John Battelle's Searchblog

Yahoo tonight announced the Yahoo Search Developer's Network (no link up yet). In short, this is a program to allow developers to build upon the Yahoo Search and Overture platforms (Overture will be rebranded Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions - I was wondering when the Overture name was going to be phased out). This is big Web 2.0/Web as Platform news, and I can't wait to see what comes of it. From the release:

The Yahoo Search Developer Network features Yahoo! Search APIs which span Web search verticals, search engine marketing and direct advertising products including:

• Web search – leveraging Yahoo! Search Technology
• Image search – the largest image search index on the Web with more than 1.5 billion images
• Video search – providing users with one-click access to any video
• News search – with more than 7,000 news sources
• Local search – the most popular destination online for local information
• Spelling correction – advanced search query spelling correction technology
• Related searches – advanced search query recommendation technology
• Overture – access to its search engine marketing API program

Most APIs provide the developers with access to 5,000 queries per day per API, exceeding current competitive search API offerings.

That last part is a dig at Google, which limits its APIs to 1000 queries, hence there has been no real commercial development on top of the Google search platform. But will 5000 be enough? Not for really scaled innovations. Let's hope they figure out the model to allow for more....full release in extended entry.

Cnet coverage.

Continue reading "Good Move, Yahoo: APIs for Search" »

Snap has news today - it's launching a Cost-Per-Action advertising platform. With Goto/Overture he launched CPC, now he is pushing cost per action - advertisers only pay when specific actions occur due to their advertising. Interesting!

Check out Andy's scoop: he thinks Yahoo/Overture is about to launch an AdSense like play. Makes sense, given the RSS ads they are testing now...

You know how I am always on about search and video - how I think search naturally will become the interface to buying content. Another paving stone has been laid in that road with the news that Blinkx and Movielink are hooking up. From the LA Times article (reg req'd):

The two companies plan to announce today that Movielink, a downloading service owned by five major studios, will make its pictures available through the Blinkx search engine.

No money is changing hands in the deal, executives with the companies said. Movielink will get additional exposure, and Blinkx will get access to movies that other search engines lack.

Blinkx uses speech-recognition and other technologies to make a searchable index of trailers for the movie service's nearly 1,000 titles. The company hopes to expand the index to include dialogue from the movies themselves — so that, one day, users who type "I'll be back" will find "The Terminator" and be able to download it for a $3.99 rental.

Blinkx release.

Kanoodle is launching an RSS ad feed system. This is similar to what Overture/Yahoo is testing with Feedburner. Cnet coverage.

Speaking of Cnet, interesting piece on how US broadband policy is deeply borked - an interview with Michael Copps, on of two democrats on the FCC.

In his latest Silk Road (not online yet, I got it via email) Piper analyst Safa Rashtchy writes:

"Continued weakness in Internet stocks this year, which set up the perfect background for an exaggerated reaction last week on search pricing, reminds us of a similar pattern that developed in Q2 of 2004. Just like now, many funds were selling Internet stocks then, based on perceived weakness in search....We believe, just like then, that the current perceived concern on weakness in search pricing is entirely misguided."

Nearly two years ago I traveled to Montana to see Jonathan Weber, a good friend and partner in the Industry Standard. Weber had set down roots in Missoula after teaching there one semester - he was planning to come back, but he met a girl, bought a house on a river, and by the time I saw him, he was settled in. Weber wanted my take on a new idea he was turning over in his mind - the creation of a regional magazine covering the Rocky Mountain area in which he now resided. I told him I was skeptical - regional print magazines are a tough road - but agreed that the basic premise of a new western ethos certainly seemed to be forming, driven by both local forces and the influx of educated outsiders drawn to the region's beauty and promise - folks like Weber, in fact.

Well, I am tickled to see the fruit of Jonathan's labor, just announced: New West. (Yes, Weber did call my teaching partner Clay Felker, who started another "New West" in California nearly 20 years ago, for his blessing). But this is not a print magazine- that is coming later. Instead Jonathan is building a full bore second generation blogging network covering the Rocky Mountains - Idaho, Montana, portions of Colorado, Utah and eastern Washington. As one might expect with Jonathan, the site is full of excellent reporting and strong voices. It includes elements of citizen journalism as well as strong long form. I think it's really going places. Congratulations, Jonathan!

From the About page:

New West is a network of online communities devoted to the culture, economy, politics, environment and overall atmosphere of the Rocky Mountain West. In a time of dramatic change, New West aims to serve as a nexus of dialogue and a smart guide to the news and issues that are affecting one of the greatest places on Earth. We aim to foster a bond among communities that may be distant in geography or occupation, but share common interests and hopes for the region as it wrestles with growth and change. We stand for forward thinking about the big picture and believe that citizen engagement will be instrumental in the development of the region.

Full coverage at the Denver Post.

Joho and MSFT's own Scoble rip MSN for a "viral" marketing campaign that includes phony blogs extolling MSN Search from deeply, deeply contrived "hip" characters. It's lame corporate marketing at its worst. Dooohhh!

Update: Aaron Pressman makes a point: MSN's big TV campaign may well help Google.

Cory posts a great riff as to why Google's AutoLink is a good thing. Scoble counters that it is not.

I see both points of view here, but as I've said before, I fall more toward Cory's line of thinking. Regardless, what I would love to to see is Google openly and transparently joining, listening, defending, and iterating based on this conversation. Be part of the dialog, Google! Why not?

Tom Evslin suggests we start Search Bees (like Spelling Bees but for finding stuff). I can't agree more. Great idea. I'm teaching search to my son's third grade class this week. Cool!

OK the "lame" was my addition. But it sure is nice to see some constructive criticism from a real live Googler. Massless is the site of Chris Wetherell, a UI jockey at Google. This was posted over a week ago, but I'm just catching up on some of my reading.

