Welcome to the Party, MSFT!

Microsoft is taking its homegrown engine outta beta and going live today, adding a few neat bells and whistles along the way. I was under embargo till 9 pm tonight, but come on, the NYT is reporting it already.

I can't offer a reasonable review of the site out of the box, but a list of the new features is at least a start:

- Even more focus on "answers" via Encarta Premium content, which is now free (well, for first use anyway. The engine has added more Encarta content in general).
- Support for RSS search feeds.
- New design, and incorporation into all of MSN, the Messenger IM client, and the MSN Toolbar.

MSFT will be spending some marketing money on promoting its new search engine, I was told in a briefing last week. Let's hope it's better than the MSN marketing of past years...

Net net: Watch for Microsoft to start really cranking now that it has a platform upon which to build. (In the Times piece, Gates is quoted: "There is a tremendous opportunity for rapid innovation here...and the great thing about the launch of MSN Search is that we now have a strong platform in place that will enable us to begin to deliver those innovations to consumers.")

(Also, and aside, I missed this Davos session as I had to leave early, but Gates apparently once again took search as his pitard, then hoisted away. Last year, he said "Google kicked our butt," this year, it was "We were as stupid as hell.")

Like Yahoo before it, Microsoft can now embark on its own path, and I expect we'll see a lot of innovation coming out of Redmond. That's good for everyone. Welcome to the party (officially), MSFT! Now it gets interesting....

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:03 PM
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How can the computer become more like your friend?

So asks Craig Silverstein, my favorite JAM* quotemiester, in this FT article.

"It's clear that a list of links, though very useful, doesn't match the way people give information to each other," says Mr Silverstein. The question that he says Google - like others - is now trying to address is: "How can the computer become more like your friend when answering your questions?"

That means giving direct answers to questions, extracting data from online sources rather than giving links to web pages. It also means doing a better job of divining what the searcher is looking for, tailoring results more closely to what, based on past experience, appear to be the user's particular interests.

A focus on answers? Hmmm. Sounds like Yahoo, AOL, and MSFT's approach. Not to mention, Ask...

*JAM: Joints After Midnight.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:50 PM
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Fark Future Google Scenarios

Fark is having a Google photoshop hack contest.
These are priceless.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:30 PM
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Meta Directory Search

Thanks to Ross Mayfield for pointing this one out to me - a meta directory search engine.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:49 AM
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Conferences Ahoy!

Earlier this month we set the dates fro Web 2.0, the second edition. So mark your calendars - Oct. 5-7th, in San Francisco. Details to come!

Meanwhile, I want to use this space to plug another great event. It's called eTech, and it's pretty much the kissing cousin of Web 2.0. eTech is where the seeds of new and interesting technologies are first discovered, whilst Web 2.0 is where they take root in the soil of business. Of course you should go to both, but eTech is coming up first. It's another conference from the great folks at O'Reilly, who I work with on Web 2.0.

In any case, Rael Dornfest, program chair and O'Reilly CTO, has graciously given me a registration discount code to pass along to you all for the event, which will be held March 14-17 in San Diego.

The code is "et05sb" - just head to the registration site and plug it in. It will add another 5% discount to the already discounted early reg fee.

And by the way, Rael has a great site, and riffed on A9/Amazon's news last week. He has a cool idea for Amazon - check it out!

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:00 AM
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Johnson and Search - No, Exploring

The ever wonderful Steven Johnson riffs in the NYT about a tool he's been using for a few years in his writing, one that we probably all wish we had.

The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me....

...The other day I ran a search that included the word ''sewage'' several times. Because the software knows the word ''waste'' is often used alongside ''sewage'' it directed me to a quote that explained the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies: by repurposing the calcium waste products created by the metabolism of cells.

That might seem like an errant result, but it sent me off on a long and fruitful tangent into the way complex systems -- whether cities or bodies -- find productive uses for the waste they create. It's still early, but I may well get an entire chapter out of that little spark of an idea.

Steven emailed me that he has a longer explanation of his software and process on his site, here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:47 AM
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Catching Up

Man. Traveling for 28 hours straight, then staying up two nights in a row for a best friend's 40th can certainly get in the way of work. But I'm back, and much to report.

I'll be chewing through old news over the next day or so, but honestly, won't report much of it, as my book is due very shortly and I have another, final chapter to finish. However, a few things to note.

