John Battelle's Searchblog

Sergey stopped by Web 2.0 earlier this month and I interviewed him for about thirty minutes. You can find it on IT Conversations. From the summary:

Sergey Brin talks about his own journey Stanford University graduate to Google co-founder. Attributing much of Google's success to luck, he says that he just followed his interests. While being at the heart of Silicon Valley was obviously fortuitous, it was not one of Brin's motives in choosing Stanford as a graduate school.

When asked about Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's comment that Google is number four in the list of internet portals, Sergey wittily responds that it means that Google is an underdog. He further elaborates on this topic by saying that he would like to think more as Google as a technology leader rather than a content rich portal. Google also does not want to follow Microsoft's "embrace and extend" philosophy to kill off smaller innovative companies.

Link (thanks, Fergus!)

Then read Farber's IP list. Via Tim (good summary) and BB.

From Cnet:

Google believes it can help OpenOffice--perhaps working to pare down the software's memory requirements or its mammoth 80MB download size, said Chris DiBona, manager for open-source programs at the search company...."We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better," DiBona said.

This is a step further than the Sun/Google alliance announced a few weeks back. Once it's good enough, will it then get tossed onto the Google Grid, alongside, say, Earth and Talk? Why not? Even though that idea was pooh-poohed by Sergey at Web 2, I'm not convinced. Once productivity apps are as good as Office and served in some kind of neat client/server execution, well, I for one would be tempted to switch. I hate, hate, HATE working with Word and PPT on the Mac. So many clearly obvious and never addressed bugs. (Excel, so far, has been OK).

Perry, in a comment to the Google Base post, makes the astute observation that to date, Google has never really been seen as the destination or the application, more like the switchboard. A successful implementation of OO could change that....

It's a double feature, both the NYT AND the WSJ (free link) on Google's ad ambitions, nearly at the same time! This one covers (for the most part) the impact of the print test, and includes a simply too good to not repeat quote from "Andrew Swinand, an executive vice president at Starcom USA, a media-buying unit of Publicis Groupe": "Google's project, he says, so far seems like "the equivalent of selling media like manure, and everyone gets a shovelful."

Via Philipp, this post from A Small Victory:

One day, maybe not too far off into the future, it will come to be known that the masters behind Google are actually aliens who have been using the search engine and all of its shadowy programs to learn about the Earth and its inhabitants. And then we're screwed.

This piece in the NYT was clearly written with Google's open approval, and that means one thing: Google is using the Times to talk with the folks on Madison Ave - and Wall St. And I have no doubt those folks are reading - closely. Though the issues of data privacy and Google's opaqueness are addressed, it still reads as something of a valentine. But with numbers like Google has, it's hard to see how it wouldn't be.

There are tidbits in here that mark new comments from Google (at least to a major media outlet) on a number of topics, from Google Base to Google's AdWords optimization techniques to privacy. There's also a bunch of history. From the piece:

This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner.....

...Google is also preparing to disrupt the advertising business itself, by replacing creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching. Its premise so far is that advertising is most effective when seen only by people who are interested in what's for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Web. ...HIDDEN behind its simple white pages, Google has already created what it says is one of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems ever built. In a fraction of a second, it can evaluate millions of variables about its users and advertisers, correlate them with its potential database of billions of ads and deliver the message to which each user is most likely to respond....

...."If we can figure out a way to improve the quality of ads on television with ads that have real value for end-users, we should do it," (Schmidt) said. While he is watching television, for example, "Why do I see women's clothing ads?" he said. "Why don't I see just men's clothing ads?"...

...Mr. Brin said that preliminary versions of Google Base leaked onto the Internet and that the company's partners should not fear it. "Google Base is as much about classified as it is about zoology," he said....

...GOOGLE introduced its current system for determining which ad to show on which page late last year. It is a wonder of technology that rivals its search engine in complexity. For every page that Google shows, more than 100 computers evaluate more than a million variables to choose the advertisements in its database to display - and they do it in milliseconds. The computers look at the amount bid and the budget of the advertiser, but they also consider the user - such as his or her location, which they try to infer by analyzing the user's Internet connections - as well as the time of day and myriad other factors Google has tracked and analyzed from its experience with advertisements.

"If someone is coming from a particular location, a certain ad may be more popular there," explained Jeff Huber, Google's vice president for engineering. "The system can use all the signals available, and the system itself learns the correlations between them."....

...Google recently rewrote its privacy policy to make it easier to understand what data it collects, but it did not scale back its data retention. Nor did it, as Mr. Weinstein and others have demanded, give users the right to see the data collected about them and their computers....Mr. Brin said he was not sure what other information about users might prove useful, but he said Google would not use the data inappropriately....

...."Google is very opaque and bizarre to deal with," said Joshua Stylman, a managing partner at Reprise Media, a search advertising agency, but he added that Google had become somewhat more responsive in recent months.

Mr. Schmidt addresses those complaints by saying that advertisers are missing the point of Google's new model. It shouldn't matter what Google does with their ads, he argues, so long as the received value, which advertisers can measure, is higher than the price they pay....

All in all, worth a close read, I'd wager.

Thank God it's Friday, because this is some real joints-after-midnight material. BB has the first post on it, and the full essay is here. Sit back, twirl your favorite beverage in your favorite glass, and read this one.

From BB's post:

"Historian among futurists" George Dyson recently visited the headquarters of Google, and wrote:

Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

From the essay's introduction by John Brockman:

Whether we're talking about John Cage's idea of "the mind we all share" or H.G. Well's "World Brain", Google has its act together and are at the precipice of astonishing changes in human communication...and ultimately, in our sense of who or what we are. And like nearly all science-driven, technological developments, governments can only play catch-up as no one is going to get to vote for Google's changes, and the current laws, written in a pre-digital age, don't address the new situation.

From the essay itself:

Google is building a new, content-addressable layer overlying the von Neumann matrix underneath. The details are mysterious but the principle is simple: it's a map. And, as Dutch (and other) merchants learned in the sixteenth century, great wealth can be amassed by Keepers of the Map.

We call this a "search engine" — a content-addressable layer that makes it easier for us to find things, share ideas, and retrace our steps. That's a big leap forward, but it isn't a universe-shifting revolution equivalent to von Neumann's breaking the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things in 1945.

However, once the digital universe is thoroughly mapped, and initialized by us searching for meaningful things and following meaningful paths, it will inevitably be colonized by codes that will start doing things with the results. Once a system of template-based-addressing is in place, the door is opened to code that can interact directly with other code, free at last from a rigid bureaucracy requiring that every bit be assigned an exact address. You can (and a few people already are) write instructions that say "Do THIS with THAT" — without having to specify exactly Where or When. This revolution will start with simple, basic coded objects, on the level of nucleotides heading out on their own and bringing amino acids back to a collective nest. It is 1945 all over again.

And it is back to Turing, who in his 1948 report on intelligent machinery to the National Physical Laboratory advised that "intellectual activity consists mainly of various kinds of search."

... Google is Turing's cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope. In the words of an unusually perceptive friend: "When I was there, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?"

Wow. I have to say, my musings on AI, immortality, and why search matters so much, which felt a bit out there last year when I was pondering alone in front of a keyboard, have certainly found a far more eloquent friend.

At MediaPost, Gord Hotchkiss, a search consultant, wrote the kind of review every author wants to get. What might that be, you ask? A rave? Well, sure. A review that understands the core intent of your work? Most certainly. But what really got me was the comparison to a high school sweetheart turned pinup girl:

Reading it was a unique experience for me. It was addictive, like literary crack. I devoured it in huge gulps. I can't recall the last time I read a book in such a short time. Look, They're Writing About Us!..."The Search" is unlike any previous volume written on search. There have been several "how-to" books that have explored the mechanics of search, both from a user's and marketer's perspective. But Battelle for the first time explores search as a business and social phenomenon. Not only that, he muses that it might be THE social phenomenon, with world-shattering implications. For anyone who has grown up in search, it's like seeing your high school sweetheart become a world-famous centerfold. "See, I told you she was hot. No one believed me!"

From Yahoo's Search Blog:

Save to My Web is a simple, sociable button you can add to any and every page of your blog or website. Users click to save your content and add it directly to their stored pages on My Web 2.0. From there, the page is easy to retrieve, and easy to share with others. ...
For bloggers and publishers, it's a great way to distribute content to a larger community of connected users and make your pages instantly searchable on Yahoo! Just copy and paste this code into your blog templates anywhere and everywhere you want the button to appear on your pages.
Note this: "it's a great way to... make your pages instantly searchable on Yahoo!" I think this is a neat tool, but I don't plan to put it on my site. Why? Well, it's too...focused on one place. I dunno, but I want something else. Something non-denominational. Clearly Yahoo is a major player, and that alone creates weather but....it feels like playing favorites. I guess that's just me. What do you all think?

It is inevitable, to my mind, that Google will get into brokering television ads. But the rumors running around the web (BB has a good round up) feel a bit premature. My guess is we'll see a test in the next few quarters...

