DOJ: We're All Good, Really

The DOJ has filed a response (thanks Gary) to Google's defiance on the issue of its search records subpoena. In short: No, you're wrong, we're right. And we're not violating anyone's privacy. Internetnews.com coverage.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:03 PM
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Matt Gives Up Acquisition For Lent

Now that's really sacrifice.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:59 PM
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Google Tries to Stop The Bleeding (er, Clarifies)

This afternoon Google issued a press release which seems to say very little, on balance, save telegraphing the fact that Google felt its CFO was speaking a bit too loosely yesterday. This is not the first time Google has had to clarify its CFO's statements. Remember Reyes on click fraud?

Since that statement, Google has made a point of saying that click fraud is really no big deal.

And now, after Reyes sounds the alarm about growth, Google issues this:

We would like to clarify and provide further information on these statements. As we have stated before, monetization improvements will continue to be a key factor in driving future revenue growth. We still see significant opportunities to improve monetization and intend to continue to focus our efforts in this area.

Moreover, as we have stated in our SEC filings, our revenue growth rate has generally declined over time and we expect that it will continue to do so...

Er, is this equivocation? A slap on the wrist via a press release? No matter what, it ain't good for Reyes. I am quite sure the triumvirate is, well, pissed at him right now. Paging Sue Decker....

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:49 PM
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Google and the Law Of Very Large Numbers

Microsoft's CFO became famous in the 1990s for his predictions that the company would not grow as quickly as others wished. looks like George Reyes, CFO of Google, is taking a cue. Hey, wait, is this managing expectations on Wall Street, and providing guidance? Whatever it is, GOOG is taking a hit. From a sub required WSJ article:

Google Inc.'s chief financial officer, George Reyes, said the Internet giant's growth is slowing due to the "law of large numbers" and it will need to find new ways to boost revenue.

The comments, made at an investor conference, surprised Wall Street and triggered a selloff in Google's shares. In heavy trading, Google shares fell 9%, or $37.70, to $354 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

The company's 18-month effort to boost search monetization by tweaking the advertising system has realized most of the gains possible, Mr. Reyes said. Now growth is being driven mainly by organic factors, like query traffic growth, which he called substantial.

"We're going to have to find other ways to monetize the business," Mr. Reyes told attendees of a Merrill Lynch investor conference.

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More Catching Up

TechCrunch covers the launch of Edgeio, which is the creation of one of folks behind TechCrunch (Mike Arrington) among others. The service is a neat idea - you can tag your posts "listings" and edgeio finds your tagged posts and slurps them into a listings metaservice/site. It's a platform which just might disrupt the directory driven services like eBay and craigslist.

If you like Malcolm Gladwells's stuff, he's finally got a blog.

Jeremy agrees with Dion, all your data belongs to you.

Google names a director of its foundation and plans to digitize the National Archives' video collection, and Om has a bit more on Google Calendar.

Skrenta reminds us that search CPMs are much higher. yes, because in the end, most folks want to find...and then they do, that becomes a chance to search again, and so on...the point of intent drives many more pages of content, and I'd wager that the ratio is equal, if you add up page for page and CPM for CPM...

Google is in court a lot. It lost one on thumbnail images last week (see Paul's write up), but it's just the start of the process.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:49 PM
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JG Wrote...

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:05 PM
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Updated: Dumb Filter

Boing Boing has recently been added to a blacklist of "nudity" related sites run by the US-based company Secure Computing, resulting in its being banned in entire countries - like the UAE, as well as many corporate firewalls. Here's the editor's searing response. I think it's well worth reading. From it:

Today, we've learned that Internet Qatar, the sole ISP in the State of Qatar, has also banned BoingBoing.

We've heard from librarians in Africa who want to watch the video of the American Register of Copyrights denouncing Congress, employees at the Australian Broadcasting Company, students, and workers around the world who can't gain access to our work.

At fault is a US-based censorware company called Secure Computing, which makes a web-rating product called SmartFilter. But SmartFilter isn't very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity -- even Michaelangelo's David appearing on a single page out of thousands -- as a "nudity" site, which means that customers who block "nudity" can't get through.

Last week, Secure Computing updated their software to classify Boing Boing as a "nudity" site. Last month, we had two posts with nudity in them, out of 692 -- that's 0.29 percent of our posts, but SmartFilter blocks 100 percent of them. This month, there were four posts with nudity (including the Abu Ghraib photos), out of 618 -- 0.32 percent.

