Google Says: Top This

Google announced tonight that it will up its Gmail limit to 2 GB, and that it plans to increase the limit to...the sky. Really. This is not an April Fools' joke. I spoke to Google PR, and they told me that they shortly intend to lift the limit entirely on Gmail - well, not entirely, but they hope to allow as much as possible - which in the end, I was told, makes it pretty much limitless. Google Grid, ho! (I did ask them about the abuse of this feature - and they told me they'd get back to me....). BTW, the Gmail site has a cute (I hate that word, but it fits) doodle on the whole idea. Image at left.

Not to beat a tired horse, but why do this? Mail = pageviews. Pageviews = profits. Rinse. Repeat.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:38 PM
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WordPress: Not Good

Joho covers the WordPress news: apparently the company has been hiding linkfarms in its pages, so as to make some AdSense lucre. Joho's take is quite considered.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:57 PM
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China Search Ho!

IDG has invested in Chinese search - this time it's with Lenovo, in Zhongsu, which has "strength in desktop search." I believe they believe that history will repeat - recall last year desktop search companies were purchased by Ask and Microsoft. Google and Yahoo both have interests there.... For some reason the links are borking my posting system, but here is the article: http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.php?action=show&type=news&id=2494

(Thanks, Arthur...)

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:30 AM
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Jump Shark, Jump!

The press jumps on the shark jumping story.

An article by Ben Hammersly in the Guardian says Google has been overtaken by Yahoo.

Yahoo is the new Google. Google is the new Yahoo. Up is down, and black is white. This spring has been very strange. Google, it seems, has jumped the shark. It has been overtaken, left standing, and not by some new startup of ultra smart MIT alumni or by the gazillions in the Microsoft development budget, but by the deeply unhip and previously discounted Yahoo.

Echoes of Om's post.

I do not think Google has jumped the shark. As loyal readers know, I have been impressed with Yahoo lately, but I think this is an example of taking the meme one step too far. On the other hand, this kind of coverage has got to get under the skin of those at the Googleplex.

(thanks, Cory)

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:23 AM
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News: American Blinds Case: Motion to Dismiss Is Denied

Back in September of 2004 Google argued for a motion to dismiss the case American Blinds had brought against it on illegal use of trademark terms in the AdWords network. Most of the requests in that motion were denied yesterday, I have learned. The court upheld American Blind's rights to continue its case on claims of trademark infringtement, unfair competition, contributory trademark infringement and contributory dilution. The court did, however, grant Google's motion to throw out American Blinds' claims of "tortious interference with prospective business advantage." I have a copy of the ruling, should anyone care to see it - jbat at battellemedia dot com.

This is related to the Geico case, which is still ongoing, though Google did win a portion of it.

This means the case will continue, and if its findings are materially different from those of Geico, resolution may ultimately occur in the Supreme Court, which is currently busy with Grokster, of course. (More on that in July, when the ruling hits.)

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:04 AM
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The Man Behind Del.iciou.us Quits Job to Focus on Site

Great news!

After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and
then consume all my waking hours, I've decided to quit my job and work
on del.icio.us full time.

I've given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately
decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment.

I've taken this step because it lets me continue to grow del.icio.us
while keeping it independent.

I am excited to finally be able to devote all of my energy to working on
and improving this site, and I'll also be able to acquire some much-needed
infrastructure.

Congrats, Josh!

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:11 AM
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EVDB Closes Funding, Opens Doors

Brian Dear's event-based search company, EVDB, closed its series A recently, and went live (beta) yesterday. Congrats Brian!

Also, Andy's similar events-based site, upcoming.org, has undergone a bunch of updates.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:34 AM
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Google Annual Report

...filed yesterday, is available here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:25 AM
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Rackable Gets Closer to IPO

Rackable is an interesting company - it builds the servers which power many of the web's most notable brands, including Google. The company made its name building servers to Google's specs, and it filed to go public back in February. But when you read their recently amended S-1, the name Google barely comes up - and when it does, it's not as a customer per se, but rather as a transaction: Google paid Rackable in shares back in 2002, and Rackable sold those shares in 2004.

