$55 a day?

When Bill Gross announced his search company, Snap, at Web 2.0, I never imagined the financial juggernaut it would become. Silicon Beat has the dirt.

Gross on Snap's transparency:

"It's kind of scary to put that data out there,' he added. "But it's liberating at the same time. I think it's good in the long-term. I think it will be a trend. In every aspect, it's better to be open.''

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:43 PM
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Linden Keeps On Truckin'

I really like Greg Linden's blog, he always has something interesting to say about search. So much so, that I sometimes forget he runs an interesting company too, Findory, and that every so often (more like very often, lately) Findory announces cool new features. Like the personalized news and blog search he announced today. Way to go, Greg!

PS - It's kind of neat to read this site on Findory.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:39 PM
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eBay Pulse

If you like the Lycos 50 or Yahoo Buzz or Google Zeitgeist, you'll like eBay Pulse.

(thanks Anil)

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:14 PM
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News: Google Motion of Summary Judgment Denied in Geico Case

Why, oh why do I find trademark stuff interesting? I have no idea - well, actually, I do - commercial speech is fascinating, and it underpins the entire economic base of search. I've been following this stuff for a while now, as my long suffering readers know. The two big cases (and there are others) are Geico and American Blinds.

In the Geico case, Google filed for a motion to dismiss in late summer, which was denied in the early fall. The case went to early discovery, and then Google filed a summary judgment, which is something parties to a lawsuit often do when they believe there is no merit to the case.

I haven't seen any coverage of this part of the case, but this marks another milestone: Last week (Nov. 19th to be exact) the judge denied Google's request for summary judgment, according to the clerk at the Alexandria, Virginia court where the case resides. (I discovered this while researching the book). Hence, this one looks like it's going to full throated trial (or...close mouthed settlement, though I don't think so, as that would encourage a lot more suits). It also means the odds rise for the American Blind case going forward - that one awaits a judgment on Google's initial motion to dismiss.

By the way, the reason that there was no news of Google's filing the summary judgment motion is that Google asked that it be filed under seal. That request was granted, but the fact that the motion was denied is public. Ya just gotta ask...

More on trademarks, and why they matter, here, here here and here.

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Stefanie on Video Search

Stefanie Olsen of Cnet has dug up some dirt on the big three's plans for video search. Of particular note is her work uncovering Google's plans:

Google's effort, until now secret, is arguably the most ambitious of the three. According to sources familiar with the plan, the search giant is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows.

...Google's project for TV search is ultra-secretive; only a handful of broadcast executives have seen it demonstrated so far. To build the service, the company is recording live TV shows and indexing the related closed-caption text of the programming. It uses the text to identify themes, concepts and relevant keywords for video so they can be triggers for searching.

The idea of using closed captioning for text has been around a long time, Sergey Brin and others recently published a paper on it.

For further ruminations on this, see my Friday Sketching: TV and Search Merge post.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:33 AM
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Google Desktop: Too Good For Its Own Good?

From an eweek piece by respected security expert Bruce Schneier:

The problem is that GDS indexes and finds documents that you may prefer not be found. For example, GDS searches your browser's cache. This allows it to find old Web pages you've visited, including online banking summaries, personal messages sent from Web e-mail programs and password-protected personal Web pages.

GDS is very good at searching. It's so good that it exposes vulnerabilities on your computer that you didn't know about. And now that you know about them, pressure your software vendors to fix them. Don't shoot the messenger.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:20 AM
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Google News And China: More Issues

Google News in China has had a speckled past; recall that Google agreed back in the summertime to block sources from the index which the Chinese government had specified. I and many others had issues with this. Now comes word that Google's English version of News is being blocked in China.

Shanghai. (Interfax-China) - The English version of Google's news service has been inaccessible in China for more than a week. Zhang Junwei, a Google Media official stationed in Beijing, acknowledged that the company's English News channel was inaccessible when contacted by Interfax, but could not provide further comment.

I've emailed Xiao for more info, if anyone can get to the bottom of this, it'll be him.

