John Battelle's Searchblog

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.

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.

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...)

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)

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.)

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!

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.

...filed yesterday, is available here.

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!

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?
...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Om summarizes nicely.

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.

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.

Charlene Li has a write up over here...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

A very cool idea. ZDNet reports.

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!

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.

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.

Continue reading "News: Topix Beds The Newspapers..." »

From a WaPo (reg req'd) piece on media conglomerates and growth:

Topping Redstone's shopping list are more cable television channels to add to the MTV/Nickelodeon empire, he said. He added that Viacom is "underinvested" in the Internet and will look for acquisitions there. "But not Yahoo or Google," he said.

How sporting that Viacom, market cap of about $57 billion and no growth story, deigns not to "buy" Yahoo, market cap of $44 billion, or Google, market cap $49 billion, both living smack in the middle of the fastest growing sector of the media business. Jesus. If only Time Warner had deigned not to "buy" AOL.

Pinpoint Travel is AOL's new entry into the travel vertical. I have not had time to grok it, but Chris has a report.

Yahoo's purchase is a big buzz here at PCForum. Everyone wants to know how much - just as they did with Bloglines. I don't have an exact figure, but my sources, which saw the deal but did not do the deal, say around $15-$17 million. I do not know if there is an earn out as well, there may well be.

"We believe that in the future it has the potential to become one of the great brands on the Internet and beyond, and by beyond we mean in wireless, in the search for anything on any device."

That's Barry Diller on his company's pending acquisition of Ask. Now, this bears some thinking. I wish I had an open morning to make some calls, but I'm at PC Forum, which is nearly as good as there are no shortage of opinions on this deal here. Also, last night I had dinner with a director at Ask at another event.

The long and short of it is this: This is a media play, pure and simple. Here is the third paragraph of the IAC press release, in it's entirety.

The online advertising and search markets are growing rapidly; of the $260 billion in total U.S. advertising spend in 2004, less than $10 billion, or 4%, is online, with an expected annual growth rate of 13%. Search is now 36% of U.S. online advertising and expected to grow 24% per year over the next five years (Source: Merrill Lynch Equity Research.)

In other words, this makes sense for a company looking to consolidate and leverage its media assets - and IAC is exactly that kind of company.

All is not necessarily done in this deal, however. This marks the rise of a fourth network - after Google, Yahoo, and MSN - or maybe a fifth, if you include AOL. And that means that now that Diller has declared himself a player, others may see it in their interest to make their own play. It's entirely possible AOL or even MSN might make a higher bid for Ask. Now that Diller's in the game, it just might change the calculus of the others who are playing. Remember Lycos?

But enough about deals. What about the playing field post closing? To my mind, this deal augurs my long held position that search and television are going to merge. In short, the first engine to get on Comcast's interactive guide will have a huge leadership position in terms of the video advertising revolution I wrote of here, and with Diller, who can certainly navigate the cable world better than most, Ask has a shot at being that brand.

For hints of this prior, and some of Diller's thinking in this area, read my interview with him in B 2.0 here (sub reqr'd). He does get pretty specific on search. Selected quotes:

So you are not interested in tying your properties together?

No, no. Yahoo might say, Let's go into the travel business. Why not, you know? But it is the difference between a general practitioner and a specialist. The specialization of Expedia's travel product is very hard to do. Brands that resonate with people have power. I would rather compete using a brand like Match or Expedia that does a service really well instead of using a portal.

You don't see IAC ever getting into the portal business?

If you define "portal" as a search engine, then I wouldn't rule it out -- though I also wouldn't want to give anyone the idea that we were planning on plunging in.

You've spent something like $300 million trying to crack the local market. Was that a mistake?

I am very committed to Citysearch. I was recently asked at an investor conference, "When will you shut that thing down?" I said, "It's probably going to break even in the second quarter. I think that would be ill-advised."

Your name still comes up when there's an opening in Hollywood, though you've made it clear you're not interested. But is there some point at which the line between the Web and traditional media gets too blurry to make out?

Yes. There's no question but that the Internet is going to change the way entertainment products are distributed. The first popular piece of this is the digital video recorder. That's a profound change. It proves that the 500-channel universe was interim technology.

For now, there are still vast differences: Old media tends to be closed; the Web is open. Will the closed model stand?

The gatekeeper model? No, it can't. How can you trust a gatekeeper when you know the purpose of a gate is to open and close? There will be other wires into the home besides cable. It's inevitable. Telephone companies are stringing fiber to the door, and who knows what with wireless? That has to take away the historical highways with tollbooths.

