John Battelle's Searchblog

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.''

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.

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

(thanks Anil)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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....

....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.

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...)

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."

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.

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.)

...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.

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...

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).

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This is what I've been on about for some time now - the inclusion of a major ad network play in RSS as a step toward the monetization of RSS, and the support of full text RSS as the way to go. It's very exciting for bloggers, and marks the first major step for most of us beyond just running Adsense on our sites. As many already know, RSS is often half or more of our traffic/readership. I very much hope the tests go well, the learning is good, and this gets rolled out to the masses as soon as possible. In short, this marks Yahoo's first big step toward the right side of the tail, where Adsense has lived and ruled for the past couple of years. Way to go, Feedburner, for playing such a crucial role in this important first step, and kudos to Yahoo, for making this move.

Update: Rafat noted this tie up first, back in early November!

Now here's a fine idea. Why didn't I think of that? Well, I did, but I'm simply too busy, or too slow, to do this. But it's a fine idea, and it launched last month. Jobsinsearch.com. So far, not many jobs listed. But, still, a good idea. They even have a blog...

Mark your calendars for next year in April: This looks to be a good gathering for the hard core search geek.

A Japanese massage chair completes the ambiance at the Google Zurich office. From Douwe Osinga's blog:

Since today the Zurich office is a complete Google office. We have our own massage chair. From buying to actually receiving the chair, it must have taken more than six months so we really have something to be happy about. Not just because it is nice to have one, the massage chair is also part of the God given (well, at least Larry & Sergey given) rules that make an office into a Google office.

All Wall St. eyes are on GOOG today as more than 39 million shares are released from lockup. Bloomberg story.

The possible increase of shares in circulation may ease a shortage of stock that helped fuel a rally since the company's initial public offering in August. Shares of Google, the most- used Internet search engine, closed yesterday at $184.87, more than twice the IPO price of $85.

Before today, 27.2 million of Google's 273.4 million shares were free for trading. The number of shares available will rise tenfold by mid-February with the expiration of more so-called lockup periods that restrict insider sales after an initial public offering.

Update: Here's Google's 10-Q, thanks to SEWBlog.

Some interesting tidbits from Safa Rashtchy's just published note on MSN Search:

We view the new MSN search engine similar to replacing the engine inside of a car, which was previously powered by Yahoo's Inktomi. A better engine, even a far better engine, will only be one component (a necessary first component) in convincing people to buy a car that was previously not very popular. This is not a move that will give MSN a big market-share gain; instead, it's a first step to stop the market share loss that MSN Search was experiencing. A new search engine was an absolute strategic necessity, but the hard work comes after the engine is perfected and fully launched to the entire population of MSN. This will include positioning not only the search site, but also MSN itself to customers, as a better web experience than Google. We note that consumer's loyalty to Google is not just based on search accuracy but on a much deeper brand devotion. MSN's desktop search effort may well be its most promising initiative as it's potentially an advantage given that Microsoft has deep knowledge of the desktop file structure and applications, as well as the core expertise of Microsoft's desktop group. The desktop search may well turn out to be the way MSN eventually gains market share, at least in certain segments of the population – most notably among information workers. This may still leave a potentially larger segment, Middle America, to the competition.

So far the full text is not on the site, sorry, it was emailed to me as a PDF.

I've come to realize that one of the main reasons I have a Mac is so I don't spend all day playing with new search tools (most of which are PC only), and instead I can focus on my supposed real job, which is writing the book (yes, I really am writing, I swear). To that end, I can't speak to the new launch of Blinkx, but that's OK, a lot of other folks can.

Release in extended entry.

Update: Om notes that there may be trouble in Blinkx land, a founder is out....

Continue reading "Blinkx 2.0 Launches" »

Fred also points us to Tacoda's announcement of its Audience Match network, which is attempting to get publishers to share data so as to more precisely target audience intent over multiple content sites.

Head to MSFT's own search blog!
Link to original leak.

Congrats to Larry Kramer and his team for building an asset, surviving the bubble, and hooking up with Dow Jones. Price: Nearly $500 million. NYT coverage.

Good analysis: Fred's post. He used to be Chair of TheStreet.com.

BBC: Which engine is best?

