John Battelle's Searchblog

Google settlement
The judge in the Google click-fraud case approved the $90m settlement---in credits, Google is pleased but 500 drop-out from the class-action. (Battelle talked earlier about this. ) AP: By settling claims made in the plaintiffs' class-action lawsuit, Google will give advertising credits that are the equivalent of a $4.50 refund on every $1,000 spent in its ad network during the past 4 1/4 years.

AOL Video
Time Warner introduces AOL Video search (with upload and sharing capabilities) that will offer on-demand video and TV shows like South Park, in addition to free content. TechWeb writes that the technology backbone is from Truevo and Singingfish, which AOL purchased last Dec. and in 2003 respectively. Planned to launch Aug. 4.

Hot eye-tracker study
A web navigation study finds the upper left of the search results screen attracts the majority of attention, with about 45% of user clicks within the slightly larger F-shaped area. Research at the University of Hamburg finds: the Web moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. Clickstream heatmaps and web page statistics show rapid interaction over smaller areas of the screen.
About 33% of searches contain 2 keywords, over 88% contain only 2-3. (from SEW)

False names
A loophole in ICANN's registration policy is abused in "a growing practice dubbed Domain Name Kiting," reports Kuro5hin: Of more than 35 million domain names registered in May 2006, less than 3 million were legitimate! The remaining 92% were dropped within five days without incurring registration fees...ICANN regulations permit domain registrars to delete a registration within five days a receive a full refund.

SEO guru Googler, Matt Cutts posts a few short vlogs on best and worst SEO practices, on Google Video of course. (Hmm, any YouTube users thinking the same thing?) In a few short segments Cutts answers some questions sent in by hats of all colors, discussing what really matters to a crawler and how to optimize, dispels some SEO myths, and champions user experience.

Is this the new Cutts vlog? Perhaps not, his ever SE-orientated audience quips it's not crawlable, "It’s also bad for your SEO, Matt!"

My coverage of Paul's post has prompted some very thoughtful discussion in the comments, and I wanted to point it out. An employee from Google and one from Yahoo are discussing the value and approach of R&D, with some great comments thrown in by other readers. Excerpts:

(JG@Yahoo)"Google treats research as an engineering task. And thus really only comes up with engineering solutions. They see some problem that's slightly broken, so they engineer a slightly better solution. With MS on the other hand, they've allowed funding for more pie-in-the-sky, long term projects, such as those that used to happen at PARC and Bell Labs."

(Random Googler) "I work at Google, and I see an amazing amount of research going on. The entire company is staffed with people with academic backgrounds in disciplines like computer science, computer engineering, mathematics, and so on. To imagine that we're not doing research constantly seems bizarre to me. The question of "yes, but how much basic research" you're doing also seems weird to me. When running your company involves solving fundamental problems in computer science and mathematics, that's what you do as your bread and butter."

(JG) "You mention the hordes of academics who have joined Google. I know, they're there. But if they're all busy launching products, who is creating the seeds for the next generation?"

Update: My bad. JG has a Yahoo mail address, but is not at Yahoo, he's a researcher at another Valley firm.

Reader Random Googler writes: So, I work at Google, and ...to imagine that we're not doing research constantly seems bizarre to me. The question of "yes, but how much basic research" you're doing also seems weird to me. When running your company involves solving fundamental problems in computer science and mathematics, that's what you do as your bread and butter....If Microsoft is really going to throw up charts and graphs, it'd be interesting to see their cumulative spending on R&D in their sixth year of existence as compared to Google's...it appears ... that Microsoft has spent nearly 40 billion dollars on R&D (cumulative) to produce a business that has about 40 billion a year in revenue.

Paul Kedrosky points to an interesting slide in Microsoft CTO Craig Mundie's recent analyst day presentation. The subject is R&D, the point Craig is making is that Microsoft is way outspending Google and others.

Paul points out:

Compelling, right? Microsoft's spending heavily on the Next Big Thing, while its layabout competitors, you know, aren't.

Well, I'm not so sure. Google has added over a $100-billion in market capitalization during the period, while Microsoft has shed around $30-billion in market cap. Similarly, Apple has added around 30-billion in market cap, while IBM has shed around $20-billion.

If you were of a grouchy frame of mind as a long-suffering shareholder, you could use this slide to argue that Microsoft overspends on R&D and investors would be better off off if it spent way, way less.

To which I'd add: I wonder how MSFT got these figures. Given that Google pretty much runs its engineering department as an R&D lab (ie, you can work on whatever you want at least 20% of the time), I'm guessing these figures are a bit off.

