - both significantly distinct languages compared to English. Google already has translation features built into its engine (from a third party), but this hand-rolled stuff was far more powerful, it seemed to me.

In any case, the demos that really got the audience going (and me, to be honest) was the named entities and the clustering technology. Seeing anything behind the veil of Google's real research and development is of course a revelation, but seeing something that was so clearly ready for prime time felt rather close to a declaration of where Google is heading, in particular given the recent moves in the personalization and clustering space from Amazon, Ask, Vivisimo, and Yahoo.

"Named entity extraction" is a relatively new project called which Norvig said Google had been working on for about six months. As Norvig explained the concept - essentially identifying semantically important concepts and the meaning wrapped around them - I couldn't help but think of WebFountain and my wish (near the end of the post) that Google would add a bit of IBM's semantic peanut butter into its PageRank chocolate.

Norvig also showed an entertaining (and live) demo of clustering, which he claimed was the "largest bayesian database of clusters" extant. Hmmm.

From the eWeek story covering the news:

For example, Norvig said, researchers are looking for ways to break down sentences by looking for a phrase like "such as" and grabbing the names that follow it. The goal is to not only pull out the name but also its clusters, so that a name such as "Java" can be associated both with the computer language and with language in general, Norvig said.

"We want to be able to search and find these [entities] and the relationships between them, rather than you typing in the words specifically," Norvig said.

This has potentially interesting implications in next-generation ranking methodologies, for one, but combined with clustering, it signals that Google is serious about taking what one might call the UI plunge.

What do I mean by that? Well, of all the major engines, only Google has strictly maintained what might be called the C prompt interface to search: put in yer command, get out yer list of results (Google Local is a departure, but it's still in beta). Yahoo, Ask, A9 and others have begun to twiddle in pretty significant ways with evolved interfaces which - by employing your search history, your personal data, clustering, and other tricks - deliver more filtered and intentional results (though it is still arguable if they are more relevant). I sense it's only a matter of time before Google takes this approach as well, and Norvig's demo certainly points that way. After all, it's not that often Google decides to give us a glimpse behind the curtain, and coupled with Google Board member John Doerr's semi-announcement the day before (he told the audience that Google would become "the Google that knows you") I think the UI plunge might come sooner than we all expect.

If you want to know more about how Google is thinking about clustering, here's a paper written by a Google team, courtesy of a link from Don Park.

Update: Lazy linking on my part, the clustering paper is about hardwaree (though it is really interesting...)

Yahoo's most well known blogger Jeremy Zawodny is back on the Search team at Yahoo, but this time, with a new remit. From his post today:

Well, believe it or not, I'm going back to the Search Team[1] but in a very different role this time. Instead of hacking away on software bits, I'm going to be working to:
• make sure our products kick the necessary amount of ass
• better communicate what we're thinking about and building
• incorporate outside feedback and ideas into what we're doing
• recruit more smart people

And other stuff as it comes up, I'm sure.

He also includes a FAQ of sorts, which is a hoot. Excerpts:

Q: Does this mean your blog will be full of "check out this great Yahoo feature" posts? Will you still complain about things Yahoo doesn't do well?

A: Yes. A lot.

Biz 2.0, where I wear a columnist hat, has rendered its entire current issue in a quickly readable web format. I like it, though I'm not sure how I'd work it into my daily reading (I am sure that problem is being worked on...). In any case, it's compelling to see it all on screen. Course it helps that I recently got a spiffy Apple 21-inch flat screen...Here's my column, pictures and all.

UPDATE: Oops, you can't link deep into the magazine, making it impossible to point, as I tried above, to a particular page. You have to navigate through the table of contents. Gotta get that one fixed, guys!

The night after the conference ended, I decompressed in my hotel room with Jonathan Weber, my editorial partner in the Industry Standard, and Steve Ellis, who runs an innovative music company called Pump Audio. Talk turned to what constituted "quality writing" in a journalistic sense. I'm not without a dog in this particular hunt, as it's been the central premise of both my previous magazine launches, and is at the center of a new venture I'm noodling now that the conference is over. Steve, who is British, asked Jonathan and I if we thought the Wall Street Journal represented the paragon of American newspaper feature writing. And I thought, Jesus, I haven't read that paper for months. I pay for the online version of the paper, but given how my reading habits have shifted from pull to point*, the Journal simply has not crossed my radar enough to register.

Jonathan and I agreed that the Journal pretty much defined the American standard of good page one feature writing, and I copped to being "Journal blind" for the past few quarters. Talk then moved to The Economist. Goodness, it had been ages since I read that magazine as well. I used to subscribe to the paper version (same for the WSJ), and when I did, I signed up for a few email newsletters as well. But for whatever reasons those came intermittently, and they were not very good. Why, I wondered, were these two august bastions of journalism falling off my reading list?