Cnet reports from a Harvard conference. Quote: " "Google led the way in clarity in advertising," said Mark Kroese, general manager of information services at Microsoft's MSN. "We weren't separating results (from ads) a year and a half ago, and since we've begun doing so, the response from both users and advertisers has been huge. Google proved that if you have clarity, people respond.""

Cnet also reports on how Google must be losing its cutting edge status, because the "OC" cast is now using A9. OK. In any case, Apple beat out Google for top brand this year, more a statement of Apple's prominence with the mini and the iPod than any failing of Google's, which had the top spot since 2002.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:41 AM
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Google Clarifies Adwords API

Details here and here. More when I get back.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:09 PM
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Davos

I'm on my way back from Davos, after four days of mind bending interaction. I'd love to do a long post, but I have to leave shortly to drive to Zurich, then fly to SF. So perhaps later. Suffice to say, search was all over this conference, in ways both subtle and overt. Larry, Sergey and Eric of Google were all here, I got to spend some quality time with Sergey today, finishing the last part of my reporting on the book's final chapter.

The number of extraordinary folks here, combined with their diversity of view points and backgrounds - I met folks from all parts of the world - really does mitigate the otherwise rather unnerving reality of the world's leaders all conferring in an exclusive ski resort in Switzerland.

Tonight I attended a Davos dinner on blogging, it was a great conversation, more on Davos in general here.

In any case, I will be traveling for the next 36 hours, so posting will be...light.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:01 PM
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Business.Com Adds People Search

Interesting - search for business professionals...Here's my search. I had no idea.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:34 AM
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News: A9 Debuts "Yellow Pages" - Now *That's* Local

A9 has debuted a neat new local search product today, which I am covering for Business 2.0 (the actual story will post shortly, this link is to a blog entry about the story on B 2's blog). This is a big deal for A9, and for Amazon - a blending of search and commerce models that has some interesting implications. Excerpt:

In short, Manber and co. (urged on by Jeff Bezos, who Manber says was "very involved") strapped GPS-enabled digital video camera-cum-terabyte server rigs to the top of a bunch of SUVs, then drove them around the commercial areas of major US metropolitan areas, recording what then became composite still pictures of entire cities, one address at a time. A9 took more than 20 million images of 14 million+ businesses across ten cities (more are coming soon), then created a local search application they call Block View.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:45 PM
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Is Google Image Search Updating?

Thomas Hawk wonders.

Now I know that Google was criticized a while back regarding the staleness of their images and that an upgrade was promised but I'd yet to see anything official announced. Over the past two weeks the traffic being driven to my site from Google's Image Search has continued to grow and (if you combine their various international sites) Google Image Search has now become my top referring entity to thomashawk.com......

...If I do a search for "rain" under large images, my photo titled "San Francisco Rain" (see below) is on the first page of over 270,000 large images of "rain." Wow, how did I get so lucky? Is it because the picture is actually pretty good as I'd like to believe? Is someone manually reviewing and ranking images at Google? Or is it because I publish using blogger or that I upload my photos to the internet using Hello Picasa (both Google properties)?

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:44 AM
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Googler Blogs, Then UnBlogs - Updated

Via GB'd: Hmmm. Check this out. Philipp found a Google employee who was posting openly about Google, and has some excerpts from the posts on his site. Am getting smart on this but...Seems a fellow started at Google, starting blogging about Google, said some not so nice things and probably violated internal policies to boot, and then quickly blanked his posts. This is his site (ninetyninezeroes - get it?). Empty, for the most part. And no Google cache or URL info. Clearly his site is not in Google's index - I searched for some of the strings in the text Phillip has on his site, not there. His site is on Blogger, and had been up long enough for Google to index it, certainly. So, it seems, the site has been taken out manually, something Google claims to never do.

However, I did find it in Yahoo's cache.

And here is even more - including a discourse on Google's benefits, and an overview of a Google party at last week's sales conference in SF. Highlights:

"google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what's with the 50th percentile compensation? the packages would've been decent when the company was pre-IPO, but let's be honest here... a stock option with a strike price of $188 just doesn't have the same value as the ones of yesteryear. even microsoft adjusted their base salaries to 66th percentile years ago when it was clear that their stock options weren't as much a part of the total compensation package as it used to be. for a post-IPO company like google, it only seems fair that they adjust things accordingly."

"i must say, 1500+ sales people getting drunk at a company sponsored party feels remarkably like a frat party."

I am trying to confirm this guy actually worked at Google, and that this is not some elaborate hoax...the fact that it's not in Google's index certainly indicates something is up...