Scoble: On MSFT's new engine (view from inside MSFT). Key insight: MSFT can win if they are more transparent than Google. Interesting...

Don Park: Worries that the world of search is headed toward a gated community model. Chilling, and certainly a viable scenario.

BizWeek: MSFT stumbles in search debut.

I'm noticing enough buzz on the topic to merit bringing it up here - folks on the boards are talking about whether Google might ban the practice of bidding on trademarked terms. The original rumour came from a Google UK source, reported on Corante, first mentioned on Webmasterworld, the grandaddy of the SEM/SEO discussion boards.

From that thread:

A friend of mine attended a Google University seminar at Earls Court (London, UK) on Thursday last week. Apparently one of the guys from Google said that they were planning to phase out affiliate bidding on AdWords 'very soon'. The reason - showing several ads for the same merchant reflects badly on the user's experience.

I'm a full-time affiliate who primarily uses AdWords to send customers to the exact product page on a merchant's website. If this is true quite frankly I'm in trouble. I called my account rep immediately in horror and he said he'd heard nothing of the sort. I would certainly hope Google would give plenty of warning if they were planning such a huge change.

The implications are significant here - the affiliate industry, which makes a lot f money arbitraging trademarked keywords, would be dramatically impacted. And Google stands to lose what may well be a significant revenue stream. But I sense there may be more at work here than merely "improving users' experience."

The UK information may be unfounded rumor, but the fact is, Google (and Overture) face a very serious threat from lawsuits over trademarked terms. In short, Geico (yup, owned by Google hero Warren Buffet) and American Blinds both have very serious complaints pending against Google, and both litigants are not going to go away. The cases are winding their way toward what could be a very public and very unpleasant discovery period.

Their beef? Competitors are buying their trademarked terms as AdWords and profiting from the confusion (ie other insurance companies were scooping up "Geico" as an AdWord, and driving customers to competing sites.) Interestingly, perhaps due to the fracas, there are no potentially infringing AdWords anymore on the term Geico, though a search for American Blinds still shows competitors attempting to make hay on that company's name.

Google's initial defense to these suits has been to claim that A/Google only uses trademarks in "internal computer algorithms to determine which ads to show," and B/ that the "process is not visible to users and therefore can't cause them to be confused as to the origin of goods or services displayed in the ads." (More in this Cnet story, which I am quoting.)

This argument has been viewed with skepticism by the courts, which have ruled that Geico can go ahead and sue. As it girds for the fight, Google, which previously had been limiting the purchase of some trademarks on a sort of hand-rolled basis, altered their AdWords policy to let anyone bid on a trademarked term. While the official reason given for the change was "better results", most legal observers I've spoken with say the real reason was legal consistency: you can't be fighting the Gecio and American Blind lawsuits, claiming that you're simply an intermediary, while at the same time protecting some trademarks.

What is not clear to me is whether the original source was claiming that Google was going to ban affiliate ads altogether - which would be a very large hit to revenues - or just the practice of affiliates using trademarked terms. In either case, Google could narrow or extend the policy with regard to competitors who buy their rivals' keywords. It remains to be seen.

If Google does shift strategy and ban the use of trademarks in AdWords, the suits will clearly be moot, and the company will have avoided what could have been a damaging blow to their corporate image. After all, having the courts rule definitively that you're profiting through an illegal practice is not exactly good business. Just ask Microsoft.

Tip of the Hat: Majestic Research.

Update: Good reading in response to this post and the original rumors: SEWblog.

It's the last day of the Wall St. Journal's free week, so I'll point to its coverage of this story: "AOL Plans Service to Scour Internet for Travel Deals." Yahoo has already made its intentions known in this space, and for my money, it's only a matter of time before Google does as well.

AOL's doing its deal with Kayak, which has been a Gary Price favorite for a long time.

America Online plans to enter the crowded online travel market early next year with a free service it claims will search dozens of Web sites for the best deals.

The move raises the profile of the new travel search-engine space. At least half a dozen sites, most of them launched in the past year, scour online travel agencies and Web sites of hotels, airlines and car-rental companies to find the best deals. AOL will work with closely held Kayak Software Corp., which launched a bare-bones airfare search in May at kayak.com.