I interviewed Omid a couple of months ago for my B2.0 column, here it is in full.

TITANS OF TECH
The Wizard of Ads
Google's Omid Kordestani conjured a formula that took its sales to $3 billion. Now he's rethinking the world of advertising again.

By John Battelle, October 2005 Issue

You've heard of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's famous co-founders. But there's another figure insiders know to be Google's "business founder": Omid Kordestani, the company's 12th employee and senior vice president for global sales and business development. He may be the only sales guy on the planet who's taken a company from zero to $3 billion in revenue -- and from all appearances, he's just getting started.

When Kordestani joined Google in the spring of 1999, the company had plenty of lava lamps, but no business model to speak of. Kordestani, a veteran Netscape salesman, recognized that the startup had one incomparable asset: its burgeoning Web traffic. Having overseen Netscape's lucrative banner-advertising deals, Kordestani was a pro at leveraging the value of traffic.

Advertising -- yes, those dead-simple text ads that appear alongside Google's search results -- accounts for 99 percent of the company's revenue, making his formula for success seem deceptively easy. But where users once signed up to buy text ads with a credit card, Kordestani, 41, now has to manage relationships with agencies that want more control over their clients' campaigns and with publishing partners who see Google as a prime source of online revenue -- and a long-term threat to their media businesses. Business 2.0 sat down with Kordestani to find out how he keeps Google's unstoppable sales machine rolling and what he sees coming next.

Is Google a technology company or a media company?

We're absolutely deep in advertising, but let me clarify. The difference between us and our competition is that we innovate through applying technology. The angle of a media company is you're packaging content or advertising inventory. We look at ads as commercial information, and that goes back to our core mission of organizing the world's information. When people in the media world hear this, they say, "What are these guys talking about?"

Google has introduced a lot of products lately, but the engine of your revenue and profit is clearly your text-based AdWords. How did they start?

When I joined Google in 1999, we still hadn't suffered the dotcom collapse, and a lot of money was still being spent on classic portal sponsorship deals, the kind I did at Netscape -- multimillion-dollar deals. And at Google, I called those same clients and asked them to do a $1,000 or $5,000 AdWords test with me.

Once we proved that the text ads on Google could be successful and not interfere with the search experience, then it really turned into a science. We applied auction theory to maximize value -- it was the best way to reach the right pricing, both for advertisers and for Google. And then we innovated by introducing the rate at which users actually click on the ads as a factor in placement on the page, and that was very, very useful in relevance.

Sergey Brin once told me that if AdWords didn't work, he figured that Google could always run to DoubleClick as a life preserver. How close did you get to doing that deal?

Initially we debated whether to build our own ad product. Larry and Sergey believed we could develop a better product than the existing online advertising offerings, but we knew that they could be a fallback if Google's ad program did not work.

Right after the collapse, people were cynical about online advertising. But we monitored our traffic and the click-through rate of the ads. It quickly became apparent that AdWords was working. The model was perfect because people were willing to try something out for $1,000 and see if they could get enough leads to justify additional spending. And as we gradually built a customer base, it had this nice trend line, up and to the right.

Did you ever realize how big this was going to get?

I didn't. This is a difference between Larry and me. Larry said, "Are you crazy? I always thought it was going to be this big." What was amazing about these founders was that during the hardest times, they had confidence that we could get through things. I'm very optimistic, but I've been through two unsuccessful startups, and I was at Netscape, where we had incredible challenges after competition heated up. So I wanted to be more paranoid about things.

Do you feel the pressure of being a public company now?

I certainly do, yeah. This level of growth is just unprecedented. But our business is different from traditional businesses. I've been in the enterprise software business, where the customer is trained to maximize discounts by waiting until the last day of the quarter to buy. You end up having the sales force trying to save the quarter on the last day.

The beauty of our business is we can't do that. The way the auctions and the pricing models are working together involves lots of math -- that's the beauty of it. When it's more predictable, when it's more math-based, then in some ways you have more control. It's not about doing a diving catch at the end of the quarter to make your numbers, but making sure all the dials on the dashboard are where you expect them to be.

What do you see as the future of advertising?

The measurability of online advertising will extend broadly to all areas of media. You have companies spending billions of dollars on television. As more and more consumers adopt technologies like TiVo, I think you'll be able to have much more useful forms of advertising -- more targeted, more measurable, and with new pricing models. Just imagine if we made it possible for our advertisers to quickly publish relevant ads that could range from the local plumber on one end to Super Bowl commercials on the other.

You're now selling ads for a vast network of third-party websites. Is Google turning into an ad agency?

No. As a matter of practice, Google will work with advertisers in any way they want to work with us, whether directly, through a traditional agency, or through a specialty search-engine marketing firm. Google sees agencies as crucial. Agencies create and execute marketing strategies for their customers, and Google helps them execute those objectives.

You've taken some knocks from advertisers who feel frustrated because, they say, they can't get anybody at Google on the phone. What are you doing about that perception?

People call us a black box because we make things too simple. I have a huge organization focused on this. And I apologize if people are not having the best experience. I take that seriously.

I've heard horror stories about click fraud. What's your take?

We watch it very carefully. Whenever we find it, we are very good at refunding the advertisers. We've got some of our best researchers working on this. It becomes a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game where people become more sophisticated and try to beat the system, but ultimately we find it.

Google is the big target now. Microsoft is clearly gunning for you. Any feeling of déjà vu from your days at Netscape?

Netscape ran into a bad mix of competition and "gold rush" mentality in short order. Google, being a generation later, was able to learn from what Netscape did well and build on it. The best déjà vu is working with the distinguished Netscape alumni at Google.

John Battelle is program chair of the Web 2.0 conference and author of "The Search" (Portfolio, September 2005).

Find this article at http://www.business2.com/b2/subscribers/articles/0,17863,1104033,00.html

©2005 Business 2.0 Media Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Remember when I posted on the sale of Jux2 via eBay, opening bid one cent? Well, it sold for a lot more. Hat tip to SEW.

(More thinking out loud....)

I recently spoke to a reputable person who is a senior exec in a major structured database company ( I promised not to name this person or the company/industry.) I can't go into specifics, but the company owns a very large repository of valuable industry listings, and has an web-based interface that allows folks to search those listings. Think Autobytel, or even Craigslist, but this is a vertical player in a very information intensive business. The data this company owns is locked behind a registration wall, search engines can not get to it through normal crawling techniques. It's part of the paid or "dark" web: not freely available. The company has spent a lot of time and money creating specialized search interfaces that are useful to its target market.

Anyway, a few months ago or so Google approached this person and asked if the company would want to work with Google. In essence, Google asked the company to upload its entire database into Google, which would then be mashed up, perhaps, with Google Maps and Local, and given a structured search front end and a structured database backend. When GoogleBase story broke, the person put two and two together. This is what Google wanted to do - upload the company's data into GoogleBase, this person told me. But at the time of their discussion, Google made no mention of that product.

When Google comes calling asking for your entire database, one might reasonably wonder what the company which owns that database might get in return. In this case, and in other cases I've heard about, the answer was "give us your data and you'll get lots of traffic in return." No discussion of syndication models, or shared revenues.

How does this differ from Oodle? Well, Oodle either asks for permission (as in the case of Monster, etc.) or crawls the publicly available web (as in the case of Craigslist, until they asked Oodle to stop. As to why, Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, comments here, and Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle, posts his thoughts here.) But Google came into this company with no business model to compel the target company to share its database other than "we'll send you traffic," and precious few details on how Google was going to use the data should the company make it available.

The company representative decided against working with Google given such terms (or lack thereof), and I have to say I certainly understand why. This is not a freeweb company that plays in the tit-for-tat world of web search. This is a domain specific company that has built a sophisticated vertical search engine which is difficult to replicate. Would the company be willing to work with Google if Google offered a syndication deal, or a split in revenues, I asked? "Yes, we'd at least have kept talking," the executive said. "But they wanted full control of how they might use our data, without even telling us what the model was," or even what the product might look like. The Google line, the exec said, was pretty much "We're Google, we know what's best for your data, give it to us, stand back, and watch as we make your stuff work better than you can" (my paraphase here).

This approach to business development does not feel very compelling - it's a "free web" approach to a "paid web" model. And that mismatch creates a tone that, off the record, is similar to the one publishers described to me with regard to Google Print/Library. I think the main issue here is lack of details and transparency - Google wants your data, but doesn't want limitations on what it might do with that data in the future. I think this stance, more than any other, is what might stymie the progress of a service like GoogleBase, at least in terms of cracking the major vertical industries which might otherwise make the project extremely valuable. As I've said before, I think Google could build a killer meta engine over many vertical search engines (including books) if only it was willing to cut revenue sharing deals. Why, I wonder, is the company allergic to this partnering model?

The Travel sector heats up. From the Yahoo blog:

What if, instead of having to do all your own research on “Paris hotels” and “wine tasting in France,” you could enter a single search and get a fully formed trip, courtesy of a fellow traveler, back? Even better, one that you could use to help plan your own trip—copying and changing it to fit your needs?