You've already guessed, of course. Both require paid subscriptions, and therefore, both do not support deep linking. In other words, both are nearly impossible to find if you get your daily dose of news, analysis and opinion from the blogosphere.

Sure, The Wall Street Journal supports RSS feeds, but I've been a subscriber for two years, and they've never bothered to tell me that. (I found out when I went searching for them while writing this post). As far as I can tell, the Economist does not support RSS at all. Even if I did read the Journal's feeds, I wouldn't refer to them in any posts of mine, as my readers and community can't read what I read. More and more, I find that if I can't share something (i.e. can't point to something), it's not worth my time. (Please take note, RIAA...)

Simple RSS support is not the real issue here. The real issue is how paid registration is handled. I find, increasingly, that sites which wall themselves off are becoming irrelevant. Not because the writing or analysis is necessarily flawed (though honestly, I don't trust journalists who eschew the blogosphere), but rather because their business model is. In today's ecosystem of news, the greatest sin is to cut oneself off from the conversation. Both the Economist and the Journal have done that.

So what is to be done? My suggestion is simple: Take the plunge and allow deep linking. Notice I did not say abandon paid registration, in fact, I support it. Publishers can let the bloggers link to any story they post, but limit further consumption of their site to paid subscribers.

I'd be willing to wager that the benefit of allowing the blogosphere to link to you will more than make up for potential lost subscribers. First off, if you as a publisher do not offer additional paid subscription benefits beyond the articles themselves, you're not paying attention to your community. And in any case, many folks will pay to subscribe to a site which is continually being linked to. In fact, I'd wager that the landing pages from blog links might be the most lucrative place a publisher can capture new subscribers. It's a massive opportunity to convert: the reader has come to your site on the recommendation of a trusted source (the blog he or she is reading). It's pretty certain that if you make that page inviting, and use it as an opportunity to sell the reader on the value of the rest of your site, that that reader will eventually feel like the Journal is worthy of his or her support.

Why? In short, if a reader finds him or herself pointed to the Journal on a regular basis, that reader knows that by subscribing to the Journal, he or she would be more in the know. After all, all of the blogs read and point to the Journal, the reader thinks, so perhaps I should read it too. Before subscribing, the only time a reader might find out something in the Journal is if someone points to it (a far sight from where things stand today, by the way). But if they subscribe, they can get their own RSS feeds, and be first to know something. And, in the end, isn't that what drives subscription sales?

Net net, I think allowing deep linking will drive subscription sales, rather than attenuate them.

I'd be interested in Searchbloggers' take on this idea. I think it just might work.

*"Pull to point" - I find that I read more things that have been pointed to by others, rather than only those which I pull down myself.

News from last week: The heralded one man search engine is getting bigger - both in its index, and its staff. Gigablast increases its index to 650 million pages....and is growing its staff and office space as well. I'm kind of a little sad to see it, in a way, as it was always fun to point to Matt's work as evidence of what one guy in New Mexico can do. Now it's a few folks. Still not bad....

Jason Fried of Basecamp/37 Signals reminds us to stay lightweight, and don't believe the hype. I very much hope the conference, which certainly was upbeat, was not considered hype. It's true, I focused on that which I found interesting, astounding, important, and new...which really does create a bit of novelty exhaustion, as Kottke puts it, over the course of a three-day event.

In any case, I certainly agree with Jason Fried's advice:

My advice to these new companies with their new products and fresh-faced enthusiasm… Keep it small. Start small and stay small. Borrow from yourself before you borrow from someone else. You can have an impact with just a few people. You can build great products with a small team. You can do it on your own. You can.

This is a very interesting post on the future of eBay, by Brian Dear. He keys off a question I asked Louis Monier on stage Weds...

One of eBay's main selling points for years has been: trust and safety. You're gonna be fine if you buy or sell on eBay, even if the other person in the transaction is a total stranger halfway across the world. And that is true. Most of the time, things are fine. Fraud happens occasionally, but the vast majority of the time, even big transactions like computer and car sales go smoothy.

Why do I think it might be nearby? Consider for a moment how much PC/Internet household penetration there is now. And how much high-bandwidth penetration there is now. There's a much better chance in 2005 that a whole lot of people who live in your own neighborhood or general vicinity will have stuff you want, and you certainly will have stuff they want, and both of you will have ways to find out about each others' haves and wants. Does eBay's trust and safety cushion still offer as much value in such a world?

It was a splendid event, but it left me exhausted, and I'm taking much of today off. However there is much to report from Web 2.0, and plenty of other news as well. I expect to get on it starting Saturday. Thanks for your patience with my time off. And to all the Searchbloggers I met at the conference, thank you so much for coming. It means the world to me.