Thanks, SEW.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:15 AM
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More AdWords Trademark Suits

This one has Company A (Brannock, the maker of those foot measuring devices) suing a Company B (ABC Industries) because Company B has purchased Company A's trademarks as AdWords. This is distinct from Company A suing Google and/or Yahoo, as is the case with Gieco, American Blind, et al.

Brannock files keyword lawsuit

The article also reminds us of the Rescuecom case, in which Rescuecom took the Geico et al approach of suing Google. Rescuecom is a computer services franchiser. (Nod to Gary for putting the PDF up, and to Google for making it HTML).

I never cease to marvel at the role Google plays now in small to medium businesses. Name any fixture of our lives - a foot measuring device, for example - and demand for it is now aggregated through a Google keyword.

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Want Music? Go Fish

Silicon Beat has the early word on this music search engine....I must say, while I have not checked out Go Fish yet, I remain particular to Music Plasma....

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:57 PM
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Xmas Bells and Whistles

Google has added a "wish list" feature to Froogle. As Andy Beal puts it:

You can now create a "Wish List" of items that you would like for Christmas, using Froogle. You need to either have a Gmail or Groups account in order to use the tool, which is a great way to boost members before Q1 '05.

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:44 PM
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EPIC: A Media Future Fantasy

Worth a view, though some of the presumptions are shaky. This Flash movie posits a combination of Amazon and Google (Googlezon) which obviates the traditional mediasphere and poses grave threats to democracy.

EPIC 2014.

About the filmmaker, Robin Sloan. More on the film and its progression through the blogosphere here and here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:23 AM
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Google Saves The Bubble Fund

Around the Valley, it's well known that VC funds raised in the late 90s (and hence invested at the height of the bubble) fared poorly. Such was the fate of Kleiner Perkins ninth fund. But that fund did have one big winner - Google. Silicon Beat has the details.

PS - You've probably noticed a lot of Google in recent postings. That will continue for a while, as I'm in that portion of my writing on the book. I've got final rounds of interviews at Google next week, and am working on the Google portions of the text. Bear with me....

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:06 AM
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Watch This Space

....Google Sues AdSense Publisher for Click Fraud. (Clickz)

Google has filed its first click fraud lawsuit, charging a Texas-based Web site and its owners generated fraudulent clicks on ads in its AdSense program, causing Google to pay them for useless traffic to its advertisers.

The lawsuit, filed last week in a California Superior Court, alleges that, beginning in August 2003, Auction Experts International and its founders Sergio Morfin and Alexei Leonov clicked on AdSense ads on the Auction Experts site and paid up to 50 unidentified individuals to do the same.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:01 AM
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Speaking of Biz Dev...

As I mentioned before, it's clear that the culture of business/partner development is blossoming at Google. A quick trawl of jobs they've posted in the space certainly supports the trend. But the most positions available in any department (save engineering, of course) is still sales. (They're also hiring more lawyers, as one might expect...)

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:52 AM
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Babelplex: Search in Two Languages

Meant to post this a couple weeks ago, and now SEW and Corante have gotten the word out: Babelplex is a new tool that allows you to search side by side results in two languages.

This is the first search based project for Babelplex's author, HK Tang. Born in Hong Kong and educated at the University of Washington, Tang tells me "For Babelplex, I've realized if you simplify search down to the simplest equation there are two sides. Output which Google has solidly nailed down, and input which is very relevant when searching in foreign text. I've observed users who are limited by the language of their keyboard would use Yahoo! Directory rather than Google Search to find International pages. Also, my family is bilingual, so that has some influence on the inception of Babelplex."

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:33 AM
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As Search History Develops, an Implication or Two

Thanks to reader Brendan Wilson for pointing this out: The Palo Alto Medical Foundation is warning against the use of Google Desktop (and presumably, any similar search tool). The foundation even published a FAQ about GDS. From that document:

How does this affect me? If this tool has been installed on a PC that you are using, it is possible for your private health information viewed through PAMFOnline to be cached on the computer's hard drive and retrieved later by someone else.
What can I do about it? If you uncheck the "Include Secure Pages (HTTPS)" option, the tool will no longer be able to retrieve secure PAMFOnline pages.