According to the S-1, Yahoo and Microsoft are Rackable's major customers these days:

A relatively small number of our customers have historically accounted for a significant portion of our revenue, and we expect this trend to continue. Because our revenue has largely been generated in connection with these customers’ decisions to deploy large-scale server and storage farms, their capacity requirements can become fulfilled, whether temporarily or otherwise, and as a result they could purchase significantly fewer or no products from us in subsequent periods. Inktomi and Electronic Arts together accounted for 41% of our revenue in the year ended September 30, 2002, and 34% for the three months ended December 31, 2002. Yahoo! and Inktomi, which has since been acquired by Yahoo!, collectively accounted for 46% of our revenue in 2003. In 2004, Microsoft (for which Hewlett-Packard acted as a contractual reseller for the majority of our sales) and Yahoo! accounted for 36% and 23% of our revenue, respectively.

Other customers include Sony, TellMe, and major enterprises like Deutsche Bank.

I've asked Rackable CEO Tom Barton to come to Web 2.0 and give us an overview of the real platform web - the bare metal computing that enables all those cool Web 2.0 business models. He's agreed, and hopefully by then he'll be out of the quiet period.....should be interesting!

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:16 AM
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BlogLines Update: The Universal InBox

Bloglines announced an update today - the first since the Ask Jeeves acquisition (and the IAC acquisition, come to think of it.)

Starting today, people can track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world’s largest parcel shipping companies—FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service- within their Bloglines MyFeeds page. Package tracking in Bloglines encompasses international shipments, in English. Bloglines readers can look forward to collecting more kinds of unique-to-me information on Bloglines in the near future, such as neighborhood weather updates and stock portfolio tracking.

This is interesting. It's sort of Bloglines meets search (Google et al can track packages etc.) meets .... Topix....meets...well, pretty much anything. I can't quite grok this, honestly, which is why I am looking forward to talking with Mark, Bloglines CEO (now VP/GM at Ask). Anything else I should ask him?

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:10 PM
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Searchblog's Acting Odd?

Yes, we're moving servers, getting ready for new things, and that means some stuff will be broken, acting oddly, grumpy...bear with us.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:59 PM
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Google Adds Stock Charts

You could always search for stocks on Google, and some - like GOOG - would show a lame little icon and then click you through to Yahoo Finance or a few other sites in a rather kludgy tabbed interface. Now, you get a stock chart right at the top of the results page, and a bunch of information. In fact, you get so much, you might not really need to click through to Yahoo anymore (if you click on the chart, you still are taken to a framed view of Yahoo Finance). Innaresting. All to be useful to the user, of course. But still....see my musings on this in a past post here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:57 PM
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Traffic of Good Intent

A source from one of the second tier engines recently told me "There's simply no good traffic left anymore." We were discussing clickfraud, and he mentioned that many engines were beset by it because they did not have enough good traffic to pour over their paid listings. Instead, they had "bad traffic" - ie, clickfraud or crappy affiliate sites with no content value. The catch 22 - they can't afford to dump the bad traffic.

I am not an expert in SEO or SEM, nor do I spend a lot of time thinking about traffic, in the abstract. But my own investigations of the affiliate business as well as recent acquisitions has got me thinking about traffic in more concrete terms.

In the world we now live, where search is king and the princes have been crowned, more or less - AOL, Yahoo, Google, MSFT, IAC - the scarcest resource is what that fellow called good traffic. I might rephrase that a bit, and call it "good intent" - as opposed to ill intent (clickfraud). Good intent is owned, in the main, by the crown princes of search, but as Safa points out, there are buckets of it - though smaller - at other sites, in particular shopping and high quality content sites.

Haven't we seen this before? It sure smells like Web 1.0, where it was all about eyeballs. But the shift from eyeballs to intent is important, because thanks to search, intent = revenue, and that can be measured, bargained for, and purchased.

This makes me think about recent purchases - be they Ask, Bloglines, Flickr, or Furl - in a new way. What do all those sites have? Traffic of good intent. In the case of Bloglines and Flickr, traffic that is growing headily.