Recall the earlier post about Google Images, which demonstrated that the index was rarely updated? Well, the folks at Google clearly were listening. When Sergey calls something embarrassing, something has to change. Now, when you query Google Images, you will see Google News images in your results. That'll solve some of the problems, but it's just a patch - news only archives 30 days, if memory serves. It's quite clever, though.

Example: Arafat.

Thanks to Nathan for pointing to this.

Update: Google and others have pointed out that this has been happening since April and is not a reaction to recent events. My bad.

SEW points out that a search on the new MSFT beta engine for more evil than satan returns Google as #1, and explains this history - apparently Google did the same to MSFT back in 1999.

I find this disturbing in all sorts of ways. It shows that engineers at any search company not only *can* fiddle with results, but at times when they find it convenient or funny (or perhaps in other instances, good for their business in some way) they *will.* Not a good precedent, in my humble opinion.

UPDATE: Google called me to inform me that they did not fiddle back in 1999, that the "evil" query back then returned MSFT on its own...not surprisingly...also MSFT posts on its blog that the initial results that brought Google to #1 for "more evil than satan" were a MSFTbomb, ie, not an inside job. Well, at least, not an official inside job...

Stewart Butterfield at Flickr is onto something....

Well, the rumours were true, the launch is real, and the Microsoft search engine is officially here, if in beta, and still in the "Sandbox" for now. I'm told that MSFT intends to roll it into MSN after garnering feedback for the next few months, probably sometime in the first half of 2005.

Microsoft's angle on the engine is "providing more useful answers." In the presentation I was given, MSFT showed some new research which claimed that the time between a searcher's query and a full answer averages 11 minutes. It's within this window that MSFT hopes to improve search - getting an answer, quicker.

I haven't had time to play with it to the extent I can say that it's better or worse than its competitors, but clearly, this is a significant engine. (I've included links to the press site, which features the new engine, at this writing, the beta site was still the old product). Product manager Justin Osmer, who gave me a tour, says he's confident the engine "will get us in the game." The index currently boasts 5 billion pages indexed, and includes some innovative features, including a location-based search called "Search Near Me" and a Yahoo-like approach to well-worn keyphrases like musician's names and the like. The engine also includes an Ask-like question answering capability. Before Google upped thier index to 8 billion, clearly in response to this news, Microsoft claimed, in early press releases, to have the largest index. Clearly it's back to the indexing board for them on that count, not, as Linden and many others have pointed out, that it really matters in the big scheme of things.

Search Near Me works either by interpreting your IP address to geolocation, which does not always work, or allowing you to set your preferences to include your actual location. Image and News search is also integrated.

The interface is clean and uncluttered, and includes a "Search Builder" tool that allows you to customize your query for better results. I'll have more on this in coming days, but for now, suffice to say the game is on, and Microsoft is very much on the field.

In conjunction with the launch, Microsoft has also debuted it's own Microsoft Search Blog (I'm honored, really...) along the lines of Google and Yahoo's entries. It's first entry is now up. I'm pleased to say, the comments are open.

But perhaps the most important news I gleaned from talking to Osmer was this: Microsoft has every intention of opening up its search APIs and allowing third party developers to leverage their search platform for new and innovative applications. This is where the future lies, in my mind, and I find that declaration a refreshing indication of where Microsoft is heading. "Our intentions down the road are not only to continue to grow the engine," Osmer said, "but to also set the groundwork for a third party ecosystem that would allow others to use our technology. We as a company realize that there is a significant difference between shrink wrapped software (in other words, MSFT's bread and butter) and the online world."

Amen. Let the games commence!

Draft release in extended entry.

Continue reading "Microsoft Launches Search Beta: Platform Ho!" »

Yep, that's what the Google home page now says it indexes...it also notes that this is a "nearly doubling". Now I am sure this has nothing to do with the launch of MSFT's search, more on that at 9 pm PST....Google's blog has the details.

Besides the MSFT news, more is coming and much more has past that I missed last week or that merits a quick post, but I'm buried so here's a roundup:

First off, Dogpile has launched a new feature it calls "IntelliFind" which "utilizes sophisticated query intelligence to assess the likely intent behind every entered query, enabling Dogpile to return more relevant results from a wider array of content sources." Dogpile is a metasearch engine, using results from Google, Yahoo, Ask, About, LookSmart, and many others. I'm not a huge fan of how they list paid results, but the service keeps innovating, worth checking out.