So I do wonder. How is it that Yahoo has it indexed, and Google does not? I'm asking. More when/if I hear more.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:26 AM
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Quick Update

My, it's a busy time in the search biz. I'm still in Europe and the schedule is quite demanding here, so my postings will be light. I will have some news tonight, and hope to get to a longer analysis of video search shortly. Meantime, much buzz about this Sci Am article...thanks to the many readers who have pinged me asking where the hell I am...

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:50 PM
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Firefox Pro Going to Google

I am sure this will re-ignite the browser speculation, but I think the thing after the browser, whatever it may be, is far more interesting to speculate upon.

Thanks for the tip, Steve.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:12 AM
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Rackable IPO: The Search Connection

Interesting piece in B'week online on how this hardware company prospered by building servers for Google and Yahoo...the company is set to file for an IPO shortly...

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:58 AM
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Google Video Search

I was briefed on this last week, and will have a longer report later today. Suffice to say, Google Video Search launched today. It's quite distinct from Yahoo and other's approach....

Coverage here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:32 AM
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Google Voice

It's all over the web today. Look, I was the one to pooh pooh GMail on April 1st, so I'll stay away from saying this is ridiculous speculation.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:30 AM
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adMarketplace: Another Bite at The Advertising Apple

I've been meaning to write about adMarketplace, a new advertising service, ever since I spoke to its CEO a month or so ago. But I wanted to try it out for myself first, much as I have AdBrite (the network you see on the right over there, which by the way announced (sub req'd) its funding from Sequoia Capital today). I haven't had the time to do that yet, though I certainly intend to shortly. In any case, today adMarketplace announced an interesting affiliate program that allows publishers to earn revenue for introducing advertisers into the network - if you, as a publisher, are responsible for getting an advertiser signed up, you get a piece of that advertiser's revenue across the network, even if the ads are not on your site. An interesting idea and one that feels like a step toward my Publisher Driven (nee Sell Side) Advertising model.

AdMarketplace is the company behind eBay's ad market, a background which serves as both an endorsement and a limitation, when it debuted last year, reviews were mixed. Jim Walton of adMarketplace tells me that it is his intention to quickly grow his network, and he hopes to implement a self service sign up a la AdSense shortly. More when I actually find the time to grok the system, probably later in Feb.

PS - In Davos now, jetlagged but happy to be in the snow...

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:53 AM
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The Week Ahead

A quick heads up - the coming week promises to be a big one in the world of search, if the birds flying around my in box are any indication. However, I am away the entire week in Europe, so posting might be light (I'm told there will be WiFi where I will be, but you never know...). In case any readers might also be there, I'll be at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This is my second trip there - I first went in 2001, but couldn't afford it over the past few years. This year they have been kind enough to extend me a pass, and I will be posting as I can. On the first day a group of "Young Global Leaders" (how they come up with these names...) will be at a meeting "aimed at establishing a framework for understanding the problems and risks we face in the coming decades and beyond." I am honored to be one of them, though a bit baffled how it all came about.

The WEF has a blog, as well, though for more personal coverage, you might watch Loic LeMeur's.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:09 AM
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Ask Pokes Fun At Google

This week much of the Googleplex is off on the company ski vacation. So Ask pokes fun by showing Jeeves sitting at his desk, clearly working, but dreaming of snowboarding. When you click on Jeeves, you see a smart answer showing the current conditions at Squaw Valley, where the Google ski trip is taking place. Fun!

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:58 PM
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AdWords API: Start of Something...

SIliconValleyWatcher has the scoop: Google is opening up API support for AdWords. This is a big deal (I hope) in that it lets new ecologies of AdWord-based plays begin to thrive - ideally, this will extend to AdSense, and let publishers start to actually help Google make AdSense work well enough to provide more than just beer money. (Gary Stein notes that Rich at Topix is doing some work along those lines via a premium program).

From the coverage:

The release of the API marks a transition for Google, from an online services company towards that of an IT platform for global ad delivery. The types of sophisticated management tools that will be available from Google and third parties should also help tie advertisers into its ad network.

via GB'd

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:01 AM
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Isohunt and the MPAA Knuckleheads

Isohunt is a BitTorrent search engine, one of the many sites the MPAA is attempting to scare and/or litigate out of business. But the fellow behind Isohunt isn't folding his tent and going home, he's fighting. As Boing Boing points out, so far, he seems to have a far better grasp of the legal issues than does the MPAA. Isohunt simply helps people find stuff, it doesn't host it. But the MPAA is trying to use the DMCA to force the site down. From the site owner's response:

You repeatedly mention the "representative" list of works, which serves only to intimidate us as a search service. If you look at the Betamax vs. Universal case, the VCR was not deemed illegal since it is capable of legal use. isohunt.com is a content agnostic search service on indexing torrent links over the net, which is very much capable of legal use.