This is one example of what I am sure will be a long, slow awakening to the power and potential of having search history in our lives.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:13 AM
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First Reports on Google Desktop Downloads

Thanks to Seth and the team at Majestic for allowing me to post these numbers. According to their research, about 1.3 million unique users visited Google's Desktop Search page in the first two weeks of its release, with nearly half (640,000) downloading the application. Majestic also breaks out international numbers in its report, shown on this accompanying graph (click on it to enlarge it).

(Data from Comscore, a Majestic partner.)

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:26 PM
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When You Search For Stocks On Google...

...you get Yahoo Finance results. (You can also tab through to Fool.com, MSN and others, but I'd wager no one does). Now, we all know this, and it's been this way for quite a while. But while I was in New York today I had the chance to speak with Gordon Crovitz, who runs the electronic arm of Dow Jones, including the WSJ.com. And in conversation the question came up - why does Yahoo Finance come up first? Was it a business development deal? An algorithmic decision (perhaps it's the most popular site for stock quote searches?) A vestige of an earlier time when someone just coded it that way, liked Yahoo, and there you have it?

Clearly, Dow Jones would love for that stock quote search to end up on, oh, perhaps its new Marketwatch site. And, come to think of it, there are any number of sites that would like to have the lucrative traffic which these kind of structured Google searches dole out. So it made me wonder, what is the criteria by which this decision was made? I've lobbed a call into big G and big Y to find out, but in the meantime, do any of you have an explanation? The answer has some implications as to how Google and other search engines might interact with media and content players in the future.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:42 PM
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Personal Attacks Make Google News

Russell Beattie, a mobile blogger with a large following at Russell Beattie's Notebook, has picked up a personal antagonist of sorts, who has taken to writing personal attacks over at a site called MSMobile. Now, this might be a random but interesting flame war if it were not for a few things. First, it seems that this fellow at MSMobile is really venomous. And second, his site, MSMobile, is scanned and distributed by Google News, meaning his scurrilous rants about Russell are spread far and wide into the mediasphere, doing untold damage to Russell's credibility. Russell has posted a note asking for help from Google, to wit:

So why am I writing this here? To clear up a few facts and ask for your help. MSMobiles is not a valid impartial news site, it's a personal and biased weblog. If you know someone at Google News who can take him out of their news index, I would greatly appreciate it (I've emailed repeatedly).

The power of algorithmic news at work...

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Short Week

I'm traveling to NYC for one night only, then we have 22 family members (!!!!) for Thanksgiving starting Tuesday, so I sense this may be a light week of posting.

While I'm out, here's some suggested linkage, which should keep you busy for a while if you don' t have a turkey to brine:

Cory on WIPO. He's doing important work here.

The Google triumvarate is poised to sell a lot of shares over the next 18 months. This is pretty standard, what folks in the Valley call "diversifying risk". (WSJ paid sub, BBC here)

I've moved to MT 3.0. If you have issues with seeing it, suggest you first hold down shift and click reload (for all you Firefoxers, that is). If that does not work, email me at jbat at battellemedia dot com. This should really cut down on the comment spam. Thanks, Six Apart!

Russell Beattie chronicles his new gig at Yahoo and how it came about, and has a great idea for all Yahoo Employees: Give them all a mobile phone with unlimited net connectivity. Neat idea. Think of what might be invented...

Want the dirt on Google's new office in MSFT land? Greg has it.

More copyright type headaches for Google, this time from an adult site. Reminds me of other suits on trademark. Watch this space.

Scoble has some thoughts about the power of blogs versus traditional publishing. Uh huh.

Some hints on a new Google File System paper here.

Very interesting ramblings from the founder of Kozuru.

And when Adam Bosworth rambles, people should listen.

And simply because it made me almost pee my pants....monkeys can do kung fu. (Thanks Metafilter).

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:40 PM
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Findory Getting More Personal

Greg has the details on the ongoing improvements underway at Findory. From his post:

A couple weeks ago, Findory launched search history for web, news, and blog search. As I've said before, search history is not personalized search.