In fact, out of the 25,000+ Boing Boing posts classed as "nudity" by SmartFilter, more that 99.5 percent have no nudity at all. They're stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn't wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions.

....The question of keeping your child from viewing content you don't want them to see can be addressed more efficiently locally, with tech tools like the browser Bumpercar. As BoingBoing founder (and father of two) Mark Frauenfelder explains, "My daughter and I found a bunch of great kid-friendly sites and have added them to the 'white list.' As a parent, I have local control of the sites she visits instead of handing over control to a remote group of people that I don't trust to do my job of being a parent."

The fact is, there's no effective way to censor the Internet in broad strokes. Only dumb CIOs and totalitarian governments like the UAE believe that adding censorware to your network will prevent the naughty stuff from slopping in.

Update: I love this approach to the SmartFilter problem: BB is asking bloggers to post this image (at left) on their site as a protest, in the hopes that soon enough, SmartFilter will be all filtered out.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:39 PM
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The Week That Was, and Monday Catch Up

Lots of stuff I missed, lots going on. To wit:

Google Base has gone (Techcrunch) commercial (GoogleBase blog). Not unexpected. But an important step.

The Google Page Creator. Just a doodle, I'm sure...

The Journal has a free link on its curtain raiser for Google's analyst day this Thursday. From it: Google's annual analysts' day is shaping up as a test of the company's reluctance to provide financial guidance -- and of investors' tolerance of that tight-lipped approach.

Yahoo is going to stop allowing competitors to bid (SEW) on trademarked terms. This is clearly a differentiation play from Google.

More rumors, here and here, about Google Finance.

A fascinating Googler's blog here (hat tip to Threadwatch). We were debating whether or not to do a swapping of information with the group and give them some info on how things work at Google, as an exchange for answering our questions. We had decided against it, until the participants came in and sat down, at which point it became clear that a two-way exchange was preferable. I wrote up 3 slides in sixty seconds and delivered an impromptu 5-minute speech.

Gotta run...more coming....

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:27 AM
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When One Company Gets Visits From Google

Interesting note from an entrepreneur - what he's learned from his logs.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:50 AM
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Ask Makes Its Play

Just back from the week off, and much is up in the search world. I'll have a roundup later in the day, but the top news for now is Ask, which has declared its intention to become the Fox of the search engine world - in other words, to come into the game late, with low odds, and hope to strike ratings gold. We knew this play was coming - it was clear when IAC and Diller bought Ask. Now the company has declared. Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask.com. throws down the gauntlet in the release:

“People deserve a search engine that gives them the tools to get what they need faster, not just a bunch of links on a page. Ask.com takes search to the next level.”

You're not sure they're serious? Diller is keynoting this week's SES conference, for goodness sake (I won't be there, focusing on FM then traveling to London later this week). More on all of this in the Ask Blog here.

Gary Price, who is joining Ask from SEW, has some interesting thoughts here.

A summary of the news: As expected, Jeeves is history. It's now Ask.com. Teoma.com is no more, it's been rebranded as "ExpertRank". Ask has a new homepage, a new customizable "toolbox" function, an upgraded Maps feature, and some other features which you can read about in their release here.

What I find interesting is Ask's decision to compete based on differentiation of approach to sponsored listings.
From the release:

Ask.com now has the fewest ads of any major search destination on the first screen of results. With Smart Answers, Ask.com is also the only search engine to place editorial results above advertisements.

More on this as it develops.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:45 AM
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Downtime

I'll be taking this coming week off, spending it with family for our kids' winter break. I plan to stay online, but not post very much. Happy searching.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:56 AM
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Scoble's brreeeport test

If you haven't heard about this, it's a cool idea. Scoble has created a seedbed for testing speed and comprehensiveness in blog search tools, and along the way, has found out other interesting things about search in general. From the post:

Damn, brrrreeeport is the top search on Technorati and there are 420 posts there. Wacky.

What’s an even better deal is that Google says there are now about 14,000 results. What the f___? I HATE the lies that are going on on search engines. Quick: click through and tell me how many entries there really are. Hint: it isn’t 14,000. Funny that Google’s blog search can only find 382.

MSN says there are 1,369 results. Yahoo says there are 1,010 results.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:20 PM
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MSFT Office Dead

I don't get it. Why not do what we thought they'd do? I wasn't really paying attention, and you probably all know this, but turns out MSFT Office Live is, well, NOT Microsoft Office Live (tcrunch). It's just hosting and email services by another name. What the f?