I get a lot of calls from entrepreneurs and journalists who want to know if this or that new startup is going to take off. My new measure of a company's success is pretty simple - forget the technology, the promises, or the backers. Just look at the traffic. Is it good, and is it growing? Getting good, growing traffic is a really hard thing to do. If a company manages it, it tells you a lot. Pretty simple stuff, but there you have it.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:25 AM
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Blingoooooogle

Blingo, the free-prize-inside search engine of which I wrote earlier, is officially launching today. The big news: Their search results are now powered by Google.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:58 AM
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Oodle Launches, Vertical Search Heats Up

You got Indeed and Simply Hired for jobs. Topix for local news and information. Globalspec for engineering. Technorati and Feedster for feeds/blogs. And now...Oodle, for classifieds. I met with Oodle CEO Craig Donato while at PCForum last week, and I like the concept. He's not only crawling listings where you might expect it - local papers, national papers, craigslist - he's also crawling eBay local and other unexpected sources.

But the main difference, Craig insists, is that Oodle is buyer focused, not seller focused. The site came from his own frustration with listings - the interface was terrible. How could he make it better?

The answer was not just crawling all those listings, but tagging them with all sorts of taxonomy-driven metadata to layer intelligent search over them all, so you could find what you wanted to find. A very neat idea if it works. Will it? Too early to tell, but test sites are up in Dallas, Philly, and Chicago.

The business model is a work in progress, for now they plan to do Google ads. But imagine the possibilities - they drive traffic back to classifieds sites, so there is a referral play there, and the ability to develop their own premium listings business lurks in the background.

Cool feature: any search can be an alert. The site is in beta with its first three cities, but they plan to roll out nationally soon.

The company is backed privately, but Craig is from Excite days, as is the Chairman, Brett Bullington, who is also an investor. I plan to keep my eye on these guys.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:48 PM
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A Tiny Bit More On Urchin, Google, Et Al.

After I posted on Google buying Urchin, I got a call from the folks over at WebTrends. They felt a bit overlooked, after all, they just got bought too. Sure, I told them, I had noticed, but they were bought by a private equity fund, and that means one thing - the company is going to be prettied up and sold again, either to another search/marketing player (MSFT, IAC, Publicis come to mind) or to the public in a Marchex-like IPO.

No no, the very nice PR person told me. They really want to make this business work, as it was not strategic to its original owner (NetIQ) anymore.

Awww, come on, I retorted. These guys want to make a buck, and that's that.

Then I got to thinking. Why is there a buck to be made in this space, anyway? Ahh...there's the rub indeed. Arbitrage, of course - knowing what others want to know and profiting from it. Companies like Urchin and Webtrends offer insight into what visitors really are doing on the web, as well as insights into how marketer's campaigns might be going, and what might be the wisest use of your marketing/sales spend. For the time being, such knowledge is hard to come by - Google is one such repository, Yahoo another, and then there are a number of independents. One was Urchin -but Google now owns it. Another is WebTrends. Watch this company over the next year. My prediction: It will be sold again.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:23 PM
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Russell Riffs On Mobile Search

Fun stuff.

...Here let me be more concrete, if I've got a 1GB memory card in my mobile phone and most of that filled with messages and media, well there's no reason why that stuff can't be found by a web search, no? ...

...Now I go to the Yahoo Search, and click on the "social" tab (it'd be right after the image search) and I'd type in something I'm looking for. Maybe it'd be tag names or maybe it'd be something more detailed. The search engine goes through its list of mobile items and presents the results. When the user clicks on a link he likes, well it's not to get the item right away - it's to request it. A message goes off to the mobile repository that says something like, "Hey, remember that item you said you had available? I'd like a copy of it. Now would be preferable, but if you want you can wait until the next time you have a chance. Thanks."....

... It's really about asking for anything and then getting it. To me search isn't just about finding stuff that's been indexed on the web, it's the Quicksilver type interfaces as well: Ask and you shall receive. Now the rest of the problem is just figuring out 1) How to find the data (where ever it may live) and 2) How to get it back to the person who's asking for it. With mobile phones, this means jumping through some hoops because of bandwidth and use cases, but it can be done, right?
...