That’s the idea behind Trip Planner, now available in beta on Yahoo! Travel.

Trip Planner is a new tool that helps you organize your travel research from Yahoo! Travel and all over the Web to a trip plan. Save hotels, attractions, and useful web sites into your trip plan, then add your own notes, tags, driving directions and more. When you’re done, you can share your trip with a few friends or with the entire Yahoo! Travel community.

While Google is asking forgiveness instead of permission over in BookLand, in video, so far, it's playing the opt-in game. Today brings news that it has struck a deal to run the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation archive of American Television interviews available for free viewing on Google Video (yup, that's Mr. Rogers over there on the left.)

Microsoft will join the Open Content Alliance (SEW) and index books, but only with permission. More as I can bear to post more, as this issue just drives me nuts. It's so.....big.

I'm behind in posting my B2.0 columns, but this one (paid sub required, so read on below) was fun to do....

TITANS OF TECH
The Internet Puzzle
NBC Universal CEO Bob Wright has put together all the pieces of the perfect media conglomerate. Will the Web tear it apart?

By John Battelle, September 2005 Issue

Bob Wright stepped into the big leagues of media last year, when he led NBC's merger with Vivendi Universal Entertainment. The megadeal turned the TV network chief into a major Hollywood player, with movie studios, theme parks, and an expanded lineup of cable channels in his domain. At a time when big media is aching to get smaller -- look no further than Viacom's planned breakup into two companies -- Wright decided to double down on creative content. And he might not even be done yet: In July the New York Post reported that NBC Universal is in talks to acquire DreamWorks SKG, a move that would beef up its movie portfolio.

So far, sticking with content looks like a smart bet. Even as NBC plummeted to fourth place in viewership, cable and film earnings kept the company, which is 80 percent owned by GE (GE) and 20 percent by Vivendi, growing in the double digits. But Wright has more on his mind than a replacement for Friends. Electronic piracy, the bane of the music industry, is starting to hit movies. Google, TiVo, and Yahoo are threatening to upend the video business. Wright still believes he’s made the right bet -- content, he says, will have value, no matter who distributes it. But he openly admits that the Internet is making things "awkward" for him. Business 2.0 met with Wright to find out how he plans to sort things out.

What do you make of the fact that a major television executive like Lloyd Braun has gone to Yahoo?

I’m happy that things worked out so well. You have to admit, it’s surprising. A year ago ABC was down in the dumps and he and Susan Lyne got "Goodbye and good luck." Both of their shows, Lost and Desperate Housewives, turned out to be rescue shows for ABC. It’s really quite remarkable that both of them are elsewhere now.

This kind of movement is evolutionary, though. We are all migrating to a digital world, and people move from content businesses to distribution businesses all the time. You happen to be picking one who went to the Internet. They could just as easily have gone to the wireless side or cable or satellite, or some other piece of the distribution game. But of those forms of distribution, the most awkward ones for us are the Internet search engines. And they are very important. I don’t mean to downplay them.

What do you mean by "awkward"?

Our business is developing, producing, and marketing programming. By choice, not chance, we have taken the position that we are not tying ourselves to one or two forms of distribution. We're going to try to make our programming as available and as marketable to as many forms of transmission as possible. We have broadcasting, cable, satellite, DVDs, and our theatrical base. We’ve seen wireless join recently, though it's still very early there.

But I think the one that we haven't really embraced as much as we'd like is the Internet, which is represented by Lloyd and his compatriots. The awkwardness of the Internet is that in other forms of distribution we have a relative degree of comfort with the security of the programming that we're transmitting. We know there’s leakage from theaters, we know there are stolen and counterfeited DVDs, we know that people steal satellite cards and cable boxes. But each one of those channels has its own form of security. When we get to the Internet, it's just much harder. It's early in the process, and you don't have that level of protection.

Do you think the music business has solved that problem?

I ask that question all the time. And I get different answers from people in the music industry. I think they feel obligated to say that iTunes has been very beneficial, but then they point out that they really can't live on the revenue. They look at it as sort of supplemental income. It brings some level of recognition that there is real value in their intellectual property, even if it's only 99 cents, that it's valuable, and that people are respecting that it has some value. But I don't think any of them think it's an answer. And the reality of it is that the peer-to-peer aspect of Internet trading is still wide open.

The history of music was radio and a lot of free promotion. It never had the history that motion pictures did, where people paid for it from the beginning, whether it was a nickel at the nickelodeon or $12 today at a theater. Television has always had advertising support with it. It was never really given away.

Online, leaders like Yahoo haven't figured out the value of video content. And we're grappling with that. We’ve got to find a way to get there. We have to be able to provide programming in such a way that we don't damage our existing distributors intentionally or even accidentally. The process of how we embrace the Internet isn't clear.

Won't we be able to combine advertising and video over the Internet?

The model is just taking form. When I talk to advertisers or agencies, it's not clear exactly what they want out of the Internet. We're not there yet. It's not lost on me that video seems to be the fastest-growing segment in search. And Google and Yahoo recognize that they’re going to have to start either producing or licensing content. And I think it makes a lot more sense to license because there's so much content available.

News is one of your key content operations. You recently said that despite all the negative stories about the broadcast news business, the sky wasn't falling. Why?
There’s always going to be a news business. That’s the one thing that's for sure. And there’s always going to be a large audience for it. The reported death of network news has been the slowest death of all times. You are so overcome today with alarmingly huge choices for information that there is a need for a place for people to come to get a condensed but big view of what's happening. If I go online, it's hard to find that context.

Now that you have Universal, prime-time advertising is only 15 percent of your business. But it’s still a critical barometer of the NBC network’s health. What has to be done there?

We do have work to do. Prime time is the major league of entertainment programming, and you're trying your very best to get the largest possible audience. We're going through a period here where we don't have as many winners as we're accustomed to having. I'm not denying that we would like to have some wonderful replacements for Friends or ER, but, you know, they don’t all show up on the same day.

Does the advent of video-on-demand and the DVR mean the 30-second slot is an endangered species?

No, I don't think so. Some of the cable operators have said to me, "Bob, you know, if you'll give us your programs and let us put them in a video-on-demand basis, then we'll make sure we attach the advertising to them." That's fair. I think we can have our cake and eat it too. I think people are going to get the ability to pick and choose and we’re going to find a way to attach advertising to it. Almost like Yahoo does now with search.

Is Yahoo a partner or a competitor?

Six or seven years ago, Yahoo was the king of the Net. Then it went into the ditch with everybody else. After the crash in 2001, the people there went back to their roots and rebuilt Yahoo as a search engine. Terry Semel, when he came in there, said, this is a great deal, but other people can be search engines, so we’ve got to differentiate ourselves here. Yahoo has a significant future. But it isn’t quite clear what it is.

John Battelle is program chair of the Web 2.0 conference and author of "The Search" (Portfolio, September 2005).

Find this article at http://www.business2.com/b2/subscribers/articles/0,17863,1096191,00.html

Spurred by early looks given to Jeremy and Om, I prodded Sphere CEO Tony Conrad to walk me through the beta of Sphere, his new blog search product (still in closed beta, but coming out in a month or two). It comes from a team out of Oddpost (Oddpost was planning to launch this there, but then got bought up by Yahoo. Oddpost founder Toni Schneider remains an advisor to Sphere, though he now works at Yahoo. Other advisors include WordPress dude Matt Mullenwegg and the irrepressible Mary Hodder.)

The financials: Tony has taken angel money from some impressive folks - notably KP partners Will Hearst and Kevin Compton, among others. I think perhaps the most important decision for Sphere, having seen it, is what to do with the money that folks will want to throw at it, but more on that later.

Sphere works better than other blog search I've seen, plain and simple. Why? It uses a combination of factors to do a more robust ranking methodology of blogs and posts. It pays attention to the ecology of relationships between blogs, for example, and it gives a higher weighted value to links that have more authority. This will insure, for example, that when a Searchblog author goes off topic and rants about, say, Jet Blue, that that author's rant will probably not rank as high for "Jet Blue" as would a reputable blogger who regularly writes about travel, even if that Searchblog author has a lot of high-PageRank links into his site.

Sphere also looks at metadata about a blog to inform its ranking - how often does the author post, how long are the posts, how many links on average does a post get? Sphere surfaces this information in its UI, I have to say, it was something to see that each Searchblog post gets an average of 21 links to it. Cool!

Lastly, Sphere uses content semantic analysis to help determine rank. This helps defeat one kind of spam (blogs that simply say "Tickets tickets tickets" over and over again), but it does not defeat the kind Joel wrote about. That kind of spam, however, is defeated by the ecology of links - the system will not rank blogs well that are not part of a larger ecosystem of linking.

In short, spam falls to the bottom of the rankings, and that's a great thing. Tony forwarded me early research his company has done which shows his results are markedly better than any other blog search engine out there. From my initial use of the system, I can say it most certainly is. This is not to knock Technorati or Feedster, but I calls em as I sees em, and in any case, both of those companies have their own differentiation: tagging and RSS, to be specific.