Last week 10x10 got a lot of buzz, this service lists the top 100 images and phrases that are driving news in any given hour. Cool to look at.






Yesterday Crystal Semantics announced "Textonomy Advance," which "provides rapid contextual analysis of textual information online to identify the proper theme of each site and deliver the most effective advertisements. " Sounds a little bit like Kaltix (though not about personalization).

And also yesterday Dulance, whose CEO has been posting in the shopping post below, announced an RSS comparison shopping application.

Thanks to the pending launch of MSFT's search technology, today the press is full of easy comparisons - "Is Google the Next Netscape?" is a typical headline. The mainstream press has just woken up to the "Microsoft is going to crush its competition" meme, and it's tiring to see this easy thinking splayed all over the mediasphere.

But let's get one thing straight, for once and for all: Google ain't no Netscape. As many have pointed out, it's looking more and more like the next Microsoft, in terms of business model, talent, and riches.

If Bill Gates had a magic shaving mirror, one that showed him 20 years younger and in fighting shape, he'd probably peer into it and see the image of Larry Page or Sergey Brin. Microsoft is indeed a fearsome competitor, with extraordinary resources (and I don't mean the $50 billion in cash, I mean the ability to leverage Windows). But it's a middle aged company that moves far more slowly than it did ten years ago, when it first recognized the Web threat. And even if it wants to move, which I am sure it does, it's uncertain as to which way to go: it's got a massive legacy to protect, and an uncertain path forward.

Back in 1995, MSFT faced a small company with barely any revenues and a product that, while innovative, was hardly rocket science to recreate. The internet was still a new concept and users had almost no brand loyalty, and a pretty ingrained sense that the only major player out there, besides AOL, was inevitably going to be Microsoft.

Now let's take a look at today. Microsoft faces an enormous chasm crossing moment: Windows is becoming simply another layer in the Internet application stack, eroding its lock in leverage over time. (I've taken to saying, probably far too casually, that Windows is to the Internet as DOS was to Windows). And Google? They've got hundreds of thousands of servers around the world running a proprietary, Linux-based operating system that serves up billions of queries a month, and is now being adapted to serve mail, blogs, photos, satellite images, and Lord knows what else. Google has a very distinct *architecture* advantage, not just a brand and user loyalty advantage (though it has that as well).

I'm not saying that MSFT (or AOL, or Yahoo) can't prosper in this space, or even "win" in the long term. But crush Google a la Netscape? No friggin' way. The only thing that can kill Google is Google itself, either through growing too fast, managing too poorly, or failing its customers in some catastrophic way.

What's a sign of a maturing business? One that takes care of its "developers." In the case of Google (for now, anyway), that means the agencies and search engine marketing companies that manage AdWords accounts on behalf of multiple clients. (Soon, one might presume, Google will have a robust developer network of the more traditional kind, a la Microsoft or Apple, but I'm getting ahead of the story).

Today Google announced "Google Advertising Professionals," a program designed to cater to SEMs and agencies. Google has long lagged Overture in the Manicuring the Hand That Feeds You category, I am sure this program will be a welcome addition in the search marketing space. Details in release, in extended entry.

Continue reading "Google Looks to Its Resellers" »

I was wondering why the MSFT folks were so eager to get me in front of a PC this week (I will see a preview Weds and report back asap): MSFT will debut its search to the public this Thursday, well ahead of sked. Hmm, wonder if there was a fire under that team's ass, stoked by Bill and Steve?

From the WSJ piece (the Journal is open this week, thankfully):

The Redmond, Wash. software maker on Thursday will open to the public its service for searching the Internet after eighteen months of development. The company is trying to tap into the lucrative business now dominated by Google of combining Internet search and advertising.

A Microsoft spokeswoman reached today declined to comment on the service. Microsoft, which has been testing the service on a limited basis since June, has said it will start the public version of the service by year-end. The company is also working on technology for searching for data on personal computers that will likely debut sometime later this year.

And of course Markoff has the details:

Microsoft will stress the size and completeness of its service, according to several people with knowledge of the announcement.