The Google Blog hasn't caught up yet. It's a surprising mis-representation - the culture we work in is fast, decisive, and colloquial but the blog voice is stiff. It's your not-so-cool uncle unbuttoning his shirt, listening to The Postal Service (but only the single of Such Great Heights) and proclaiming that Yeah, I totally dig your stuff you kids, this hip-hop speaks to me too. Um. Dogg. *flashes hang ten sign*.

Evan Williams, late of Google and Blogger, is at it again, with a podcasting service called Odeo.

Here's the blog about the service, and his own post on the story behind Odeo. And here's the NYT coverage (reg required).

From that:

The primarily amateur Internet audio medium known as podcasting will take a small, hopeful step on Friday toward becoming the commercial Web's next big thing.

That step is planned by Odeo, a five-person start-up that is based in a walk-up apartment in this city's Mission District and was co-founded by a Google alumnus. The company plans to introduce a Web-based system that is aimed at making a business of podcasting - the process of creating, finding, organizing and listening to digital audio files that range from living-room ramblings to BBC newscasts.

Take a week off, a lot of things happen. Here's a round up of the news that was.

Lots of folks arguing that Google's new version of its toolbar (covered here) is an unwarranted intrusion on the rights of site owners and/or users. Dan Gillmor covers it here, SEW here. Myself, I think it's just another feature, and if you don't want it, don't use it. I like the idea of control, and agree that ideally a toolbar user could toggle it on or off. But in the end, if it's useful, it'll take. If it isn't, it won't.

In lighter news, Lycos announced a dating search application. Can't find a date? Use a search engine.

JupiterMedia restates the obvious, with gusto, in a new report about vertical search: "JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation (Nasdaq: JUPM), today projected in its newly released report, "Vertical Search: Early Marketers Will Reap Rewards of Low Pricing," that the search industry will develop in much the same way historical media markets before it have, with the broad-based search engines spawning a raft of vertical search engines dedicated to specific categories. "

Google announced a new movie showtimes search feature.

AOL announced a new local search solution. This feature is for both AOL and web users, and points a major trend for AOL toward embracing the open web, as I have written in the past.

Remember job scraping search engine Indeed.com? It's got competition: Workzoo.com.

And lastly, it was not a great week for net stocks, search in particular. GOOG went down on some analyst skepticism, as did Yahoo.

I had a great time down in LA with my kids, and even got some business done to boot - LA is very much in the search/media/technology nexus. More on that as I dig out.

This is a great read. I didn't know it was out, but just found it. More after I've grokked it. John is a good friend and a great writer/reporter.

Via Searchviews: I'm going to guess that Flickr wants to be the Flickr for video, but for now, there's Vimeo...

It's Winter Break, and that means time to pack the kids into our car and head on down the road. Posting will be light...

A reasonable initial response to the news that The New York Times company purchased About.com for $410 million is shock - after all, that's a lot of money for a $40 million revenue business that was pretty much left for dead not four years ago. Ten times revenue? 30 times EBITDA? The bubble is back, right?

Well, not exactly. First of all, The Times did not overpay by recent standards - the company was in the bidding for Marketwatch (Dow Jones won), and if I recall correctly that company went for 60 times EBITDA. And currently, most internet companies are trading at well above thirty times EBITDA.

So one could argue that the Times got a deal, but in the end, that's not the interesting part of the news. What's interesting is why the Times wanted About in the first place, and the role search - and the long tail - plays in the deal.

In the past few years, About.com has remade itself through paid search - the site was massively optimized to rank well in search engines, Google in particular. The reason was pretty simple - About's revenue is driven by AdSense, and the more optimized it was, the better the clickthrough. I have seen research reports comparing major search sites to About, and the result is pretty stunning - on average, 10-15% of clicks on search sites are paid. But on About, it's over 20%. That's a pretty big difference.

Many point out that much of About's audience are one time visitors who find the site through search, and that's true. But informed sources tell me that in fact, that's true for nearly every well optimized site, and About's search-derived traffic actually converts to regular readership at a higher rate than even the Times. If that's true, that's a good sign for the deal.

The Times saw About as an opportunity to get into the search game, certainly - lord knows news is not a very profitable business when it comes to paid search. But there's more. About provides the Times a platform to explore microcontent without having to - necessarily - extend the Times' brand to everything. And as I've told anyone who will listen to me, I think microcontent is key to winning in the Web 2.0 publishing world. When publishing folks from mainstream newspapers tell me that blogging is far too small to possibly impact their businesses, I often ask this question: Would you rather have scores of microsites with a combined revenue of $15 million, profits of $3-5 million, and a double digit growth rate, or a newspaper group with revenues of $50 million, profits of $5 million, but declining growth?

The Times actually has a profitable and growing newspaper group, and it's much bigger than an average publisher, but my point is this: the opportunity in publishing is clearly moving down the tail, and if you want to win, you need to play down the tail as well. About.com allows the Times to do just that. About is based on Six Apart's MT, for one, so if they want to extend the Times own brand into blogging, they're already halfway there.

Plus, it's no secret that the content over at About is rather uneven - some of it is downright awful. On the other hand, some of it is the best in its field. With Martin Nisenholtz* (CEO of NYTD and now SVP at the Times) and the Times at the helm, one can imagine it will only get better, which is a very good thing for advertising revenues, as well as readers.

Not to mention the fact that About allows the Times to offer its own, non-search advertisers more opportunities to play down the tail - Now the Times can sell a national auto advertiser like GM both the main Times site, as well as About's auto enthusiast sites. Would GM make a small About buy without a Times' relationship? Possibly, but unlikely.

Also, owning the free About.com may well give the Times some air cover should it decide to cordon off portions of its main site to subscribers - a move that has been speculated upon by many in recent months.