The service gives you ways to filter your results, which I like very much: By date, by relevance, and by language. I also got to see a new version of the service which had some neat interface hacks along the lines of a time axis. More on that as it comes live. As for business models, Sphere also surfaces related content on the right side, and Conrad is thinking of negotiating deals with those publishers, as well as the time honored sponsored links approach (they'd probably use Overture, as Toni is over at Yahoo...)

So back to the larger question. Great blog search is sure useful to folks like me, and to readers of Searchblog, who according to the survey you took a while back are a pretty bloggy crew (I'll have a link to those results soon). But will normal folks want blog search, and if so, how will it be delivered (Yahoo, for example, thinks it's within news results...)? Tony admitted that to scale his service he needs two things - many more machines (solved by money) and a lot more distribution (solved by a deal or selling to Yahoo, or Google, or AOL or....etc.). So what to do with his company? In short, should he pull a Flickr or Oddpost, and sell if the right offer comes? Or should he take some VC money and try to make it on his own, like Six Apart and Technorati?

Ah, to have such problems. Good luck Tony, the first look is promising.

Will...Someone...Please...Tell...Them...To...STOP ROLLING OUT NEW FEATURES!

A reader points me to this new feature on Google. Try searching for two destinations - say Madrid Ibiza - on Google. Here's what you see:

Now, I was not aware that you could do this - it's a very interesting evolution of Google's service. It works in the US too....

I may have just missed this, perhaps it's been around a while?

(Ongoing Thinking Out Loud based on the conversation spawned by this post)

So my question for Craigslist is this: Once Yahoo or Google decide to do a vertical listings engine - and they will, at some point or in some fashion - will Craigslist bar them as well?

If the answer is a consistent yes, then we understand what Craigslist's strategy is. In essence: a walled garden. They are building a self contained community that does not want to be part of the search economy. That's fine, though I could argue at length it's not a very wise strategy, but they have to right to pursue it.

However, right now, Craigslist is on the fence. Vertical aggregators like Indeed are OK, and extremely generalized engines like Google are OK.

This raises an interesting question with regard to GoogleBase: Will Oodle - or anyone else - be able to crawl its contents? My guess is no. While Google is extremely aggressive about its right to crawl anything it can, it will most likely act like an owner when it comes to content - and metadata - it hosts on GoogleBase.

I spoke with Oodle's founders today, right before the GoogleBase story broke, to get an update about the ongoing Craigslist/Oodle story.

Oodle founder Craig Donato was genuinely puzzled as to why Craigslist has asked Oodle to stop - and despite the comments in the last thread, which claim Oodle is a parasite, I see his puzzlement. Why stop Oodle, but not Indeed, or other aggregators? Is it because Oodle indexes all of Craigslist? Perhaps, but where's the harm?When you look at Oodle's model, it's all about pushing traffic back to Craigslist, in fact, the only way you can execute on the content you've found via Oodle is to go to Craigslist - a familliar model - it's the whole premise of search.

So, if Craiglist lets Google and Yahoo crawl its listings (I presume - hard to know till Craig or Jim Buckmaster decide to engage in a conversation about this...), why does it have a problem with Oodle?

Most likely, because Craigslist sees a day when folks might go direct to Oodle to post listings, bypassing Craigslist altogether. Oodle already takes listings as a feed - clearly targeted to listings sites, rather than individuals - but that could change.

However, I think cutting off Oodle is shortsighted. It's the content debate all over again. What should Craigslist be doing? As a user of the service, which I love by the way, I can think of a very long list.

Craigslist should focus on making its service better. Much, much better. It has a community, it has a brand, but damn if it isn't near impossible to find stuff if you don't already know your way around. The internal search is awful, and it's impossible to find things across regions (unless, of course, you used Oodle, which now you can't....). It's also impossible to post across regions, and I sure wish you could. The interface - both for posters as well as searchers - is rudimentary and not intuitive. The better the service gets, the more unique it will be, the more valuable, and therefore the more difficult to disintermediate. In short, make the content better, and it will win. Services like Oodle will only make your content shine, just as Google News makes the NYT shine, for the most part.

A final thought on GoogleBase. If Google is really, really serious about this - that instead of going the Google News route with listings, it plans instead to get folks to post their stuff to GoogleBase - it marks a significant departure for the company: It will become a publisher, a competitor in the content creation and management game, which places it in direct competition with the multitudes who feed and feed off the main Google search engine. Watch. This. Space.

- GoogleBase update here from SEW.

From the release:

Johnny Chou will join Google as President, Sales and Business
Development, Greater China. In this newly created role, Chou will be
responsible for building Google's sales and channel businesses, and
expanding the company's strategic partnerships in the region.

Chou comes to Google from UT Starcom, where he was President of the
company's China Operations for the past 9 years, and brings over 20
years of diverse business management experience to Google. With the
addition of Chou and the recent hire of Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, Google has
brought together two of the most respected and experienced executives
in China and their hire is a reflection of Google's commitment to the
Chinese market.

Google search for Johnny Chou.

Joel Spolsky is a well known software guru, and the man can write, making him something of a hero for folks like me. But he rarely opines on Google. Today he takes on click fraud and spam blogs. Worth a read.

There might be a technical solution to this, although I can't think of one offhand. The minute companies start cutting checks to "affiliates" at the end of the month that are based on nothing more than clicks, you're bound to get the AllAdvantage phenomenon. AllAdvantage was probably one of the most spectacularly stupid business ideas to come out of the first Dot Com bubble: a company that paid you to look at ads. That's because they fell victim to one of the better business ideas from the first Dot Com bubble: hiring armies of low-paid workers to look at AllAdvantage ads.

Eventually, it stops benefiting the advertiser, and the advertiser figures it out, and stops paying for the whole charade.

Google repeatedly says that clickfraud is not an issue, and we keep hearing from folks - advertisers, publishers, etc. - that it is. I wonder if this will ever go away?

Word is ripping around the web that Google is testing a new subdomain called base.google.com. A screen shot - the site has been up and down - shows a Google database of sorts where you can "Post your items on Google." It's a tagged database of stuff that heads directly into the world of Paul Ford's classic "Google Takes All" essay.

Apparently this will be debuted at Google's invite only Zeitgeist conference today. Philipp has more.

Last minute note - in other words, I forgot to mention - but I am doing what may be my last official book tour reading tonight on my home turf of Marin, at the Corte Madera Book Passages. 7 pm, here's a link to it on Yahoo Maps.

Though this marks the last official book reading, what I have come to realize is that the tour really never ends. Loads of folks have come calling asking me to come and speak, and I am trying to do as much as I can. And I still get to go to London next month for the FT book award. Cool!

We have not heard that much from MSN, but that is changing. Gary notes a video from Scoble in which a few MSN search geeks rap about their engine.

OK, this is entirely self referential, but I just love seeing the cover of my book in Portuguese. Here's the Brazilian version of The Search - a Busca. I must say, the Brazilian press has been a joy to work with.

That's a very large market cap. Today is a quiet posting day, for various reasons, but I did find the time to step into a CNBC studio and mull why Google seems to be pulling away from everyone else in search related earnings. My really, brilliant, over the top observation? Google is the leader in search. Since it has more searches than anyone else....it has more earnings. It also seems to be better at monetizing its searches, though exactly how is anyone's guess...

Also, notably, Google is pulling in more and more searches on its own google.com site, which of course are the most profitable kind of searches there are. No pesky publishers to whom you must pay TAC. Just pure marginy goodness. Now do you understand why they are pushing the Toolbar?! (Besides that long term idea of knowing loads about you so they can personalize search, of course...)

A few tidbits from the earnings worth mentioning, many from Comscore data that Street analysts are quoting:

Average revenue per search (yes, any kind of search, not just paid): 12 cents. It was around a dime in late 04.
Avg. revenue per searcher: $7
Avg. revenue per sponsored click: 62 cents.
Estimated profits for Google in 06: Roughly $4 billion (Bear Stearns) (which is about the same as their forecasted annual revenues this year, FWIW)
Revenue growth of Google year to year: 96%
Of Yahoo: 42%
Estimated revenue growth for next year for Google (Bear): 61%
For the average of eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon: 29%
Price target for GOOG (Piper): $445
Number of shares Battelle owns (For all of you who keep asking): 0
Also: Number of employees added in the past year: Nearly 2000
Amount spent on capex, 05 (estimate): $800 million
Amount MSFT is estimated to spend: $810 million

Hummmm....

More holy sh*t numbers from Google. Bloomberg:

Google Inc., the No. 1 Internet search engine, said profit jumped sevenfold, surpassing analysts' estimates, as new mapping and instant messaging features attracted users and the company added advertising space. The shares gained 8.4 percent.

Third-quarter net income rose to $381.2 million, or $1.32 a share, from $52 million, or 19 cents, a year earlier, Mountain View, California-based Google said today in a statement. Net revenue doubled to $1.05 billion, topping the $944 million average estimate in a Thomson Financial analyst survey.