"I think Microsoft is a couple of years from doing anything serious, but it's a reminder that the big bad evil beast is out there," said John Tinker, an analyst who covers Google for ThinkEquity Partners, a small investment bank in San Francisco.

As long as I’m on the topic of societal impacts of search, I wanted to sketch out a scenario for you all, in a similar vein to the one I did recently on the integration of search and television.

This scenario involves several elements already in place – search technologies, mobile phones, and the Universal Product Code system – and some more fanciful, but nevertheless feasible technological and business model innovations.

So let’s set this one in motion and see what happens. Imagine it’s the near future, and you’re in your local grocery store on a mission to pick up dinner for a Saturday night dinner party. Because you’re a Searchblog reader with oodles of disposable income to burn, it’s a Whole Foods store, the aisles dripping organic righteousness and whole grain goodness. You know that dinner for 8 is going to run you at least $200, not counting the wine, but that’s OK, compared to the tab at the local bistro, you’ll be coming out ahead. But you do want to make sure you’re not spending money you don’t have to, especially on the wine.

Now, Whole Foods has quite a wine selection, but the store ain’t known for its discount prices on anything, and when it comes to wine, you’ve always had a sneaking suspicion they’re really sticking it to you. But it’s a convenience buy, you’ve always thought, you’re willing to put up with it for the most part.

As you slip your Naiman Ranch tri-tip into your basket and thank the butcher, you head to the wine aisle. What might go with that grilled tri tip? A nice cabernet, no doubt. Whole Foods' wine aisle, a testament to hierarchy and peer pressure, places the most expensive bottles on the top, and the cheap juice on the bottom. No self-respecting Whole Foods shopper wants to be seen bending down to check out a bottle of wine. Then again, those bottles staring out at you from eye level are exactly the kind that you suspect Whole Foods marks up with the glee of a five star sommelier.

What to do? Not to worry, you’ve got Google Mobile Shop installed on your phone. You whip out your Treo 950, the one with the infrared UPC reader installed, and you wand it over that bottle of 2001 Clos Du Val now lovingly cradled in your arms. In less than a second a set of options is presented on the phone’s screen. It reads:

2001 Clos Du Val Merlot, Lot 21
Stags Leap District, Napa Valley
Average Retail Price: $38 (click here for more)
Price at your store: $52 (more on this)
Click here for a list of prices at nearby stores
Click here for stores selling similar items
Click here for reviews of 2001 Clos Du Val Merlot
Click here for more on this vendor (Ecological Impact, Vendor Labor Policies…etc.)

You’re pretty sure that Clos Du Val isn’t employing child laborers, and anyway you’re really only interested in price comparisons, and the first screen has confirmed your initial suspicion: Whole Foods is ripping you off.

You click on the “list of prices at nearby stores” and see that the liquor store up the street is selling the same bottle for $39. You click on that store’s link, and then choose the “reserve this item for same day pick up” option. With a satisfied smirk, you replace the bottle on its perch on the top shelf, and head over to compare prices and recipe tips for the $6 boxes of imported pasta. As you leave, the fellow who runs the store's wine department eyes you warily, then picks up the phone to talk to his manager. "Herb?" he asks. "Did you get my message about banning cel phones in the store?"

Is this scenario possible? For it to happen, a few non-trivial things need to occur. First, the entire UPC system, which I must admit I do not fully grok, must be made open and available as a web service. Second, merchants must be compelled to make their inventory open and available to web services. Third, mobile device makers must install readers in their phones, essentially turning phones into magic gateways between the physical world and the virtual world of web-based information. And fourth, providers like Google must create applications that tie it all together.

I’ll leave the speculation as to whether steps 1 and 2 are possible to those who know better (Ross? VanGorilla?), but I am pretty sure #3 is already happening (right Rael or Russell?). And #4 is a no brainer – it’s square in Google and Yahoo’s mission.

The implications of search breaking out of the PC box and making real time information available at the point of purchase has been discussed in plenty of places, I am sure, and probably with far more prowess than this simple scenario. It has also been the failed business model of several Web 1.0 companies. But somehow, with recent developments in local and mobile search, it seems much, much closer to happening now.