The implications here are significant, and this overall story is worth watching. Among other things, the dunderheads at the MPAA are trying to make linking to something illegal. That's a dangerous precedent.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:54 AM
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The Yahoo Ticker

Tickers have been around for while - I remember during Push 1.0 everyone was downloading a stock or news ticker app for their desktop. Then everyone uninstalled it - it crashed the PC or made it unbearably slow, or was simply irritating and a waste of screen real estate.

Well, every good idea deserves another chance, and this time Yahoo's on the case with a beta of a new kind of ticker, one that rolls not just stock info, but just about anything in RSS - so you can monitor, say, Technorati tags or Yahoo News alerts. Oh, and it has a search box, natch. As usual, it's PC only, IE only. Sigh. More on the Yahoo Search Blog.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:34 AM
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Google Setback in France On Trademarks

I'm writing today (the book again!) but this is interesting. From Cnet: Google loses trademark dispute in France.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:23 PM
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News: AOL Puts A Stake In The Ground

As I worked on my book over the past year or so, AOL was quite significant for its absence. It didn't seem to have a strategy to speak of when it came to search, its focus on its own walled garden of access customers kept it from influencing the broader conversation of web-based search.

That all seems to be changing now, as AOL last Fall announced it was opening up its service and was taking a more web-centric approach to its business. First major step seems to be in search: it too is throwing its hat into the ring, and the approach it's taking should be familiar to anyone who has a Yahoo login - yup, it looks like Yahoo, with an AOL twist.

(NB: The new search is not available as I write this, I will update when is goes live. Full release is in extended entry.)

First, AOL has used Google as its core index for sometime, and this is not changing. What is changing, and what I find most interesting, is that AOL is throwing open its "Search Experience" to the general web user. AOL has developed any number of interesting tools layered on top of Google - think A9, and Yahoo till they dropped Google for their own index last year. But until now, AOL has focused on its access base - i.e. its access clients, who use PC-based client software to access the AOL service. AOL wasn't really a search destination for anyone who wasn't already an AOL member.

No longer. Last Fall AOL announced a business strategy shift which predicated today's annoucement. It gave up the walled garden model, and - not surprisingly for those who feel search is critical to all things internet - their first big move toward paying off that announcement is in search.

As one might expect, AOL has joined Yahoo in taking what might be called the "media model" of search. The media model takes a person's query and salts the results with all manners of human edited results - mostly from content the service owns, or content that the service access from partners, or content from the web that the service edits together to create what has been called "smart search", "search shortcuts," "programmatic search," and the like. (To be fair, Yahoo, of all the players, is actually pursuing both a Head and a Tail approach - with their algorithmic index and in particular their approach to RSS and video search, for example, they are very much playing in the tail as well).

But AOL is taking "programmed search" to the extreme. It is, after all, a major division of a gigantic content player, and up until now, that content was locked away behind the failing access business model. No longer. AOL Search is taking the media model of search to the maximum - they have 60 full time employees creating edited "snapshots" which respond to what AOL Search chief Gerry Campbell says are 20% of all queries. That's 2.5 million snapshots preloaded, so when you type in a popular query, you get an "answer, not just a list of results." I imagine that number will only continue to grow. Yahoo circa 1995, anyone? This time, however, AOL only has to pre-load queries which prove out to be worth the time - the log files will tell them which ones. As will the economy. "We won't have a smart box for a query like 'birds of the Maldives'" Campbell told me. " But that's why we have Google."

Yow! It's not like Google is against "smart search boxes" - they do add Froogle, News, and Mapquest links when they deem it appropriate. But AOL (and Yahoo) have taken an far more aggressive approach. AOL "without a doubt" wants to to be a major web destination, Campbell says. Which will win? Eh, both.

AOL and Yahoo are playing to the head - where the money is, where the commercial value is - honestly, where most of the most popular content is. Google is playing, as a service, more to the tail. And the stuff they are adding to their new web search, combined with the stuff they plan to add, will, i think, push AOL into being a full throated contestant in the ongoing search scrum. Yippee!!!

Campbell said something interesting as we chewed through this: that AOL is creating a "query driven navigation interface," as opposed to just another search engine.