Google's release here.

I spent some time yesterday and this morning speaking with Allan Alder, counsel for the AAP (see my initial post on this here). I came away convinced of what I initially suspected but so far had not stated: this is a far bigger issue than simply book publishers wanting to protect their business models (though there's plenty of that in here as well.)

Today David Drummond, counsel at Google, posted another missive in the ongoing communications battle over this issue. In it he positions Google as the innovator which is making incumbents nervous, a position that certainly has a long history (he quotes the Sony Betamax/VCR case) as well as plenty of support amongst the technology elite.

We think you should be able to search through every word of every book ever written, and come away with a list of relevant books to buy or find at your local library. We aim to make that happen, but to do so we'll need to build and maintain an index containing all this information.

It's no surprise that this idea makes some publishers nervous, even though they can easily remove their books from the program at any time. The history of technology is replete with advances that first met wide opposition, later found wide acceptance, and finally were widely regarded as having been inevitable all along.

But there are a few larger issues percolating here that bear discussion. First, who is making the money? Second, who owns the rights to leverage this new innovation - the public, the publisher, or ... Google? Will Google make the books it scans available for all comers to crawl and index? Certainly the answer seems to be no. Google is doing this so as to make its own index superior, and to gain competitive advantage over others. That leaves a bad taste in the publisher's mouths - they sense they are being disintermediated, and further, that Google is reinterpreting copyright law as they do it.

And this is not just about books. If Google - and by extension, anyone else - can scan and index books without permission, why can't they also scan and index video? Look at who owns the book companies that are suing - ahhh, it's Newscorp (Harper Collins), Viacom (Simon&Schuster), Time Warner (Little Brown).

As I said, I plan more posts/pieces on this, as the issues raised - of innovation, of intellectual property rights, of business models, of more perfect search - are fascinating. But they are also nuanced in that they reflect some of our most treacherous technology/policy debates: the tension between DRM and innovation, between a creator's rights and the public good, between open and closed (the Craigslist/Oodle debate, for example, is very much related to this).

After staring at this for a day or so, it's clear to me that this case will go to court. No one wants to settle. Google is digging in, and so is the media world. Folks, we have a real battle on our hands.

Reader David Gordon sent this link to me, from German publication Die Zeit, but in English. A gem, if you like your joints after midnight fare. Focuses on the man behind Teoma/Ask Jeeves and his quest to beat Google, but asks the Big Questions about search as well.

I just love that headline, from the Chicago Tribune.

From the article:

For Comcast Corp. Chief Executive Brian Roberts, the key challenge in today's digital video world is how to become the Google of television.

Roberts, who heads the nation's largest cable TV provider, said broadband Internet makes the traditional cable TV business obsolete. As a result, he said, Comcast is stressing its on-demand video service, which enables customers to view movies and programs whenever they want.

Well, I have to say, this is pretty clueful of Mr. Roberts, who has always impressed me as the most forward looking cable guy out there.

Part of Comcast's strategy is to become more like Google by making it easier for customers to search for the video content they want, when they want. One part of that strategy is developing a more robust interactive TV viewing guide. Roberts stressed that these technologies must be easy to use.

Note to Roberts: If your current interactive cable guide (which I suffer through daily) is any indication, you have *a lot* of work to do on user experience/user interface. Comcast has never, ever, ever been in the user experience business, it's been in the distribution business. If you're serious about competing in search and experience, it's time to get serious about UI/UE/HCI. Tivo, for example, is pretty good at this....yet even Tivo's search is terrible by comparison to any web based search engine. I know there are design constraints to doing great search on a TV, but sheesh, this is structured search, for goodness sake. It should be *easier*!

Murdoch's plans for the web have been much speculated about, for good reason - there's a whiff of Diller about Murdoch, in that sense that whatever he ends up doing will matter a lot. Fortune has a Q&A up outside their traditional pay wall with Ross Levinsohn, the point man behind Murdoch's web push. The interview was done by Adam Lashinsky, who also penned a piece on Murdoch last week in Fortune, which he reminds me is outside the pay wall as well. In it, he describes Murdoch's Internet retreat last month, which I, among others, was invited to and presented at. From it:

"When you've got a big, expanding world economy, you'd expect a boom in advertising, and it hasn't been there," [Murdoch] explains a couple of weeks later in his Los Angeles office, a spacious fifth-floor redoubt overlooking the sprawling lot of his 20th Century Fox movie studio. Even as traditional ad sales failed to boom, he says, small in-house websites like Foxnews.com and Britain's Times Online started generating meaningful revenue on puny investments. "You start putting two and two together, and we decided to abandon our defenses and get offensive."

And other tidbits in this Cnet story.

This free link from the Journal focuses on a story that has grown over the past few months into a national discussion - what to do about spam blogs. Google's blogger is a major culprit - some claim as much as 90% spam on that platform. From the Journal's piece:

Spammers have created millions of Web logs to promote everything from gambling Web sites to pornography. The spam blogs -- known as "splogs" -- often contain gibberish, and are full of links to other Web sites spammers are trying to promote. Because search engines like those of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. base their rankings of Web sites, in part, on how many other Web sites link to them, the splogs can help artificially inflate a site's popularity. Some of the phony blogs also carry advertisements, which generate a few cents for the splog's owner each time they are clicked on.

The phony blogs are a particular problem for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo because each offers not only a Web search engine focused on providing the most relevant results for users but also a service to let bloggers create blogs.

More: Tim Bray, Mark Cuban

If this sounds familiar, it's because the Author's Guild sued Google last month. Now, the Publishers (via their trade group the AAP) are joining in. It seems Eric's WSJ Op Ed was timed ahead of this news...

I really don't get this. I have been both a publisher and an author, and I have to tell you, these guys sue for one reason and one reason alone, from what I can tell: Their legacy business model is imperiled, and they fear change. Of course, if they can get out of their own way, they'll end up making more money. But that never stopped these guys - the MPAA, the RIAA, and now, the AAP.

Sure, I hear them when they complain about how Google has been seemingly arrogant, and how the company has presumed rather than politely requested permission. And maybe this truly is an issue of principle. I just called Pat Schroeder, who runs the AAP, and left word that I want to understand this better. Hopefully, she'll call back. When she does, I'll post more.

From the AAP release:

WASHINGTON D.C., October 19, 2005 –The Association of American Publishers (AAP) today announced the filing of a lawsuit against Google over its plans to digitally copy and distribute copyrighted works without permission of the copyright owners. The lawsuit was filed only after lengthy discussions broke down between AAP and Google’s top management regarding the copyright infringement implications of the Google Print Library Project.

The suit, which seeks a declaration by the court that Google commits infringement when it scans entire books covered by copyright and a court order preventing it from doing so without permission of the copyright owner, was filed on behalf of five major publisher members of AAP: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons.

The suit, which is being coordinated and funded by AAP, has the strong backing of the publishing industry and was filed following an overwhelming vote of support by the 20-member AAP Board which is elected by, and represents, the Association’s more than 300 member publishing houses.

Update: Pat and I have swapped calls and hope to speak later today or in the morning. And Google has issued a short response:

"Google Print is an historic effort to make millions of books easier for
people to find and buy. Creating an easy to use index of books is fair use
under copyright law and supports the purpose of copyright: to increase the
awareness and sales of books directly benefiting copyright holders. This
short-sighted attempt to block Google Print works counter to the interests
of not just the world's readers, but also the world's authors and
publishers."

...is to have real estate information integrated (SJ Merc). Seems the CoStar Group the Navteq of real estate. As Tim says, data is the new Intel Inside....

MSN's answer to Yahoo and Google's ad platform has been a long time coming, but they are finally gearing up here in the US (MSFT launched AdCenter in Singapore and France - an alpha of sorts - earlier in the year). Today marks AdCenter's pilot launch in the US - you can go here to sign up to be a charter advertiser (no guarantee they will take you...). Microsoft claims to already have 500 folks signed up (word of the recruitment leaked out a week or so ago and here is the site of one of them, JenSense), and I am not surprised. I am sure that advertisers will flock to a well-considered new avenue for search advertising.

No, the question is not "will advertisers want to test AdCenter?" And the question is also not "will Microsoft innovate in massively scaled advertising platforms?" - I think the clear answer there is yes. (Microsoft is offering audience targeting, for example, and what I have been told by many is far more detailed reporting). Advertisers will very much want to try out AdCenter. Why not? If it works, great! If it doesn't, no harm, no foul, it's CPC!

The real question, to my mind, is will Microsoft have enough traffic of good intent to satisfy advertisers' demand - or put another way, will Microsoft get to scale on the traffic side of the equation? To do so, it needs to enter the syndication business. Microsoft needs more than MSN Search traffic if it is going to compete. It has to learn to play nice with others - and partner with the long tail.

