John Battelle's Searchblog

Every so often there's just too much stuff:

Searchfox, a personalized RSS reader, is going into private beta. You can ask for an account here.

Yahoo is improving its Mail search. Wonder why?

Doc on blog and RSS spam (which is search spam by another name...)

MSFT to launch Skype killer (via Slashdot). Is there any hope left for old line telcos?!

Reply gets funded. I like the idea of this service. Does it work for anyone?

French President Chirac says he'll fund a European search engine to thwart Anglo Saxon cultural imperialism. Good Lord.

You want a good roundup of RSS search? SEW has it.

SEW also has good reporting on the ongoing Google Print saga.

Om says: Watch yer Google Wallet, it's coming. eBay, ho!

Only 11% of blog readers use RSS (but more than half of Searchblog's, I think).

New mobile search features from Google.

Aaron Wall, who writes the SEOBook search optimization blog, has been sued by Traffic Power (I am not giving them any link love) over comments on his blog. On its face, this seems outlandish - free and open commenting on blogs should be protected - but there are complications regarding trade secrets and SEOBook's competition with Traffic Power, which is much maligned in the search world, to judge by its Google results. Slashdot has a thread on it here. The WSJ has a good overview and free link here.

Remember QOOP, that web-to-print play that does Searchblog's print edition? They just cut a deal to do photo books with Flickr and Buzznet. Imagine what happens when they, or someone like them, does a deal with Google Print? Oh wait, the book industry can't possibly want that, it'd cut them out of a new sales channel: once a book goes out of print, all the money would go to the Author and to Google. But the Print edition is based on a copy scanned by Google - a first serial copy, no doubt.

Hmmm, this is a sticky wicket. That *can't* be good....or...could it? If you're an author, why, that sounds pretty good. After all, thanks to Search and QOOP, your book all of sudden has a new life, and might even generate a few dollars. Question for readers more versed than I in this stuff: Would an out of print reprint of a book found via Google search and printed and sold in a one-off fashion via something like QOOP be first serial still, or would it be second serial? See why those publishers are up in arms? They make their hay in hits, sure, but the backlist is where the reliable margins are....is Google Print just an extension of the backlist, or is it a new beast, one that needs to be added to the Author's contract with the publisher?

If you are a publisher, seems it's time to rework those first serial North American contracts to consider this new wrinkle.....stat.... if you're an Author, read those contracts closely...I've pinged my agent, to see what her take is...

(Caveat - the founder is a pal, and I have a deal with QOOP for Searchblog, as I mentioned.)

In today's Times, Henry hits it, I think.

TEN years ago this month, the initial public offering of the Internet pioneer Netscape set off a dot-com boom that today is usually viewed as a sort of financial kindergarten recess, a regrettable free-for-all of idiocy and greed. Although this view does capture an aspect of the period - the arrogance and punch-drunk frivolity that come with easy money - it misses the big picture. It also implies that had we only been smarter and more disciplined in the late 1990's, we could have spared ourselves the pain and embarrassment that followed. History suggests otherwise.

The growth of the Internet has paralleled that of most industries based on revolutionary technology. Canals, railroads, telegraphs, telephones, cars, radios, personal computers - all progressed (or are progressing) through four phases of development: boom, bust, mature growth and decay.

I can now retire happy.

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index.

This piece is just too funny to even quote. Go read it.

I have to say, the speed with which Google has become The Target is rather breathtaking.

Thanks, John.

This scoop from Cnet sure caught my eye:

Google is expanding its lucrative Internet advertising network into the print world in a bold attempt to capture traditional ad dollars.

The search king, which makes 99 percent of its revenue from Internet ads, is quietly testing the waters of print advertising sales, according to executives at several companies that have bought the ads. Google recently began buying ad pages in technology magazines, including PC Magazine and Maximum PC, and reselling those pages--cut into quarters or fifths--to small advertisers that already belong to its online ad network, dubbed AdWords.

This certainly has nothing to do with search. An image of the ads is here.

This feels like a revenue diversification play, to be sure - selling directories and marketplace ads is always the next step once a publisher exhausts the low hanging fruit of its core offerings - but I wonder what the real agenda is here. Does Google see an opportunity to, in essence, become the middleman for anywhere from one to ten pages of directory/marketplace ads in nearly every B2B and niche magazine in the world?

Of course it does. And why not? It has the infrastructure in place (as I said in my previous excerpt, the most valuable asset it has after their tech is its network of advertisers). Let's see. The Cnet piece said that the advertisers paid Google $1000 for their ads in PCMagazine. There were five of these advertisers - so $5K. The manufacturing/distribution cost of that page is probably no more than a grand, so that's $4K in profit to split between Google and the publishers of PC Magazine. Let's say the split is 70/30. That's $1200 to Google, and $2800 to the publisher. As with the online world, this is free money for the publisher, and they probably love it.

Now, $1200 a page, say an average of five pages per B2B magazine, at least 1500 viable B2B mags in the country (probably more, but....), so do the math, that's $1200 times 5 times 1500, that's, er, $9 million, and that's one issue. Say the average B2B magazine comes out 18 times a year (some are monthly, some weekly, some biweekly etc.), that's $162 million in revenue a year, the vast majority of that pure profit. And that's just to start.

Yeah, I see how that might be interesting to Google. And to publishers who, in the end, are never very good at monetizing the back of their book.

For now, this feels like a test. But this sure as heck doesn't feel like a groovy, engineering-driven, throw-it-against-the-wall kind of test. This is a test of a very real opportunity.

Update: Google sent me a statement, thin soup, but here you go:

Google is testing a program to place ads from our advertising network
into U.S. print publications. This limited test is part of Google's
continuing effort to develop new ways to provide effective and useful
advertising to advertisers, publishers and users.

This Infoweek piece rounds up recent and continuing resistance to Google Print, portions of which are currently on pause, from publishing and library organizations. Some strong language and saber rattling, inasmuch as these folks have sabers to rattle.

"Google, an enormously successful company, claims a sweeping right to appropriate the property of others for its own commercial use, unless it is told, case by case and instance by instance, not to," the AAUP board said in a statement. "In our view this contradicts both law and common sense."

The ALPSP was the first of the three groups to indicate publicly that it was ready to go to court.

"We call on Google to hold an urgent meeting with representatives of all major publishing organizations, in order to work out an acceptable pragmatic way forward and to avoid legal action," Morris said.

I've asked to speak to someone at Google about this, because this sure sounds like a lawsuit is the next step, if Google does not do more to appease them.

I've said in the past that I think this ain't Napster. Let's hope the book industry thinks so too.

Time magazine tackles search in this week's issue. I spoke to a Time reporter last week, and you never know where it's going to go - Time tends to talk to a lot of folks, and then boil it all down to the least common denominator.

The piece starts with a "search in the future scene" which pretty much summed up the conversation I had with the reporter (without of course saying we had it), then rounds up the conventional wisdom, numbers and all[1], and then goes into an overview of "next generation search," beginning with AOL's SingingFish (a Time Warner property), on to futuristic image search Viisage, mobile search (4INFO), an interesting app called Mobot (pattern matching via cel phone camera images), question answering (KnowItAll), tagging (Flickr), audio/video (Blinkx, Nexidia), maps (A9) and personalized (Greg's Findory gets a nod).

Why did I do all these links? Because Time's website doesn't link out. How 1996 is that?! I can only imagine all the folks who were not mentioned in this roundup are feeling blue - for a startup, a mention in Time is a Very Big Deal. But thank goodness for all of us Time did not put this package on the cover, as the reporter told me they might - that always marks the beginning of the end of any trendy story. Maybe next week....

[1]So the battle is on for the next generation of search, which will be smarter and more tailored to the individual, embrace video and music--and be accessible from any device with a chip. By 2010, search-engine advertising will be a $22 billion industry worldwide, up from an estimated $8 billion today, according to Safa Rashtchy, a senior analyst with Piper Jaffray in San Francisco. It's the reason search has become the most hotly contested field in the world of technology.

The recent news from Google on Talk, Maps, Earth, Desktop, et al reminded me of a couple of pivot points in the company's history. For this week's excerpt (I'm just back from time off, and digging out...) I'm going to post excerpts from two. First is the purchase of the assets of Deja and the move into new markets in 2001, next is AdSense in 2003. This is culled from two separate chapters so it may not flow perfectly.... Net net: the idea of Google expanding beyond search is not new – it’s been happening for years.

The book stuff is really starting to heat up. I did my first reading/talk at the Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven, MA last Friday, and the first reviews are in as well, for more, see the Amazon page. Yikes.....

(And by the way, thanks to your pre-orders, the book is first on the list of "Popular Pre-orders" for Business on Amazon. THANK YOU!)

By the time Schmidt joined, Google was handling more than 100 million searches a day. Early in the year, the company began a raft of significant improvements to its search service, starting with the purchase of DejaNews, a failed attempt at making money from Usenet, a public messaging system composed of more than 500 mil- lion discrete postings on nearly every subject imaginable. While the acquisition of such a data-rich asset went largely unnoticed, the move marked a significant departure for the company. By acquiring Usenet and adding it to the index, Google was actively seeking out new information, as opposed to passively spidering the Web.

The move was consistent with what would become the company’s new mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google would continue this trend through 2003 and 2004 with the acquisition of Blogger, Picasa (a photo-sharing service), and Keyhole (a massive satellite imaging company), and the launch of Google Print.

But it was during 2001 that Google’s appetite for data began in earnest. The service added public phone-book information to its index as well asa new image search tool, complete with 250 million images. By the end of the year, Google’s burgeoning index comprised more than 3 billion documents. At the same time, the company aggressively expanded internationally—by early 2002, it was serving search queries in more than forty languages. And 2001 saw Google’s aggressive entry into the mobile market through partnerships with major players like Cingular, AT&T, and Handspring.