To the particulars (and I'd love to have screen shots, but I never got the deck mailed to me that I saw online when AOL briefed me earlier today. When/if I get em, you'll see em.)

AOL is adding a lot to its search play. First they have a new and much improved interface. Probably most impressive, at least in concept (I have not played with it) is the "SmartBox" feature which is sort of like Yahoo's "Also Try" or Google's search suggestion tool, but in real time as you type a query. Cool idea.

They're adding clustering, via a deal with Vivisimo. They're adding pay-per-call, via a deal with Ingenio (I'd love to write more about this, but I'm beat, it's late, maybe later in the week!). They're adding those smart boxes I was talking about. They're adding search history - but only your last 50 searches. I think that's lame, but Campbell told me the average AOL user searches just 20 times a month - same as your typical web surfer. They plan to watch that and possibly add more. And they're planning on adding robust local search that integrates some of their properties - MapQuest, Moviefone, Yellow Pages, City Guides, etc.

And, of course, they will be adding desktop search, through a deal with Copernic, which is, I hear, a great desktop search tool.

Soon, Campbell told me, they plan to add localized indexing, so you can search just the part of the web that is in your region. That will be through a partnership with FAST.

And, oh yeah, they will be integrating vertical search, travel, shopping, etc. Oh, and they have added the ability for "AOL partner advertisers" to buy their own trademarks as ad terms, boxing out others. Hmmm, that smells a bit opportunistic given all the legal stuff swirling around trademarks, but hey, gotta make a buck.

Man, they've been busy. I can't wait to play with it. I'll update this post once I do.

AMERICA ONLINE INTRODUCES NEW AOL® SEARCH INNOVATIONS AND OPENS UP NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR ADVERTISERS



Dulles, VA – January 20, 2005 – America Online, Inc., the world’s leading interactive services company, announced today new AOL® Search innovations and partnerships to expand its offerings for AOL® subscribers, current and future audiences of AOL's network of Web properties, including the new AOL.com® portal, and advertisers.

Available today is a new version of AOL Search, as America Online expands its search services with new technology partners in addition to Google™ core results. On AOL Search, users can find news, local information, images, audio and video files, and products all in one place, and it combines results from Google with relevant AOL® content and tools to quickly narrow searches, helping users find better answers faster than ever before. 

New enhancements of AOL Search include:

  ** An updated design that moves away from a tabbed interface to provide users with a more directed and personalized search experience.

  ** A new sorting and “clustering” feature that helps users find exactly what they are looking for more quickly and efficiently. AOL has licensed clustering technology from Vivisimo, which automatically organizes relevant search results by topics and displays them alongside the list of general Web search results. This approach saves users from having to wade through long lists so they can zero in on more specific results and find exactly what they're searching for. AOL Search is the first major search engine to incorporate clustering technology within its search results.

  ** An innovative AOL® SmartBox™ suggestion tool that automatically presents relevant choices to help instantly narrow a query even before users press the “Search” button. The SmartBox tool helps users refine and clarify their search, increasing the accuracy of their results. For example, typing in the word “eagles” into the AOL Search query box presents the opportunity for users to hone their search to “The Eagles” (the band), “The Philadelphia Eagles” (football team), or “Eagles” (the bird). AOL Search will also display a user's most recent searches to save time when they want to look up the same searches again.

  ** A new layer of results called "Snapshots" appears at the top of search results and presents editorial content and relevant information for a wide range of topics from local movie showtimes and sports stats to current events. Snapshots results, which draw from AOL's large network of content and Web brands, include integrated maps and member ratings for local businesses, restaurants and other points of interest. Also available are quick tools such as a calculator, currency converter, "find a flight" from AOL® Travel, and "find a restaurant" from AOL® CityGuide. There are now more than 2.5 million AOL® Snapshots programmed packages provided for as many as 20% of all AOL Search queries. AOL Search integrates locally relevant search results for cities across the U.S. and draws from AOL’s leading local services including AOL CityGuide, AOL® Yellow Pages, and the MapQuest® and Moviefone® services.

  ** Integrated shopping search results provide users with an easy and convenient way to purchase products they’re looking for or to easily access Pinpoint® Shopping’s database of more than 25 million products where users can also narrow products by category, brand, price, store name and merchant rating.

  ** As part of America Online's ongoing commitment to ensure usability of AOL products and services by people with disabilities, the new AOL Search offers the ability to adjust font sizes and improved compatibility with screen reader software used by the blind.