More on that too, later....

From their statement:

“Flickr is happy to confirm that it has signed definitive agreements to be acquired by Yahoo!. We feel this deal will benefit the Flickr community by aligning the great resources of Yahoo!, a more robust infrastructure, broader reach of consumers and big company resources and the cool, innovative technology and features that Flickr has to offer. We are excited to see where two such strong forces can go together.”

Ask is being acquired by IAC, Diller's outfit. I sensed something was up when I spoke to Barry earlier in the year, but man, this is a big deal. I'll have more on it later, I'm on the road, but...fourth network, ho!

Man, the French really don't like Google. AFP is suing Google News for using its images and news headlines without permission. Big deal? I'm not sure. But these kinds of cases are certainly not going to help the service get out of beta.

Best story I can find on this is here, from Ireland.

Today we had to implement comment registration on Searchblog, and across all the sites hosted by my fearless Webmaster Scot Hacker. He explains the reasoning here, I commented at the end of his post on my thoughts. In short, comment spam is borking his servers, and because Searchblog is such a target, this site is unfortunately responsible for much of it . I am saddened that this friction has to be thrown into the conversation, I much prefer the ability for anyone to read these posts and comment at will, without first having to register. I particularly appreciate those of you who post anonymously, I know many of you work at companies that I cover here, and often you make your thoughts known under cover. Do not worry, you can keep doing that, but you have to register under a pseudonym. I very much hope this will not stunt the conversation I have grown to count on to keep me on my toes, please let me know how you think it's going. jbat at battellemedia dot com, if you can't stand to register and comment!

Boing Boing is filing an amicus brief in the Apple V. the Blogosphere case. I've refrained from comment as it's not totally search related, but honestly, this is a very bad precedent. I break news here, and intend to keep doing it, much as I did for MacWeek back in 1988. Apple didn't sue me then, because I was working for an "organization." But now, if it's just me, they can? Hogwash.

In any case, we're looking for examples of blogs breaking news stories. If you have em, send em to BB's counsel. More info on where and how is at this post.

Yesterday I spoke with Chris DiBona, Google's open source outreach point man. He told me of plans to launch Google Code, a place where Google makes some of its code-innovations back to the open source community. The site went live today with four developer tools, which are way beyond my ability to grok. Chris told me that Google had been planning to do this for some time down, and that this is not a response to recent postings complaining that Google only takes from the OSS community. On the other hand, surely this move will be welcomed.

Continue reading "Google Code" »

The headline says it all: Chirac Rivals Google with French Online Book Plan.

I had to rush to catch a plane this morning and I missed the embargo lifting on this important news: As expected, MSFT will build its own Overture/AdWords competitor, called AdCenter, due sometime later this year or early next. This does not come as a surprise to most, it's not only logical, it's necessary. The big question is whether the company will able to scale to the tail - or will it keep its ecosystem closed to MSN. For now, it's closed, but syndication is in the plans, I was told in a pre briefing. More soon, I am dashing onto the plane....release in extended entry.

Seattle paper's coverage....

SEW...

Continue reading "The Other MSN Search Shoe: MSN AdCenter" »

OK, so I just got word of this new Labs offering, and it looks neat, and yes, I do like the Mac OSX references in the blog posting, and as a Mac guy it's nice to see some props thrown our way. Turning the tabs above the search box into an icon-driven menu bar is a cool idea. And it lets Google cram 11 items up there, as opposed to the six they now have as text.

But let me be very clear about this: The "aw shucks gee golly this was just something I tossed together and it seemed really cool and gee the nice managers at Google let me put it up" schtick is wearing, well, really, really thin. Even if it's true that most new ideas do bubble up from engineers in their spare time (and far as I know, they do), it's just .... I dunno, a schtick. Nothing gets up to Labs or the main page without some serious strategic thinking - or at least, it shouldn't. And does every engineer that hacks something together have the same affection for the words "cool" and "amazing"?

That said, it's a neat UI hack, and it addresses, at least in some small way, the tabs issue that Danny writes of so well.

The story is out, the 'sphere is buzzing. Yahoo will soon introduce a new service that incorporates blogging, photo sharing and other neat tricks.

Over at its Research Labs, Yahoo today announced The Tech Buzz Game, in conjunction with O'Reilly Media. This is a search-driven marketplace creates a futures market of sorts predicting the popularity of various technologies. Very cool. You can even win prizes for best predictions.