Clearly, Google was metastatizing—everywhere there was op- portunity, it seemed the company was expanding. Google soon had more than one hundred engineers in the company, but no focused approach to managing how their time was spent. Unsure of the best way to handle such growth, the triumvirate set up a traditional management structure based on hierarchy—teams of engineers reporting to more than a dozen engineering managers, who in turn reported to Brin and Page. But the approach began to feel top-heavy and bureaucratic—it was slowing down innovation. In September 2001, Brin and Page gathered all the engineering managers together at a companywide meeting—then informed them they were out of a job. Most got jobs in other places in the company, but the founders had made a declaration—not only were they in charge, but things would be done differently at Google.

-----------

By the end of 2002, Google stopped publicly discussing its key internal metrics, claiming that it had “more than 1,000”employees and “more than 10,000” computers in its vaunted infrastructure. The company did still boast about the size of its Web index, which passed 4 billion documents in December 2002. But it guarded its revenue numbers jealously— perhaps because they were so good: in 2002, the company made nearly $100 million on gross revenues of about $440 million. That’s some serious cash, and the longer people like Bill Gates stayed in the dark about it, the longer Google could remain free from additional competition.

As compared with Google the service, it has always been difficult to extract information from Google the company—clearly this trait was inherited from its founders, Page in particular. But in late 2002 and early 2003, it seemed the company was circling its wagons even more, perhaps for competitive advantage, but perhaps also in preparation for a possible IPO.

In December 2002, the company launched Froogle, an e-commerce search engine. To most, it was increasingly clear that Google planned to play, and big, in the world of e-commerce. Through the next year, the company continued its aggressive expansion and its rather disingenuous practice of avoiding hard numbers. In mid-2003, the company announced it served “more than 250 million queries a day,” and as of early 2005, it has not updated the figure. In early 2003, Google acquired Blogger, the wildly popular weblog hosting company, prompting many to speculate that Google was becoming a portal along the lines of Yahoo or AOL. But Google for the most part left Blogger alone.

Why? The answer most likely lies in the company’s next major innovation, a new advertising program called AdSense. Launched in March 2003 and rolled out to the world that June, Google’s AdSense program marked a departure in the company’s business model—this was not a pure search business; it was something else. AdSense allowed third-party publishers large and small to access Google’s massive network of advertisers on a self-serve basis—in minutes, publishers could sign up for AdSense, and AdSense would then scan the publishers’ Web sites and place contextually relevant ads next to the content, much as AdWords did for Google’s own site. But there was a significant difference to AdSense—it was driven not by the intent-based queries of consumers, as search is, but rather by the content of a site. The presumption was that if a reader was visiting a site written about, say, flowers, advertisements about flowers from Google’s networks would be a good fit.

By nearly any measure AdSense was a hit—thousands of publishers signed up for the service, most of them tiny sites that previously had no way to monetize the small amount of traffic they had garnered. This was particularly true for blogs—the connection to Blogger now became obvious. For many, AdSense was the equivalent of magic—they added a few lines of code to their sites, and in a month or so checks from Google started showing up in the mail.

But while AdSense as a revenue stream has grown steadily—by Early 2005 it accounted for an estimated 15 percent of Google’s over- all revenues—many advertisers complained that AdSense didn’t work nearly as well as AdWords. Potential customers are in a very dif- ferent frame of mind when they are reading about flowers from when they are typing “flowers” into a search engine. Google acquiesced to advertiser feedback and in 2004, allowed them to opt out of the Ad- Sense network. Regardless, AdSense was a major new distribution Network for what can be considered Google’s second most impressive asset, after its core infrastructure: its network of advertisers.

From time to time advertisers pop up over at Boing Boing who want to do nothing but buy a hard coded text link. The advertisers are not in any way interested in conversing with BB readers, all they want is to grab some Googlejuice by having a link on a high PageRank site. We always say no, as the intent is so evident. But here is an interesting case (at publisher O'Reilly, which is a partner of mine in Web 2) where a more sophisticated approach - via Google ads - to basically the same idea was not caught, at least initially. BB and SEW have good overviews.

From Tim's post:

So there's the heart of the question: is it appropriate for a site to monetize its page rank as well as its page impressions?

It's pretty clear that the practice of "cloaking" -- that is, hiding links so that you're selling only the page rank -- is illegitimate. But what if someone pays you for a real ad, even if you know that they are paying you primarily because of your page rank rather than your targeted audience? As long as there's no deception as to the nature of the sponsored link, and a legitimate opportunity for click through, isn't this still an ad?

That leads to a whole nest of hard questions: Where are the boundaries between legitimate "search engine optimization" to help people find stuff that they will appreciate, and "search engine gaming", to inflate the rank of sites that are less useful? Whose responsibility is it to solve this problem? Should web sites turn away advertisers just because they are performing arbitrage on Google and other search engines? Or is it the search engine's responsibility to adjust their heuristics to counteract any attempts to game the system? Or both? Is it legitimate for a site to improve its own user experience by hosting small, well-paid and relatively inobtrusive text ads rather than the large banners and popups demanded by many advertisers if those ads lead to a worse user experience on search engines?

Long term, I'm pretty sure that supporting people who game search engines is not a good thing.

A free link in the Journal. The guts of the piece:

In recent months, the top Googlers have sold off nearly $3 billion of their own holdings. These insider sales all have been on the up and up, conducted under a so-called 10b5-1 plan that allows them to sell a predetermined number of shares over a given period. Diversifying their riches in this way would be a wise strategy for the Google boys under any circumstances. But it is particularly wise if you suspect your stock has a touch of hot air.

They also have been changing their compensation plans, moving away from reliance on stock options, which become worthless if the stock drops. Instead, they have started using Google stock units, or GSUs. That is Googlespeak for restricted stock that takes four years to vest, but will continue to hold value even if the share price swoons. The company issued 61 million GSUs in its second quarter.

If that isn't evidence enough that Google is preparing for the bubble to burst -- or at least deflate a bit -- then the new stock offering should be. The company says it has no specific plans for the cash. "The principal purpose of this offering is to obtain additional capital," Google lawyers wrote in their registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "We have no current agreements or commitments with respect to any material acquisitions."

Like George Mallory and Mount Everest, they are taking the money "because it's there."

And it's another fun read. Jason ties together the Google Desktop (which he reminds us was launched as "Desktop Search" but is now just, well, your "Desktop....."), local web servers, and next generation web apps and browsers. In short, he is saying, the Web OS is nearly here. It's why Yahoo bought Konfabulator, and why MSFT is integrating the web into Vista, it's Apple's strategy too. A good overview....

It's here, it's Windows only (so far), and it's got folks talking (just not me, cuz I'm A Mac Guy.) And it comes with its own Adwords campaign, natch....

Businessweek: Georges Harik, Google's director of product management, says the company has opened communications with AOL and Yahoo, offering them interoperability on the Google Talk network free, and it will soon contact Microsoft. It remains to be seen whether these big players, especially AOL, which runs both its AOL Instant Messenger service and the globally popular ICQ service, will take Google up on its offer.

"WE'RE WORKING ON IT." "Our network will be open. We want to make all instant messaging networks interoperable," Harik says. Users of other IM clients would be able to connect friends to Google Talk just by adding their Gmail user names. No agreements have been struck yet. "We don't know what their reaction will be," Harik says.

Oh really? I mean, really!!!?

This issue has been a hot potato for, what, five years? And Google is claiming to not know what happens when you poke a stick into a beehive? Please!

SEW: The entry sees Google directly competing against the much more mature clients and established user bases of competitors Yahoo and MSN, not to mention its own partner AOL. The move also opens Google up to accusations that it is way off its mission of "to organize the world's information." Heck, Google Talk doesn't even feature a box to let you search for things, as rival products from AOL, MSN and Yahoo do.

Of course, the failure to launch an instant messaging product would leave Google at a competitive disadvantage. In the end, while the company may not like the P word, but a portal Google effectively is.

Downloadsquad review: Another big feature they're working on is "joint search," which would allow two or more Google Talk buddies using Google and surfing the web together. This would be a natural segue to the fabled Google Browser, but there is as yet no confirmation from Google.

Google also tells us that they don't yet have solid plans on making money with the service, but plan on using it to drive users to Gmail.

Slashdot - nearly 700 comments so far.

Press release is in the extended entry.

Update: Of course, readers remind me, Mac folk can use this via a Jabber app like iChat....

Continue reading "Other Shoe on Google Talk" »

It's nearly as predictable as rain in November (at least, in Marin...): the Backlash story. It's my sense that the Google backlash had its peak strength back in 2004, after Google hired its first 1000 new folks and everyone who did not get hired, or who did not get in on the IPO in some way, or did not see any viable competitors on the horizon, or never got a freaking phone call back from the Adsense group, started grousing about how Google was getting too big for its britches.

Now, Google has serious competition, can't hire whoever they want, and its founders have learned to say the right things in public about past practices (Sergey, for example, told me he regrets the seemingly haphazard way his company hired in the past few years, and Omid told me he is 100% focused on Adsense service issues).

But this is Gary Rivlin's story, so he got some interesting folks to talk on the record, including Joe Kraus, Reid Hoffman, and Craig Donato. To wit:

Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused "across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley" - or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.

and:

"When I meet with venture capitalists, or if I'm engaged in a conversation about going into partnership with someone, inevitably the question is, 'Why couldn't Google do what you're doing?' " said Craig Donato, the founder and chief executive of Oodle, a site for searching online classified listings more quickly.

In any case, the Times piece marks the top of a sine wave of coverage, in my estimation. It'll get worse from here, then get better again. The cycle of spin....

Is leaking out...audio and IM...more to come

"I'm on Google Talk Right Now" reports smashsworld.com.

Apparently all you need is a Jabber-compatible IM client (like iChat) and a gmail account. Now folks, tell me this is not a major community play. Just tell me.

David Hayden, of Critical Path and Magellan reknown, today launched a new search engine called JetEye. The concept is interesting - you can create your own set of search results ("jetpaks"), which you can share with others and make searchable. This combines the idea of the architecture of participation and the force of many with the currently in vogue concept of social search.