Lastly, About has a large audience base, and the Times (now the 12th site when combined with About) can market to that audience in new ways - including cross selling the Times itself, which still represents the lion's share of the company's revenues.

At the end of the day, I think this is a good move for the Times. They've cast their lot down the tail and with the search economy. As Martin told me when I pinged him after the deal: "We're deep into Web 2.0 now."

And the move is good for those of us who think blogging, and microcontent in general, is a good thing. As Rexblog put it, the Times gave us all comps to work with as we start to think of our own sites as business. By Rex's calculations, the Times paid $18.64 a visitor and $820K a blog (if you view About's microsites as blogs). Not bad!

More coverage:

Paid Content
Fred
NYT coverage

*(Full disclosure - I did a short consulting gig with Martin's group last Fall, we did not discuss About or corporate M&A.)

I will have more to say on this later, but for now, here's the Chicago Trib's take.

Gary Price finds a new paper out of Stanford which proposes PeopleRank - a system for aiding annotation of pictures of people.

Gary Stein notes that Google is buying up some land in Oregon for a technology center, and also notes that Yahoo is moving its media division to Santa Monica, a fact I knew, but neglected to mention here before....Yahoo's moves into media are starting to look very interesting, I hope to speak to Lloyd Braun shortly about it all.

Can't get enough about the fellow who lost his gig at Google due to his blog postings? Gelf has more. What's Gelf? As much as there is, is here.

As I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to dine with Lincoln Milstein and Peter Negulescu last night. Peter, or Petey as I like to call him, is an old friend who started with IBM and ran through all sorts of interesting companies, including Excite, before landing at the helm of SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle's digital arm), which got him just in the nick of time, to my mind. Lincoln was the number two guy at the New York Times Digital before jumping over to Hearst earlier this year.

The conversation wandered happily all over the place, but an interesting tangent focused on local search and its impact on the Yellow Pages. Given that Hearst runs a bunch of newspapers, including the Chronicle, and that the Chronicle has scores of ad sales reps and a strong brand in its local region (I know, "strong" is an arguable term, but let's leave that one aside for now), I asked Petey why SFGate isn't an aggressive player in the local online advertising market. While I can assure you Peter has very interesting plans in the content space, he chided me for my ignorance regarding the 800-pound gorilla of local markets - the Yellow Pages. "They have like 6-700 local sales people in every major region," he told me. "They visit every merchant in town." In other words, the Chronicle can never compete.

I then asked their opinion of an idea I have been turning over in my mind for some time - that of Yahoo becoming the new Yellow Pages. Stay with me here, it might take a while for me to explain. My idea is this: Given that Yahoo Local is a very well received service, and given that it basically builds a web page on the fly which describes a local merchant's offerings, and given that that local merchant can upload basic content to Yahoo Local about his or her business for free, why isn't Yahoo aggressively courting local merchants with, in essence, the equivalent of online Yellow Pages ads? Turns out, Yahoo *has* launched a rudimentary "premium" listings product (I covered it here), and I can imagine the day when that service becomes a real force in the local listings market, one that could eventually unseat the Yellow Pages, if Yahoo plays its cards right.

In my first post on this subject, I wrote:

... it became increasingly clear to me that were I a small business owner, I'd want the ability to edit my listing so I could make my business look more appealing. In fact, if Yahoo Local were sending me leads, I'd very much want to be able to buy my way into a better listing - perhaps post stellar reviews of my establishment, snappy come ons, the like.

The more I think about this, the more I think it will happen. If I run a small deck construction company, and I notice that Yahoo Local is sending me leads, I really am motivated to have that first page have all sorts of things on it that are not there now - a picture of a beautiful deck, testimonials from happy customers, etc. And I want the ability to update that site as often as a like - unlike the Yellow Pages, which updates once a year. (Verizon does allow for these kinds of updates already on its site.)

So with all this in mind, I spoke to Paul Levine, who runs Yahoo Local. And I learned a lot. My first question was basically the same as the title of my first post: With services like Yahoo Local, who needs the Yellow Pages anymore?

That's when my education continued. Turns out, Yahoo has a significant relationship with the sales forces of three major Yellow Pages publishers: SBC, Verizon (for Canada), and BellSouth. That's more than 5000 local sales reps who carry Yahoo Yellow Pages (*not* Local, interestingly) in their bag, right alongside their own print and online listings. That relationship is "very productive" for Yahoo, Levine noted, and he took pains to make sure I understood he does not subscribe to my nascent "Yahoo is undermining the Yellow Pages" riff.

However, the fact that this sales relationship exists only convinces me further that in the end, change it is a coming to this space. Yahoo has a history of working with partners until such time that the partnership is superseded by Yahoo's own business needs - just ask former partners Overture and Google about that trend. And Levine did acknowledge that the grassroots demand from merchants who want to work directly with Yahoo to update and add value to their listings was "exceeding expectations." As Yahoo develops this market, I expect they will also develop a very sophisticated internal sales force to manage their merchant relationships, one that probably can do the job currently being executed by those 5000 Yellow Pages reps in a far more productive and efficient manner.

Will online replace the Yellow Pages? Ask anyone under 35 that question - to most of them, the Yellow Pages represent an unwieldy doorstop, an irritating drag on the recycling bin. Most of the growth is online, and the Yellow Pages industry certainly knows that.

The fact is this: it's always less than ideal to depend on a third party to carry your products in their sales bag. And as online becomes the key driver of local sales leads, expect Yahoo, in particular, to become a very aggressive player in the space. For now, Yahoo and the Yellow Pages are happily co-existing. But when Yahoo's base of local merchant relationships hits a tipping point, expect them to become significant competitors.

Update: I neglected to mention Yahoo Local has a cool new mobile feature, driving directions to your phone, Gary has the scoop here.