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:54 AM
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Yahoo 360 launches

Randy Farmer, head of the Yahoo! Community Projects team, blogs about Yahoo's new 360 social networking/blogging/etc product.

From the Yahoo Search Blog:

Now, I get to tell you about Yahoo! 360° -- a new model for online sharing that's easy and convenient for everybody.

During my years of online community building, I've seen many types of social software emerge: email, chat, instant messaging, forums, groups, multiplayer games, blogs, and twikis (to name a few).

Until now, most social software worked on a shared view, what I'd call a we-centric model, where every participant sees the same information as all the other participants. We all see the same posts on a message board, the same conversation in a chat room. In effect, communications are either public or private.

These days, as we publicly post more of our opinions, photos, and sensitive information on the net, there's growing concern about spam and other threats to our privacy. And there's a need for tools to help us manage real-world relationships that are becoming more and more digital. The time is right for me-centric community - a way for you to get the information and connections you want, without giving up control of your information. Yahoo! 360° lets you control not just what you see but what others can see about you.

Unfortunately, the main link to the 360 site gives you this:

You can check out Randy's site on 360 though...

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:24 AM
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BlogPulse Covers 9+million Blogs, Launches 2.0

Intelliseek launched BlogPulse 2.0 yesterday, adding more sites, more search, and more analysis. It only has six months of data though (before it only had two months). I wish we'd get working on that web time axis! On first glance (and that's all I've given it, caveat) there seem to be some powerful tools in this release, like the Trend Search.

Here's the release.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:14 AM
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Safa Notes More Consolidation Ahead

Safa Rashtchy of Piper notes in a research report (click on the March 28 note) that the Ask/IAC deal could augur more Internet consolidation.

After ASKJ, What Is Next? The announcement of Interactive Corp.'s intention to acquire ASKJ is likely to be a catalyst for the Internet and search sector, especially given the recent misconception about weakness in search. As we have often stated, we believe a number of companies in our universe are perfect acquisition targets - perfect because they represent sectors that are on the rise, such as search, comparison shopping, lead generation, or content, and because their value can be significantly higher within a large company. We believe three key areas of value include content and search traffic, conversion technologies and comparison shopping platforms, and local search and listings platforms. Companies that are well represented in these areas include Marchex and Shopping.com, as our two favorites, as well as InfoSpace, CNET, and Homestore.

While we are not predicting the dawn of a new era of M&A activity within the Internet sector, we do believe that for the first time in many years there are distinct areas that are highly valuable for consolidation.

In short, Safa points out that high value traffic, especially search, is at a premium these days. Given that there is not a lot of search traffic available, other kinds of well understood intent, like at shopping sites, high CPM publishers, etc. are seen as attractive.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:14 AM
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Google Acquires Urchin

I've been sitting on this all day because I could not get confirmation, but damned if it doesn't come in an email from Google. I shoulda run with the tip I got from a loyal reader....in any case, Google has purchased a web analytics company with serious enterprise mojo.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - March 28, 2005 - Google Inc. today announced it
has agreed to acquire Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego,
California based web analytics company.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and
marketers to better understand their users' experiences, optimize
content and track marketing performance. Urchin tools are available as
a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting
providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the
Internet.

Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and
marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on
investment and make their web sites more effective.

"We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the
information they need to optimize their users' experience and
generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising
spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product
management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to
Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Google
anticipates that the acquisition will close before the end of April.

So this is interesting on a number of levels. Urchin was a third party system that many used to understand their Google ads, among others. As part of a Google suite of tools, it will take on a decidedly different cast. More as the word trickles out. BTW, I was told by the tipster that the price was $30 million.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:39 PM
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Times Rounds Up Google's Legal Woes

As you get bigger, you are a major target, and Google's legal department must feel more overworked than Calamity Jane's liver (Deadwood reference alert...)