To see the impact, do a web search at Findory, then click on one or two of the search results, then do another search for something fairly similar. In cases where we believe we can help, we'll modify and highlight some of the search results.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:03 PM
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Grokking Wondir

Spent some time on the phone today grokking Wondir with its founder, Matthew Koll. Matt has a long and distinguished history in search, starting back in the non-web days (he created a text search engine in the early 90s which he sold to AOL in 1998) and running up into the present.

Wondir is, at its core, a question answering service. Wondir itself is more than two years old, but Koll only recently took the "beta" off the service and turned it into a for-profit enterprise. While there are loads of question answering services on the web, this one is different in some important ways. First off, it feels like a search engine. That's intentional, Koll told me, as he feels the process of finding answers through chat rooms and usenet like forums is cumbersome and unintuitive. Secondly, Wondir aggregates questions and answers through the architecture of participation, essentially getting its questioners to become answerers, and vice versa. This is non trivial - getting people to answer questions is not as easy as it might seem. But Koll has thought through all of this, and I like where this service is going.

You don't have to register to ask a question, but it pays if you do, because then your answer can be sent to you (and you can also tell Wondir areas of your own expertise, and it will notify you of questions that come in that you can answer if you wish to). When you do ask a question (in plain english), Wondir does a number of clever things. First, it parses your question's text and categorizes it in any number of potential topic clusters. It then alerts registered users who have raised their hands as willing to answer questions in those topics, either through email, RSS (soon), or IM. It also posts the question right there on the service, in a scrolling ticker below the search box. Wondir has any number of categories in a pull down menu, and when you select a category, the questions scrolling across the bottom change as well (the questions in the "mature content" area are a hoot).

Now, that alone is not enough to get this service to scale, and Koll knows it. So he's done a few more neat tricks. First, he's cut vertical content site deals, distributing Wondir out into the web in areas where the expertise and the community lives, complete with the question ticker. For example, there's a Wondir question/answer service at ichef.com, ratemyteachers.com, and icerocket (that new engine backed by Mark Cuban). Those more tightly integrated affiliates create scale and databases of questions and answers, databases that are then folded back into Wondir's overall engine, meaning that the more questions that are asked and answered, the better the overall engine gets. Neat, huh?

It gets better, at least theoretically. Koll has also cut a deal with Six Apart for a Typepad implementation, which will allow bloggers to share ecosystems of question answering. So, for example, Danny, Gary, Andy, and I might have a Search-related Wondir implementation. Eventually, we'd be able to share revenue in that model as well.

Revenue? So what is the business model? Well, it's paid search, of course. That's the beauty of it. A site like Wondir, or its affiliates, is very intent driven, and very specific, making AdSense a natural fit. That might answer the major question I have about the service - why, beyond good kharma and self promotion, would anyone want to get in the habit of answering questions for free? (Although, I'm not so sure that being helpful isn't in our human nature to begin with, and it's cool to have a service like Wondir to test that theory. )

Of course, Google Answers has been around for a long time, but as Koll points out, you have to pay for those answers, and the business has a limited architecture of participation. Koll claims it's doing only hundreds of questions a day, and Wondir, while still pretty much in stealth mode, is doing thousands.

Koll told me he wants to get the word out on Wondir, and hopes we'll all bang on it and help him make it better. I for one plan on using it for a while, and I certainly hope the service hits a tipping point. The implications are pretty darn cool.

Bonus link: Chris Sherman did a nice write up of Wondir back in 2002.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:03 PM
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Google Takes Another Step Toward Becoming Development Environment

Just got this note from Google PR on the beta introduction of the Google Deskbar API.

Today, Google announced the availability of the Google Deskbar API
(application programming interface). This technology makes it possible for
software developers to build their own features, or plug-ins, for the
popular Google Deskbar.

The Google Deskbar API is in the experimental, beta phase. We invite
developers to use the service and encourage them to send us their input and
feedback. Plug-ins can be written in any .NET language, such as C# or Visual
Basic.NET. More information about the Google Deskbar API can be found here:
http://deskbar.google.com/help/api/index.html.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:28 PM
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Move Over Big G...Here Comes....