Yahoo has already made a play for the long tail with YPN, and Google is king of syndication with AdSense. For now, AdCenter is only available for MSN Search. But if Microsoft is going to truly compete, it has to compete for the rest of the web's inventory. Of course, it can get a big head start by stealing AOL from Google....either as an acquisition, or just as a deal. As I've said before, AOL was the deal that made Google, well, Google, and it was the deal that drove Overture to profitability. Microsoft has plenty of cash, and a very keen desire to win. This is what is fueling all sides in the AOL Poker game.

In any case, I certainly look forward to seeing how folks respond to Microsoft's entry into the field. And we'll all be keenly watching how Microsoft competes for traffic of good intent....

For those of you who like to read tea leaves, Gary has compiled this list of domains owned by Google. Some fun ones:

Googleporn.com
Googlequiz.com
Googlesex.com
Googletv.com
Googlevideo.biz
Mygoogle.com
Sergeybrin.com

(Updated, with chart at left from Safa) Yahoo just announced earnings. Apparently, they were quite good - but then, that's what the Street expected. The chart at left shows how, in general, Yahoo beat Street expectations, but the stock is not up sharply in after hours trading, mainly, I sense, because folks pretty much priced this in already.

From Yahoo's announcement:

• Revenues were $1,330 million for the third quarter of 2005, a 47 percent increase
compared to $907 million for the same period of 2004.

o Marketing services revenue was $1,160 million for the third quarter of 2005, a 46

percent increase compared to $797 million for the same period of 2004.

o Fees revenue was $170 million for the third quarter of 2005, a 55 percent

increase compared to $110 million for the same period of 2004.
• Revenues excluding traffic acquisition costs (“TAC”) were $932 million for the third
quarter of 2005, a 42 percent increase compared to $655 million for the same period of
2004.
• Gross profit for the third quarter of 2005 was $810 million, a 41 percent increase
compared to $574 million for the same period of 2004.
• Operating income for the third quarter of 2005 was $270 million, a 57 percent increase
compared to $172 million for the same period of 2004.
• Operating income before depreciation and amortization for the third quarter of 2005 was
$385 million, a 48 percent increase compared to $260 million for the same period of
2004.
• Cash flow from operating activities for the third quarter of 2005 was $440 million, a 65
percent increase compared to $267 million for the same period of 2004.
• Free cash flow for the third quarter of 2005 was $345 million, a 71 percent increase
compared to $202 million for the same period of 2004.
• Net income for the third quarter of 2005 was $254 million or $0.17 per diluted share
(including a net impact of $16 million, or $0.01 per diluted share, related to the sales of
investments). For the same period of 2004, net income was $253 million or $0.17 per
diluted share (including a net impact of $129 million, or $0.09 per share, related to the
sale of an investment and an associated tax benefit).

What a fun list. Spotted via Threadwatch, the 100 oldest domains. The Top Ten:

1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM

And I was told by a very reliable source, Gordon Bell, who I quoted in the book, that DEC.COM was the oldest. So I stand corrected, assuming this is right.

Yahoo announces the deal on its blog. Whereonearth is a local search company with wifi location based services, just like the company Google is working with. All Yahoo needs now is to become a Wifi ISP a la Google's ambitions, and it can pinpoint you down to the hotspot. Oh wait, it has deals with SBC, Bellsouth, and Verizon, which just so happens to be a huge Wifi provider....

...In the Wall St. Journal on the topic of Google Print. In it (paid reg is required), Google's CEO makes the case for why he and his company believe Google Print is fair use, and that the folks suing him (the Author's Guild) are misguided. From the op ed piece:

Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World and Third, en toute langue -- and all, of course, entirely for free. How many users will find, and then buy, books they never could have discovered any other way? How many out-of-print and backlist titles will find new and renewed sales life? How many future authors will make a living through their words solely because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered audience to find them? This egalitarianism of information dispersal is precisely what the Web is best at; precisely what leads to powerful new business models for the creative community; precisely what copyright law is ultimately intended to support; and, together with our partners, precisely what we hope, and expect, to accomplish with Google Print.

I agree with Eric on this one. Steve Langdon, a press relations fellow at Google, also pointed me to

this piece in Slate, with which I also agree. In it, the author points out the tension between authorial control and exposure to the author's work. He also reminds folks that you can't rip off a book via Google Print - it's not Napster. I think this relates to the whole Craigslist/Oodle dustup, and I'm brewing a post on that, though it ain't quite ripe, yet. This is a major issue in our culture, and one worth more consideration by us all.

In its S1, Google claimed it was going to be different, in particular in how it provided information to the Street. But in this blog post (from last week, I'm a bit behind in my reading, clearly), it is reminding us that, well, sometimes it's good to be like the other guys. Google reports its earnings this Thursday, a much anticipated news event. What's new? Starting this past quarter, Google is going to start reporting its pro forma, non GAAP earnings.

Why?

Well, to be pretty brief, the earnings number looks better (by comparison to analyst figures) when you subtract accounting charges for things like stock based compensation, which was used as the example in the post. Wall St. analysts already do this as a matter of course, so Google has decided to do it too. I'm looking forward to grokking this earnings report. I sense it's going to be an interesting one.

Some while ago I wrote about jux2, a meta search engine which let you compare results across major engines. It was a neat idea, and the site got some good reviews. But as happens, jux2's founders' attention wandered to other projects, and they could no longer keep the service running. One of them, Aaref Hilaly, emailed me yesterday and informed me that he was still getting requests about the service, and he figured that someone might want to run it. Now, if he was really smart, he'd dress it up and try to sell it to Rupert Murdoch, but barring that, he's offering to the highest bidder on eBay.

Current price: One cent.

"There is no reserve," Aaref wrote me, "so someone can get a bargain. After all, given the times in which we live, shouldn't everyone have their own search engine?"

Many folks have written it up, including SEW and TechCrunch. I love the idea of domain specific search. I wrote about GlobalSpec, which is similar, here.

My pal John Heilemann's NY magazine column on Diller is out today. A fun read. From it:

Consider: When Diller, with Murdoch’s what-the-hell backing, started the Fox network, he was up against a troika—ABC, NBC, and CBS—with virtually 100 percent of the prime-time audience. The Big Three had deep pools of talent, vast resources, and a hammerlock on national advertisers. To any sane observer, they looked granite-solid, impregnable.

Fast-forward to today and it’s déjà vu all over again. In the booming search business, you have another apparently indomitable Big Three in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. (AOL is No. 4, but everyone assumes, Dick Parsons’s protestations notwithstanding, it will soon become an appendage of either Google or Microsoft.) The new Big Three account for 83 percent of Web searches. Having developed a ludicrously profitable form of advertising, they are making money by the bucketload. They have deep pools of talent, vast resources, and, as they are quick to tell you, impossibly high IQs.

This important.

Gary has all the details here.

Google just reworked its privacy policy, the updated policy is here. I plan to have a lot more to say about this once I speak with the company. I stared at the policy for the book, and found it to be a bit wanting when it comes to some issues. But then again, that's true for nearly every major company. And this new policy is an attempt to both clarify and bring attention to these issues, which I think is admirable. As I've said many times, Google's main asset is trust...

More when I have more...

Update: Via SEW, this comparison of past and present policies.

When I wrote about Oodle a while back, I wondered if the sources of its listings would ever get cranky (Oodle scrapes classified listings all over the web, then creates a vertical search engine). I never thought the first grump would be craigslist - but indeed, the company has asked Oodle to stop scraping its listings. It feels counter to the vibe craigslist has always had. I've asked Craig for his reasoning, will post if/when he responds...

I'm in Vegas right now, so allow me a poker metaphor as I consider the whole Yahoo/MSFT IM and Google/Comcast/AOL thing.

The more I think about this, the more I believe that these two deals are linked, intentionally or not. In my last post about Yahoo and MSFT interoperating around IM, I suggested this is a reaction to Google Talk. Kind readers jumped all over me. You were right to do so, as I did not explain myself very clearly. What I really should have said is, it's a reaction to the potential for Google to interoperate its IM client (Google Talk) with, oh, say, AOL's (AIM). It's a battle in a larger war for AOL, and for overall market share.

If you stare at how the battle lines might be drawn up here, the Google/AOL partnership discussions demonstrate that Google is actually starting to play poker in a calculated, strategic fashion, much as its peers in the media world have been for years. Google is at the table now, and like everyone else, it's eyeing the flop....and the flop, folks, is AOL.

IM and VOIP are critical applications to all players at this table, right? If Google struck a deal with AOL, they could defend their fledgling toehold in IM, and extend it to one of the largest installed bases in the world.

What else is critical to Google right now? Access to traffic of good intent (ie, search traffic and good content traffic). AOL has both, and could help Google defend currently owned search turf, as well as grow its share of this critical revenue/profit driver.

What else? Google must find new users to whom it can distribute the all important Google Toolbar/Sidebar/Destop Search et al - Google knows it has to get into deeper relationships with its users to prosper. AOL has shitloads of users, and were a deal to go down, it'd be pretty straightforward to turn all of 'em into Google clients.