The Times (reg rq'd) reports. Joi summarizes.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:56 AM
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Indeed Launches Domain Search for Jobs

I wrote of Indeed a while back, when it was pre-launch, today it launches. Expect to hear more and more about this trend - domain-focused crawls with innovative front ends. I saw one at PCForum which launches tonight, will have write up later....Also, in the same vein as Indeed is SimplyHired, recently launched as well.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:26 AM
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WaPo Does Desktop Search

The Washington Post runs an overview (reg req'rd) of the major desktop search tools. Good for any of you who have held back on installing any of them. I for one installed a Blinkx beta some time ago (the only one for Mac I could find) and it ate so much processing power I had to take it offline. Sigh.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:11 AM
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Yahoo Mojo

Om summarizes nicely.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:29 AM
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Open Advertising

I like this idea a lot - guy buys a text link on a site, then blogs about how it's doing. Better yet - the site he bought on is Searchblog.

Threadwatch chews through the idea here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:44 AM
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When Competition Comes....

Practices like this will have to go. I've always wondered why Google makes it so hard to opt our of the Adsense play if you are an advertiser. I imagine once Yahoo and MSFT are in the game, this kind of thing will not stand.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:38 AM
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Yahoo 360 First Look

Charlene Li has a write up over here...

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:41 AM
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A Glimpse Into How Google Codes

Interesting insights from a Google engineer.

There is, by and large, only one code base at Google.  This has many advantages.  Most obvious is that it is really easy to look at and contribute to code in other projects without having to talk to anyone, get special permissions or fill out forms in triplicate.  That is just the tip of the iceberg, though.  Having one codebase means that there is a very high degree of code sharing.  Need to base 64 encode/decode something?  No problem, there is a standard Google routine for that.  Found a bug?  Just fix it and check it in after getting it code reviewed by a documented owner.  One of the reasons that environments like Perl, Python, C#, Java, etc. flourish is that they have large and well through out libraries of useful code.  For a variety of reasons, C++ has never had this. ...

... The intranet in Google is super transparent.  Teams are actively encouraged to share the most intimate details of their projects with the rest of the company.  This happens through tech talks, design docs, lunch table conversations, etc.  When two teams are doing similar things, people start with the assumption that they must have their reasons and that the situation will be worked out in time.  There isn't a huge push to over optimize and have only one solution for each problem.

...When someone comes up with a new idea, the most common response is excitement and a brainstorming session.  Politics and who owns what area rarely enter into it. 

There is a lot of detail here, and given how little Googlers tend to blog about work, it's rather refreshing.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:58 AM
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Audacious: Our Media

Congrats, as Dan says, to the folks behind OurMedia. A very audacious plan. From their site:

We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:39 PM
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The Messy Web

Adam posts on thoughts from PCForum and Etech, on his personal views and those of his employer, Google, and why he decided to keep posting regardless. Great stuff.

In the end, he writes a passionate defense of a meme I've started to call the "messy web."

As long as we don't let the ontologists take over and tell us why tags are all wrong, need to be classified into domains, and need to be systematized, this is going to work well albeit, sloppily. What it does is open up ways to find things related to anything interesting you've found and navigate not a web of links but a link of tags. At the same time Wikipedia has shown that a model in which content is contributed not just by a few employees, but by self-forming self-managing communities on the web can be amazingly detailed, complete, and robust. so now people are looking at ways in which the same emergent self-forming self-administering models of tagging and Wiki's and moderation can be used for events (EVDB) and for music and for video and for medical information. It's all very exciting. It is a true renaissance. I haven't seen this much true innovation for quite a while. What I particularly like about all this is how human these innovations are. They are sloppy. To me Tags are sloppy practical de-facto ontologies.

Hear hear. Read the whole thing, because he mentions how he takes off all of August, and I am doing the same, though in a more moderate form.

And by the way, congrats to Brian Dear for launching EVDB at PC Forum (it's not live quite yet...). A neat idea I hope to write more about soon.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:35 PM
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Snap On Logos

Every so often I head over to Snap.com to see how they are doing. They have an uphill climb ahead - it's not easy starting a new engine, traffic is scarce, and fueling the increasing returns fire is a black art.