Last night at Etech Udi Manber gave me a sneak peek at what Bezos announced this morning - A9's "OpenSearch." A9 has always been more of a "remixable" search engine - with many columns on the right hand side that let you hack your search interface - you can create columns of image, reference, web, and many other types of searches. When I wrote up A9 last year, I imagined that those buttons on the right hand side may well augur a time when any content provider might become a button. Turns out, I was right. But I didn't imagine A9 would use RSS as the way to do it, it's a neat hack. As the tagline to the introduction of the new services states: "We want OpenSearch to do for search what RSS has done for content."

Today Bezos took the stage at Etech and announced an open platform which lets any developer create a searchable column that can be added to A9. In short, if you have a content site, you can syndicate searches of that content through A9. It's all built on RSS, and it's quite easy to do, I'm told. There are already a bunch of new content sites on A9, I imagine many more will be added as news of this spreads. I've added a couple to my page - "Top Blogs" which searches the top 300 or so Technorati sites, and "Sponsored" which basically shows every Adword related to the keyphrase you type in.

"We want to have thousands of these columns," Bezos said.

This is a neat idea, one that I think will evolve and shift over time. What helped me grok it was the idea of a professional, say a doctor, who builds his or her own A9 interface that has traditional web search, as well as a special column for PubMed (MedLine). It lets the doctor remix the search experience to add vertical search results as well as web search into his search interface.

I asked Udi why he didn't have an RSS button for each new column so that we could syndicate new search columns into our RSS aggregators, and he agreed that that should be added, and most likely will be shortly. Also, you can't point to searches as links due to the javascript based interface, which is kind of a bummer.

But the javascript means that the interface for this new feature is very slick - as you use it, it really starts to feel like a desktop OS environment. Just an observation...

Today at ETech we announced details about Web 2.0's sophomore edition. Once again we are doing the event in San Francisco, and even on the same dates: Oct. 5-7. We've upgraded the hotel to the Argent, which is right across the street from SFMOMA and the Yerba Buena center. The program is in very early stages of development, but we've got a great initial lineup of speakers committed, including Jeremy Allaire, who's doing some interesting things with video over IP over at Bright Cove, Stewart Butterfield at Flickr, Tom Barton at Rackable (the company which literally builds the web platform - the computers for Google and many others), along with Scott Cook, Mark Cuban, Rob Burgess, Mary Meeker, Microsoft's new CTO Ray Ozzie, and many more.

Our initial thinking behind this year's event reflects an evolution of Web 2.0's original theme, which was "the Web as Platform." This year we take that as a given, and focus on what the opportunities and challenges are in this new web ecology, in particular services and businesses which run over the platform. Hence the tagline "revving the Web" - both adding power and features, as well as the idea of building the Web's next iteration. Broad areas of focus included media & entertainment - an area which is clearly accelerating this year, communications (including Mobile and VOIP), and computing and OS (including the whole Web OS concept).

Here's where you come in, much as last year, except we have more time this go round. I'm looking for amazing ideas, companies, and people to feature in High Order Bits and workshops. Last year we had more than 90 speakers by the time all was said and done, and I'm sure we'll have just as many this year. Send any and all ideas to me at jbat at battellemedia dot com, and I very much look forward to seeing you in SF this Fall!

I've taken jabs at Google for not doing what Yahoo does in the Local market, ie, allow local businesses to update their listings, and in particular, charging those businesses for premium services. Well, Google went halfway toward addressing that shortcoming with "Google Local Business Center," a free listing service for all US businesses. The company stopped short of actually introducing a business model, though.

Text of email announcement is in extended entry.

Continue reading "Google Local Adds Self Serve Business LIstings" »

Over at BB, Cory posts on Mark Pilgrim's hack "Butler" which strips out most Google ads, removes copying restrictions in Google Print, adds alternative search results to nearly every Google service, and generally does things which I can only imagine will keep give big G fits. It is still in geek stage - it requires "Greasemonkey" and Firefox - but man, it sure sounds like fun.

For the second year in a row, Boing Boing has won best group blog and best blog of the year at the Bloggies! Wow! Here's the site's post....I have to say, being the band manager for such a great site is an honor and a privilege.

Dave Sifry of Technorati has updated his "State of the Blogosphere" presentation from Web 2.0 last October. The growth in blogging is really amazing. From his note announcing his new findings:

"Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. That's just about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. In fact, the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months. It has already done so at this pace four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times."

Dave will be adding more to his presentation, so keep an eye on his site.

Posting may be lighter than usual, but if you are at the conference, please come and say hello!

Announced about a month ago, Become.com is a shopping search engine that its creators claim is vastly superior to its competitors. These guys can put some wood behind that particular arrow, collectively they were responsible for MySimon (now owned by Cnet) and Wisenut (now owned by LookSmart).