Coming soon, AOL Search will further expand its Local Search capabilities with a greater diversity of features, based on a new algorithm, giving users an even more comprehensive and convenient way to find information where they live, work and travel. America Online is working with Fast Search & Transfer, Inc. (FAST™), a leading provider of search technology and solutions, on its new content aggregation, indexing, and algorithmic approach to enhance its expanded local search services and results customized to users' geographic locations.

Also announced today, America Online has signed a license agreement with Copernic for desktop search technology. Under the agreement, AOL is working with Copernic to deliver integrated desktop search with AOL Search that will allow users to conveniently search from one place for information online or files on their computer hard-drive.

America Online is also working to provide expanded opportunities for businesses and advertisers. In addition to its successful relationship with Google to provide Web search results and sponsored links for AOL Search, America Online announced today that it will work with Ingenio, a company that offers a new way for local merchants to tap the power of Internet advertising through its Pay Per Call™ Advertising Platform. Ingenio Pay Per Call offers advertisers -- whether or not they operate a website -- an Internet-based, pay-for-performance system to drive targeted phone calls, rather than clicks, to their business for fast and efficient customer acquisition.

Coming soon, these advertisers – including businesses large and small, as well as local merchants and service providers – will be showcased in a sponsored link search results area on AOL Search, the AOL.com Web site, AOL Yellow Pages and other AOL properties, providing advertisers exposure to a mass audience of ready-to-buy customers searching online for local products and services. Ingenio Pay Per Call advertisers will be charged only after a phone call is made to their business as a result of the ad. An auction-based, open bidding approach gives advertisers unique insight into their local market, allowing them to determine how much a phone lead is worth to their business at any given time.

About America Online, Inc.

America Online, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc (NYSE: TWX). Based in Dulles, Virginia, America Online is the world's leader in interactive services, Web brands, Internet technologies and e-commerce services.



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• Posted by John Battelle at 9:27 PM
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(Updated) Follow On No Follow: Will "Fully web-expressed writing" Suffer?

I am still not sure how I feel about this, everyone in the comments field of the last post have valid points to make. As I understand it from the Google Guy post (and I am not sure this really is a "Google Guy" - when will Google just stop being coy and let actual real people make comments?) the rel = tag will possibly extend how comment URLs can be understood, built upon, etc. That sounds like a good thing.

But certainly then one question is, do we default to "no follow"?

Now, I'm not questioning No Follow simply because I want to ensure that those who leave URLs in a blog's comment space get more search juice. For the most part, I agree with Danny's approach on this question. But what bothers me is that there may well be an ecology that evolves based on the link mojo in comments which we can't imagine, but that would be important and wonderful, and that will not develop if every comment has a tag telling search engines to ignore it. Like it or not, search engines are now processors of our collective reality, and fiddling with that requires some comtemplation.

My gut take on this yesterday was "We're making a decision without thinking through the implications." My second gut take was "We can't possibly imagine all the implications." So my third gut take is "Don't do it if we can't imagine what consequences it might have."

OTOH, there is much to recommend any system that foils spammers, and ecologies always evolve through a rubicon of conscious choice and unconscious wandering. I have found, however, that using the tools provided by MT, comment spam is no longer a big deal for me. I manage the problem on my end (with able help from my webmaster), and that's that.

In the end, I remain unsure how I feel about this, and will continue to grok it, and if I come to some conclusion, I'll share it, but for now, I'm still pondering it. Meanwhile, my webmaster has installed the software, but I'm going to ask him to take it off mine, till I figure out how I feel about it.

Update 2: Anil has a good post on all this here. But as I read through it, I realized I really wanted to read the comments too. And bingo, they were great. Danny chimed in, as did many others, and I learned something. The comments themselves were very valuable information. Let's imagine a scenario five years from now when someone - perhaps a student doing his thesis on the early growth of blogs - wants to do a search for intelligent commentary on the emergence of post-PageRank relevance schema. Assuming that everyone follows No Follow, does that mean that the comments in Anil's post, which I found very good, will have less juice in the index, even though they use linking to make posts? What if the comments brought up entirely new ideas, ones that deserve to be found later, or linked to important concepts which elucidate the discussion?

In other words, here is one of the unintended consequences I worried about already becoming apparent: No Follow will discourage people from doing what I'll call "fully web-expressed writing" on other people's blogs - where they write in that rather post-modern way of linking as they write, which is what we all do in this bloggy world we live in. A deft web writer is like a spider pulling strands to support his or her central thesis - it's an emerging form of communication, and from what I can tell, it's going to be very important long term to our culture.