Spoke with Google product chief Marissa Mayer yesterday, who told me that Google is launching its third rev of its toolbar today. It's Windows only, and it's a beta: Google is not planning to auto-update current toolbar users until the bugs are worked out.

I asked Marissa what the deal was with all the beta stuff at Google. More than 75% of their offerings are in beta, some have been there more than a year. She responded that Google was getting close to lifting beta from on a number of key products - Froogle and News were two she mentioned. But that beta means different things at Google. For client software like Desktop or Toolbar, beta is used more strictly, as in, this software ain't ready for primetime, and we want some feedback to be sure it doesn't bork your machine, and we intend to fix bugs and get it into general release as soon as possible.

For web apps, beta means something quite different. "We have a list of features we'd like to see in a product," Mayer told me. Once that list is complete, the beta tag is taken off, even if the product is quite robust without them. As an example, she mentioned Froogle, which was launched without a "sort by price" feature. The product was simply not complete. When Mayer and Google feels it is complete, the beta tag will disappear.

So, Toolbar, as a client side piece of software, is in beta in the more strict sense of the term. It'll be out of beta relatively quickly, Mayer told me. The new release has three main new features:

1. SpellChecker. This feature moves Google's "Did you mean" concept from search results to the toolbar. For any web form (ie Hotmail, or any web-based input) you can now get spell checking courtesy Google's algorithms. Cool.

2. AutoLink.The Toolbar will not automatically make US addresses appearing on web pages into URLs which are linked to Google Maps. Again, cool.

3. WordTranslator. This nifty feature translates any English word on a page into any of 8 other languages. Mayer said this would be a sought after feature for international users who use English as a second language.

I've often thought about Google's Toolbar, and I've heard through reasonably well connected sources that the company is not pleased with the scope of its Toolbar downloads. This release should certainly increase Google's user base. I asked Mayer how many folks are currently using Google's Toolbar, and she said - true to Google's stated policy of numeric vagueness - "in the millions."

My guess is that means "in the low millions," and that Google would very much like it to mean "in the high millions." (This brings up the marketing issue, which I wrote about here.) In any case, this toolbar release points to something of a new trend for Google, that of surfacing its inherent search features - spell checker, word translation, maps - into more visible and user friendly formats. Expect to see more of this going forward.

PS - Gary over at SEW speculates that perhaps this might offer a new revenue stream for Google.

Over on Yahoo's Search Blog. Reiner Kraft is one serious search geek - more than 100 patents filed, apparently. From the interview:

Q: Aren't you also finishing up your thesis?

A: Yes, it's about domain specific search and is based on what I call iterative filtering meta search. The idea is to leverage the search engine infrastructures to create a filtering mechanism that automatically helps you get documents for a specialized information need. For instance, we built a buying guide finder that helps you to find just buying guides.

Q: If I hadn't checked out your website , I'd think that everything you do revolves around relevancy and search! A lot of people at Yahoo! don't know that you were part of a German band and that you've composed over 30 rock songs. How do define yourself first; composer or inventor?

A: (laughs) I just like to think about new ideas. So to me, it's all the same thing. You create some music piece or you create some ideas or some algorithms to do something. It doesn't have to be specific to search but ideas related to web technologies in a broad sense.

Firefox hitting 25 million downloads is getting lots of notice, but this is my favorite, from Scoble, Microsoft's leading blogger, who posted something of a pained congratulations note:

"In just a few months your app has become one of the most used Windows applications in the world. My hat's off to you!"

Note the use of "Windows application." Winning by moving the goalposts, is what I think that's called.

PS - You've probably heard, but Gates and MSFT are now promising a new rev of IE by Summer.

Yes. At least, it is getting into the business, cautiously at first, with partnerships like this one, with Showtime. Watch this space. It is going to get interesting.

I've riffed on it before. At a New Orleans based exhibition, an artist has taken it one step further. Wired reports.

Sullivan said he wanted to create an urn that was visually interesting, allowed some user interactivity and referenced the physical body. He decided that his remains will be integrated into a computer processor. A virtual agent running on the computer that contains his ashes will scour the web for mentions of his name. As the mentions increase, an on-screen image of Sullivan will morph into an image of his younger self. But if the mentions decline, Sullivan's image will age, deteriorate and eventually fade away.

In the gallery, a prototype Ego Machine is presented on a computer display. Sullivan realized that since this is a project in perpetuity its results might be imperceptible during a brief visit to the gallery. To make it more interesting for viewers, Sullivan decided to allow people to consciously feed or starve his ego, either at the gallery or online.

(thanks, Philipp)

Reading Bizweek (yup, the print edition) earlier this week, I noticed this article, titled "Keywords for Ad Buyers: Pay Up." (BTW, it's entirely too hard to find this stuff on B'Week's site, but that's another issue.) In the article, Ben Elgin notes Google's extraordinary earnings, then adds that Google has the enviable position of pricing power:

What accounted for the outsize profits? The high prices Google charges for search keywords, for one. Industrywide, they were up an average of 43.7% last year, according to search marketing firm iProspect.com Inc. And the most sought-after words have become far more dear: ``background check'' rose 258% in a year. On the day of the earnings announcement, Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt told analysts: ``There does not seem to be price resistance'' from advertisers.

But the pricing power cuts two ways. Elgin goes on to give eBay as an example, quoting CEO Meg Whitman:

``It's incumbent upon us...to figure out how to moderate these quite significant increases in media costs,'' eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman declared in January following disappointing fourth-quarter results, when rising search marketing costs helped pinch profit margins.

If I am reading this right, it seems that eBay, which got hammered after its last earnings for not living up to its reputation as a growth machine, is blaming Google for increasing its cost of goods sold. Now that's interesting. Recall Paul Ford's wonderful essay on how Google out-eBay's eBay (not to mention the Epic piece about "googlezon").