I spoke to Michael Yang, Become CEO, and Yeogirl Yun, the CTO. The founders have developed a new ranking technology - they call it the "Affiinity Ranking Index," or AIR - which applies a unique combination of math and human editing. Before it does any math, Become puts people in the process of determining relevance for particular shopping-related search topics. A team of editors contextualize pages based on how they relate to each other, then those pages are crawled, and Become's AIR algorithm is applied.

I can't really grok how AIR works, but this is from a draft release on AIR: "AIR identifies exceptional web pages by understanding the level of interconnection between valuable sites from within specific fields of interest. AIR evaluates a web page based on what other “knowledgeable” sites in that specific field say about the page, and also evaluates the page based on what the page says about other “knowledgeable” sites in the specific field."

"Unlike Become.com’s AIR, Google’s PageRank estimates the popularity of a given web page by looking only at links into the page and doing so without any understanding of context. Become.com’s AIR, on the other hand, considers a site to be valuable if 1) it receives links from valuable sites within a similar topic of interest and 2) if it provides links to other valuable sites within a similar topic of interest (while minimizing links to off-topic sites). "

I pressed Yang and Yun for more details - PageRank is published, after all. But they were mum, save adding that their inspiration was Applied Physics and Engineering Dynamics - two fields in which I must confess I am not very keen. I chided them a bit - after all, calling your new algorithm AIR, but not publishing it might just open one up to some jokes - but they do have the right to protect trade secrets, after all.

The proof is in the use of the engine itself. It's in a registration-based beta, so you'll need to sign up. I used it, although cursorily, and I did like how it seems to understand the intent behind a shopping query - it's not a product search engine, like Froogle, instead it seems to give you a lot of information that helps you in your process of buying. Yang added that a comparison feature is coming.

Yang and Yun hope to take Become and AIR across many vertical search areas - health, people, travel, etc. Given these guys backgrounds, it's worth checking out.

Yippee, Joe Kraus has posted on the long tail Web 2.0 meme! And wouldn't you know it, the framing is all about search.

Referring to Excite's search stats, he notes:

In fact, the frequency of the average query was 1.2. That means if you wrote each of the millions of queries on a slip of paper, put them all in a fish bowl and grabbed one at random, there was a high likelihood that this query was asked only once during the day. Of ten-plus million queries a day, the average search was nearly unique.

The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail” – queries asked a little over once a day.

You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day.

Joe goes on to show how this applies to software and his new business, JotSpot.

USA Today rounds up the usual suspects - Danny, Jason, me - as well as some unusual ones in this overview of AdSense.

From this Cnet story:

Now Yahoo plans to launch its own advertising option for small publishers, a source familiar with the plan said. Like Google's service, Yahoo's self-serve product will display text ads deemed relevant to the content of specific Web pages. Advertisers pay only when a reader clicks on their ad. Yahoo and publishers will split the fees.

A couple of weeks ago I got to talk with Steve Levine, the founder of Transparansee, a neat technology that lives on top of structured search. The model is to sell it to other sites as a custom install. Think of it as a smart layer of search on top of database-driven applications like dating, home or car buying, or, in the example Steve took me through, Fodor's.

Transparansee's "Discovery Search Engine" seeks to address the "stupid computer" problems which plague most structured databases. You most likely have experienced some variant of this: you put in a set of parameters meant to find just what you are looking for - for example, on Fodor's, you want French bistros in Chelsea priced at $35 with a food rating of 20 or above - and you get no results, or only one or two. You have a sneaking suspicion that the results are missing an entire set of possibilities which are "close enough" to what you want, but you've been limited by the parameters you chose - if you open it up too much, you get a bunch of stuff you don't want. What to do?

Transparensee uses "fuzzy search" algorithms to scour a database and offer on the fly weighting based on any parameter you choose. Presto, what you want to see is at hand. It's hard to describe, but an "aha" when you see it in action. For example, there may be the perfect French bistro for you, but because it's one block away in another section of town, it does not get found. With Transparansee, you'd see it at the top of the list, because it matches on so many of the other weights.

This is powerful stuff when you think about it, and it solves a core database search issue, at least for me: you know there is the right answer for the query you are entering, but damned if it isn't escaping you, due to the blunt nature of structured search. Think of such a tool for Expedia, or Lexis Nexis, for example. No, I can't point you to examples quite yet, but the site has some that you can peruse via PDF files.