My pal Steven Johnson, he of wonderful books, had a third child recently. To celebrate, Steven asked his pals to link to his birth announcement post. For a brief moment, Steven's new son Dean was one of the top results in Google for "Dean". Then, abruptly, Dean was gone from Google's index.

Steven wonders, why?

Has Dean been labeled a black hat spammer by Google? Matt, can you help us?!

UPDATE: Matt says it was just the usual, er, burps.

A curious guy, named Tony Ruscoe, was digging though one of Google's many latent registered domains and found some interesting stuff. On the Sandbox subdomain (recently serving Checkout), Google is running experimental services. Although existing user names don't permit log-in, Ruscoe says he was able to create a new account on Sandbox and add new services, currently unavailable to regular users.

In the experimental bin sandbox.google.com, added 14 services to his "sandbox" account. Some of these are already disclosed, so only the surprises are listed here: Google Events, Google Guess, Google Online Assessment, Google Real Estate Search, Mobile Marketplace, New Service (AKA Workplace), and New Services.
Highlights: * Google Guess, as Ruscoe writes, "How many guesses do we get? This really could be anything!" * Google Online Assessment, he speculates is an internal tool--again, pretty vague. * Google Real Estate Search. * New Services has "code names like cf, gmt and voice."

* Mobile Marketplace: Maybe number 13 in John Battelle’s Predictions 2006 post will come true. Maybe Google will finally plug mobile “into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user” and maybe they’ll also be the ones to create “a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious.” But we’ll see...

* New Service (AKA Workplace): Maybe this is the big one people have been waiting for; the one that will really kill Microsoft Office. At least, if it’s at all related to IBM Workplace it could be. I don’t know an awful lot about this, so if anyone else feels more qualified to talk about it, please go ahead. All I know is that it’s got something to do with OpenOffice.org – so that’s why it could be the killer...

If you have a healthy paranoia about one (or any) search engine caching every detail (date/time/IP/terms) of your search history, ixquick may have the answer. Icquick acts as an unretentive buffer to search with eleven top engines. Particularly interesting given the government's repeated irreverence for constitutional privacy protections, much less respect for well-maintained corporate safeguards.
Ixquick's Meta Search feature enables the user to simultaneously search 11 of the best search engines. However, Ixquick does not share the user's personal data with these individual search engines in any circumstances. In addition, as of this week, Ixquick will delete the users' IP addresses and 'unique user IDs' from its own 'Log Files'.

...then check this out. (A bit off topic, but I have three kids - four if you count FM, which I'm pretty proud of as well...)

A while back I posted a note asking you all who you'd like to see interviewed here on Searchblog. The top vote getter was Bill Gross, of Goto/Overture, Picasa, Knowledge Adventure, and Snap fame. (He also starred in Chapter 5 of my book). Bill was gracious enough to agree to an email interview, and even more gracious to agree to answer some of your questions in the comments section, when time permits.

As those of who who've read The Search know, I'm a fan of Bill and his work. From Chapter 5:

By his own account, Gross has been starting companies since he was
thirteen. His problem was never ideas. No, he, in fact, has way too
many of those. His problem was scale—how could he possibly start
companies as quickly as he could dream them up?
Gross started in a linear fashion, building companies one at a
time. He’d grow them till he got bored or distracted (or both); then
he’d sell them. He funded his first year of college by selling solar en-
ergy conversion kits through ads in the back of Popular Mechanics.
While still an undergraduate (at the California Institute of Technol-
ogy in Pasadena), Gross hacked up a new high-fidelity speaker de-
sign and launched GNP, Inc., to sell his creations (GNP stood for
Gross National Products—an indication of Gross’s sense of humor
as well as an underdeveloped sense of modesty).
But Gross had reason to boast: GNP, Inc., grew to claim number
seventy-five on Inc. magazine’s 1985 list of the 500 Fastest-Growing
Companies. When he graduated, he sold the speaker business to his
college partners and started a software company that presaged much
of the rest of his life’s work. The company, GNP Development, al-
lowed computer users to type natural language commands that the
computer would translate into the arcane code needed to execute spe-
cific tasks. In other words, Gross’s company created a program that
in essence let you “talk” to the computer in plain English, as opposed
to computer code. Gross’s program was a small step toward Silver-
stein’s Star Trekinterface (as discussed in Chapter 1)—the holy grail
of nearly everyone in search today.

Searchblog: You've had tremendous success over your career, and in particular with search (Magellan, Goto/Overture, Picasa, etc.). But the world has woken up to search - and Google seems to gain market share monthly. Yet you are trying to once again take on the world with Snap. What makes you feel like there's still an opportunity there?

