Month: May 2005

A nice piece penned by Max Kalehoff.

A ranking of all Web sites based on the total volume of traffic received directly from search engines placed Wikipedia at 146 in June 2004. But in September 2004 it jumped in the ranking to 93; 71 in December 2004; and in March 2005, it was the 33rd most popular site in terms of visits received from search engines.

That means Wikipedia is impacting not only the trivial results of our Internet searches, but increasingly what content we consume and the types of answers we find to larger questions. This is a profound statement for anyone competing in the marketplace for attention to content and ideas.

Marissa Mayer is announcing a new initiative at the moment…Fusion, the first product from which is a new personalized home page. This “strategic initiative” aims to “fuse together Google’s functionality into a single unique way to interact with content.” It can be found in the Lab area, but don’t be fooled, this is an all out response to the success of Yahoo and others in the personalized/RSS space.

This is nothing new, Excite did this in 1996. But I am quite sure it will be much better – after all, there’s nine years of innovation behind it.

Mayer claims the difference with this personalized home page is that it’s very easy, it’s very crisp and “Googly”, it integrates across all Google products. It includes feeds from Wired, Slashdot, BBC, and others, and soon full RSS support…hmmm…MyYahoo RSS, anyone?!

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“We were wondering what we should do for Google Travel,” Brin told the Factory Tour just now. Well, Google Earth is the answer. I hinted at this in a previous post about Keyhole’s new database, and I think this is it.

More as I get links….

Google is launching the kind of personalized integration tool that many thought they’d never do. At first it was thought to be called iGoogle, but the name is uncertain at this point. It’s due from Google Labs later today, according to SEW. While watching the webcast I noticed a Powerpoint glitch that showed integration of address books and local search, but I did not get a screenshot in time. More as I find out more. SEW coverage. (thanks to a commentor on my site, who points to this!)

Some highlights from the Q&A session with Marissa and Peter:

Q: How many servers do you have? A: 10,000 was the last figure given (Oh, please!)

Q: Why are products in Beta so long? A: We want to leave them in beat when we are still working on them and we plan to make a lot of improvements. Froogle didn’t have sort by price, for example. News didn’t have sort by date. We are getting close to taking some of these products out of beta.

Q: Eric in the introduction said search is not how you think about your business. How do you think about your business? A: Think about our mission. There are lots of things that fall into that. Gmail, etc. – that are not just web search.

Q: How often do you crawl? A: It’s continuous – used to be monthly. Sites like CNN we might hit every ten minutes, others daily, or weekly….

The agenda looks good. I’m listening to Marissa Mayer right now, the agenda:

10:15 am – 12:00 pm Progress in Research and Ads

Marissa Mayer – (Director, Consumer Web Products)

Peter Norvig – (Director, Engineering Search Quality)

Q&A

Break

12:00 – 12:45 pm Lunch

12:45 – 2:00 pm Opportunities Today

Jonathan Rosenberg – (Product Management)

Jeff Huber – (VP Engineering)

Dave Girouard – (General Manager, Enterprise)

Q&A

Break

2:00 – 2:45 pm Future Directions

Alan Eustace – (VP Engineering & Research)

Marissa Mayer – (Director, Consumer Web Products)

Sergey Brin – (Co-Founder & President, Technology)

2:45 – 3:45 pm Q&A – Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin

3:45 – 4:30 pm Product Demos

“Future Directions” should be interesting. Marissa had a funny overview of how the engine works, including introducing an engineer who handles porn spam. The image at left is from her presentation. So far, pretty basic stuff, but still interesting. Peter Norvig is starting just now.

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Google is having a press day today, inviting many press to the plex for a day of meetings and presentations they are calling the “Google Factory Tour.” A last minute screwup in my calendar is preventing me from going, but fortunately there will be a webcast for press folks. I’ll be watching that and asking questions via IM and email! Stay tuned….