This is a trend to watch. (And thanks to Lincoln Milstein, head of Hearst's digital media efforts, and Peter Negulescu, head of SFGate, for heping me put two and two together at dinner last night!)

It was no black monday - the stock went up yesterday (WashPost), despite heavy trading, and is making a run today as well.

From the WP piece:

"There is so much demand for this stock it is amazing," said Tom Taulli, co-founder of Currentofferings.com, which tracks initial public offerings. "It doesn't seem to let up."

The meme is accelerating, as Ross Mayfield put it in an email to me today. He pointed me to this piece by Dave Morgan, Tacoda's CEO, in ClickZ, and this presentation (note: PDF download) which Dave also created. Cool! Excerpts:

Advertisers just want results. Going forward, they'll be happy to open up their advertisements to distribute them to any publisher who wants them, so long as the publisher delivers to the right audience under the right environmental controls and is willing to be paid on a performance-only basis. This clearly takes PPC advertising to the next level and changes the tradition media selling equation.

...Media owners of all types have long lamented ad brokers and marketing service companies buy their media, optimize it, then don't share the margins. Print publishers and TV stations can't do anything about it, but Web publishers can. Sell-side advertising would greatly complement CPM-based brand advertising and could become a significant revenue channel.

Congrats to the O'Reilly team and to Mark, the editor and my partner over at Boing Boing, on the launch of Make, a magazine/book hybrid that I think has great potential (my shorthand for it is "Popular Mechanics for the digital age.") I was involved in conceptualizing the project early in its life, and I am so pleased to see it out in the world! Full release in extended entry.

Continue reading "Make Launches" »

With Yahoo spending on its search launch last year, MSFT reportedly going well into nine (yes, nine) figures on its MSN Search marketing campaign all this year, and now Ask getting into the ring, the search branding wars have begun. The question is, does it at all matter?

I certainly understand the desire to frame and catalyze your brand with television, it's quite a good medium for that. And Ask certainly suffers from a long hangover from its last marketing push, back in that bubble era, when it made far more promises than it could keep.

But somehow television feels so - hopeless. I doubt this is going to move the needle. What will? Grassoots buzz, the kind that began to build with the acquisition of Teoma, then Bloglines, and might continue should Ask keep up those kinds of moves, and succeed in some kind of integration play that yields superior online services. Ask's recent flirtations with the open source world is also interesting. In any case, it can never outspend Microsoft, which of all the companies in this space just might bull its way into the consumer's mind with the blunt instrument of a TV marketing spend. I'm not saying Ask is wasting its money (well, maybe I am). In the end, as good as those Chiat Day ads might be, the money might better be spent on the product itself.

So says Roger McNamee. Hear hear.

Tagging and Flickr in particular are starting to break out. I am not sure where it will all head, but it's clearly a trend - metadata from the roots up. Check out these two new tools: Flickr Graph, which maps social networks based on Flickr, and TagSurf, which I'll just let Russell explain.

The folks behind MusicPlasma, which inspired my BlogPlasma idea (in the works) have added movies and more to their site, and renamed it LivePlasma. It's in beta now, and I could not get the members area to work (it promises to support custom maps which can be shared, etc.), but check it out, they are looking for input.

Qoop, the company behind the Searchblog Print Edition test, is thrilled at how many of you have checked them out since I posted my note last week. So much so, that CEO Bill Murray emailed me and said he wants to lower the price of the book by ten bucks, to $19.99. Those who have already bought it will be charged the new price. Cool!

Late last week GOOG took a hit, and initially I thought - man, that analyst day did not go well. After all, as the Times (reg req'd) pointed out, the chef presented, but the CFO did not.

But I think it had more to do with this - Google's last lockup up expires Monday, and some $19 billion of stock comes free to sell. The market more than likely is pricing in the expected selling frenzy.

From the Merc's coverage:

Karen Brosi, a certified financial planner in Palo Alto, predicts many Google insiders will do just that because they've learned an important lesson from their ``tech-bubble ancestors.''

``What they know is that stock goes down. They know they have a value on paper. They know the only way to keep that value is to dump that stock,'' Brosi said.

Most companies bar workers from selling stock for 180 days after the initial public offering. But the Mountain View Internet search company took the unconventional step of letting employees sell slices of their holdings four times after the IPO in August, and its stock has generally maintained an upward path. Since it went public at $85 it peaked at nearly $211 this month, before slipping back to $187.40 Friday.

Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham have started a fund - reportedly oversubscribed - that will invest at the intersection of technology, media, and disruptive internet models. I'm very pleased they are doing this, and there is such interest from institutional money. I like these guys a lot (caveat, Fred's previous fund, Flatiron, invested in The Standard) and met with them today when I was in NYC. It was nice to be able to congratulate them in person on closing their fund and getting on with investing. They noted, as we spoke, that the advent of lightweight business models and the excesses of the bubble make it actually harder to invest in Web 2.0. That's good, I think - it really makes investing a considered decision on both sides. I am sure they'll have a great time, and thanks to Fred's site, we can keep tabs on how it's going in real time.

I was on an airplane during Google's analyst day (webcast), and I think it's a good thing, or I would have obsessed over Google's presentation. Thankfully, others already have. Greg Linden has a good short take. Here's Slashdot. And here's a good overview from SEW.

Well, yes, in fact! I have a buddy who is involved in Qoop, a very cool new company that makes print editions of online content. It's still very much in beta, but one day he came ambling down my stairs with a big, bound copy of Searchblog, with all the posts from 2004 inside of it. It was really cool to see, and he asked if I would be something of a test case for his company. Why of course I would, I replied. So here you have it (I put a link to this on the left side of the page, it'll stay there for as long as folks click on it). The price is a bit steep (a bit under $30 - I get about a third of that), but it has something like 100K words, all of them exceedingly wise, of course, and it's an excellent example of one-off printing - no inventory, no backend warehouses, it's online to print, and it's direct. Think about this plus Google Print, for example. Or Flickr. Whoa. In that perspective, I'm honored to be a test case. Long tail, ho!