It sort of reminds me of collaborative filtering, but for more types of datasets. After all, it's hard to imagine a collaborative filtering application for home buying - "people who bought this home, also bought these homes...".

I asked Steve what his plans were for the technology, and he said "to prove it out with as many clients as possible." Is he open to Transparensee finding a home at one of the majors, or does he want to become the Swizerland of structured search? Too early to tell, Levine said. He's still in early startup mode. But this looks promising, and I hope the idea spreads.

This just in....you can now customize Google News.

I have a riff brewing - but it ain't quite fermented - about ads and tagging. Some of this has been spurred on by conversations with folks like Andy at Waxy. There's something there, and recent developments, like comments on ads, is starting to point that way. Adding to the meme, Jeff Jarvis, who has been my posting partner on the whole PDA/Sell Side advertising concept, is already riffing on ads and tags. This is a brewing area, more to come...

Today's Times has a longish piece on search titled "Search Engines Build a Better Mousetrap." The article reviews alternatives to Google.

I am quoted in it, but the reporter misheard one key detail: I said "millions" not "billions" in the quote below...

John Battelle, who maintains a Web log about search technology (Searchblog, at battellemedia.com), said innovations like "Block View" showed how dynamically the search companies were taking advantage of new technologies - and new economies.

"In 1997 you would have had to spend tens of billions, and it wouldn't have made any sense," Mr. Battelle said. "Now, you can strap a camera and G.P.S. on a computer and drive down the street taking pictures. It's a neat idea, and it didn't cost the farm to try. Now imagine that across the whole Web - that's what's happening."

Even back in the late 90s, it would have been tough to spend billions on a feature like Block View! Also, the quote is ... condensed. My point is simply this: Innovations like Block View are now sprouting up everywhere, throughout the web, not just in search. Why? Because they can, the ecosystem now supports it. That's the Web 2.0 meme in action...

When success hits you, then things go wrong, the first instinct is to protect. But the right thing to do is be transparent. Seems momentum is building in the b'sphere for Google to do the same.

Along those lines, I did finally get a response on the issue of the "keyword hint" feature that had apparently been beefed up for publishers like Boing Boing (see the post here). Here is Google's "official response" to my query, which was essentially this: is this a new feature, previously unannounced, or are you selling something that doesn't exist? Why is a Google rep cold calling me with this feature, and promising it to me as something to draw me into using AdSense?

The response:

"The keyword tool is a limited test and only available to premium publishers at this point.  We continue to work on making more tools available for all of our publishers."

Sigh. Transparency, guys. Upfront, and on the backend. It works, really, I swear. And admitting mistakes. Two things that are hard to do, but pay huge dividends.

Fact is, the Google rep who called me didn't tell me this is a "limited test only available to premium publishers." Nope, he made it seem like it was a normal feature, ready for me if only I signed up. What did he think I was going to do with the information that Google had new tools that might make AdSense work better? Keep it to myself? I'm a ***publisher*** after all.

Anyway. End of rant. It's hard being number one. But it's easier if you are in conversation with those that put you there.

...to an AdSense competitor...

Been underwater most of this week, and it looks to continue. But here are a few nuggets worth checking out:

Greg points to Amazon Zuggest, a Google Suggest/Amazon mashup. He also points to some interesting personal search work at Microsoft, courtesy Todd Bishop.

Rumors about Yahoo buying Flickr are getting to a boiling point, one source who pinged me (I can't verify this) said it's done deal at $20 million, $10 million now, $10 million on earn out. We'll see....

Philipp reports that Mark Jen, famous for getting fired for blogging while at Google, is now at Plaxo.

Jon Udell is doing some interesting things with Google Maps. On Kuro5shin, some neat things with Google Print.

Technorati has launched "related tags" which is a cool idea. Weinberger reports.

Matt McAlister, who was employee #1 at the Standard, took the wraps off his personal blog and posts on "Why Google Isn't What It Used to Be."

SEW has a pointer to an article about a visit to Google India.

Via AdWeek, (SEW also notes this) Yahoo anticipates the end of its relationship with MSN (via Overture). We all knew this was coming.

Via Slashdot, a Threadwatch post noting that Google is cloaking its own pages, perhaps. This practice is banned by Google's own TOS.

I can't write a full review here (I'm on a Mac...), but tonight Google takes the beta off its Google Destkop Search (this link is to my initial coverage, including a lot of ramblings on the implications).

Taking off beta is no big deal, right?

Well, no. It's a pretty big deal, because Google is adding a couple of things in release 1.0 which 1/make a lot of sense, and 2/will stir up a pot o' press reaction, all of which will have some variant of this headline: "Google Plans End Run Around Microsoft."