If as a commentator on someone's blog, you know that you're spending ten, twenty, or more minutes crafting a response, and that response - because it lives in someone's comments field - will be ignored by the conferrers of future societal attention (ie - search indexes) - then I can imagine many folks will simply avoid writing thoughtful responses in comemnts altogether. Instead, they'll post on their own site. It seems that one of the things No Follow will do - subtley or not - is discourage active and intelligent dialog on a post. That is not, to my mind, a good thing.

So far what I have read seems to frame the folks who are unsure about No Follow as not wanting to lose the ability to gain PageRank from comments they might post elsewhere. Danny pointed out in Anil's comments that there is something rather seamy about using comments to announce your blog, or point to your favorite post, or whatever. With exceptions, I agree with that. But I don't think this is about that - it's not why I am still unsure. It's more subtle - what am I locking down here that otherwise might flourish? What am I cutting off that might prove important in the future?

Also, the idea that we need to get "back to PageRank as it was in the beginning" feels a bit off - that was then, this is now. We can't go back.

I would have liked to have posted this on Anil's site, but he has TypeKey registration set up, and I'm not against it per se, but I just don't like the siging up proceess getting in the way of thinking out loud as the impulse hit me. Sorry about that, but there you have it, proof in the process. As I have said many times, f*ing spammers.

Lastly, I sense that this is more about the search engines and their need to despam their indexes (important certainly), than it is about the bloggers and the need to despam our sites (which as I said before, we all are getting reasonably good at). Note that Ask - which takes a different indexing approach from the more PageRank-centric MSN, Google, and Yahoo - is on the sidelines on this one. Not that we don't all live in an intertwingled ecology, and not that we don't all potentially benefit from this move, but ... this felt rushed and rather unilateral.

Anyway, yet more to chew on. This is drawing an amazing array of responses, far more than I can read right now. My apologies in advance if I missing some obvious advancements in the discussion, or have my facts dead wrong.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:53 AM
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No Follow

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this yet, because what ends up happening is folks who leave URLs in comment fields get no search juice at all. This creates an early lock down in the blog space that I am not sure won't have unexpected consequences. On the other hand, I love the idea of f*ing with comment spammers...

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:07 PM
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Thoughts on Picasa and Google's Marketing Strategy

Last week I had a chance to speak with Lars Perkins, once CEO of Picasa and now GM of Google's Picasa unit. He was brimming with the news of his new product's features, so let's do a quick overview of what's new, and then I'll add a few thoughts as to what all this means. At least, what it seems to mean from where I stand.

First, Picasa is a major upgrade, the first since its release. It adds features in four areas:

- Editing. Version 2 has more and deeper editing features, including new filters, new lighting effects and masks, new color correction, etc.
- Backup. Picasa now lets you back up to CD or DVD, and create "gift CDs" for family and friends.
- Organization. You can now tag pictures with metadata and organize them in new ways.
- Integration with other sites. Picasa announced a deal that allows you to get prints of your Picasa photos through four major photo sites: Ofoto, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Walmart.

Ok, for more on the features, there's always PCWorld. What I'm interested in is the more joints after midnight stuff, what does Picasa *mean*, man?

It was odd - almost weird - to be having the discussion I did with Lars. It felt like I was back at MacWeek in the late 1980s and there I was, talking to a product manager at - well, a company like Microsoft about his new product - just one of scores the company was working on at given time. The whole thing struck me as very...traditional. Google was introducing a new software application, touting its new features...Wow, i thought to myself, this is how things are going to be with Google, going forward. Just one more product, one more set of features, one more cog in the machine. I don't know why that struck such a dissonant note, but it seems to me it's apt - the company is getting big, and every product can't have the entire impact of the Google brand, so to speak.

But every product does carry that brand's influence and potential. And to that end Picasa has many implications. First, let's consider the business model. I asked Lars what it was, and he admitted "We don't have one." Since Google bought Picasa, the software is now free - it used to cost around $30 to download.

"That's kind of took some getting used to," Perkins added. "I had to unlearn some of my entrepreneurial instincts...For now, the focus is entirely on creating the best user experience. Like most things Google has done, we'll figure out the business model down the road."

OK, I can swing with that, but ... really. What about selling prints and calendars, like Ofoto does? "I don't think you'll see Google offering end user products like printing or mugs," Perkins replied.