David gave me a tour of Jeteye late last week, and as with many of these ideas, it really all depends on whether or not folks pick up the habit (the Wondir QA engine comes to mind, for example.) For now, it's a promising start up, and the key will be whether it reaches critical mass.

MediaPost coverage.

Dirson (he found talk.google.com is live, but not responding) and many others, including the NYT yesterday, have been speculating about a new communications tool promised out of the Googleplex for tomorrow. I've heard it's anything from an IM client to full blown free WiFi for the masses. I have no special insight into this, but I do believe IM is a no brainer. MSFT, Yahoo, and AOL all have IM clients. IM ties folks to a platform, and that's what Google is building with Desktop et al. VOIP is another possibility. Om and others have found that Google is running a Jabber client, for example, and speculate that Google is about to introduce a VOIP/IM meta client that works with multiple IM clients. That would certainly be cool.

In any case, stay tuned. The other shoe will drop Weds.

From a Times (UK) article:

Now Google and Yahoo!, two of the internet’s most important pioneers, are to do battle over a deal that would see them embracing the world of “old” media for the first time.

The two US-listed companies, which between them had a market value of more than $126 billion (£70.2 billion) at close on Friday, are understood to have each approached Trader Classified Media, the Euronext-listed owner of 575 print titles, ranging from Canada’s Auto Trader magazine to Buy & Sell Chinese in the US, about a possible corporate tie-up.

Sources familiar with the discussions say that other firms, possibly including Ebay, the online auctioneer, have also made approaches.

Google rev'd its Desktop application today. Again, I can't run it as I'm a Mac guy, but I'm told the new features include:

- A customizable "Sidebar" interface for easier results viewing (in other words, Google floating on top of Windows, all the time. Gates is really happy about this...)
- Email (Outlook) integration and offline Gmail searching
- More API support
- Better encryption
- "QuickFind" which sounds a lot like a UI hack on top of Windows to make it easier to launch applications.

What does this sound like to me? Sounds like Google acting like a software developer, strengthening a product in anticipation of it becoming a standard interface to your data. But that's just me.

My first post on Desktop is here. SEW/Gary on the app here.

I am still percolating on a mountain of input about the Yahoo Google size matters debate, but in the meantime, several readers have pointed me to the fact that the NCSA has distanced itself from the "study" done last week which concluded that Yahoo's claims were possibly false. From the new disclaimer:

The following study was completed by two of Professor Vernon Burton's students at the University of Illinois. Though one of the students previously worked with Professor Burton at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the study was done outside the scope of any NCSA core projects. When first published online, staff at the NCSA noted several issues with the study, and some revisions have been made to the document to reflect several of these concerns. Changes are detailed at the bottom of this page.

Please note again that this study is not an NCSA publication and was not conducted as part of any NCSA project or under the supervision of NCSA.

Many folks have contacted me pointing out the possible pitfalls of the study's approach. This does not mean, however, that there are not conclusions which can be drawn from it.

There is much more to this issue (of size, bragging rights, etc.) than meets the eye, and I do intend to write a longer piece, as I said before. I've spoken to senior folks at both companies, and also am tracking down third parties. But as I am supposed to be on vacation early this week, I'm going to not rush this one. Stay tuned.

Long time readers may recall when I posted a thread on perfect search a year or so ago. I got so many wonderful answers, and I wove much of what I learned into my final chapter. This is a short excerpt from that chapter. Again, please send or post comments, corrections, clarifications - I already see a few things here that I would like to tweak...as usual...a book on topics like search is a never ending work...like a blog!

Search Everywhere

In the near future, search will metastasize from its origins on the PC-centric Web and be let loose on all manner of devices. This has already begun with mobile phones and PDAs; expect it to continue, viruslike, until search is built into every digital device touching our lives. The telephone, the automobile, the television, the stereo, the lowliest object with a chip and the ability to connect—all will incorporate network-aware search.

This is no fantasy; this is simple logic. As more and more of our lives become connected, digitized, and computed, we will need navigation and context interfaces to cope. What is TiVo, after all, but a search interface for television? ITunes? Search for music. That box of photographs under your bed and the pile of CDs teetering next to your stereo? Analog artifacts, awaiting their digital rebirth. How might you find that photo of you and your lover on the beach in Greece from fifteen years ago? Either you scan it in, or you lose it to the moldering embrace of analog obscurity. But your children will have no such problems; their photographs are already entirely digital and searchable—complete with metadata tagged right in (date, time, and soon, context).1

But let’s not stop our digital fantasy train yet. It may sound farfetched, but in the future, your luggage will be searchable. Within two decades, nearly everything of value to someone will be tagged with tiny computing devices, devices capable of saying, upon radiowave-based query, “I’m here, right here, and here’s what I’ve been doing while you were away.” Instead of the ubiquitous bar codes airport officials now slap onto your luggage, there’ll simply be an RFID (radio frequency ID) chip. Lost your luggage? I don’t think so. Not when you can Google your Louis Vuitton in real time.

Think about that—Google your dog, your kid, your purse, your cell phone, your car. (Do you have an E-ZPass or OnStar yet? You will.) The list quickly stretches toward the infinite. Anywhere there might be a chip, there can and most likely will be search. But for perfect search to happen, search needs to be everywhere, attached to everything.

This means that among many other things, search needs to solve what so far has been a rather intractable problem: that of the invisible Web. As Gary Price and Chris Sherman point out in their book of that name,2 the invisible Web comprises everything that is available via the Web, but has yet to be found by search engines. Deep databases of knowledge, like the University of California’s library system or the LexisNexis news and legal citation service, are walled off from search for commercial or technological reasons. And while the contents of your hard drive may be digital, they most likely have not been indexed and offered up to a search application—yet. As I pointed out earlier, all the major search engines have launched desktop search tools which index your hard drive and serve up the results much as you might see Web results. Prior to the advent of desktop search, your PC was part of the invisible Web. No longer.

Also mostly invisible, and mainly still stuck in the analog world, is what might be called the content Web. There are nearly 100 million books extant, but only several hundred thousand online as of this writing. Add to that unsearchable pile humanity’s analog archives of film, television, and periodicals.

Thanks to Napster, we’ve already got the music nut partially cracked. When Napster launched, millions of people ripped copies of their favorite music to the Web. And therein most likely lies the solution to the rest of our previously unsearchable media. For nearly every book, film, and television show, someone, somewhere, will come up with a reason to put it on the Web, assuming we can get out of our own way with regard to intellectual property issues.3 Massive archiving projects, such as Google Print, the Internet Archive, and Amazon’s Search Inside the Book, have gone a long way toward solving a piece of this problem, but they have a long, long way to go, and simple logic tells us that no one entity can (or should) archive the sum total of humankind’s information. No, when it comes to making the world searchable, the best way is to simply let the world do it.

This phenomenon has many casual monikers, but I like to call it the Force of the Many. Eventually, everything of value—including your luggage—will be connected to the Web, because to be connected is definitional to the concept of value in a wired world. As the Force of the Many weaves humanity’s belongings into the Web, search engines will weave this new content into their indexes, moving the world ever closer to the possibility of perfect search.

A related query results play. IE, search for "On Demand" and get results with "Comcast" related pages. Readers had been telling me this, but I could not confirm it. Now it appears Mediapost has. This has some interesting business model implications, when you think about it - certainly Google would never do paid inclusion, but this is the kind of thing that might allow for such a move should the company fall into the hands of the Dark Side.

Update: Google PR has given me a statement on this:

Google is testing an automated technique for detecting when an alternate
query might help users find what they are looking for more quickly. For
these searches, which are both commercial and non-commercial in nature,
Google displays one or more alternate queries together with a preview of
their top results.

Nah, just a secondary offering:

UPDATE: Astute reader notes that the offering amount is Pi without the three....
'

Google Inc. Files Registration Statement with the SEC for a Proposed
Public Offering

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - August 18, 2005 - Google Inc. (Nasdaq:
GOOG) announced today that it has filed a registration statement with
the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed public offering
by the company of 14,159,265 shares of Class A common stock.

The managing underwriters of the proposed offering are Morgan Stanley &
Co. Incorporated and Credit Suisse First Boston LLC, acting as joint
book-running managers, and Allen & Company LLC, acting as co-manager.
The underwriters have an option to purchase up to 600,000 additional
shares of Class A common stock from Google solely to cover
over-allotments, if any.

A copy of the prospectus relating to these securities may be obtained,
when available, from: Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated, Prospectus
Department, 1585 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 or Credit Suisse First
Boston LLC, Prospectus Department, One Madison Avenue, New York, NY
10010.

A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed
with the Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become
effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be
accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes
effective. This release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the
solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of these
securities in any state in which such offer, solicitation or sale would
be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities
laws of any such state.

I've gotten a lot of mail on this, which tells me it's worth noting: Google is tweaking its ad placements and putting more ads up, and it bought a mobile company. Silicon Beat covers it well.

Yahoo Local has been getting better and better of late, and today Yahoo launched another rev of the service which I think comes close to redefining the idea of local from that of a search based application to that of a destination - no small feat, given all the mojo and investment inherent in the "local search" terminology.

I spoke with Paul Levine, head of Yahoo Local Search, earlier in the week and he gave me a tour through the site's new features. What did I see that led me to this conclusion? Two things. One, a major commitment to the architecture of participation - Levine and Yahoo are committed to surfacing user-generated content wherever they can. And two, integration into the recombinant web - at one point Levine called Yahoo Local an emergent "collective wiki for local."

I really like this idea - that of creating a platform based on a need (in this case local) - then letting the users build the service over time. While it clearly controls the dials and levers for now, Yahoo seems to be watching how folks are using the content and services they have integrated into local, then building (or rebuilding) the site as paths are laid down and choices are made by the users.