TITANS OF TECH
A Man Who's Going Places
Erik Blachford controls half of the online travel market -- and Barry Diller's Net ambitions are riding on his shoulders. So why is the CEO of IAC Travel so relaxed?

By John Battelle, October 2004 Issue

Within Barry Diller's online empire, InterActiveCorp, there's no business more vital than IAC Travel -- which makes Erik Blachford his most important lieutenant. Overseeing Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire, and other travel properties, Blachford is responsible for 37 percent of IAC's revenue and more than two-thirds of its profits. Still, even as IAC Travel's growth has been extraordinary -- it's now the third-largest travel agency in the world -- it's feeling the pressure from any number of competitors, including its suppliers, competing online services, and even portals and search engines. To keep growth going, Blachford is expanding into Europe and Asia and has dived into the $100 billion corporate travel market. But what he's really dreaming of is re-creating the perfect travel agent online.

Barry Diller was once asked about IAC Travel, and he replied by saying something to the effect of "You think this is the future of travel; I think it's the future of everything." Does he see what you're doing in travel as indicative of the future of the entire Internet?

InterActiveCorp, at the highest level, is just a big bet on consumers using the Internet for more stuff. If you fundamentally believe that the Internet is going to provide people with richer and better information for making decisions, then you have to make bets across a pretty wide variety of things. We've got high airline ticket prices, and hotel rooms are expensive, so the dollar figures involved get pretty eye-popping pretty fast, and that's one of the reasons people like to point to the travel category.

I understand that more than 20 percent of the travel business is now booked online.

It's closer to 25 percent this year. It's probably going to around 35 percent by 2006. By the time you get to 2010 or 2011, we think between one-half and three-quarters of leisure and unmanaged business travel -- everything not handled by corporate travel agencies, that is -- should be online.

With growth prospects like that, why did IAC take a hit in the last quarterly earnings? Why does Wall Street not give it the same earnings multiple as its peer group?

Well, you had a couple of different things going on. On the one hand, the whole category did get beaten up pretty badly. So there is something to be said for people just looking at the overall growth trends quarter over quarter in online travel and saying, "Boy, that didn't seem quite as quick as we were expecting."

(continued in extended entry)

Continue reading "B 2.0 Column: Erik Blachford, CEO of IAC Travel" »

Blogging from the show floor, but got this email from the Googleplex:

Greetings...

Google is continually developing innovative ideas to improve our users' search experience, and as always, we welcome your feedback. For instructions on how to get started, users may send a text message to 46645 with the word [help]. More information about Google SMS can be found at http://sms.google.com.

Really cool of the folks at Feedster to give the Web 2.0 feed such prominence on the home page, and to create an XML feed for coverage! Here's the link, and thanks guys...It's been a great event so far.

In the tradition of Dan Gillmor, I'm going to ask that you readers comment on this post, and add a twist - how about you guys tell *me* what the news is? I'll be in the haze of Web 2.0 all day, but I know big things are brewing, and I'll check into this post. Go ahead, comment away! (You might start with the Google Print news - migod, as if A9 wasn't enough reason to call Amazon a competitor...)

Wow, what a first day. Amazing workshops, and then really fun sessions. Bill Gross unveiled Snap, a very cool new engine that you can check out here (yeah, Snap, uh huh, in an earlier incarnation it was a failed Web 1.0 portal from CNet and NBC). And then early Google investor and Board member John Doerr, in a great interview with John Heilemann, let us know that Google was not going to sit on its hands w/r/t personalization, in fact, he said there will be announcements very shortly about Google's next phase of personal search. Also, Rojo debuted, and we still have Marc Cuban to go tonight...

More to come, and much more on the web 2.0 site, where coverage is aggregated....

Kanoodle today launched BrightAds, an AdSense like play that differentiates on categorization. Wish I had more time to talk about it - Boing Boing is playing with it. As soon as I have the time post-conference I'll post on this again. Release in extended entry, quoting from it:

Kanoodle, a leading provider of sponsored listings for search results and content pages, today announced the launch of BrightAds™, a self-service tool for small- to medium-sized content publishers that will enable them to run Kanoodle’s content-targeted sponsored links on their sites. With the launch of BrightAds, it is now easy for independent Web publishers to add highly relevant sponsored links advertisements to their sites and generate immediate revenue.

A unique benefit of BrightAds is that it maps ads by “topics” rather than keywords, which prevents core keyword mapping challenges and provides publishers with ads that are more relevant to their site’s content.

Continue reading "Kanoodle Throws Hat Into AdSense Ring" »

It's been pretty busy at Yahoo lately, a new My Yahoo, new Local, and now, new My Yahoo search beta. (As of 9 pm PST 10/04/04, it's not quite live...)