In short, the new version of Google Desktop will include APIs for any Windows application developer, letting anyone plug their application into GDS (ie, iTunes, chat, or...MSFT Office, for example). Developers can access these APIs to do two things - one, to make sure their documents are indexed by GDS, and appear as searched by GDS in any way they care to. And second, to plug Google search, all of Google search, into their apps.

In short, if you are Windows developer, you can now plug Google (yup, all of Google search, not just desktop) into your application. Isn't integrated search what MSFT is promising with Longhorn? Why, yes it is. But that's two years out. This is ready now.

So is this Google starting an all out war for the hearts and mind of Windows developers, and for the search habits of Windows users? Hell yes to the latter, but on the former, not yet, but it's sure as hell interesting. When I asked Nikhil Bahtla, GDS product manager, about this, he used Wordperfect as an example. Nice choice. I doubt MSFT will be busy working on a Word or Office plugin any time soon.

But wait, there is more. The new GDS will also create a floating "search box" independent of any browser, which you can place anywhere you want on top of Windows. Hmmmm. This sounds very, er, post browser, very...Web 2.0. See my musings on how web-based apps are starting to do to Windows what Windows did to DOS here....and man, this sure feels a lot like a paving stone down that particular road.

Given all this, I had to ask the Googlers I spoke to about the Microsoft issue, and they, as usual, ducked the question, saying they were merely providing features that Google's users were asking for. Certainly that's true. But certainly, it's also true that this release will cause no shortage of consternation up in Redmond.

Once you have APIs and desktop software like this, you need to create a major push to support developers. Will Google be doing this, I asked? No comment, at least not at this point. But expect it. It will be, of course, what "Google's customers will be asking for."

In any case, read more about the news here (only a ZDnet story now, but by Monday morning...). This is certainly getting interesting. Release in extended entry.

Continue reading "Google Updates Desktop: MSFT Will Take Note" »

When I'm driving, I listen to radio. Radio is a pretty pure medium, particularly AM. I've always thought AM talk radio (I listen to sports radio when I'm bored with NPR, which is a lot, honestly) was a lot like blogging - you have a host who sits in the middle of a conversation, and the best ones are really good at getting the community involved. They have regulars, they have a defined area of coverage, they clearly connect to their audience. Anyway, as I was listening to AM radio on my way back from the gym, an ad for something pretty random came on. I don't recall the ad exactly, but it felt extremely...non-endemic. After all, everyone listening is really into sports, right? (I was listening because the Giants are back in spring training, the blossoms are on the fruit trees, and all is right in the world...)

Anyway, this advertiser sent me on a reverie. Why, in all honesty, was this advertiser buying the ad space on the radio in the first place? Was it to reach men, 24-54? Yes, certainly. Was it to reach men, 24-54 with an interest in sports, and engage them in a conversation that was related to the product they were selling? No, not really, as the ad was for something else - maybe it was a mortgage refinancing offer. Was it to speak to this audience in the language they were all speaking at the point of context - the language characterized by the host? Clearly not. The ad was abrasive, a pushy come on.

So why did the advertiser buy the ad?

And then it hit me. The advertiser bought the ad to gain access to distribution. The advertiser wanted to speak to a big group of men, and the best outlet the advertiser could find was the radio station. At that time, in the Bay area, there simply was no other option. For the most part, the advertiser ignored the context of the endemic conversation it had interrupted (sports talk, in this case), and took over the distribution channel for its thirty seconds, pushing a presumptive and noisome message into my ears.

We have all come to accept this, because that's the cost of a closed distribution system - those with the most money will pay the most to gain access to that distribution - in short, they rent it for the highest dollar. In nearly all "old" media, sales teams spend nearly all their time hawking this fact: buy our audience, and say pretty much whatever you want to them (as long as its not illegal).

But what happens to advertising when distribution is secondary, and audience and content is primary?

That is exactly the question internet publishing and blogging opens up (at least, the best forms of it). Internet based publishers don't control access to some finite distribution system, all they control is access to the audience itself. This, in turn, can and should skew the conversation around internet advertising to one based on endemics - is this advertiser a good fit to the audience in the *context* the site provides? Can the advertiser address the audience in a voice that respects and even adds to the conversation occurring at that site? The lack of distribution scarcity creates a subtle but important forcing mechanism - It lets the best publishers (to my mind) say "Sure, we'll take advertising, but only advertising that respects the conversation present on a site will truly flourish." That, in the end, creates an ecology which rewards the strongest content and authors/sites which have durable and vibrant bonds with their communities. And that, I must say, makes this publisher a very optimistic fellow.