Levine said he noticed that local searches were frustrating to many because they were often too broad - a search for "San Francisco pizza" or somesuch gave too many results. So Yahoo Local is now driven by the idea of "neighborhoods" for larger cities, a concept which informs and allows all sorts of new interface executions. It also has automatically generated "city pages" which surface the most popular content based on actions of local users. The whole deal is RSS friendly.

Yahoo is leveraging its "buzz" technology in part to create these city pages, and it's also tying in the tagging inherent to its MyWeb social search platform (which does have its problems, as SEW notes). There are many other features, like wizzy rollover stuff and expandable maps, but I've never really been that strong on product reviews...

A couple of thoughts on where it seems this might be heading. First, I've written a lot in the past about the idea of clickstreams, search history, and the like. As I was touring through Yahoo Local, it struck me that what the service was starting to do was, in effect, *not waste my time and investment* as I interacted with it.

Said another way, as a user I get the sense that the more I put into Yahoo Local (or any number of other well considered sites), the more I get out. I'm motivated to use it not simply because I get some information, find a phone number, get driving directions, but also because I sense I am contributing, through my clickstream, to the creation of a smarter service which will serve be better in the future. Also, I am participating in a community that I am part of. That, in the end, is what will drive loyalty and usage in a Web 2 world.

Secondly, and germane to where Yahoo sits strategically in a Google dominated world, Yahoo's embrace of user-generated content sets the company apart. Yahoo is clearly pursuing a strategy of hosting content - every merchant can build a page describing its wares, every user can comment on those wares, for example. Borrowing content from the Yellow Pages (or integrating related - but not connected - content from the broader web) can only take local web search so far. The architecture of participation is what's next.

Google's local offering has been growing significantly of late, even though Yahoo holds a commanding lead in overall usage (one it its only such leads in a search related offering). Given how rich this area is in advertising dollars and consumer demand, expect more announcements soon...

From the beginning of my career in media I would watch the Veronis Suhler forecast on media, it was not only pretty considered, it was also used by most entrepreneurs to justify their next magazine launch or cable channel. At times I could not get my hands on it, but I recall early in the Wired years we used it to justify how big the technology/culture space was going to get.

This year's report is out and apparently it delineates, for the first time, between "new" and "traditional" forms of media, and furthermore pegs the new media percentage of dollars at about 17% of all ad spending last year, growing to more than 26% by 2009. MediaPost has a report here.

The MediaPost report notes that others view Veronis' numbers as too conservative, ad agency Carat, for example, thinks digital spending will hit 50% in two years. This all depends on what comprises "digital spending." Digital TV? Then the 50% is an easy target. No digital TV? Then perhaps Veronis is more in line....As with every year, I'd sure love to see the full report. It runs nearly two thousand bucks though, so I'll have to watch from the cheap seats.

A fine piece of Jesus Not Again writing from Danny. I'm deep in this as well, as those of you who've read my previous posts know. And more is coming, but I promise, I will be brief as can be. I'm waiting to talk with a couple more folks. Danny notes he and Gary will also be posting more later in the week. I agree with Danny that relevance is key, but think it's nearly impossible to set a standard for relevance - it's too subjective. I disagree that size is not important. Once we can figure out how to audit and count size, it's important, as important as UI, speed, or algorithms. It's also important in a business sense - it's a number that folks pay attention to and that marketers know works, and that the mainstream press will parrot. Even if you disagree with the tactics, and I do, it's still important....

Some in the Dutch govt. worry about Google Earth (but not IBM or MSFT?) in this article.

Both politicians and police are concerned that certain locations in the Netherlands, such as the port of Rotterdam, the royal palace in the Hague and Amsterdam Airport, already potential terrorist targets, could be made more vulnerable to terrorists thanks to the detailed images created from satellites and aircrafts within the last three years available via Google Earth.

Udi and his team have formally tossed their hat into the mapping ring with A9 Maps. Udi has shown this at a few industry conferences, but now it's live. It's an interesting and pretty cool interface, you use a magnifying lens icon to scroll A9's Block View on the right side of the page. Very You Are There. It breaks down when there are no Block View images - becomes a standard maps interface. But as usual for A9, it points out what's possible and what might be coming....

If this is true, then Rupert probably is reading Om Malik's blog, as he's owned the Blinkx story.

PS - Om also has a story up on Biz 2 that speculates Google may be building a hugely scaled ISP/Wifi net.

I'm a Berkeley guy, so this was interesting. Cnet has the scoop:

U.C. Berkeley, birthplace of early search highflier Inktomi and the school where Google CEO Eric Schmidt got his computer science doctoral degree, is bringing together roughly 20 faculty members from various departments to cross-pollinate work on search technology, said Robert Wilensky, the center's director. The principal areas of focus: privacy, fraud, multimedia search and personalization....

..."If you have 20 researchers interested in search, then getting them together where they are cross-fertilizing ideas, you make something bigger than its parts. You can create a nuclear reaction," said (Robert Wilensky, the center's director).

According to the story UCB is in talks with Google and others about joining the center in some way. I find it really hard to believe that any company would pay more than lip service to this at present, innovations in search are simply too important to a company to share. That's just how it is. These kind of ideas are always well intended, but 20 researchers? Between them, Google and Yahoo have thousands of folks focused on this problem worldwide....that's not to mention Microsoft and scores of others.

However, there is certainly a need for a focused, interdisciplinary approach, and many universities have significant academic work already brewing in this idea. It remains to be seen if the big search companies will support it in any other way than they always have - by buying the companies and hiring the people who come out of it....

A while back I reminded you all that if you signed up early for Web 2.0 this year, you'd get a significant discount. We make the early registration for the event invitation only, to give alumni and friends (at least, the ones we had correct emails for) a chance to get a seat first, before we open it up to the public. I'm pleased to say that we have had very strong early registrations, nearly as many now - in mid August - as we had just a week before the event last year.

That means that the conference will probably sell out (sponsorships are nearly sold out, for example). So if you want to come, and grab that earlybird discount, sign up now. If you have not gotten an invitation, consider this post your invite, and head here. You need to fill out a form requesting one, but just say you came via Searchblog, and you'll get a code to use for registration. When it comes, register asap, as hotel rooms (should you need one) are filling up fast too, and after Monday, the doors swing open for everyone....

BTW, the conference is really coming together. Terry Semel just confirmed, I'll be interviewing him. So has Shawn Fanning, Yusuf Mehdi (MSN), Jonathan Miller (AOL), Bram Cohen, Pierre Omidyar, Omid Kordestani (SVP and "business founder" at Google), Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us) and many many more. And we have at least 16 killer workshops - on tagging, the future of video, of search (of course), VC 2.0, etc etc etc. The workshops are part of the overall deal now, no separate registration, and they are really going to rock. It all starts Weds morning the 5th of October.

OK, end of commercial. If you're not planning on going, then you're not reading this anyway. If you are, the best deal is to act now, as they say on TV.

Given that it's nearly a year since the blessed event, I thought it'd be fun to post a portion of my chapter covering the IPO. This is just a taste, the first 1000 or so words. As always, if I got stuff wrong, let me know....

Success and failure are equally disastrous.
—Tennessee Williams

Sergey Brin is jet-lagged; he has the vaguely disoriented look of
a young man still finding his bearings after a very long,
strange trip. I watch him enter a crowded restaurant and look
around for familiar faces—save for me, the persistent author, there
are few. He is in Davos, Switzerland, attending the World Economic
Forum (WEF), the annual conference of political and business lead-
ers. The room is full of captains of industry and members of the
media from around the world, and all of them stop to regard Brin,
who is, quite literally, the man of the moment (he is slated to give a
short dinner presentation that night).

Brin forges ahead around the tables, acknowledging a greeting
here and there, his hands pressed together at his chest like a yogi’s,
his eyes more alert as he warms to the task at hand. He sits down at
a table near the back, shakes hands all around, then informs his dinner
companions that he really did just step off his plane. He was
here to stand in for Larry Page, who was supposed to be at the dinner,
but Page was feeling under the weather after the ten-hour flight.

It is January 2005, and Brin is at Davos for the fourth time, but
this is his first as a billionaire helmsman of a newly public company.
At last year’s soiree, Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, acknowledged
quite publicly that “Google kicked our butt” in search, but promised
that Microsoft would respond with an even better offering. One year
later, Microsoft had indeed introduced an early version of its new
search software.


Back at the dinner, Brin is accepting congratulations
and plaudits for Google’s unusual initial public offering.
The stock’s stellar performance since the IPO
(it had more than doubled in less than four months)
had nearly everyone asking Brin what might be next for Google.
Brin accepts the plaudits, but is clearly uncomfortable lingering
on the story of the IPO itself. “We have more time to focus on the company
now,” he later tells one well-wisher. Clearly, Brin is glad the IPO is
behind him.

The journey from dorm rooms and Burger King takeout to private jets and
a starring role at the World Economic Forum has been dizzyingly brief;
certainly Brin can be forgiven a resultant touch of jet lag. And as
years go, 2004 ranked as a critical turning point for Google, the
company, as well as Brin and Page, the men. For 2004 was the year Google
began to grow up, not necessarily because it wanted to, but in the end,
because it had to.

Rumors of an IPO
On October 25, 2003, the top story on news.google.com read:
“Google Sparks Hope of New DotCom Boom.” Given that the
Google News computers choose stories based on popularity and
prominence of source, it’s fair to say that the speculation about
when and if Google would file papers to become a public company
had reached fever pitch. Later that same month, the New York Times
reported that Microsoft was eyeing an acquisition of Google, a story
that Bill Gates later disputed. In any case, it was clear that by the
end of 2003, Google was crowned Silicon Valley’s latest golden child.

Expectations were high—reports claimed Google’s IPO would value
the company at $16 billion, roughly the same size as Amazon.com.
As 2004 dawned, Google had become the talk not only of Silicon Valley,
but of Wall Street as well. Whispered financials for the
secretive company pegged 2003 revenue at nearly $1 billion, with
profits estimated at more than $300 million.