Well, then, what about getting a piece of the referral action? If you are sending Picasa members to Walmart or Ofoto for printing services, don't you at least get a piece of that action? "No."

Huh. Why not? "We are interested in working with all partners, and when you try to cut these business development deals, there are always exceptions they want...."

It seems to me that if you're Google, you can set the terms of a deal: make it the same for everyone, for example. But regardless of the "we'll figure it out later" approach to business, which I at once admire and find rather disingenuous (will Google really send its Picasa customers to YahooPhoto?), there are any number of reasons why Picasa makes sense for Google.

1. Photos are data, and Google loves data. The more, the better. Sure, it's not in the *web* index, but that can come later, as the definition of the PersonalWeb and the PublicWeb start to overlap.
2. Photos are personal, and photos are shared - both trends that allow for search to be better and more important to individuals and groups. This also binds a user to Google, over any other service.
3. Having a photo service will help a search company understand trends in non-textual search, and messy taxonomies of grassroots-driven tagging in particular.
4. And Picasa can be a business, in particular a referral-driven business. Once Google establishes Picasa as an application with its own momentum, I expect the company will reconsider its business model neutrality and start to charge commerce-related fees, much as it most likely will with Google Print.

As I think about Picasa, Google Desktop, Print, Keyhole, Blogger, and Google Groups come to mind, as does Google's long held aversion to consumer marketing. And I've come to the conclusion that Google can no longer afford to avoid consumer marketing. In order for these services to really scale, to get to where they need to go, Google will have to start promoting them. It's unavoidable - even if you do have the best product in the world, you need to tell people about it before they get locked into other options - Yahoo, for example, promotes Travel, Photo, and other services it owns. That's what marketing is, after all. Sure, you probably don't need to market Google search, nor do you need to market in traditional ways. But you sure do need to promote Picasa if you want it to be anything more than a footnote in its space. So I revise what I've said in the past about Google hiring an agency. I don't think they'll do it to launch a big "We're Google and we rock" TV campaign, but it makes a whole lotta sense that they might hire an agency to promote the growing number of services and applications the company owns or will own in the future. I don't know how many GDS downloads there have been, but given how many competitors there are in the desktop search space, I can only guess the number isn't as high as Google would like, for example. I would not be surprised to see a campaign sometime later this year that reminds consumers that Google has more to offer than just a wicked fast search engine.

Oh, and I did ask Lars if we'd see a Mac version of Picasa, and he asked me if I had used iPhoto. Yup. Enough said.

PS - The Picasa site is very slow today - I imagine it's getting hammered.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:46 PM
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Picasa 2 Ships

I noticed the news has leaked - Picasa version 2 has shipped, a major upgrade to the photo app - purchased by Google last year. More on this shortly. Congrats to Lars Perkins and his team.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:41 PM
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More on the Book, Favorite Subtitles So Far...

As most of you know, last Friday I posted a plea for help on the subtitle for my book. I never imagined I’d get so many responses – 90 comments so far and still climbing, and more than 150 discrete suggestions. Thank you!

So as to hone your subtitlin’ skills, many of you asked me what the hell the book was really about, and that certainly is a reasonable question. So let me attempt to outline the thing, given that I just sent chapter 9 of 10 to my editor, and I need a break from writing it. (Instead, of course, I’m writing about it, but there you have it.)

The book breaks into ten discrete chapters, and attempts to tell the story of search through any number of major narrative actors, as well as via a few key Big Ideas. One of them is the Database of Intentions, which was one of the first posts on Searchblog, but others include the idea of Intent over Content as well as the power of the Search Economy. As one might expect, Google plays a significant role in the book – I devote three chapters to the company.

In any case, here’s the outline (subject to change, of course).

Chapter One I’m calling “Why Search.” I attempt to lay out why I think search is such a big deal. If you’ve read my immortality or eternal/ephemeral riff, or the DoI post, you’ll find some familiar stuff in here. I preface some of the bigger issues – privacy, shifts in business, etc. – that I go more deeply into in subsequent chapters. I end with a pretty far fetched scenario around AI, but that’s kind of the point of the first chapter – get you interested in all manner of things, and hopefully pay it off later on.

Chapter Two I’ve come to call “Who What Where Why When (and How Much)” – this is the chapter many of you search vets might skip, as it introduces how search works, what its basic business model is, how we came to where we are in search, and so on.

Chapter Three I’m calling “History” – it tells the story of early search, from Archie to AltaVista, and the rise of the portals. There&#