What might be the effects of such a system coming to fruition? For one, markets would have to compete far more on service, convenience, ambiance, and other non-price related factors. And vendors of products that have been made in third world sweatshops, or with factories that overpollute, or that support causes some consumers do not wish to support, would be called out in a far more transparent fashion. Refusal to participate in such a system would mean that vendors or merchants have something to hide, and as such, the system could be a major force for good in the global economy – forcing transparency and accountability into a system that has habitually hidden the process of how products are made, transported, marketed, and sold from the consumer.

I for one very much hope such a system is just around the corner. What do you think?

Yesterday evening I spent some time chatting with a major news program that is doing a piece on Google. During the conversation, the correspondent asked how engines like Google are changing our own sense of self as we relate to the rest of the world. I went off on my (now rather tired) example of a hypothetical Deadbeat Dad who failed to make child support payments, was called out in court and in the local papers. He eventually mended his ways, paid up, and decided that because his reputation was sullied in the community where he lived, he'd move to another state and start over fresh.

But when he got to his new home, he couldn't get a job. Why? Because unbeknownst to him, his potential employers had Googled him, and found out he was a deadbeat dad.

But damn, if I had talked to the correspondent today, I could have just pointed her to Tim Bray's thoughts:

Today, I’m angry. A person with whom I have to deal is misbehaving and may destroy something good through bad, inexcusably bad, behavior.....Suppose I posted a piece here whose title was that person’s name, laying out in succinct but forceful detail the nature of the bad behavior, solidly illustrated by pointers to online examples. Suppose I offered a calmly-worded opinion that nobody in their right mind should consider hiring, or doing business with, or dating, this person. Suppose some other people who shared my opinions saw fit to point to the attack and perhaps chime in a bit. Given the way search engines work, I’d say that such an attack would be extremely damaging, and very hard to recover from. Would I do this? I don’t think so, unless it was a matter of life or death. But I sure do think about it sometimes.

That's the power of search: to paint a possibly skewed, damaging, or incomplete picture of a person. Given that engines tend to rank on popularity, and that searchers tend to read only the first few results, who you are in the index becomes, in a very real sense, who you are in the public eye. I'm quite sure Dan Rather has Googled himself lately, and is not pleased with the results.

Jeremy also has some thoughts on this....

Andy points us to a Reuters story covering the MSFT annual meeting. As the story reports, MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer told the audience that with regard to Google and Yahoo's lead in search advertising:

"We will catch up, we will surpass."

I only hope they do it through innovation and service, and not by forcing it down Longhorn users' throats.

Cnet coverage.

Over at his site, Jeremy gives Searchblog his opinion on the Feedburner implementation. Elsewhere, I've gotten comments on the AdBrite ads running on the right and below the permalink pages.

Jeremy says:

My thoughts on this:
• The ads are irrelevant--unrelated to the content of the post. Unlike AdSense, they don't fit in with the context at all.
• The ads are pretty big.
• That space is not well used. Instead of Amazon.com branding, why not show an album cover there? That might get me interested. Maybe.

I have to agree, as does Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner. But I think this issue will be solved shortly, in a matter of months. There will be more choices and more flexibility in RSS advertising, and I sense that given Yahoo's deep interest in RSS, we will be seeing movement from the big guys soon. Amazon may never solve the contextual problem for sites like mine, which are not really focused on products, but that's most likely a problem not worth solving.

In any case, when I have a moment, I'll turn off the Amazon ads. I'll try more stuff in RSS when it comes available.

As for the AdBrite system, I agree that the ads which show up on my site are mostly crap. A few of them, however, have been endemic or nearly endemic, and that's because someone made the decision to actually buy an ad, as opposed to the network stuff that runs most of the time. Problem: when someone buys an ad, they look just like the network ads, which is not good - an endemic sponsor should look endemic! I'll be working on that with the AdBrite folks. Generally, they have a way to go yet. More to come as the experiment continues...

Folks (and particularly Firefox folks) please bear with me as we update the site. We're moving to MT 3.0 and there will be some glitches.