By this time, both Yahoo and Microsoft had realized the threat
Google posed to their businesses. Each of those companies had
valuable public shares and massive piles of cash, and they scrambled
to redeploy them against Google. Simply put, if Google was going
to compete, it could not afford to stay private. Valley watchers, press
pundits, and Wall Street writhed in ecstatic speculation: Would
Google’s IPO augur the second coming of the Internet bubble?
Could it usher in a new, more profitable era of tech growth? Who
would get rich? Who would fall behind? Who would follow in
Google’s footsteps? Might the company stumble?

In its early years, the company had downplayed talk of an
IPO—after all, the markets were in the tank, and no one seemed to
have an appetite for any kind of Internet stock, no matter how robust
the company might be. But 2004 marked a transition of sorts—it seemed
to be springtime again in the Valley—and the spotlight was squarely on
Google. With its venture backers, its thousands of option-holding
employees, and its massive profits, clearly the company was heading
toward one of the largest public offerings in the history of
technology. Right?

In fact, the answer was a qualified no. In an interview with the
San Francisco Chronicle in the fall of 2001, Eric Schmidt laid down
what would become the triumvirate’s standard answer to the IPO
question. “The IPO question we’ve debated internally, but frankly,
we’re profitable,” Schmidt said. “We’re generating cash. We don’t
ever need to go public.”

This line was repeated, over and over, for the next three years,
to the point where Google’s evasive responses were becoming
something of an industry joke. At a conference in early 2004,
Brin even went so far as to joke that an IPO was not in the offing
because “filling in all those accounting forms is too difficult.”

Turns out Google’s leaders were wrong about not needing to go
public. Because the company had given stock options to more than
one thousand of its employees, an obscure SEC regulation would
force Google to begin reporting as if it were a public company, as
early as April 2004. The stage, therefore, was already set.

Despite the realities of SEC regulations, that Google would be-
come a public company was never really in doubt. Once a company
takes money from venture capitalists, the event is nearly a fait
accompli—only an acquisition or bankruptcy can easily divert the
path. “The day I was hired I understood the company would go
public because it had venture investors. The only question was tim-
ing,” Eric Schmidt told me after the IPO, giving the lie to three
years of transparently disingenuous corporate line-toeing.

But despite their company’s obvious course, Brin and Page
struggled with the idea of becoming public. Google had prospered
in private, and its founders worried that the company would be
forced into a mind-set of short-term thinking, a trait common to
many listed companies.

Throughout 2003, Google toyed with scenarios that would allow
the company to stay private. It hired consultants to model complex
financial mechanisms—such as repurchasing options and the deploy-
ment of a shadow equity plan that might protect the company from
avoiding its seemingly predetermined fate. But the math never satisfied
Page, Brin, or their board—any way you cut it, the maximum payout

for Google’s investors was the public markets, plain and simple.

From "The Search - How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture," Portfolio, 2005. Buy it here!

I have no idea. I find him fascinating. Now Dan Farber has given me some justification. He found a letter from Dr. Lee to friends and family in China explaining his move from MSFT to Google and had it translated. It says a lot about what Google means to engineers. From Dan's post:

Lee writes, "Microsoft is an outstanding company, and there are many things we can learn from it. But Google is a company that makes feel a shock. The reason Google gives me a shock is the passion for creating a new generation of technology. I found treasures in Google everywhere. The technology and products are way beyond just the search."

At the end of the letter, Lee gives his formula for why Google is his choice:
youth + freedom + transparency + new model + the general public’s benefit + belief in trust = The Miracle of Google

Cnet: Google Pauses Library Project.

All I can say is - let's work this out, folks. This ain't Napster. I know the book industry has issues with this, and they are significant, but man, they are completely shooting themselves in the foot if they don't figure out how to leverage Google and search in general to sell down the long tail. Sheesh.

I had a long chat today with folks from Yahoo about the ongoing "size matters" tempest, and it was once again enlightening. I'm planning a longer post on all this, but the upshot of our conversation was that Yahoo stands by its number, that it agrees with many that size alone does not matter, that any claims that any one company can accurately estimate another's index are simply not defensible, and that, in the end, the proof will be in the results.

Yahoo also acknowledged that it was certainly aware of the PR angle when it made its announcement, and that given Google's home page claim regarding index size, it was hardly a new tactic to tout that number.

I think there's more to this story than meets the eye, in terms of a major, multi-billion dollar tussle for the hearts, minds, and pocket books of millions of web users. Sure, the math is hard, and the science even harder, but at the end of the day, I think size matters, a lot. Maybe not so much to the ultimate results one gets - that may well be a case of "it's not the size of the wand, it's how you wave it" - but in terms of bragging rights and marketing mojo. Perhaps the ultimate end game of this all will be a deeper cultural awareness of what constitutes good search, but then again, no one ever got rich overestimating the public's taste for nuance.

BTW, several sources contacted me to remind me of a fact we all know to be true - that Google's claimed size on its home page - of roughly 8 billion documents - is pretty out of date. Since they put that up, nearly a year ago (scroll to bottom), I'm pretty sure the discoverable web has grown by, oh, at least a few billion pages, and I'm also pretty sure Google knows about those pages. Recall that Google increased its index by roughly a factor of two back then, as a response, one would presume, to Microsoft's claim to have trumped Google's number, which had been reported at about 4 billion. I mean, heck, this new post will create a page, and I bet Google (and Yahoo and everyone else) will have found it within a week, if not a day. Blogs alone are adding millions of pages every week.

Would I be surprised if Google announced shortly that its index was magically up to, oh, 22 billion or so? No, I would not. I think if and when that day comes, the timbre of this debate will change. Clearly, such a change would not have occurred overnight.

Heck, if engines are going to do it anyway, I'd love to see the static numbers on home pages (Yahoo sometimes touts its Image Search index size on that service's home page, by the way), replaced with a counter that is updated constantly. Kind of like that national debt billboard, but for the overall size of the web as discovered by each engine. Why not, at least it'd be more accurate....

From this DJ story:

"Make no mistake, our commitment to this space and this business will constitute a major part of the company's growth, profits and asset building over the next several years," Murdoch told investors and analysts during a conference call to discuss fiscal fourth-quarter results. "We believe through our superior collection of News Corporation assets, and through further strategic and targeted acquisitions, we can very quickly become a major player in this industry."

News Corp., which in July agreed to pay $580 million for Web concern Intermix Media Inc. as part of a new Internet strategy, could spend a total of about $1 billion on acquisitions, Murdoch said. "Now, something may come along to change that, but it wouldn't change it...by more than another billion. This is not something we're putting tens of billions into or need to."

Murdoch said News Corp. plans to create an Internet portal and is in advanced discussions to acquire a controlling stake in a search engine, which he declined to name.

Rumors are circulating it's Looksmart, the

stock is up on them. Mamma.com has also been rumored, but had a bad quarterly report today and is stock is not up....

Earlier coverage.

First, I have very good confirmation that the earlier Meetro-Google rumour is false. Second, Rafat has a rundown on the word that Newscorp/Murdoch is on the prowl for search properties.

Update: The Yahoo Alibaba story is true, but you knew that...

As I posted earlier, Yahoo's claim of indexing more than 20 billion items ruffled more than a few feathers across the web, and nowhere more distinctly than at Google. I spent an hour or so on the phone with a group of Google folks, and they shared a lot of information about how they measure index size, how they deal with issues of duplicate URLs and documents, and why they are baffled by Yahoo's claim.

I am still reporting this story, so a longer post is forthcoming, but an update at the end of the day is worth penning.

First of all, I agreed to review some of the Google information on background, agreeing not to disclose it save with permission. (I agreed to this only if I could tell you all that I did in fact agree to it). I am still digesting what Google had to say, and the information they sent me, but it did leave a distinct set of questions percolating in my mind, questions that I plan to speak to Yahoo about (Yahoo has agreed to talk as well, we just haven't had time yet).

In any case, the lead really is this: I asked Google to go on the record with their concerns about Yahoo's index and whether they believed the news was in fact accurate, and Google agreed. The quote, which I can only attribute at this point to a "Google spokesperson," is as follows:

"Our scientists are not seeing the increase claimed in the Yahoo! index. The data we have doesn't support the 19.2 (billion page) claim and we're confused by that."

Now, the size of an index is only one part of the equation of what makes a good search engine - relevance, speed, UI, and other factors are also critical, but when it comes to comprehensiveness (size), Google has been king pretty much since day one, save a couple of short lapses with FAST in 2002 and another in 03, as I recall, with Yahoo (briefly). The company has always trumpeted its size on its home page, and Yahoo's announcement had to come as a slap in the face. Down to the presumptive specificity of the pronouncement on their home page since 2000 - "searching 8,168,684,336 web pages" - Google set the tone for all future "size matter" battles.

I plan a longer post on this, as I said, but there are some tantalizing examples (I will add some in the next post) that one might expect would yield significantly different results between Yahoo and Google, given Yahoo's massive new size, but don't. The math, in essence, seems not to be adding up. At least, that is what the Google scientists are saying. But then again, I am not a mathematician, and there are always at least two sides to the story. So stay tuned and we'll see how this one plays out...

(I must say, this calls for a benchmark/standard for measurement that might makes all of this moot...)

Kind readers have contacted me of late asking if I'm perhaps a bit overworked, as the analysis and timeliness of this site has suffered in recent months. Is it the new company or preparations for Web 2.0? The fact that the book is pretty much finished? Summer doldrums? Or perhaps a case of blog burnout?

Truth is, it's most of that, plus a bit more (save the burnout part - I have never not wanted to work on this site). First off, let me apologize for the shorter posts, and the paucity of analysis of late. While I didn't plan on it, Searchblog turned from a way to communicate with a few hundred folks about a book I was authoring to a nearly full time job. Trouble was, I already have a few other full time (or nearly so) jobs, including Web 2.0 and the new company I am now starting. It's real work to write a good site, even when you have the support of an entire community. It needs at least a few hours a day, if not more. Just responding to the PR requests, along with doing original reporting, can take up to half a day.