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:16 PM
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Free The Internet Through Regulation

That's the general idea of the proposed "Global Online Freedom Act of 2006", the details of which you can find in this article and here (sponsoring congressman's website).

Besides blacklisting Iran, China, and Vietnam (hey, that war really worked out, didn't it?!), the legislation would declare:

- U.S. firms which create, provide or host Internet search engines would be forbidden to locate their search engines within designated Internet-restricting countries.

- U.S. firms would be forbidden to alter the search engines in response to requests from Internet-restricting countries or make changes that produced search engine results within restricting countries that differ from results elsewhere.

- U.S. search engine providers must transparently share with the U.S. Office of Global Internet freedom details of terms or parameters submitted by Internet-restricting countries.

- U.S. businesses maintaining Internet content hosting services can personally identify users only for cases of legitimate law enforcement purposes as determined by the U.S. Department of Justice.

OK, so where the hell is *our* right to know? Will all this information, all this back and forth, will it be public?

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:14 PM
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I Don't Buy It

I love reading Xooglers. But this post, well, I don't buy it.

The post explains how, because Googlers are generally an exceptional lot, praise was hard to find, and when it did come, it came in a very understated fashion. OK, amongst the ranks, I can buy that. Golden geeks tend to shy from overt idolatry. But they are also human beings. And human beings tend to manage up, period. I'd love to believe that folks spend all *not* telling Marissa, Larry, Sergey, and the other members of the founding class that they are brilliant, but...I don't buy it.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:01 PM
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Friday Link Love

Women.com: It's a vertical search thing. (paidcontent)

Prefound.com: It's in Kentucky (land of Fark and Bourbon), so I already like it. Has a model that pays "Featured Finders."

Want to know how much content on an engine is sponsored v. organic? So did this academic.

The Amazon Music Player. (NYT)

Homemade kitty exhaust fan (just to see if you're paying attention) (Make)

Matt M. groks Megite.

Guess what? Search is still growing and growing and growing! (SEW)

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:47 AM
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And You Thought It Was Sci Fi

Reader Bob noticed a bar code scanning phone, which is part of the technology needed to make my local search/physical search wine anecdote happen. Cool!

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:25 AM
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OK, Uncle, I Need Help!

Searchblog is my passion. It's also one hell of a lot of work. And as much as I'd like to claim that I'm doing the best job in the world, I'm clearly not - there's so much more I'd like to do.

Thanks to FM, which is selling the ads on my site (yeah, OK, I started the company, and it's the reason I'm so busy, how's *that* for recursive), I now have money coming in that amounts to more than just a beer budget. So, I'm spending it, on getting help.

In other words, I'm looking for a special someone who wants to be a Searchblog assistant editor. And, to help make this happen, I'm open to making it a full time position, by combining it with a role at FM helping our authors. Here's a link to the job posting. If you know anyone who might fit this bill, especially folks who are into search, internet companies, the works - why please let me know.

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:23 PM
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Links to Love

MSN offers free prizes for searching.

Google launches a Google China Blog. It's Chinese to me. But they do give me link love, which is quite nice. Barry posts on SEW that the first posts seem to be about Valentine's Day. Not exactly topical.

Another trademark suit a la American Blinds and Geico, Check N Go. (via Cnet)

AOL wants in on the "American Chinese" market. Timing, anyone?

Many folks have noticed that Google is testing click to call.

Very interesting question, Dirson: WILL GOOGLE BAN MOHAMMED CARTOONS FROM THEIR RESULTS?

Mat says: Check out shark jumping through internet history. Maybe "jumping the shark" has...er...jumped the shark? (And no, I wasn't flaming Google, I was speaking from personal experience.)

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:35 PM
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Gates On Information: You Can't Stop It

From the FT:

BIll Gates (BG):....Now in some ways, the digital world is superior. The ability to have anonymity is actually better when you want it. There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying the government’s corrupt and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.

FT: Unless you’re in China.

BG: No, in fact, it can even be done in China. Now China may not like that. ....There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking. It is an interesting thing that the tools of technology are creating a level of openness that is good in some ways. But there are these things where – like child pornography – it’s harder to block or track than it would have been in the physical world.
....

FT: Do you keep information on servers inside China?