The difference is compelling, check it out....I have to admit, the presentation is...well...pretty!

Since I'm on the topic of Boing Boing, we've been testing Yahoo's long tail RSS ads. It's tough to find ads that are relevant to Boing Boing's content, and often the program fails - defaulting to pretty random ads. But when this combination hit my RSS aggregator, I had to note it....

After all, it is Friday. Plush toys, indeed.

Porn. Knock me over with a ticklish feather. This sounds like it came from Alta Vista, but I'm sure it's true everywhere....

Fred Wilson seems to be tempting fate by posting on his Google Adsense numbers, but I for one am pleased he's doing it, as it might spur some innovation in the space. Fred's pretty pleased with his $500 a year from AdSense, but I think that's not close to what Fred could or should be pulling in. Thomas Hawk has some comments on the post.

Given experiences like Fred's and my own (which are similar in scope), I would be upbraiding Google on Adsense as it relates to blogs and smaller sites in particular, but this week when I got a call from a nice fellow in their New York advertising office. He was calling to inquire about Boing Boing and Adsense - basically, it was a cold call - Google was doing marketing outreach. While sites like Fred's and Searchblog are not getting these calls, the Google rep told me his job was to call "mid size" sites like Boing Boing (I'm the "band manager" there) and convert them into Adsense customers. (He did not realize that I write Searchblog, and was not treating me with any kind of special preference, as far as I could tell. I did inform him during our conversation.)

I explained to the rep why Boing Boing is not using Adsense - the list is rather long. First, the ads are not very relevant - Boing Boing is pretty eclectic and updates quickly, and the content confuses the Adsense algorithms, forcing them to default to lowest common denominator type ads - like mortgage offers and affiliate sites. The Google rep countered that for sites the size of Boing Boing, Adsense can crawl more quickly, increasing the chance that more contextual ads will appear. He also reminded me that Adsense has updated tools which allow publishers to specify keywords for ads they might wish to attract, as well as ads they might want to avoid. So Boing Boing might use keywords like "music," "gaming," or "technology" to attract advertisements in those categories. And we can create negative keywords like "mortgage" to get rid of those offers. I knew Google had these tools, but this fellow told me Google has given the keywords more weight lately. This isn't exactly the verticalization of Adsense I had been hoping for (I'd love it if Google let advertisers "tag" themselves so publishers can connect to those tags), but it's a start.

The trickier part of Boing Boing's resistance to Adsense has to do with its Terms of Service (TOS) for both advertisers and publishers. Adsense has an anti-"anti" TOS - it does not allow negative ads. This meant that ads promoting, say, anti-Bush t-shirts, were not allowed. To its credit, Google has updated this portion of their TOS (political speech is now OK), but the "anti" terminology is still in the TOS, and the definition is so vague as to be difficult to comprehend.

Which leads to the big issue with Adsense: transparency. Many have written about this (including Thomas above), but the basic reality is this: No one knows how Google makes its decisions regarding Adsense. This means we don't know what the split is with publishers, what constitutes a violation of the TOS, or what the average price per click is. Not to mention that the TOS prohibits partners from discussing their earnings (which is why I think Fred might be in hot water....). In short, working with Adsense is a "trust us" proposition, one that Boing Boing is not willing to make. (Though I do make it, here on Searchblog, at least for now. For more on my own experience, read this.)

Lastly, Adsense has a "no competition" clause, meaning we can't run any other text ad network. In my gut, I just don't like that approach.

Anyway, the Google rep was quite open and listened, responded, and - most surprising of all - said that if we did try Adsense, he'd be our account executive - we could call him at any time with questions. Now that is new - Google has been really beaten up by nearly everyone I spoke to for lack of response (my post here reflects that). You can't really blame them - with hundreds of thousands of advertisers, it's hard to scale up. But clearly, Google is now trying harder. Credit where credit's due....

From Slashdot:

"Microsoft Watch reports Marc Lucovsky, one of Microsoft's key Windows architects has defected to Google. His confidence in Microsoft's ability to ship software seems to have waned, too."

The poster is referring to this post on Marc's new blog, his first post, reminiscent of Adam Bosworth's earlier musings (Adam was another MSFT Wheel who left for BEA, then went to Google.)

Google today introduced upgrades to Google Local, taken together they point to some interesting trends in Google's approach to this market.