When you can't give your site that kind of time, it's immediately evident. Many authors I've spoken with - in particular those who author sites in their "free time" and have a day job - are feeling pushed to the limits, and are searching for a way to do what they love full time. This is why I'm starting FM - to provide what I hope will be an infrastructure and support system that will allow our authors to make a real living doing what they do best.

Unfortunately, to start FM and get Web 2.0 pulled together, and not sacrifice family (I've done that before, and don't plan to again), something has to give. Of late, it's been this site.

I plan to refocus my efforts and try to do more here (maybe instead of trying to cover all the news, I will just drill down on one or two items a day, for example), but I may fail more than I succeed, as the book tour is coming up, and Web 2.0 will dominate after that. Once the book tour is complete, Web 2 is over, and the initial start up phase of FM has passed, I'll have more time to focus on doing what I love here. In the meanwhile, please accept my apologies. I view the conversation here as central to my work life, and when it suffers, I feel it as much as (I hope) you do.

If you have any input or ideas for me, please keep sending them my way. Thanks.

That's the latest rumor flying around - my god folks, it's f'ing August, take a break from the dealmaking!

Yahoo is now claiming nearly 20 billion pages in its index, making it the largest index on the web. I have it on good authority that Google disputes this, but could not connect to Google tonight. This has the makings of a major pissing match. Stay tuned. More at SEW.

One man's integration play is another company's potential bigfoot letter. From Google Blogoscoped.

First, rumors running around that it may acquire Meetroduction - the company behind Meetro, which makes location aware sofware, sort of IM meets social networking meets...well anyway, go check it out. I heard of this first from a UBS report that was emailed to me:

InternetNews.com reports that GOOG will announce later this week the acquisition of Meetroduction, an eight-person Chicago firm that has developed and recently launched an interesting proximity based instant messenger platform called Meetro. It allows users to see the approximate geographic location of other users, imports contact lists, and is interoperable with AIM and soon other IM platforms.

Second, Google has established a relationship with China Enterprise in which CE will act as reseller of AdWords in China, a first.

From a note from Google PR:

Starting this morning, users who visit any English language Google News page will see RSS | Atom links. When a user has a feed reader installed, clicking on either of these links will generate a feed of current stories related to the page they’re looking at. In addition, many feed readers can also “auto-detect” the feed and import it into the reader automatically. Google News feeds are similar to Google Alerts whereby readers receive headlines and teasers with a link to click through directly to the news source to read the full story.

Check it out here.

The annual Search Engine Strategies conference, which Danny and company put on in nearly every major city on earth, is raging right now in San Jose, and I'm very sorry to be missing it. The news is hot and heavy, to track it, check this link (Google News) or this one (t'rati).

Meanwhile, Reuters reports on a Jupiter study that claims search revenues will outpace image ads by 2010. I don't agree, in fact, I think a morph of the two will be bigger than each of them - think the TV upfront with an AdWords backend.

This is not a surprise, but Comscore, backed by Gawker and Six Apart, reports that those who read blogs are wealthier, younger, and probably thinner than the rest of the world. Also, nearly a third of online Americans have visited blogs. As someone who is starting a business in the blog space, I'm pleased. But I hope we remember as we generalize about "the blogging audience" that at the end of the day, it's not about generalizing, it's about endemic, passionate communities....

Nick has a good write up here. InternetWeek here.

The New York Times and Fred at Union have funded Indeed to the tune of $5 million. I share an investor in the Times, and Fred is a pal (and he gives Searchblog props for making the intro ....). I'm happy for all parties involved, and wish them well.

Fred's write up here.
My previous posts on Indeed here and here.

Update: I should have mentioned that SimplyHired was also funded, and by major Google hitters, late last week.

Apparently Howard Stern, and/or folks who work for/with him, are suing Google for misrepresenting AdWords budgets. Now this should be good. (via Threadwatch)

The plaintiffs are seeking class action status. They say that Google's daily budget limits are misrepresented and that Google "continues to bill plaintiffs and all other members of the class in excess of the daily budgets," creating in effect a monthly budget limit made up of the sum of the daily budget multiplied by the number of days in the month.

Google does indicate that it will refund customers charged more than 120 percent of a daily budget, but the lawsuit gives examples that allege regular violation of this policy, with one example campaign running from between 121 and 162 percent of overdelivery, all charged to one of the plaintiffs.

Most summers my family and I travel East for August to a little cottage on an island off Mass. called Martha's Vineyard. We were fortunate enough to have a great grandmother who decided to move there round the turn of the century (1900, not 2000). Last summer we missed due to Bea's arrival (about the same time this blog was born), but this summer we're heading back. For the first time I've got broadband installed and plan to continue writing and working, but I might be slow on the uptake while we settle in. Happy summer all!

This post will be the first of a number of excerpts from my book. Over the next month I'll post as many as I can. This first one is from a chapter I wrote on Bill Gross, who has founded many search companies (his latest is Snap), but Overture (nee GoTo nee Yahoo Search Marketing) was his biggest hit. I think Bill makes for one of the best stories in the book, and I hope I did him justice. This is a small portion of the chapter, titled "A Billion Dollars, One Nickel at a Time." Each chapter in the book is broken into sections, this excerpt starts with a section, about a third of the way through the chapter, which focuses on Gross's early insights into market economics. As with all things book related, I look forward to your feedback and clarifications/corrections.

The Sugar Daddy: It’s All About Arbitrage

When he was twelve, Gross lived in an apartment building in Encino,
California, outside of Los Angeles. There were hundreds of kids in
that complex, Gross recalls. “We all roller-skated together, played
baseball together, swam together, did everything together,” he tells me.
And when they had saved up enough money, they all made the pilgrimage
to a local pharmacy, where they’d buy their fix of candy.

“We used to hop the cinder-block wall surrounding the complex and
go buy candy for a dime at the West Valley Medical Center,” he recalls.
“We’d go there all the time.”

Now here’s where it gets interesting. In Gross’s words: “One day
I was at Savon [pronounced Save-on] on Ventura Boulevard and saw
they had a special on candy, three for a quarter. So I bought five dol-
lars worth—at eight and a third cents each—and brought them back
to my apartment, where I sold them for nine cents. I saved the kids
a penny, and they didn’t have to hop the wall. Everyone began buy-
ing from me. I would ride my bike up there to get the candy and
bring it back in bulk in a big Styrofoam cooler box I mounted on the
back.”

In essence, Gross staked an initial capital investment of five
bucks on an arbitrage opportunity in the local candy market, and it
paid off. He was making two-thirds of a penny on every unit—
roughly an 8 percent margin—but he really started cleaning up as
his volume increased. “After I started buying whole boxes of candy,
Savon sold it to me for seven cents. And then finally, when my vol-
ume got really big, and I was selling at the bus stop and at school in
the mornings, I got it for six-point-four cents, as I recall, from Smart
and Final in Van Nuys.”

Volume had driven Gross’s margin up from 8 percent to more
than 40 percent. With the profits, Gross paid for his next project:
the solar energy kits he sold in the back of Popular Mechanics. “I
made a business in candy that allowed me to buy the math books
and solar energy parts I wanted,” Gross explains. Those kits, in turn,
paid Gross’s way into Caltech.

Gross learned several things from his days as a player in the
candy trading market: first and foremost, it pays to be a supply-side
sugar daddy in the middle of a high-demand transaction with clear
market imbalances. Second, Gross realized that you can make sig-
nificant money on pennies a transaction, if the volume is high
enough. And third, he developed a taste for entrepreneurship, a taste
he has clearly never lost.

What Gross spotted in the frothy search market of 1997–1998
was another arbitrage opportunity. As defined in Webster’s,arbitrage is
“the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities...in differ-
ent markets in order to profit from price discrepancies.” Gross ob-
served that the market for any kind of traffic—be it undifferentiated
or intentional—valued clicks at about five to ten cents each, but it
seemed obvious that the inherent value of intentional traffic should be
far greater. If Gross could harness and sell a search engine’s ability
to turn undifferentiated traffic into intentional traffic, he’d make a
killing on the spread.

But Gross had a conundrum. To launch a search site like
GoTo.com, he needed both audience and advertisers—and the more
advertisers the better. (GoTo filled out its search offerings with a
standard organic search feed from Inktomi.) Gross knew he could buy his
audience, and he reasoned he could arbitrage that audience’s inten-
tional traffic—as reflected in the keywords they typed into his en-
gines—against an advertiser’s desire for business. But he needed a crit-
ical mass of keyword-buying advertisers to support his site, and given
the untested and relatively complex nature of what Gross was creat-
ing, it was going to be quite difficult to persuade those advertisers to
come on board and bid for keywords. After all, while Bill Gross un-
derstood the intrinsic value of a keyword, not many others in the In-
ternet world did. Until he could prove otherwise, Gross was selling
theory, and little else.

Gross solved his problem by adopting the time-honored approach of
dumping—or perhaps drug dealing is a better comparison: the first one’s
free (or nearly so). Gross built not one but two entirely audacious
ideas into GoTo’s initial business proposition for advertisers: first
was the concept of a performance-based model—one in which advertisers
paid for a visitor only when a visitor clicked through an ad and onto
the advertisers’ sites. Instead of demanding upfront money from
advertisers, the way AOL or Yahoo did, GoTo.com’s model guaranteed that
advertisers had to pay only when their ads were clicked upon. Of course,
this is now the standard model for the multibillion-dollar paid search
market.

Second, and even more audacious, was how Gross priced his new engine:
one cent per click, an extraordinary discount to the market. He knew his
price was seven to ten times less than what every Internet marketer was
paying at the time, and in an environment where traffic was crack,
advertisers couldn’t help but look to Gross for a fix.