BG: Our servers are all outside China. This whole thing of inside versus outside China, I never understand that, it somehow comes up in the Google discussion. I don’t get that at all. This is not about where the servers are. We don’t have servers inside China, we just don’t. It may be that for responsiveness at some point we’ll do that, but that’s not the way we work today.

FT: Should the US government establish guidelines to regulate how internet companies deal with censorship in countries like China?

BG: I think something like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been a resounding success in terms of very clearly outlining what companies can’t do and other rich countries largely went along with that. That’s a great thing. I think – [it] may be that idea [will] come along. I hope the people who make those things are sophisticated and not over-simplistic.....

...Clearly people like ourselves are glad to go along with whatever reasonable things gets laid down. That’s why its part of the dialogue.

The internet overwhelmingly makes information available. It is not possible to block information, it is just not. You can make it so that the average person who just clicks on popular websites, with no extra effort, certain things don’t show up there. But in terms of actually blocking information… it’s bad news if you like to block libelous websites, or child pornography, or various things, copyright stealing. It’s very hard to do blocking. You can only take the very direct paths. And particularly if you put something up that says, we took this thing down, think of the time period between when you put it up and when it comes down and how people can cache that. It’s hard to block information. It’s so night and day versus when newspaper publishers and TV owners were small chokepoints that controlled the distribution of information.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:48 AM
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Via Scoble: GooglePark

Scoble posts on GooglePark....

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:16 AM
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More Search History In The Courts

Terrible story, but telling too.

Court papers released on Tuesday revealed Entwistle searched the internet for information on how to kill and commit suicide days before their deaths.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:51 AM
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China Net Hearings

Are going on today. Live blogging will be available from various authors, Red State has a list.

Also, an interesting development within the Chinese establishment, an open letter criticizing the party's information policies from senior (but out of power) party officials.

Update: WaPo on the story.

Update 2: Gary has it all here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:49 AM
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Oh Sh*t, Folks Care About This, What to Do?

Call me cynical, but this feels like a PR move, sound and fury, signifying, well...not much.

The State Department announced plans Tuesday to step up a campaign to combat efforts by foreign governments to restrict use of the Internet.

At a news conference, Josette Shiner, a top State Department trade expert, called the Internet "the greatest purveyor of news and information in history" but said too often the flow is blocked by government censors.

Shiner announced the formation of a task force that will consider, among other issues, the foreign policy aspects of Internet freedom, including the use of technology to restrict access to political content.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:47 PM
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I Was Wondering When This Would Happen

But I thought it would be Yahoo. Google grabs web analytics UI wizards Measure Map.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:08 PM
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Technorati, New State O' Blogosphere and "Filter by Authority"

Dave's post here is fascinating, from it:

Given that there's a lot of interesting topical posts by influential or authoritative bloggers in those topic areas, we formulated an idea: Why not use these authoritative bloggers as a new kind of editorial board? Watch what they do, what they post about, and what they link to as input to a new kind of display - a piece of media that showed you the most interesting posts and conversations that related to a topic area, like food, or technology, or politics, or PR. The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the "A-list". We call this new section Explore, and we've seeded it with some of the most interesting topics that we could find. But one of the nice things about Explore is that there are no gatekeepers, and that anyone who writes interesting topical blog posts can get included simply by tagging his blog and tagging his posts.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:08 AM
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The Fonz Said...

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:36 PM
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Never Poke a Dragon While It's Eating

(Caveat, something of a rant coming).

I've been unsettled about this whole China thing for a while, so to help me think things through, I called Xiao Qiang, a physicist who knows the China regime first hand, and has wrangled with it as the founder of Human Rights In China, then continued to think deeply about it as a scholar at the Berkeley China Internet Project, which was founded while I was still teaching at the school.

I caught Xiao at a good time, as he is leaving to testify in Washington Tuesday. He was ready to talk, and so was I, and together we puzzled through the rash of recent events - the two Yahoo incidents, the launch of Google.cn, the recent hearings in Congress, Google's defiance of the DOJ and the eerie parallels between the US's snooping for reasons of "National Security" and China's, Yahoo's call for help today, etc. If ever there was a critical mass building for some kind of action on this issue, why, it seems now would be it.

So what to say about all this? After all, can we really expect private companies to effect national and international policy? Perhaps if they banded together - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL (GYMA) - and said "Enough! We ask the Chinese government to respect the basic rights of humans to free speech and free association!" After all, besides the universal claim that "going into China, even censored, is better than not going in, in terms of total information available to the Chinese user," the real reason all these companies are going in is, well, their competitors are going in. What if they all agreed to hold hands and...not jump?