Comcast, from what I can tell, wants to convert AOL users to Comcast broadband customers. Makes sense. Comcast doesn't play where Google does, so a partnership might work. And while it might be a stretch for Comcast, the company does not have an open distribution network of any significance, and AOL just might make sense should Roberts & Co decide they need to diversify away from its two businesses of pure broadband provisioning and closed cable networks, which is threatened by TV over IP, among other things.

When I interviewed Jonathan MIller on stage last week he said he knew he was a "swing vote" in the portal wars. There is clearly a war going on right now between Google and Microsoft for the prize of AOL, and Yahoo and Comcast are playing in so far as they can cause trouble, and perhaps, swoop in at the last minute and steal the bride itself.

This is a new game for Google, which has in the past pretty much set itself apart from the rough and tumble world of Big Bets Based on Business Strategy. My gut reaction to the news was that this was a bad idea - Google does not have the Media Player DNA, and in its core believes it should win through innovation, not dealmaking. This next stage of the company's life should be very interesting to watch. My gut tells me that in the end, Google will get cold feet, mainly because the price (of either a deal or an acquisition) will be too dear, and AOL will fall to Microsoft, who will be willing to overpay. But watch Yahoo here, and Comcast - either one might decide to up the ante and change the game as well.

Rumors of Google investing, with Comcast no less, in AOL. I think it's not a great idea, but more on that initial reaction later.

Also, MSFT and Yahoo partner on IM, can you say Reaction to Google Talk?

And, Google puts wood behind the arrow of Google's foundation. A billion or so...

I'm running between book stuff, so a few things of note. First, it was fun to meet a few readers last night, one of whom was from Real, which settled its differences with MSFT today, so congrats on that!

Second, chris's gada.be mobile engine launched yesterday. SEW coverage here. I think this is the definition of a neat hack.

Third, I should note for those of you who missed it, that Sergey Brin stopped by the Web 2.0 conference last Friday and I had a chance to interview him on stage. That was fun, as it was both unexpected and great timing, as I had already interviewed Diller, Semel, Medhi, and Miller, all of whom had things to say about Google. So Brin got to answer them. Coverage here.

Fourth, Xeni Jardin of BB has written another op ed, this one about Yahoo both launching Kevin Site's site as well as helping to jail a Chinese journalist via the Database of Intentions...

Fifth, Seth Godin is going to soon launch Squidoo, which has a very interesting, search aware/driven model. More from Jarvis here.

And finally, SEW shows you how Google is getting into tagging....

Yahoo tonight is launching a new version of its News search that includes blogs, Flickr photos and My Web results. From the release:

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that Yahoo! Search is beta testing a new version of Yahoo! News Search which now includes blogs, Flickr photos and My Web links, available today at http://news.search.yahoo.com. The move to augment professional journalism with grassroots journalism signals Yahoo!’s commitment to fusing mainstream content with user-generated content to give consumers a more complete search experience.....

...Beginning today, when a user conducts a search on Yahoo! News they will receive mainstream news stories along with blogs. When a user clicks on “all blog results” they will receive Flickr photo thumbnails and My Web links on the right hand side of the search results page. By incorporating grassroots journalism from all around the globe into News Search results, consumers can now enjoy opinions, analysis and commentary, via blogs, and related photos from the Flickr community that provide a visual context to breaking news as reported by everyday people. In addition, the new My Web feature, Yahoo!’s new social search engine that harnesses the collective knowledge of the My Web community, provides relevant links to information related to the news topic.

Try a search for Web 2.0, which was covered more by blogs than by mainstream sources. The plan is to roll it out at 7 pm PST, but I could not see it yet....

Compare that search to a normal news search at Google, and Google Blog Search. ....BTW, anyone have any idea how these guys are doing ranking?!

I'll be heading up to Seattle Monday bright and early, to speak at both Microsoft and Amazon. I return Tuesday afternoon. We don't have a bookstore signing set up there, but maybe we can meet up in the bar at the W if you'd like. Just let me know....

This is my second to last book tour event. I go to Vegas for a talk Weds, back Thursday. Then, a few talks here and there through November and December, but nothing really requiring major new trips. I am really, really tired, and very, very happy with how the book did. Onwards....

Update: So it looks like if any Seattle Searchbloggers want to meet up, let's do it at around 7 pm, lobby bar of the W in downtown Seattle. I'll be the one with a bourbon and a menu...

While I recuperate from Web 2.0. Here's a post on Sphere, a new blog search tool he likes...

The big issue is finding relevant and intelligent blog posts on a specific topic, that are based on authority. The authority is not an arbitrary decision of a human community, but a “collective effort.” Google tries to do this in its new Reader by restricting “google search” to RSS feeds. But that’s not the answer.

Instead, I recommend you guys take a look at Sphere, a stealth mode start-up that has developed some interesting algorithms to solve this problem.

Readers may have noticed Intel ads on the right. These are new, indeed, a product of Searchblog's joining the FM network. Please tell me if they bum you out, but it's all part of the alpha phase of FM's rollout. They'll go away, and others will follow, I hope. I'm very excited, now that Web 2 has occurred, to focus entirely on FM. Many others, including Om, Glenn, Boing Boing, and Matt, are coming along for the ride....

Google is announcing as I type a new feedreader - a first generation one, but full text, which I think is the best approach. It's not up yet, but it will be shortly, in their Labs section.

Google also announced its work on determining sex of a person using pattern recognition in photos. This is a first step toward ID'ing faces, then searching by face. Cool.

Yahoo, by the way, also showed some cool photo stuff, a flickrstream that shows tags and images by cluster a long a timeline.

Update: It's live.

Right now, Prabhakar Raghavan is showing a cool slider widget that fliters results in real time giving the fabled second hit of user input into results. This is not new, from what I can tell, but the first time I saw it. Cool.

It's hard to both post and run this event, but a few things have been so interesting I wanted to note them.

First, Terry Semel, who I interviewed yesterday morning, had some choice words for Google. In essence, he suggested that if Google and Yahoo were to be judged as competitors, perhaps they should be judged as portals, since that's what both companies are now. And by that measure, Google is "number four."

I also got to ask Terry a question suggested by Indeed CEO Paul Forster. If Google does jobs.google.com (which is expected by many shortly), would Semel let Google crawl hotjobs.com?

"We will always be more open than Google," was his response. Innaresting.

Second, I interviewed AOL CEO Jonathan Miller yesterday, and got a chance to ask him about the persistent rumors of a MSN or even Newscorp acquisition (I also asked MSN honcho Yusuf Medhi,more on that later). He deferred, but did say that all things worth considering will be considered. I then played off my favorite AOL idea of the moment. It goes like this: AOL was critical in Overture's rise, when Overture got the AOL deal, it made the company. Then, when Google stole AOL with Adwords, that deal (which many said Google overpaid for) was critical to Google's future success (according to Eric Schmidt, who told me as much for my book).

So, I asked Jonathan, might not MSN try to steal AOL's business from Google? MSN can afford to overpay, and a hundred million or more in guaranteed profit to Time Warner's bottom line can't hurt, right?

Miller had a great answer: "We're kind of the swing vote," he said. "I think people have noticed that."

Indeed!

More, I hope, when I get a chance.

Long time readers know I am a fan of Google Maps but think Google Local has a bit of work to do.

Now the two have been mashed up by Google.

From the release:

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today
announced the official launch of Google Local, merging the technologies
behind Google Local and Google Maps. No longer in beta in the U.S. and
Canada, users can visit http://local.google.com to find local search
and mapping information in one place.

"With today's launch of Google Local, users will be able to go to one
location to find all the local and mapping information they need," said
Marissa Mayer, director, Consumer Web Products, Google Inc. "Whether
it's directions to the nearest pharmacy or reviews of nearby dim sum
restaurants, we will continue to develop innovative technologies that
enrich our users' lives."

As far as I can tell there have not been any improvements in Local, but that is coming, the release says. My suggestion remains: harness user feedback like Yahoo has....

From the release:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - October 5, 2005 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ:
GOOG) today announced that Shirley M. Tilghman, Princeton
University's President and Professor of Molecular Biology, was
unanimously elected to join Google's Board of Directors. Dr. Tilghman
is a world-renowned scholar, an exceptional teacher, and is respected
worldwide for her pioneering research and advocacy of women in science

"It's an honor to welcome a woman of Dr. Tilghman's reputation to
our board," said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google. "Google
is a company born out of university research, so we look forward to
tapping into her extraordinary talents as an accomplished academic, and
as a champion of discovery."

I'm heading into the conference this morning, and very much hope to have time to post, but it's going to be iffy - so much is happening. Check out the lineup, and the workshops. Amazing....lots of news coming from here, I sense....you might check out a Technorati or Feedster search for coverage....

Congrats, Andy and co....

I have been trying to grok this Sun/Google announcement, and beyond a lot of handwaving about sharing and working together, I've not seen much to really dig my teeth into.