But I was recently pointed to this little tidbit - Snap lets companies, or, I suppose, anyone - upload their logo so it appears with their listing. Another sign of input into how you look in that database of intentions.

Meanwhile, it sure is fun to stare at Snap's statistics page.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:28 PM
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ZoomInfo Redefines Vanity Googling?

A people and business search engine, ZoomInfo launched earlier this week while I was at PCForum. I have not had time to use the professional edition (they have a free and pay version, and were kind enough to comp me so I can play around with it) but the Post has a nice write up here. From that:

Cambridge, Mass.-based Zoom Information Inc., searches the Web for public information about people and corporations, then allows them to edit their profiles. "With us, you have the ability to ... present yourself how you want to be presented," Russell Glass, ZoomInfo's director of consumer products, told the Associated Press.

A neat idea - managing your own entry in the database of intentions. But it suffers from initial overload - so far, I'm the founder of WebMD, CEO of Northern Light, CEO of A9 (sorry Udi, I'm taking over), among many others. Oh, to have such a resume!

ZoomInfo is backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures, so I expect this is not the last we'll hear from them.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:40 PM
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TrendMapper Watches Keywords

A cool hack from Eirik Solheim, TrendMapper pings engines on a regular basis and maps results. I love this kind of service, it provides a view of history and zeitgiest that inforrms our understanding of search and its impact on culture and business. From Elrik's email:

"I have been using search engines to track interest for a subject for a long time. I have done this manually by searching for the same term at regular intervals, keeping track of the amount of hits and look for any significant growth.

Google talks about how many searches pr. day for specific words and phrases to track popularity, still I haven't really found a service that can give me a historical view of the amounts of hits on a subject."

If anyone knows of similar services, let me know!

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:59 AM
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Yahoo Launches Creative Commons Search

A very cool idea. ZDNet reports.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:02 AM
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Queryster Does Searchx

Google may have killed GoogleX, but the idea sparked the fellow behind Queryster to hack up Searchx, which puts most of the majors on a Mac OSX like icon menu. "I hope Apple and Google don't sue me," he said in an email to me. Me too!

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:35 PM
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Yahoo Ups Mail Limit to 1 GB

Starting next month, Yahoo Mail will go to one gig. Platform wars, Ho! Release in extended, I don't have a link for the news, save the mail site, which does not mention it yet. One thing to note: According to figures I've seen lately, mail is about 40% of all Yahoo page views, it's the silent driver of profits at that company. And that's why Google is pushing Gmail so hard lately - those pageviews drive profits.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:37 PM
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News: Topix Beds The Newspapers...

Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix, which I wrote of glowingly here, called me earlier today to break the news: His company is selling a 75% stake to three major newspaper businesses: Gannett, Knight Ridder, and the Tribune Company. None of the new companies will have the ability to control the company, and this alone says volumes about how Web 2.0 is terrifying the newspaper industry. They can't even buy their competition outright!

Rich would not give me a ballpark valuation, but given that he has real revenues and a scalable model with OEM potential (in terms of optimizing contextual ads and local), I'd wager it was pretty good - better than Flickr, perhaps.

I'm just in from a few whirlwind days at PCForum, which had a lot of search in it. I'll be digesting this news, as well as PCForum thoughts, over the next few days. Meanwhile, the Topix release is in extended entry.

GANNETT, KNIGHT RIDDER AND TRIBUNE ACQUIRE A 75% STAKE IN TOPIX.NET
Combination of Technology, Media Assets and Reach
to Power Growth of Topix.net

CHICAGO, McLEAN, VA. and SAN JOSE, CALIF, March 23, 2005 .Topix.net
announced today that Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), Knight-Ridder,
Inc. (NYSE: KRI) and Tribune Company (NYSE: TRB) jointly have acquired
a 75 percent stake in Topix.net. Ownership is split evenly, with
each media company owning 25 percent and the Topix.net founders
retaining a 25 percent stake. Financial terms of the transaction
were not disclosed.