This release marks a major step in Yahoo's commitment to the concept of what I've dubbed the PersonalWeb - it supports the creation of a "personal web index" (via "saving searches), search "communities," annotation, and sharing of search results. Interestingly, the beta also lets you block sites, a form of refinement that may prove important as this whole field starts to march forward. So does all this sound familiar? Yup, it should, you've seen versions of this movie before, and quite recently - A9 last month, Ask Jeeves even more recently, the sale of Furl to Looksmart, and reliable sources tell me more is on the way. (IE: Watch this space).

From the PR info I was sent:

My Yahoo! Search is an extension of Yahoo! Search, to help users better find, manage, and share search engine results.... Yahoo! understands that users want greater flexibility and control of their media and information, and is committed to providing a personal search experience that can be tailored to meet the highly specific needs of the individual.

This is a developing story, and I am sure many others will cover it before I can pull away from Web 2.0 again....Yahoo's blog post is here...

Evhead is leaving Google. His company was purchased by Google back in 2003. A sign of things to come? Yes and no. Yes, liquidity creates opportunity for folks to leave and follow their bliss. But OTOH, I sense Evan would have done this anyway.

I won't promise it, but I'll wager Searchblog will be looking pretty unlived-in this week, as I'll be focused on producing Web 2.0. When I am doing a conference, I tend to get in a kind of zone, and I forget about pretty much everything else. It's three straight days of live stagecraft, and we have more than 60 speakers presenting, which is the most I've ever managed in one event. We also have evening events, from Google, Morpheus, and Yahoo, so the usual burst of late night items might be slow as well.

We invited a lot of press and bloggers, so I expect there will be plenty of places to grok the goings on. In fact, you might start with Google News, and perhaps check out who's linking to us over at Feedster. Andy, Ross, Jeff, Wade, and I am sure others will also be blogging it. We'll also put a link to all the coverage on the main site, once the event gets going.

I'm excited that this event, which began as an idea Tim and I shared nearly a year ago, is actually happening, and is so well attended. We hoped for 400-500, and we have more than 550 registered (yes, you can still come, but today is the deadline for the pre-show price. Walk in tix are quite dear). We hoped for 5-6 sponsors, and we have 15. And much of the support came in the last couple of months, as momentum built. It's been a great education preparing for this. Thanks to everyone who is coming, and to all you Searchbloggers for putting up with my absence. There will be a killer search panel on Weds afternoon, and some news on search from Bill Gross, Yahoo, and others - so stay tuned!

The Beta tag is off, and the Local product, which has new interface features and many improvements driven from its limited beta period, is now live and integrated into the home page. I am on the Yahoo Local advisory council, an unpaid and informal group that Yahoo pinged for feedback during the process.

I'll be prepping for Web 2.0 Monday, but Chris will have the scoop here.

Andrew Goodman makes a fine point: with all the hype around Google's possible entry into the browser wars, many have missed the fact that Yahoo looks more than ever like a player in the Web-as-Desktop field.

Thanks to Gary's pointer, I'm looking forward to trying out this new Opera-based tool, the Opera Show Generator, which allows you to use your browser as a web-based slide player, a la Powerpoint. Again, a very Web 2.0 development.

Over on his site Om finds a new patent in Yahoo's arsenal that might have implications along the lines of the supposedly settled Yahoo/Google lawsuit. The patent Om found covers "displaying paid and unpaid listings on the results page after a search term is input."

The settlement gave Google access to a whole bunch of Yahoo patents, but I am not sure if this one - US Patent # 6,704,727 - was part of the deal. I have already sent emails to the PR folks at these two fine companies, and probably would know more on Monday.

Yes, I'm crushed by Web 2.0, but so much going on....

Google Launches Froogle UK(Cnet)
SFO Expansion, Ho.
FindWhat Launches AdSense Rival(ClickZ)
Category based, rather than contextual
Blinkx 2.0 Coming(InternetWeek)
Note the lengthy comments in my earlier post on Blinkx
Gary and Greg Grok(Searcher)
Gary Price interviews Greg Linden
Rifkin Riffs on the PersonalWeb
How big is your PersonalWeb? He does the math!
Google Should Be In the Browser Biz Bizweek
"No-brainer."
Technorati Does a Hackathon At Web 2.0
Details in the post.
The Next Big Thing (USA Today)
Feel that bubblicious press love
TiVo and NetFlix Join at the Hip(PVRBlog)
VOI anyone?
EFF Kicks Diebold's Ass(Boing Boing)
On a roll...
Genocide at a Buck a Click (Ethan Zuckerman)
Who cares about Africa, he asks.