In short, Bill Gross bought traffic from one place for five to ten
cents, and resold it on his site for a penny. Not exactly a great busi-
ness model. But Gross believed that the market would take over,
and that soon advertisers would compete to be listed first for high-
value keywords like “computer,” “camera,” and book titles. On the
come, Gross was betting that market forces and the greater value of
intentional traffic would push per-click prices past his cost of traffic
acquisition.

Gross’s gamble lay in building out GoTo as a habit for both his
advertisers and his audience. Back at the IdeaLab’s headquarters, he
built out elaborate models showing how GoTo would slowly grow
audience and advertiser share, and how his plan of arbitraging traffic
would eventually turn profitable as advertisers began to bid various
keywords up from one cent to as high as two dollars.

“Eventually, with volume, I was able to drive traffic acquisition
costs down to six and sometimes four cents,” Gross recalls. “Then
people would exit paying a penny, or possibly two, as some might
click on more than one link,” he continued, warming to his tale.
“But people were also bookmarking the site, and using it again,
which drove down my average cost to acquire a searcher/search.
With volume and loyalty, my cost to drive a search was declining
each month, and my earnings for each search were increasing.”

In about six months, Gross claims, the two prices met and crossed—the
average price paid by an advertiser rose past the average price GoTo
paid to acquire a searcher. “Our model had them crossing in about two
years,” Gross says, “so we were way ahead of schedule. I was certain we
could get there, because I knew bid prices would increase to their true
value over time, and I knew the true value was somewhere in the [range of]
twenty-five cents per click to two dollars fifty cents per click and even
higher on some terms. I never knew some would go to one hundred dollars [as
they have for terms like “mesothelioma,” a rare cancer that—in a gruesome
twist of capitalist fate—affords a high chance of recovering damages in a
lawsuit], but I was sure they would beat one dollar or two dollars, and
they did.”

Back in 1998, the idea of basing a business on the idea of pay
per click was viewed as a wild and rather dismissable gamble. After
all, if you’re Yahoo or AOL, why would you ever want to be held ac-
countable for the performance of what you sold to your partners? If
marketers couldn’t turn the traffic into profits, that was someone
else’s problem.

“The more I [thought about it], the more I realized that the true
value of the Internet was in its accountability,” Gross tells me.
“Performance guarantees had to be the model for paying for media.”

Gross knew offering virtually risk-free clicks in an overheated
and ravenous market ensured GoTo would takeoff. And while it
would be easy to claim that GoTo worked because of the Internet
bubble’s ouroboros-like hunger for traffic, the company managed to
outlast the bust for one simple reason: it worked.

So says Slashdot and Cnet (scroll to bottom). Say it ain't so, Google! The story Google is upset about is this one....I remember seeing this piece, which has a bunch of personal info on Eric Schmidt that was found via Google, and thinking "Huh, some of the stuff in that story is old, or out of context," and thinking that a few more phone calls would have been in order, at the least. But the point of the story, even if it was not necessarily made well, was that so much info was available on Google. And another point might be that a search engine never gives a full or necessarily accurate picture of the person (that point was lost). But to ban Cnet for this? Sounds a bit over the top.

Dan Farber has a good post about Prabhakar Raghavan, who now runs Yahoo's research.

From it:

Raghavan, who spent 14 years doing search and data mining-related research at IBM and was lured from his stint as CTO of enterprise search vendor Verity, told me that he intends "to go after the best in world and to get them."

...Regarding search, Raghavan said, "We have two views of better search. Most people are not interested in search—they want to get things done. The future has to be more friendly to people getting tasks done. You don’t want to spend two weeks of evenings sitting at a keyboard and piecing together a vacation plan. You want a system to go out and find the answers, based on future technology that goes beyond crawling and indexing page."

Matt McCallister, who recently left IDG for Yahoo, wrote a very thoughtful post on why he couldn't get The Standard, the company I founded and IDG still owns, relaunched while at IDG. Very true words, especially these:

I wish somebody would launch a media brand that covered the Internet business for people in the Internet business.  I've bet my career on this industry, and it would be really nice if there was a brand that stood independently in the middle of it, reported on it with intelligence and depth and integrity, and helped facilitate dialog amongst us all.

Baidu, that is. Minority owned by Google, rumored to be courted by same, under the cloud of alleged copyright abuse, but still raising its range and setting hearts aflutter. More from Reuters.

Update: Trading now, up 200%. More from PaidContent.

Astute readers will have already noticed that I am trying out Yahoo Publisher Network ads on the site. So far, the ads ain't exactly perfect, but, so far, none of the systems I've tested have been. Now, I'm not allowed to direct traffic to them, it breaks Yahoo's TOS, so I won't tell you where they are. But if you do notice em, feel free to tell me what you think. (And yeah, I've noticed they seem to be cut off. Working on that. I'm not exactly a code jockey....)

Back in 04 Factiva partnered with IBM's WebFountain to deliver a buzz service of sorts, and I liked the idea. Problem was, the IBM part didn't quite work right, according to folks I've spoken with. Now Factiva is back, this time with a homegrown product ("Factiva Insight") and a partnership with Intelliseek. The company calls its product an "online reputation management system" and I have to say, without too much cynicism, that I'd wager this one will stick. I sense that many, many companies are interested in where they stand in this sprawling 'sphere, and they'd trust Factiva to help them sort it out. More soon, I think I am speaking with Clare Hart, Factiva CEO, on Friday.

As a pal said to me, Meckler never sells save at the top. Buyer is Incisive Media of the UK (quite possibly the worst use of color on a site in the history of the web). $43 million. My, my. Congrats (I think) to Danny, Gary, Chris, et al.

Yahoo keeps rolling with new stuff. Tonight it's audio search. From the release:

Yahoo! Search is the first major search engine to deliver an audio search product that provides users access to over 50 million audio files from major music services and independent publishers.  Yahoo! Audio Search provides access to a variety of audio files including podcasts, music downloads, albums and spoken word such as newscasts, speeches, and interviews, as well as other audio related information including music videos, album reviews, artist images and artists websites....
... Yahoo! Audio Search’s integration with My Web, Yahoo!’s new social search engine, enables users to save audio searches, creating a personal, searchable Web of favorite audio Web pages. Moreover, My Web users can share their musical tastes with their communities by creating RSS feeds of their saved Web pages.
Gary has a complete review here. From that:
...what Yahoo is releasing today is a different. It's a one-stop service (metasearch, sort of) that allows the user to search, find, and access both "open web" audio files (via a Yahoo crawl) along with audio files from numerous music/audio (fee-based) services including Yahoo's own Music Unlimited, iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, Emusic, GarageBand.com, and other services. Of course, to download these files you'll need to pay.
That's right folks, you'll need to pay. Get used to this, I'd wager it's coming from Google as well - search as the interface to finding and then paying for stuff. It's about time, in my humble opinion. Imagine when Google oneboxes (ie adds results automatically like they do with Local) Google Print, for example, or audio, or video....when nearly every search suggests something that can be purchased. Why, it's a veritable ecommerce nightmare for Amazon and eBay. No wonder they are so into search...

Google was clearly thinking long term when it hired Dr. Lee, an AP story shows that they were willing to pay him even if a MSFT non compete made it impossible for him to work for the first year.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, joined by The Seattle Times and The Wall Street Journal, filed briefs last week asking the judge not to seal the documents, which included a Google document stating it would continue employing Lee for up to a year and defend him in court if Microsoft wrongfully accused him of breaching the noncompete agreement.

Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said Google's employment agreement with Lee "underscores the fact that Google was aware that Dr. Lee had a noncompete agreement with us and had the expectation that by hiring him, he could be breaking that agreement."

The article also had this great tidbit:

Other documents released Tuesday were largely blacked out, including notes from a May 2004 meeting Lee had with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and other executives. The subject: "Kai-Fu Lee's thoughts on search." Microsoft redacted most of the words, except for "Google," "MSN," and "Longhorn," the former code-name for the Windows operating system update the company plans to release next year.

I'm a Cal guy, so it's nice to see a write up of some cool UCB tech in the search space. David Pescovitz (disclosure - he's a BoingBoing pal) covers a new technique in ad optimization. From the piece:

The ideal algorithm would take into account when ranking the advertisers how much budget each advertiser has left. That would not only boost Google's income but keep competition fierce. The question was how to write an algorithm that did this.

"You want the best ranking algorithm, not just one that keeps advertisers in the auction because it suits the search engine's purposes," says Umesh Vazirani, who is also a researcher with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

..."The mechanism that we have is much more resilient than traditional methods to this kind of gaming," Umesh Vazirani says. "For example, if a person has a higher bid but has spent most of his budget, the top ranking may go to the lower bidder."

Why, it's Looksmart, it looks like. Good for them, to gain such a strong new partner. How did I determine this? Well, someone pointed me to a sub only article that Danny wrote (this link will take you to the free version) about the Ask deal, in which he reported that some of the new platform is licensed from a third party, which he speculates might be Miva:

Ask Jeeves says it built the technology internally for its new program but also licensed some parts from a third-party vendor that it won't name. Why not name if the other vendor was Miva, for example? It's a likely candidate in having long-standing technology in the area and a licensing program.

"A lot of the reason we don't want to talk about our partner is that we developed a lot of this in house. A big piece of it is not from the partner. We're going to leverage off the IP [intellectual property] of the organization that we have for search," Gardi said.

But I got a tip to check out the results on some popular terms at Ask, and lordy be, turns out that some of the ads are being served by Looksmart. Take a look for yourself. This is a query for "e-loan." The first "sponsored" result - E-Loan - gives this URL:

....//tm.ask.com/r?t=an&s=a&uid=0082EE2D8DA597E24&sid=180D69D8C158F0F24&o=
10234&qid=90C8B368E677CD50AB1CE9E57874F586&io=0&sv=0a300514&ask=e-
loan&uip=43a922b6&en=aj&eo=&pt=E-LOAN%20%3F%20(Official%20Site)
&ac=24&qs=1&pg=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Faskj-adtrack.looksmart.com%2Fog%2Fpr%
3DPsr%3Bro%3D1%3Brc%3D1%3Bla%3D365857%3Blm%3D322774%3Bkw%
3D14557279%3Bed%3D20050801%3Bii%3D78ea.79f6.42f0fcc9.94b%3Bpn%3D%3Bto%
3D%3Btc%3D1%3Bpo%3D1%3Bpc%3D1%3Bpi%3Daj_reply_13%3Bts%3D%7Chttp%3A%
2F%2Fwww.eloan.com%2F%3Fuser%3Dask%26mcode%3Daskkw4mdq...