If ever there were a sign that Firefox is gaining markeshare, here you have it. Yahoo has released a PC Firefox version of its toolbar, and plans to add Mac support soon.

I'm out of pocket most of the day, heading to NYC.

This fellow says Google's going to a $1 trillion market cap.

Mark Jen, the fellow who reported on internal company activities at Google, is gone from the company. I pinged a Google rep and he confirmed it.

This is a clear message to Google employees. I imagine any who are blogging, are re-reading their HR policies about now...

I guess someone who violates the rules like this will, I imagine, be dealt with in various ways by various companies. I wonder what Yahoo might have done in the same situation, or Microsoft? The information on the site, which was taken down and then redacted, was really not that big a deal. At least, it seems that way to me. But one never knows.

Is this such a clear case of violation as to merit firing? Perhaps he left on his own accord, we may never know as I imagine he signed something on his way out the door. In any case, I'd be interested in what others in similar situations - Scoble, Jeremy - have to say about this. I'd also be interested in the views of various Google bloggers out there. But I imagine this one is a third rail....

Ev, any thoughts now you're outside the wagons?

Update: Mark is blogging again. Read the comments.

Nice explanation in the piece from Bret Fausett, who publishes Lextext.com.

When a domain expires and changes hands, Mr. Fausett said, Google can now more easily find, scan and index the new site, so it does not mistakenly point searchers to a site with irrelevant content, or place advertisers on sites with content that does not match their products or services.

That alone could profoundly affect the domain name market, which has rebounded partly because of another Google service, AdSense. Through AdSense, Google pays publishers to display text ads related to a site's content. Speculators often buy the expiring domains of even marginally popular Web sites and replace the site's content. But because the practice diminishes the usefulness of Google's search engine, the company has long sought ways to curb it.

Huh. I know Google integrates maps with local, but this feels new. Thanks to reader Richard Lusk.

BTW, Andrew Chen noticed it as well, and has a nice post here. Update: Google has sent out its release on this, it's in the extended entry. Update 2 - the buzz on this is pretty good, including a nice review from Gary, though he did notice that Osama is apparently hiding out at the Googleplex...

Continue reading "maps.google.com" »

If you recall my 2004 predictions, I claimed Bloglines would be sold to a major search engine. I just didn't think it would be Ask. But come to think of it, it's a good fit - Yahoo is well on their way toward the Bloglines space with its integration of MyYahoo RSS, and Google, well, Google doesn't seem to have the appetite for RSS many wish it did. MSFT is busy getting its index up to speed.

"Ask was the best fit," Mark Fletcher told me last week. "They have a multi-brand strategy - we will not be going away."

Fletcher, who together with Larry's brother Carl Page and a few others sold his other company - eGroups - to Yahoo back in the golden era for a whole lotta dough - does not need to sell. So his choice of Ask is instructive. "Ask got it," he proclaimed, indicating others were in the hunt but did not, er, get it. "We had a lot of choices, and this one made the most sense."

So, I asked Jim Lanzone, Ask's head of search and the architect of the deal, what are you going to do with Bloglines? "Our plan is to leave it alone for now," Lanzone answered. "We'll integrate it across properties, but if it never makes us a dime directly, it will make money for us indirectly."

In other words, Bloglines is growing like a weed, has tons of users, and more interestingly, tons of data about what those users read. Those profiles might make for some serious endemic advertising plays down the road. Both Fletcher and Lanzone concur. "The profile a user makes on Bloglines is a pretty good proxy for a user's interest," Lanzone said. "But step one is to let Mark blow it out, and see where it goes."

So don't expect any AdWords or other monetization, at least at first, and not in your face. Lanzone took pains to make sure I understood that *he* understood he has a good thing, and doesn't want to f*ck it up.

One thing that will come out of this, Lanzone said, is "world class blog search." Stay tuned, Ask is getting interesting...

Bloglines site about the deal...and Ask's blog post...

PS - No, I don't know how much Bloglines was sold for, Ask and Mark are not saying. However, I am sure it was not a trivial number. Mark would not give me user metrics, but it's in the hundreds of thousands, if not past a million. How valuable is that to a search platform? In a word, very. I'd be surprised if the deal was less than $25 million. But what do I know? Nothing. Sure, Bloglines has no revenue. None, zip, nada. So much can and probably will be made of the fact that this was yet another sign of an impending bubble. But...then again, Bloglines has more than 280 million blog posts in that index. That's a lot of data....and a lot of profiles of its hundreds of thousands of users. That's worth something, quite a bit of something.... UPDATE: My dangling of the $25 million number out there has gotten a number of responses - from parties that are in reasonable positions to know. I am told the figure is closer to $14 million or so. I can't confirm this...yet, but there you go.

Folks have been noticing for some time that Google Images seems to have been updated, today Google made it official. From the note sent to me by Google PR:

Today, Google announced two new updates to Google Image Search that further help users find the information they need. First, Google Image Search now includes more than 1.1 billion images from around the world. With a comprehensive index of images, users can quickly and easily find relevant images of both popular and obscure queries.

In addition, Google released a new feature that displays images from Google Image Search above Google web search results when they're relevant to users' search queries. When users search for queries such as [sunsets], [mountains], [torre eiffel], or [inverno] on the Google homepage, they may see relevant thumbnail images at the top

of their search results marked "Image Results." When users click on the thumbnail images, they will be directed to the website that contains the original image. Users may also click on the "Image Results" link to see the complete Google Image Search results page for that query.