...Empower. This is getting old, but I did predict it....

First line of the release:

"Move over, Google ... a new player is giving you a run for your high-speed money."

The claims continue: "The service, built on a platform that produces results almost four times faster than Yahoo.com, 11 times faster than Overture.com, and edges out Google.com on momentum, prides itself on both speed and variation of results."

If "variation" = "terrible" then they've succeeded....the engine looks to be entirely driven by pay-for-play.

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:24 PM
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PubSub, Blog Search Engine, Relaunched

Mary Hodder has the goods....PubSub is monitoring more than 6.5 million blogs, about half of them active....

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:43 AM
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The Law Embraces the Internet Archive

As Cory points out over on BoingBoing, it was only a matter of time. This does point to the beginning of the web as digital memory for our ongoing culture.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:38 AM
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Orkut Media?

I got an odd email from orkut yesterday, as did many others. It reads:

Dear John,

Stay beautiful,
the orkut team

OK, I'll do my best to "stay beautiful" (migod, please), but what is this all about? I have not been on orkut since the service's launch period, save occasionally trying to log in so as to insure that yes, in fact, orkut is still not working properly. And now this - a media product? Media? The equivalent of a weekly magazine online? The very idea of media under the umbrella of Google (even if it's sort of leaning in under the umbrella, not quite out of the rain) is interesting. For now, it's not much to look at. We'll see if that changes.

One thing hasn't: When I tried to read the Orkut Media FAQ, I got the error message at left.
Good to see some things are still consistent in this crazy world of search.

Interesting to see that the editor of orkut media is Gavin Tachibana, a "content manager" at Google who graduated from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach (though I'm on leave this year). Cool. Looks like Google is hiring media types - an interesting move.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:10 AM
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Google Guidance? Some Notes on the 10-Q

In its unusual S-1, Google famously said it would not offer traditional guidance to Wall Street. But this week the company offered a bit of it anyway, stating in their quarterly filing (filed on Monday) that revenue growth will not continue on the pace it has.

Trends in Our Business
Our business has grown rapidly since inception, and we expect that our business will continue to grow. This growth has been characterized by substantially increased revenues. However, although our revenue growth rate increased in the third quarter of 2004 compared to the second quarter of 2004, our revenue growth rate has generally declined, and we expect it will continue to do so as a result of increasing competition and the inevitable decline in growth rates as our revenues increase to higher levels. Consequently, we believe that our revenue growth rate from the second quarter to the third quarter of 2004 may not be sustainable into the fourth quarter of this year and in future periods. In addition, the main focus of our advertising programs is to provide relevant and useful advertising to our users, reflecting our commitment to constantly improve their overall web experience, and therefore steps we take to improve the relevance of the ads displayed on our web sites, such as removing ads that generate low click-through rates, could negatively affect our near-term advertising revenues.

Those revenue policies changes are worth watching.

All of this certainly not a surprise (save the guidance, which feels rather like the way MSFT used to always warn, then over perform). The company had under a billion in revenue in all of 2003, and in the first three quarters of 2004 it's already more than doubled that. As Microsoft has discovered, it's hard to grow torridly on a large base.

The document, which I'm only getting around to reading today, also has some clues on the size and capital spend of the company (one wonders the meaning of the word "significant" in the temporary employee count...):

Our full-time employee headcount has grown from 1,628 at December 31, 2003 to 2,668 at September 30, 2004. In addition, we have employed a significant number of temporary employees in the past and expect to continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Our capital expenditures have grown from $120.3 million in the nine months ended September 30, 2003 to $259.9 million in the nine months ended September 30, 2004. We expect to spend over $300 million on capital equipment, including information technology infrastructure, to manage our operations during 2004. Management of this growth will continue to require the devotion of significant employee and other resources and we may not be able to manage this growth effectively.

The company also notes its ongoing trademark litigation woes:

Legal Matters

Currently, there is no material litigation pending against the Company other than as described above.

Interesting that the Brian Reid matter is not considered material. That may mean it is close to settlement.

Cnet story.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:51 AM
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MSFT: Thank You, May I Have Another...