First, Google has integrated its broadly acclaimed Google Maps application, not a surprising move. Second, and more interestingly, Google has incoporated reviews. But unlike Yahoo, which allows for users to submit reviews at the point of search, Google crawls the web for reviews which are already extant, then rolls them into its results. Users cannot add their own reviews on the spot.

This is an important distinction, and yet another declaration of how Google differs from its competitors, in particular Yahoo. I've written about this here and here (and a lot of other places). Blogger aside (and there's plenty to say about the limitations of that platform), Google has always been uncomfortable with user created content, at least on its main site. While sites like Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo are full bore participants in the architecture of participation (AOP), Google prefers to lay an algorithm between user created content and its own search service. It's still AOP, but it's AOP once removed.

Why am I on about this? Well, Yahoo's approach allows merchants to join the AOP party, and start paying for listings, for example. Google's approach - at least so far - eschews this potential revenue stream. Again, Google seems to be avoiding the deeper media play.

This is not a criticism, per se, just an observation. The new Google Local also scans the web for other useful information such as prices, hours of operation, and so on. On first blush, the new service looks greatly improved. But I wonder if the approach - of filtering the web rather than engaging an AOP based platform - will really work for users. We'll see. It's great that there are such distinct approaches to the same market - it means we'll all learn more, more quickly.

Upto11.net is another music search engine, but it has a different interface from MusicPlasma. Worth checking out, I liked it on first blush...the engine uses a community "fan base" to help with filtering.

Last week there was buzz about how paid search is slowing, this week Fathom Online, which maintains a monthly keyword pricing index, reports that in fact prices dropped for paid search terms, by an average of two percent. Release is here.

I don't know how you all feel out there, but I sense a backlash of sorts building toward paid search. The story has been too rosy, for too long. Journalists and Wall St. analysts are starting to look hard for chinks in the armor.

One of the most interesting, from my point of view, is clickfraud. I've been talking at length to a fellow who is a significant advertiser on Google and other paid search networks, and he is literally exhausted from chasing down all the fraud that is plaguing his ad buys, and really angry with Google for not being responsive to his requests for relief. I'll be writing up that story and posting on it shortly, but if you have any information or insights on clickfraud, send em my way, or post em here.

My friend John Heilemann points me to the site for this new book, Safe: The race to protect ourselves in a newly dangerous world. This is a bit off topic for my site, but the folks behind the book are old colleagues and wonderful people, and the book itself is the expression of a new model in authorship, pioneered by Katrina Heron, who took over the editorship of Wired magazine a few months after I left to start the Standard. From the site FAQ:

Safe was a collaborative effort; having multiple authors allowed us to address a broader range of subjects than any one of us could have. It enabled us to talk to a vast collection of thinkers in a relatively short time, and to find links and themes connecting wide areas of counterterrorism-related research. Technology moves quickly, and working together also helped us to make the book as current as possible.

I've posted in the past on how Yahoo will turn ten this year, the image at left is from a Web 2.0 presentation we did back in October (by the way, I'm busy building the program for this year, and it looks awesome, already have a dozen folks lined up and I'm really excited...send me your ideas...) Anyway, a kind reader sent me a note that on Weds Yahoo plans to launch a microsite that, the reader tells me, "will be linked to from the main page. The microsite "will feature companies, news, historical events, popular culture, Yahoo! milestones, and innovations which are relevant to the past 10 years of the Web." Keep an eye out for it!

Yahoo has had a spate of press coverage lately, from the Journal, Wired, and others. It's SES Show week in NYC (wish I was there, but alas I could not make it) and Jerry Yang gave the keynote. Gary Price did a nice walk down memory lane here. Good coverage of SES here and here.

UPDATE: Here's the ten year retrospective link...

I've written a lot about this, so I'll spare the retread, and just point to yet another example of Yahoo's media ambitions, this Wired piece. It focuses on Semel and media, but the best quote has to do with Web 2.0 and it comes from Yang:

As a 10-year-old Yahoo! looks to the decade ahead, there are powerful forces driving the business. Technological change and further customization will be constants. But there's another factor that excites cofounder Jerry Yang enough to keep him coming into the office every day: the network effect. "All those things we talked about in the early days of the Internet are just now starting to come true," he says. "Access isn't sufficient. It's not enough to search. You also have to find - and then share with others. That's where this company is going and I want to be there to see it."

More on the TV over IP meme - Jeremy Allaire, who has more than a few years of entrepreneurship under his belt - is launching Bright Cove, an "exploding TV" company, as Fred Wilson puts it. It's got serious money behind it - more than $5 million at launch from Accel and General Catalyst. Om has more coverage - he calls it "a platform for the little guy." This sounds promising.