Topix.net continuously monitors breaking news from over 10,000 online
sources and categorizes daily news content into over 300,000 topics,
24 hours a day. Topix.net will operate as an editorially independent,
stand-alone company managed by Topix.net.s executive team. Topix.net
will use content and funding from Gannett, Knight Ridder and
Tribune to expand and refine its NewsRank. technology, services and
operational infrastructure.

"This transaction provides us with the resources to be the best
place to connect to a very wide range of news on the Web," said Rich
Skrenta, CEO and co-founder of Topix.net. .We all serve the news
enthusiast, so it.s a natural partnership. Gannett, Knight Ridder and
Tribune generate valuable online content and Topix.net is dedicated
to making that content easily found. By believing in the potential of
our ideas and technology, they have made an investment in the future,
and we.re thrilled to be a part of it..

Topix.net features links to news and information from more than 10,000
news sources including newspapers, magazines, radio, television
stations and Web logs. Topix.net distributes news through its Web
site, RSS feeds and email news alerts. It syndicates its content
through partnerships and tens of thousands of Web sites that host
news feeds from Topix.net.

Topix.net uses its NewsRank. technology to deliver highly relevant
news, using concept, instead of simple keyword searches. It delivers
published news stories organized by ZIP code, industry and hundreds
of thousands of topics.

.People want the news that.s relevant to them . where they live, the
business that they are in, the topics they care about. Topix.net.s
technology will leverage the media assets and broad reach of our
three companies in entirely new ways,. said Jack Williams,senior
vice president diversified business and development at Gannett. .We
are extremely pleased to partner with Topix.net to grow and develop
its service and help audiences find the news they want online..

Collectively, Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune operate more than 140
newspaper Web sites with nearly 30 million unique visitors monthly. The
companies have partnered together in other joint ventures such as
ShopLocal.com and CareerBuilder.com.

About Topix.net:

Founded in 2002 with the specific mission of providing users with the
ability to quickly and easily find targeted news on the Internet,
Topix.net is a news aggregator with unique technology to find and
categorize news into 300,000 topics, from Autos to ZIP code level local
news. Topix.net distributes content via partnerships with Citysearch,
Ask Jeeves, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Metro Newspapers, Newsgator, Findory,
Wondir, Infospace, Link Silicon Valley and HelloMetro.com.

Gannett Co., Inc. is a leading international news and information
company that publishes 101 daily newspapers in the USA, including
USA TODAY, the nation.s largest-selling daily newspaper. The
company also owns in excess of 750 non-daily publications in the
USA and USA WEEKEND, a weekly newspaper magazine. Gannett subsidiary
Newsquest is the United Kingdom.s second largest regional newspaper
company. Newsquest publishes more than 300 titles, including 17
daily newspapers, and a network of prize-winning Web sites. Gannett
also operates 21 television stations in the United States and is an
Internet leader with sites sponsored by its TV stations and newspapers
including USATODAY.com, one of the most popular news sites on the Web.

Knight Ridder (NYSE: KRI) is the nation.s second-largest newspaper
publisher, with products in print and online. The company publishes 31
daily newspapers in 28 U.S. markets, with a readership of 9.0 million
daily and 12.7 million Sunday. Knight Ridder also has investments
in a variety of Internet and technology companies and two newsprint
companies. The company.s Internet operation, Knight Ridder Digital,
develops and manages the company.s online properties. It is the
founder and operator of Real Cities (www.RealCities.com), the
largest national network of city and regional Web sites in more
than 105 U.S. markets. Knight Ridder and Knight Ridder Digital are
headquartered in San Jose, Calif.

Tribune (NYSE: TRB) is one of the country.s premier media companies,
operating businesses in broadcasting and publishing. It reaches more
than 80 percent of U.S. households and is the only media organization
with television stations, newspapers and websites in the nation.s
top three markets. In publishing, Tribune operates 14 leading
daily newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune,
Newsday and Spanish-language Hoy, plus a wide range of targeted
publications. The company.s broadcasting group operates 26 television
stations; Superstation WGN on national cable; WGN-AM in Chicago;
and the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Popular news and information
websites complement Tribune.s print and broadcast properties and
extend the company.s nationwide audience.

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