Then I saw this passage in a Bloomberg story, including a quote from Eric:

At Google, Schmidt is pushing further into Microsoft's territory. The company has moved beyond Internet search, where it leads Microsoft and Yahoo! Inc., into desktop search, allowing users to plow through all files on their PCs. About 78 million individual users visit Google sites each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

The Google toolbar, which sits on the desktop and links users to Web sites, e-mail and other products, is a linchpin in the company's challenge to Microsoft. Google could add ``tens of millions'' of customers through Sun's downloads, Schmidt said. That will help Google ``monetize'' its toolbar by selling more advertising, Schmidt said.

He wouldn't say if Google's toolbar would link to OpenOffice.org.

Hmmm, I thought. That reminds me a search I did recently, for a GoogleWhack "Sally Girger". I'd been meaning to post on it, but have been so busy....

The result was a blog page (had to do with my Q&A at the Guardian newspaper, never mind that....) but what I found interesting was the ad Google placed at the bottom of the page for its own Toolbar. I had been wondering how Toolbar downloads were going, given how important they are to Google's future (it's where all the marbles are, really, having a direct relationship with a person, a search history, a preferences set, you name it). The Toolbar, in the end, is how Google pushes out Microsoft.

Seems the push is on to get more Toolbars downloaded. And now, I see why Google is doing this Sun deal. It's the Toolbar, of course! From the Cnet coverage:

Details about what exactly that will entail were vague at best, with the only nugget offered being that Sun, in the immediate future, will make Google's toolbar a standard part of the package when users download Sun's Java Runtime Environment from the server seller's Web site.

In other words, Google really, really wants more Toolbar distribution. Watch this space.

Quite a few readers have emailed me asking why the heck Amazon is suggesting a book on beer might be what they want next. I think it may be that the Author, Steve Hindy, has written about technology in the past, and folks who bought those books also bought The Search.

But this next book he's written is pretty far off the mark: "Steve Hindy's Beer School : Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery."

I take no credit for this. I drink far more wine than beer as of late....

Here's the Amazon email:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle also purchased books by Steve Hindy. For this reason, you might like to know that Steve Hindy's Beer School : Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery is now available . You can order your copy at a savings of 32% by following the link below.

Check it out. Highlights:

So the big story these days is that Google and Microsoft are going to war and that either could win. This is a big story because it's a great story: two undefeated heavyweights preparing to bash each other's brains out. Alas, it's also fiction.

....In the absence of disastrous mistakes by Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft's best chance to win with MSN is to merge it with AOL and spin it off. This would be extraordinarily challenging, and it would not guarantee success: the merged company would still run third behind Google and Yahoo!. A combined MSN-AOL, however, would be far stronger than either company alone.

Blodget has a longer report (from which this post is summarized) available for free on the site, which marks his entry into the b'sphere...wlecome!

As most have probably read elsewhere, Google and Sun plan an announcement today - the speculation is that Google will host an "Office Killer" on its infrastructure, featuring StarOffice from Sun.

Why Google needs to directly poke Microsoft in the eye, is beyond me, but I'll wait for the details....clearly Sun and Google have a long co-mingled history (in people and financiers) ...

Update: It's a pact for Sun's desktop and office, alright. I really don't understand why Google wants to do this. But I'll keep staring at it. T'rati search.

This is the super secret project from Marc Andreessen and friends. It's called Ning. It's a social app/mashup/remixing "playground." Wish I had more time to grok, but Web 2 starts tomorrow....

I'll be signing and reading at Barnes & Noble today in San Jose. Details:

Monday, October 3
7:30PM
Barnes & Noble
3600 Stevens Creeks Blvd.
San Jose, CA 95117
408-984-3495

If you are around, come on by!

Also, Google asked me to do a guest post on their blog, it can be found here. Cool....

Scoble wants more from my book, so he writes it up, and the comments are flowing in. Cool!

On the subject of why he thinks engines are doing a poor job, (using a hotel search as an example), he asks:

So, what COULD search engines do? Well, first, give me some choices at the top of the page. Why couldn't search engines ask you these questions:

1) "are you looking for hotels in New York or named New York?"
2) Are you looking for hotels with free Wifi?
3) Are you looking for hotels with great views?
4) Are you looking for hotels nearby major tourist destinations?
5) Are you looking for hotels with above average ammenities like super large bathtubs, well stocked minibars, etc.?

This reminds me of the passage in the book with Gary Flake, who is now - huh - at Microsoft (he was at Yahoo when I spoke to him). "If only I could have one more modal dialog...." In other words, he wished searchers were more like Scoble - sure of what they wanted, and willing to engage in a dialog with the search engine. Most, it turns out, are not.

More freely available content can only be a good thing. From the release:

The Internet Archive, Yahoo! Inc., Adobe Systems Inc., the European Archive, HP Labs, the National Archives (UK), O’Reilly Media Inc., Prelinger Archives, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, today announced the formation of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) http://opencontentalliance.org, a global consortium focused on providing open access to content while respecting the rights of copyright holders. The OCA will provide a wide range of material including cultural, historical and technological digitized print and multimedia content from libraries, archives and publishers. Content will be hosted in a single, permanent repository and complete works will be searchable and downloadable for free by anyone.

....Yahoo! will power the search engine on the OCA website and all OCA content will be made available through Yahoo! Search, further bolstering the comprehensiveness of its index. Once content is available through the OCA, any search engine will be able to index it. This takes a significant step in expanding the deep web, the millions of Web sites containing content that search engines typically cannot access, as well as advances the global sharing of knowledge.

Found here, originally in Bizweek here.

Look for Yahoo! to unveil a response to Google's blog search early next week. This from Bradley Horowitz, director of tech development in the company's search group. He wouldn't provide details in advance. And it could be that Yahoo's announcement will cover only one aspect of blog or RSS search, and not the comprehensive release the search industry's waiting for.

A zip code overlay tool! I'm with Matt on this one. Addictive. File it under One of Those Things I've Always Wondered But Never Thought I'd Know. How cool is it to find out your zip code includes your favorite mountain bike trails?

This story - "Assessing Battelle's 10 1996 predictions for 2006 tech" - has been forwarded to me many times. I guess that's the downside of being in this biz for so long - it's entirely plausible that I made a bunch of predictions in 1996 for 2006. Only, I didn't. The Battelle Institute, a company that does a bunch of work for the government and is very remotely related to my family (like four generations ago, two brothers split up, one went west, one did not...), made these predictions. I am sure I was making predictions back then, but thank goodness, I can't remember them.

Via Slashdot:

Nuance Communications, a Menlo Park maker of speech-recognition software, has sued Yahoo for unfair competition and theft of trade secrets, accusing the Internet giant of raiding all but one of Nuance's research and development engineers. Nuance said 13 engineers from its Menlo Park and Montreal offices were 75 percent finished with a project that would allow people to search the Internet by speaking their queries into a telephone, rather than typing them on a computer keyboard.

Via SF Chronicle and SEOBook.

Google Inc. has offered to blanket San Francisco with free wireless Internet access at no cost to the city, placing a marquee name behind Mayor Gavin Newsom's effort to get all residents online whether they are at home, in a park or in a cafe.

The offer by the popular Mountain View search engine was one of more than a dozen competing bids received by the city before its deadline Friday. Officials will review the submissions and decide which, if any, of the candidates gets the green light to build the so called Wi-Fi service, which would be free or inexpensive for users.

Yesterday I once again drove down to Google, but this time it wasn't to do a set of interviews for the book, it was to read from the book to perhaps the most demanding audience I've ever encountered - a room full of Googlers, nearly 200 in all.

I was a bit nervous. While I think the book is fair, and clearly acknowledges the importance and power of Google, it also has more than its fair share of reporting on the negative aspects of the company's astonishing rise - from privacy concerns to allegations of arrogance and self dealing. Would I be booed off the campus?

It didn't help my anxiety to see a gaggle of folks in the audience who also were in the book or helped me in one way or another - from Louis Monier and Peter Norvig to Raymond Nasr, Steve Langdon, and Eric Case.

But my concern was overblown. I had a great time, and I think the folks in attendance did too. I read selections from the early years, as well as my riff on the future of Google. And the questions, man, the questions were challenging and very, very thoughtful. They ranged from "if we build the Google Grid, and succeed, what do we do then?" (answer - I have no idea!) to "What would you do if you were running Google?" (answer: buy a video asset and set it free, more on that soon). Another good question: "What might make Google fail?" I wrote about that in the book - two things - one is lack of direction - when you encourage thousands of folks to dream and provide them the chance to execute on those dreams, a company can lose focus. And the other is simply managing growth - the company is hiring more than ten folks a day.

At the end, Eric Schmidt came up and said hello, and we chatted about the book and my visit. I signed a lot of books, and I asked each person who came up what division they worked in and how long they'd been there. The average time of duty? About six months. A very young, very fast growing company indeed.

I am very thankful to Karen Wickre for inviting me down. It was the highlight of the book tour so far. Of course, week after next I am going to Microsoft and Amazon. That should be interesting as well!