Also worth noting that Google is now incorporating ar more images into its main SERPs, in some cases. Aaron has a number of examples.

Google lost last week in a French trademark case involving Louis Vuitton. Cnet reports.

As I've been working on my book, I've developed a rather odd form of visual incentive. For each chapter I created a 3x5 index card, each taped one atop the other on the side of the bookcase next to my desk. As I worked on a chapter, I devised a series of notations which marked my progress. An open circle meant I had finished the "cull" of my notes and interviews, and was well into the writing process. A slash through the circle, from top left to bottom right, meant I was about a third through. A second slash, which comprised a "V" inside the circle, meant I was two thirds done. And a final continuation of the second slash outside the circle's circumference and to the right - which made the whole thing look like a checkmark through the circle - meant I had finished the chapter's first draft. I then wrote the word count of the chapter on the card, and moved on. (As I revised chapters, I revised the word count as well).

Well, I'm pleased to say that at about 5.30 today I marked the final check on my wall of 3x5 cards. While weeks of revisions, corrections, and possibly rewrites await me, the fact is, I have completed the first draft of this f*cking book. Nearly 90,000 words later, I'm at last into the realm of editing, as opposed to writing.

For whatever reason, well, for reasons too numerous to state, I wanted to let all of you know about that first. Thank you for being here with me as I labored over it. Now, I plan to go out with my wife and, most likely, drink far more than I probably should.

The rumors are flying, hastened by Mary Hodder's claim on her site. I'll have much more to say on this later.

The chatter about Google lately, as a stock, is that it is "priced to perfection." In other words, Wall Street is expecting Google to perform flawlessly over the next year or so. If it does not, the stock will tumble. And what is flawless? Oh, how about a doubling of earnings in one 12 month period - on top of a recent quarter where they already doubled? Would you want to have to manage against that expectation? Nope, me either. This is exactly the kind of pressure that Larry, Sergey, and Eric said they would not pay attention to when they dropped that bomb of an S1 on the world last April. To quote from it:

As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same. In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to “make their quarter.” In Warren Buffett’s words, “We won’t ‘smooth’ quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you.”

If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short term results but are in the best long term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities. We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long term view.

Many companies are under pressure to keep their earnings in line with analysts’ forecasts. Therefore, they often accept smaller, but predictable, earnings rather than larger and more unpredictable returns. Sergey and I feel this is harmful, and we intend to steer in the opposite direction.

Now that Wall St. has really put the pressure on, it will be interesting to see what happens. My guess is Google will stick to its original principles, miss analyst expectations, and the stock will go up anyway.

MediaPost reminds us (reg req'd) that thanks to some early deals via AOL (hey, smart acquisition), Time Warner now owns 8% of Google, making it the third largest outside owner. Strategic? Nope, say TW brass.

TIME WARNER NOW HOLDS AN 8 percent stake in Google, according to information filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. In Time Warner's fourth quarter 2004 earnings report released this morning, the company said it "does not consider its remaining interest in Google to be a strategic investment," but the position makes Time Warner the third largest outside investor in Google after two big fund managers.

Gary Stein points us to the Hollywood Reporter's interesting interview with Lloyd Braun, the new head of content at Yahoo.

Yahoo! right now has a very strong, deep content presence on the Web. We have 16 of these vertical sites, which I call channels -- not because they're like television. It's not going to be a place where we're going to do our version of "Alias" or "Lost" or any of those shows. But these places are young on the evolutionary scale of what they're going to look like. My job is really to define -- with this group of executives that I have -- what is Internet content going to be? Right now, we're an aggregator of information with some interesting broadband components. We have these great deals with JibJab and Mark Burnett (for extra content from NBC series "The Apprentice"). There's going to be more and more of that. But that will represent only the beginning of where this is going to end up.

...THR: What will be the business model for acquiring content for Yahoo!?

Braun: I'll tell you this. I'm giving great thought that as we construct these models, that in success we are not going to create a system that does exist in television now where there are such crushing upfront costs that the whole weight of the system makes it feel like it's going to break. We have to be thoughtful not to just look at this business where it is now but where it will be five, 10 years from now. Because once we start establishing these precedents, they get very, very hard to break. I don't pretend to have the answers to this yet, but I am giving an enormous amount of thought to the issues.

The NYT canonizes that which we knew to be true: Online advertising, in particular search, has taken its place as a major force in all of marketing.

TITANS OF TECH

Screen Test
Reuters CEO Tom Glocer wants to build an online broadcast network. Can the venerable newswire take on Fox and CNN?

By John Battelle, January/February 2005 Issue

During its formative days, Reuters was a relentlessly innovative company, using the best tech it could get its hands on to carry the news. Before the telegraph came along, it beat competitors by using carrier pigeons to send information about stock trades. But back in the 1980s, Reuters decided to wholesale its newsfeeds to Ted Turner -- and watched CNN become a billion-dollar business. As broadband video blossoms on the Web, Reuters CEO Tom Glocer doesn't want his London-based company to make the same mistake twice.

In 2003, 10 years after joining Reuters's U.S. law department, Glocer worked his way to the corner office -- the first American and first nonjournalist to helm the venerable company. He immediately restructured it into four customer-focused divisions, a move that's saving a billion dollars over five years and has sent the stock price up nearly 50 percent in the past year. What's more, he's managed to pull this off while sending hundreds of journalists to Iraq and losing some in the line of fire.

Now Glocer is shaking up Reuters's highly respected newswire business. Think of the newswire as wholesale; Glocer, in essence, is using the disruptive power of the Internet to get into retail. The move would have been unthinkable 20 years ago for reasons of both cost and culture. But Glocer has learned the hard way that you don't make much money selling your content to others. Successful media companies, he says, make their money either by creating branded products or by controlling distribution. Glocer recently sat down with Business 2.0 to explain how he plans to do both.