Oh please, I then say to myself. Don't be freakin' naive. Unity on an issue as freighted as national policy on China? This from a group of companies who can't even interconnect their goddamn IM networks? It'll never happen.

Let's set up the problem here, just for reference sake. After all, what's the big deal? Just like a sneaker company, Yahoo, Google, et al all have to play by Chinese rules in order to do business in China. If Nike can do it, why not Google?

Well, let's break that one down. What happens when Nike gets itself into a PR pickle over, say, child labor or issues of environmental degradation or fair wages? Why, Nike simply pledges to do better, to spend a bit more to nominally clean up the environment, or to pay its workers a living wage, or to not hire children. Such practices cost Nike a bit more money, but don't raise any eyebrows in Beijing. Nothing wrong with a US company spending more in China, after all.

But companies like Yahoo and Google don't traffic in sneakers, they traffic in the most powerful forces in human culture - expression. Knowledge. Ideas. The freedom of which we take as fundamental in this country, yet somehow, we seem to have forgotten its importance in the digital age - in China, one protesting email can land you in jail for 8 years, folks.

But... should GYMA decide they wanted to create some kind of pact that actually, well, had an opinion about how those forces of freedom should be let loose in a place like China, well, we all know how that would fly in Beijing. Not to mention Wall Street, of course.

But, some protest, the US policy of constructive engagement is working! Look how the Chinese economy is booming! How a new middle class is rising up! It's only a matter of time before that middle class demands some form of democracy, and the US policy will be vindicated.

Oh, really? Really? If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you in Baghdad. The Chinese own a shitload of our debt, and are consuming a shitload of the world's export base of oil. As they consolidate their power, do you really believe they're also planning parades for us? I'm pretty sure they'll be celebrating decades of US policy that looked the other way while the oligarchy used our technology (and that includes our routers, databases, and consulting services) to meticulously undermine the very values which allowed us to create companies like Google in the first place. But those are not the kind of celebrations I'm guessing we'd be invited to.

So as I puzzle through this issue, understanding how in practical terms it's really not sensible to expect that some GYMA pact is going to change the world (as much as I might wish it would), it really, honestly, comes down to one thing: The man in the White House.

Until the person leading this country values human rights over appeasement, and decides to lead on this issue, we're never going to make any progress. Congress can call hearings, and beat up Yahoo, Google and the others for doing what everyone else is doing, but in the end, it's not GYMA's fault, nor, as much as I wish they'd take it on, is it even their problem. It's our government's problem. Since when is China policy somehow the job of private industry?

Until that government gives GYMA a China policy it can align behind, well, they'll never align, and the very foundation of our culture - free expression and privacy, will be imperiled.

After all, the Chinese leaders must be thinking, as they snack on our intellectual property, we're only protecting our citizens in the name of national security.

Just like they do in the US, right?

Update: The Tibetans are protesting Google. Ugh.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:08 PM
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MSFT Acquires MotionBridge

Mobile search is heating up.

Today, at the 3GSM World Congress 2006, Microsoft Corp. announced the acquisition of MotionBridge, a leading provider of search technology designed specifically for mobile operators and the mobile Internet. MotionBridge, based in Paris, is a worldwide leader in mobile search technology that is currently available to customers through contacts with major mobile communications companies in Europe and North America.

“The emerging field of mobile search is strategically important and crucial to delivering on our vision for Windows Live™ of providing a seamless and rich information experience for individuals and businesses across devices,” said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of MSN Search at Microsoft.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:01 PM
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On China and Yahoo

Over at NPR, Xeni of BB has a take on the Yahoo story featuring my colleagues at Berkeley, Xiao Qiang and Orville Schell. Worth a listen.

Update: Yahoo is asking for a coalition of the willing on this issue, SEW reports.

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:40 PM
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ADVISE Me, Baby, Is This Just TIA In New Clothes?

From the CMS (Via ABC):

The U.S. government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity...

...The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement, or ADVISE. Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security, part of its three-year-old Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment, or TVTA, portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year....

...What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information — from financial records to CNN news stories — and cross-reference it against U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" — linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va.

The storage requirements alone are huge — enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. ...

..For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.

...ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."

My take on TIA and all this is both in the book, and here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:57 PM
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Hey, Wall St., Give Us A Break...

after all, we just launched a beta of Gmail just for you suits!