As long as I'm talking about MT, parent company Six Apart announced a deal with Kanoodle today. Over at Boing Boing we've been working with Kanoodle for a while, and as much as I'd love to say the service works perfectly, there are still major issues, mainly on the contextual side. (The folks there have been great to work with.) Boing Boing is a very hard-to-categorize site, and so far, it's been very difficult to match the Kanoodle ads to the BB content. I am sure, however, that easier-to-categorize sites will welcome this new service. Release in extended entry....excerpt:

Kanoodle, a leading provider of sponsored listings for search results and content pages and Six Apart, the maker of award-winning Movable Type and TypePad weblog software, today announced that the companies will offer TypePad subscribers the ability to easily add Kanoodle's content-targeted sponsored links to their sites.  This marks the first time that webloggers will have seamless access to revenue-generating sponsored links as part of their publishing toolset.  The companies expect the product to be live by the first quarter of next year. 

Continue reading "Site Update, Six Apart News" »

Funny that I was in Florida last week, because the webmaster boards are lighting up with speculation that Google is about to do another major update to its index. When this happens, the rankings of many keywords and websites shift dramatically, with major implications for the business models of thousands of small sites.

The last major update, dubbed Florida, was just about a year ago, and it killed a lot of affiliate spam. But it also took out a lot of innocent bystanders. Site owners and the SEO community are battening down their hatches, as the holidays are usually the times when Google hurricanes hit. Why? That's when the pressure to make money on the web is most intense (many online retailers make 80% of their profits in the fourth quarter). That means the attempts to game Google also intensify. Should be fun to watch...but I wouldn't want to be a small online retailer right about now...

Gary points us to a new report (PDF download) issued by the folks at Consumer Union that reviews the disclosure policies of major search engines.

Key findings:
• Paid inclusion was not satisfactorily disclosed or explained by any of the search engines tested. The credibility of this practice is of such concern to the industry itself that, after Consumer Reports WebWatch testing had been completed, two of the top five search engines announced plans to terminate paid inclusion programs.
• Meta-engines, which present results from several search engines simultaneously, repeatedly failed to adequately disclose the presence of paid placement and paid inclusion within search results.
• Disclosures are generally hard to find, accessible by headings and hyperlinks that often blend in with the page, making them easy for consumers to overlook. • Information disclosed by the sites on business practices with advertisers — and how these practices may affect search results — was often confusing and jargonladen.
• Some engines, like Google – one of the few majors not named in the original FTC complaint – took pains to visually segregate paid results from non-paid results. Consumers may want to avoid others, like 1st Blaze, because of inadequate or absent disclosures that undermine the integrity of search results.

According to a release I rec'vd from Fathom Online today, keyword prices are still rising at a healthy clip.

Fathom Online, a leading search engine marketer, released its October monthly Keyword Price Index™ showing an overall 14% increase in the price of keywords from the September average of $1.37 per keyword to $1.55 for October.

Search advertisers in some sectors of the market found that the start of Q4 was definitely more costly than September. For instance, in the consumer services category, which includes entertainment, spas, and other related goods and services, prices increased on average 78% from $.54 to $.96 per keyword. Retailers faced increases on average of 52% from $.32 to $.48. Other advertisers fared better, particularly in the automotive industry where prices dropped 10% from $1.43 5o $1.39 and in telecom/broadband where the average fell 5% from $1.89 to $1.78.

Slashdot has details on Apple's integrated search function, noting that metadata will play a starring role. Apple's new search technology, which will incorporate desktop search, is called Spotlight. More detail here. Spotlight is expected to be integrated into Apple's next OS release, Tiger, due in Spring. From what I can glean from the thread, it seems Apple's search tool will be well received. As a Mac guy, all I can say is hurry up!

Florida was great, thanks to all who asked, but it's nice to be back in the Fall weather of Northern California. We start up the Searchblogging again with this interesting post from Slashdot regarding the troubling Abu Ghraib images:

Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's boyfriend charles graner and note how you don't get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!. Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread."

Turns out, though, that all this really was, according to Sergey Brin, was an embarrassing shortfall in Google's indexing process - essentially, he copped to Google only updating its image search every six months, given that the images hit back in early summer.

I don't quite understand how things that were once there (according to those on the thread mentioned above) fell out, but...here's what Sergey posted:

In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed that our image index is not updated as frequently as it should be. Expect a refresh in the near future.

In the meantime, you can just search on Google Web Search for [abu graib photos] [abu graib photos] [google.com] to get plenty of what you are looking for.