Despite the costs of the ongoing conflict in Iraq, your stock went on a tear in 2004.

The market sees Reuters as a classic recovery story. By the end of 2006, we will have taken $1.7 billion out of our costs since we started restructuring in 2000. Our core subscription revenues are still declining, but the Street is increasingly confident that we can return these to growth next year.

Last summer you pulled your news off Yahoo. Why?

For 153 years Reuters has run a wholesale media strategy. We produce raw text, video, and pictures and make it available to the world's publishers, who in turn slap their brand on it, develop brand loyalty, and aggregate an audience. Go back to 1980 and ask yourself, as I often do: Between Reuters and CNN, who had the greater assets and likelihood to launch an international news network?

Did Reuters consider competing with CNN back then?

I don't know. I wasn't there. But I do know that Ted Turner has said that they kept looking over their shoulder because they couldn't believe their luck. When they were starting out, they really were the Chicken Noodle Network. Reuters had bureaus in 200 places and a hell of a brand name. Who had ever heard of CNN? More recently, Reuters repeated the mistake -- we were the wholesaler to Yahoo and others.

But this time you pulled out.

(continued in extended entry)

Continue reading "Latest Business 2.0 Column: Tom Glocer, Reuters" »

So I missed the Google party on Friday night at Davos, as I had to fly back for my best man's 40th. But this fellow did not miss it. If you feel like a trip down his particular rabbit hole, read on.

It's now on the home page.

In other news, Ask now has a blog (where the feed, Jeeves? - Update - here it is), keyword prices drop for the first time month to month in quite a while, Rivlin has a nice piece on the "half bubble" in today's Times, and there's been a lot of interest in Google's job posting for a strategic partner development manager (as I've said again and again, it seems obvious to me that Google will eventually get into the content middleman business.)

More than half a year ago Jeff Weiner, head of search at Yahoo, took me aside and showed me something he was personally passionate about. He called it Search Spots - and the idea was really cool. It's been done before in various contexts, but the idea was very well implemented and totally integrated with Yahoo and your browser in general - basically, anything you might be reading can become fodder for an inline search. From the email I received from Yahoo PR:

Last Christmas Jeff saw a news headline for the #1 single in the UK and wanted to learn more about the artist, watch the video, maybe buy the CD. It took him about 20 minutes to search for all this information. In a staff meeting he addressed this issue and asked folks around the table how long they felt it should take to access this type of related information - the consensus was it should only take seconds - but the current search experience was so linear it was prohibitive. 

In parallel, one of our top engineers (and top search innovators) was off in his spare time creating a prototype to address the exact same pain point that Jeff was sharing with his staff. Y! Q. This product was not on the roadmap for product development but demonstrated such tremendous value to the user experience that it was greenlighted and set into production. With limited resources, he and his team went to work to create what is going to be pushed live late tonight on (next.yahoo.com) as a test product.

The URL is here. I plan to play with this, as it is Mac compatible (yippee!). More to come...Yahoo's blog take is here...

Thanks to Rich, founder of Topix, for this heads up, and congrats!

This story over at Netimperative is a good read for anyone who wants to grok clickfraud, and it includes a good tick tock of several advertisers' travails.

Let's face it, click fraud is bad news for the advertiser, but it’s still pouring millions into search engine bank accounts.

So, is it feasible that they really would want to put such a concerted effort into something, which effectively, helps them make less money?

In Jake’s case, he presented them with refined data which he’d pulled together himself. Once Google had analysed the data, they got back to him (within five days) and agreed that it was fraudulent activity and agreed to a refund.

I have to say, in my further conversations with both Jessie and Jake, we were all agreed that, as Jake put it "there’s an insane number of PPC advertisers who don’t bother tracking. They don’t bother using unique URLs for monitoring and ROI purposes."

Philipp over at Google Blogoscoped has added me to his long list of email interviews.

Recall my BlogPlasma idea? Well Greg Linden at Findory has worked up a first draft of it, which he calls Findory Neighbors. He explains the thinking behind it here. Here's Searchblog's "neighborhood."

I like this, but it needs more work - the alphabetical approach doesn't work for me (it creates some false positives), and I still want MusicPlasma's skin. I'm going to try to work with the MusicPlasma folks and Greg to build on this and make it even better!

Still writing, so I'll just note this, link to coverage, (here's Technorati on Google Earnings) and say: Holy shit. A billion dollar quarter (not including TAC - traffic acquisition costs - of about $378 million). Release in extended entry. And...in 2004, the company created a billion in net cash. Yow. How's the company doing in the markets? Check here. It's up nearly 12 points in after hours trading - in the first few minutes.

Continue reading "GOOG: A Billion Dollars Here, A Billion There" »

Sigh. The problem with doing a book is that you hold stuff back, hoping it'll stay fresh for the book, and then suffer death by a thousand little cuts. Such is the case of today's NYT story on Google's Founders Awards, which I discussed with Sergey a while back.

The idea is neat: reserve millions of dollars in value for teams of people within Google who make major contributions to the success of the company. Basically, Google wanted to create a culture within the company that rewards people on par with the returns someone receives when they start a successful company, then sell it - to a company like Google, for example. I think it's innovative and rather bold - an acknowledgment that Google is maturing, but still committed to the kind of upsides that Valley startups are all about.

BTW, Google reports earnings today.

OK, back to the final chapter.

Google is a minority owner of Baidu, the #2 search engine in China. Today the FT reported that it will seek a listing on the US market.

It could if it wanted to. More likely, it could offer domain registration as part of another service. I've speculated in the past on what those services might be.

Thanks to reader Nick Douglas who pointed this out.