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:14 PM
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When You Make the Cover of Time

The shark has been jumped.

Update: Forgot to add a link to this post, which predicted the cover...

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:52 AM
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Comment Spam

For a good stretch, my intrepid sysadmin Scot had fought off the robotic legions of pagerank-sucking comment zombies, but they have scaled his javascript embattlements, and we are furiously falling back to fight another day. Bear with us as we figure out next steps...

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:49 AM
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Target: Google

Barron's has a reputation for hitting the darling of the moment in the groin, and this weekend that darling is Google. I have a WSJ sub, I'm not sure this link is open. If it's not, highlights:

INVESTORS HAVE BEEN FIXATED on Google the past few weeks, as its shares have tumbled nearly 25% from a peak of $475 -- and the fact is, there could be a lot more tumbling ahead. The share price could well be cut in half over the next year as the Internet giant grapples with growing competition from Microsoft and Yahoo!, increased pricing pressures in its online ad sales and mounting concern about what's known as click fraud.

..Over the next year, both Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN portal are expected to improve their search offerings. In the second half of this year, Yahoo! hopes to improve its systems so that search-engine ads are more relevant to search results and therefore more likely to be clicked....

...Last week, news came out that Amazon.com has jumped into the game through its network of "associates" -- Websites that have links to Amazon and receive fees when readers click the links and buy products. Amazon is offering to place ads from a third party on affiliates' sites; Amazon and the affiliates would then split the revenue generated by clicks on the third-party ads....

..Finally, there's the matter of persistent insider selling. As Google starts to spend the $5 billion it raised through two stock offerings in the past year and a half, its senior executives have aggressively sold shares. Co-founders Brin and Page have each sold more than $1.5 billion of stock. CEO Eric Schmidt sold $493 million. Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development, sold $793 million, and Ram Shriram, a director, pocketed $442 million, according to Thomson Financial.

Granted these folks all continue to have substantial holdings in the company, and most of the sales were part of pre-arranged selling programs that Google asked these executives to establish at the time of the IPO. Still, it's notable that none have purchased shares in the wake of the recent stock pullback. Investors might be wise to follow what they do and not what they say.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:57 AM
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This Is A Sponsored Video Deal

If ever I've seen one. Google "olympics."

(Thanks, anonymous reader!)

Update: Staci reminds me that this is an announced deal...)

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:22 PM
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Ask Gary

Gary Price, Search Engine Dude extraordinaire, is leaving Search Engine Watch and going to Ask, where he'll be Director of Online Information Resources. It's a loss for all of us and a big win for Ask, we'll miss him at SEW, but he'll keep his ResourceShelf site up and running, he tells me! Congrats Gary!

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:34 PM
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Yahoo Updates MyWeb 2.0

Yahoo has rev'd MyWeb 2.0. I think the idea is right on, but does anyone else sense that 360 and MyWeb are, well, a bit ahead of Yahoo's own audience curve?

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:18 AM
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More Anecdotal Evidence of A Closing CPC Price Gap?

From the InternetStockBlog, a note about Blue Nile's earnings, an echo of the FTD call last year.

Blue Nile reported a surprisingly weak 4Q05, in our view, blaming both weak jewelry industry fundamentals and what CEO Mark Vadon called irrational pricing in the pay per click advertising market (although we will continue to believe he said “eRational”). On the conference call, Mr. Vadon stated, “We saw extremely aggressive increases in the cost of online advertising. Our cost per click on Google for example, rose by over 50% from a year earlier. While the cost of online marketing grew significantly in Q4, we remain disciplined in our spending, in order to maintain profitability on new customers rather than to chase unprofitable growth, as some of our competitors have done.”

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:14 AM
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Google Desktop

If you had any doubt that Google plans to be a major force in the market that Microsoft dominates, this should erase them. Why do I say this? Well, because Google's new version of its Desktop software includes Tic Tac Toe, of course. And everyone know that clever operation system companies *always* include a game in their offerings...

Meanwhile, TechCrunch gets into the privacy and other implications.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:56 AM
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Scoble: Just Wait

Scoble asks: Why do search engines lie? He writes, after realizing that the number of results never is, in fact, the actual number of results:

Why aren’t there any truth in advertising laws for search engines?

Just wait, Robert. There will be.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:43 PM
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Now *That's* Convenient.

Google Says Firefox AdBlock Interferes With Gmail Chat

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:40 PM
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