Microsoft and Overture have extended their contract, giving those who are waiting for Microsoft to roll out its Adwords competitor a clearer sense of when that service might roll out. The new contract is extended to June, 2006 - a one year extension.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:15 AM
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Tivo, Don't Forsake Us...

Two items on Tivo, one a bit disturbing, the other merely entertaining zeitgiesty stuff. First, as many have noted all over the web, Tivo is adopting a new fast forward ad unit that shows banners as you skip commercials. I think this is pretty bad idea, honestly, but let's see how it feels when implemented. And second, Gary points me to the Tivo Hot 100, the top shows as recorded by Tivo users via the "Season Pass" feature. Not many surprises here, but it's still interesting to look at.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:41 AM
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Google Scholar Launches: A Hint of Things to Come?

Google has, for some time, had a few verticalized, niche search solutions hidden in their Advanced Search areas, notably their "topic specific" search around Linux, the Mac, govt sites, and the like. Today the company launched another, more ambitious vertical search tool called Google Scholar. According to folks I spoke to last night at Google, the service was done by one engineer in his "20% time." Anurag Acharya, the engineer behind the service, tuned Google's crawler for academic papers and worked with universities to make those papers available to others on the web.

The services has the tagline "Stand on the shoulders of giants." It includes a cross referenced citation link for each paper, which is very cool, and as we all know, the basis of PageRank (and the WWW) in the first place. Here's a search for vertical or domain specific search, for example.

This move marks a trend toward making usually invisible (and useful) information more accessible, one that I could imagine spreads to other domains, perhaps ones more commercial in nature. (Scholar does not have ads in it, at least for now). The special ranking algorithm and policies for dealing with the nature of a structured document universe such as this clearly scales to other opportunities - ie, travel, automotive, business information and the like.

Here's Resourceshelf's take on this, and SEW's.

Cnet coverage.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:24 AM
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RealNames Resurfaces

The founder of RealNames, which rose and fell with the fortunes of the bubble and Microsoft back in the late 90s, has regained his domain, launched a limited search engine, and has plans for more.....here's and excerpt from his blog...

have recently reaquired the RealNames domain name - realnames.com. This is some 30 moths after we were forced to close the company.

Google’s direct navigation via Keyword feature [ in the Google toolbar], and Microsoft’s version of the same thing (try typing a natural language Keyword in the IE browser that does not have the Google toolbar installed] are both falling far short of what is needed - a standard, natural language, naming system, available through all browsers, and embedded as a sub-index in all search engines, with the ability to have names registered in all human readable scripts.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:47 AM
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Dinosaur Disney Threatens to Sue Over Linking

Good God, how much tin does it take to fill Mickey's ears? Recall how worked up I got over the Kleptones mashup of Queen's A Night at the Opera? Well, many others did too, including Waxy, which linked to various mirrors of it, as did I. In any case, Disney, which owns the rights to the original Queen recording, has now threatened to sue Waxy over the links. I know of one other organization that regularly threatens to sue when someone links to what they consider private intellectual property. They threatened me at Wired in the mid 1990s. Who were they? The Church of Scientology. Great company you keep, Mickey f*cking Mouse.

Link via Boing Boing.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:58 AM
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Would you pay $999.99 For One Click?

Yow! Would you pay $999.99 for one click? That's the maximum now for the Overture network. Used to be $100. Mesothelioma, anyone?

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:41 PM
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News: Overture Testing Ads Rolled Into RSS

This came across my desk tonight from a trusted source, and I checked it out, and it seems to be real: Overture is testing RSS ads in limited release, on small(er) feeds like this one from the MobileTracker blog.

MobileTracker notes the news in this posting:

If you’re an RSS feed subscriber you have probably noticed that the feed is now full text. That means you can read via RSS whatever you would normally see on the main MobileTracker page. If we add more content “after the jump” (like photos, which is often the case), you’ll need to click through to see it. You’ll also notice on the RSS feed that there are now advertisements. These are content targeted ads which means they should relate to the topic of the article. The ads are provided by Overture and powered by FeedBurner. We’re proud to work with both companies.

Here's what the ads look like.