Note the part I bolded....it's clear that Ask and Looksmart are sharing APIs, and probably more.

That might explain why Ask is reticent to talk about who their third party partner is - Looksmart was tarred with a lot of crappy traffic and poor results over the past few years, and has been on life support since it lost the Microsoft account over a year ago. But I recently spoke with Looksmart CEO David Hills (no, he was not my source...), who came in last year to turn the company around. He had a very clear eyed view of his company's problems, and a very practical approach to to solving them: get rid of the fraud and the crap, and focus on partnering. Looks like Ask might be his first big deal.

Yahoo is getting a lot of coverage for its move into Google's domain, here's a roundup and a few thoughts.

The New York Times has a piece quoting yours truly:

Yahoo says its new small-site service will let a Web site specify what categories of advertising it does or does not want on a given page. Moreover, Yahoo will offer a telephone number that even small publishers can call for help, something that Google does not make readily available.

Yahoo appears to be focusing on a weakness in Google's offering for small publishers, said John Battelle, a blogger and author of "The Search," a book on Google and its rivals to be published in September by Portfolio Hardcover.

"Google is the 800-pound gorilla and until now there aren't even any chimps around," he said. "You hear two complaints over and over again: They are a black box and you can't get anyone on the phone to help you."

I've already gotten a couple of raised eyebrows from my pals at Google, but guys, don't be defensive, I'm just the messenger here. Yahoo is doing what you might expect a competitor to do - hit ya where you're soft.

Jensense reports some of her initial thoughts as a user. SEW as usual has a report. YPN is only available as an invitation beta, I have been invited to check it out, and plan to in my copious spare time.

The Wall Street Journal (free link) rounds up all the action in Google's once solely owned space, including from MSFT.

Microsoft next week will announce that an invitation-only test of MSN Keywords will begin in October with 500 advertisers and search-engine marketing specialists. The service will move MSN closer to how Google handles advertising, by using live auctions of keywords. MSN Keywords is one tool of a broader set of new advertising services called adCenter that Microsoft is building on MSN. Microsoft executives say they hope the tools will allow companies to tailor advertisements by giving them more detailed information on Web users than is currently available.

Cnet via NYT has the story of the Yahoo Publisher Network launch. More on this Weds...

From the piece:

Yahoo is planning to launch on Wednesday an ad network for small Web publishers intended to strengthen its hand against rival Google, a source familiar with the plan told CNET News.com.
As previously reported, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has been working for months on a self-serve advertising service tailored to bloggers and other small Web publishers, a move that homes in on Google's territory.

It's VERY hard to substantiate these claims, but here they are again, in a survey covered by WebProNews.

From the survey release:

The experiment was conducted in conjunction with Los Angeles-based Clicks2Customers.com and focused on three pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns running during a 10-day period in 2005. Duplicate clicks were determined by comparing IP addresses, language, browser settings, referring URL, time of click, operating system, browser plug-ins and country of origin.

"Our random sample of PPC campaigns uncovered as much as 29.5 percent PPC fraud and showed that Google was able to account for and credit only a tiny portion of those fraudulent charges," McGlaughlin said. "Whether it is click fraud or the lesser known impression fraud, these fraudulent clicks can cause a lot of damage to advertisers because it drains their budgets. Companies should be aware of how big of a problem it really is and be equipped to more aptly detect it."

Yahoo is starting to syndicate its content out, as long as there's money to be made...Yahoo Shopping is now available for mashup madness...

Dogpile announced today that it has results from all four major engines, and plugged a study (download) that shows results do not overlap as much as we might thing. SEW has an article about that study here.

From Dogpile's release:

Dogpile announced the integration of search results from MSN Search to their industry-leading metasearch technology that combines the best results from the Web’s top search engines. With this announcement, Dogpile will be the exclusive home to all four of the Web’s leading search engines—MSN Search, Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves.

While most people believe search results across all four engines are the same, the reality is the vast majority of the results from each engine are different and do not overlap. This fact was validated by a new study conducted jointly at the University of Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania State University... (which found that) only 1.1% of page one results were the same on all four engines.

We've got video search too...

From Dave at T'rati. Highlights:

* Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
* The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
* A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
* About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
* About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly

Don't get fooled by all the new features in the flickr update, the real news is photorank. As the flickr blog item states:

The other new feature is called interestingness and it's huge! A long time in the making, interestingness is a ranking algorithm based on user behavior around the photos taking into account some obvious things like how many users add the photo to their favorites and some subtle things like the relationship between the person who uploaded the photo and the people who are commenting (plus a whole bunch of secret sauce).

Watch this space.

And here's July (up soon is Bob Wright, CEO of NBC, then Omid Kordestani, of Google):

TITANS OF TECH
Turning the Page

Bit by bit, Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy is digitizing the copier company she helped save.

By John Battelle, July 2005 Issue

She was not the obvious choice to lead Xerox through its darkest hour, but four years and one miraculous turnaround later, no one is questioning Anne Mulcahy's leadership anymore. A nearly 30-year veteran of the company, Mulcahy doesn't like to dwell on her much-lauded role in helping Xerox avert bankruptcy. She's too busy trying to get the company growing again.

Long before any of us Googled anything, we all Xeroxed everything. The company's iconic status came despite a scant presence in homes; although Mulcahy had established Xerox's consumer printer business, she shut it down when the company was strapped for cash. (By making tough decisions like that, Mulcahy cut the company's $14 billion debt load almost in half.) Xerox now mostly serves large businesses, not just selling them copiers but managing "information flow" by scanning and storing documents in digital form. And despite the spinoff of its fabled Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox has still managed to innovate: It now gets two-thirds of its $15.7 billion annual revenue from products and services that are less than two years old.

Having turned the company around, what will Mulcahy do next? Many people floated her name as a potential replacement for Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard. A Xerox PR staffer told the New York Times that Mulcahy would "never, ever" consider leaving. "Why don't you just put a fricking lock on the door!" Mulcahy says with a laugh. If she has more successes like the turnaround, Xerox's board had better do just that. Business 2.0 sat down recently with Mulcahy to learn more about her plans.

Are you bored yet with being asked how you turned Xerox around?

Yes! It was interesting, but it only led up to the thing we really care about, which is succeeding, not just surviving.

How do you get a culture to move beyond survival and start innovating?

The most critical thing -- even more critical than getting the company financially stable -- was recognizing that nobody's in this just to survive. You have to make sure there's a compelling enough story that the great people will stick with you during the difficult times, that they will hang tight for the possibilities of the future.

Let's talk about that future. What happens to the document on the Internet? Do you consider Google a competitor?

It would be terrific if Google's model worked in larger enterprises, but the world those businesses live in has not only tons of digital technology but also vast amounts of manually intensive paper-based processes. Making information more accessible, more personalized, is a huge opportunity. Search as a utility is a wonderful thing, but it's really about the journey from paper to digital for our customers.

So what does going from paper to digital involve? Are you just talking about scanning documents?
(continued in extended entry)

Continue reading "July Titan: Anne Mulcahy" »

I'm getting caught up on my B2.0 column posts, here's June:

TITANS OF TECH
Reinventing Television

Silicon Valley veteran Mike Homer wants to move TV shows from the airwaves to the grid. If he succeeds, we'll never look at video the same way again.

By John Battelle, June 2005 Issue

Editor’s note
In the Titans of Tech column in our June issue (“Reinventing Television”), we ran an interview with Mike Homer, CEO of Kontiki, conducted by contributing writer John Battelle. After the issue was sent to press, Battelle announced a small round of funding for his new business venture, FM Publishing, in which Homer is a minority investor. According to Battelle, Homer’s involvement in FM took place well after the interview and editing of the column were done.
(My post about my dumb mistake is here)

At every important turn in Silicon Valley's recent history, Mike Homer has been there. He got his start as an engineer and later a marketer at Apple, then joined Go, a handheld device startup that, despite $100 million in funding, failed to find its market. From there Homer landed at Netscape, just in time to see the company's spectacular success and equally spectacular slaughter at the hands of Microsoft. After Netscape was sold to AOL, Homer jumped ship to launch Kontiki, a Net-based video-serving business, where he is still chairman, and invested in a slew of technology startups, including TiVo and Google.

For years Kontiki has labored in obscurity, perfecting a video-delivery service for corporate clients. But all along, Homer had his eye on the consumer market. He now believes that the time has finally come to put video on the Net -- and he's betting his money and his reputation on it. In April he and former Netscape cohort Marc Andreessen launched the Open Media Network, an audacious nonprofit that intends to host video files and create an Internet TV guide. Business 2.0 caught up with Homer on the day the network launched.

Why are you calling the Open Media Network "the future of public broadcasting"?

OMN is a free public service that enables consumers to view and publish legal content on the Internet. Digital distribution technology is now capable of doing a good job with video on the Internet, but there are still a lot of factors within the industry that keep producers from putting a wide variety of content online. We wanted to find a segment of the broadcasting industry that was willing to move first -- and that's the Public Broadcasting System.

So what's holding back the rest?

First is concern over cannibalizing their current channels of distribution. Second is concern over piracy. And the third is the lack of a demonstrated business model.

How does OMN differ from other recent offerings, such as Google's planned video service?
(continued in extended entry...)

Continue reading "Titan Column: Homer" »

Not a new idea, Infoworld reminds us.

Unfortunately I am swamped today, and can't spend the time I'd like grokking this, but SEW has done it for us...