Grosss: I've always thought that search is extremely important, but my interest in it has always been very personal in that I've always been trying to make things that "I" would really want. With Magellan, I wanted to be able to view my files faster than DOS allowed back then. With Goto, I wanted a way to remove the spam at that time from the Top 10 listings at the search results I was seeing. The pay model seemed like the best way to do it, and although ridiculed at first, really took off. And then again with Picasa, we really wanted a way to browse and organize our photos better than the PC-based tools allowed at that time.

Snap is very similar, in that a team of us at Idealab just brainstormed about what things we would like to have that would make search more productive for us. It might not be for everybody, but we feel there is a lot of room for innovation in particular areas, and we're extremely excited to pursue that. I absolutely agree with you that the world has woken up to search, but that is far from saying that every idea in search has been done, and thus it is very exciting to us.

What do you make of Google? When folks ask you for your unvarnished opinion of the company, what do you say? What is its biggest weakness? Strength?

I think Google is an amazing company. They have a money machine, and they continue to introduce a broad array of new advertising offerings. I think they are turning out to be one of the best competitors in the history of business -- and they have shown that with their ability to go up against MSFT and stay ahead. That's a very impressive feat.

I think their biggest strengths in order, are their profit margins, their brand, their core relevance algorithm, their number of advertiser relationships, and their many smart mathematicians and developers. I think their only weakness, and it's small, is the increasing challenge they will have to keep up their rate of innovation now that they are becoming such a large company.

I have to ask, given that you starred in a chapter in my book, what you thought of that chapter, and if perhaps you disagree with my characterization of you as a bit wistful that perhaps GoTo could have become Google, so to speak?

I don't recall how it came across in your book, but I am certainly not wistful. I think Goto "did" become Google <smile> as I think 99% of Google's revenues come from pay per click. Seriously, Google did an amazing job of building upon Goto's early success.
Seriously also, we're honored to have played a part in causing such a fundamental and profitable shift in the internet advertising space over the last 10 years.

Do you have any ideas about what search might look like in five or ten years? Do you think pure search sites will continue to prosper? How might they be different from today?

I do think pure search sites will continue to prosper, but I also think that there will be many new kinds of specialized search that continue to surprise us. I just made up a little table of the searches I do per day over the last 20 years, looking at some key milestones, like when I started using email heavily, and then when Netscape took off, and then when the first search engine companies went public, and then again when new tools came out, like X1 for searching email, iTunes for searching music, my TomTom for searching for locations.

Overall, I find myself increasing my searching from a few searches per day at the beginning of the 90's to probably 40-50 searches per day now, but that includes my daily email and file searches with X1, searches with Snap and Google, patent searches, music searches, and so on.

So I think that search in the future is going to continue this march, impacting our lives with, say 25% compound annual growth in our usage. And I think search will continue to find a greater and greater place in our daily lives, where it's just embedded in nearly everything we do, to find information, entertainment, friends, places, and 10 more things that are as hard to imagine now as it would have been 10 years ago that I would type 3 characters, then see some album art, and then click play.

Would you be open to answering a couple of questions from the Searchblog readers when we post this?

Yes, I'd be happy to answer some questions as long as it's not overwhelming in time.

Thanks to Xeni at BB, this story of a Federal search warrant to search, well, Google, to find the clickstream of a fellow who threatened the NAACP.

Cnet covers it (this is old news from last week's earnings call)

Google-powered ads, which have become a mainstay on Web sites, are now being played on at least one radio station in Detroit. And like so many other Motor City radio products, it won't be long before they go global. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a conference call with analysts last week that the search giant plans to make its radio-ad business generally available within three months.

You probably hate these posts? Why doesn't Battelle just use Delicious, for goodness sakes? I dunno, call me old school, but here are stories I find noteworthy that happened while I was away last week on vacation:

Microsoft says folks can use Google in Vista.

Google moves the ball on "invalid click" tracking - a report out of the Lanes click fraud case says Google is taking reasonable steps to control it.

Google killed its earnings again, Yahoo had less than happy news (delays on YPN, for starters). MSN, meanwhile, reports revenues are down. But Google's stock didn't pop. Some folks say the reason is increasing costs. Fred says buy YHOO.

Hitwise breaks down Google properties.

YouTube hits 100mm a day (I hope to have a new post on YT soon, pending response from them about this post, which I can understand they didn't take kindly to).

Read this lede from Cnet:

The heads of the nation's two major spy agencies on Wednesday told Congress that it's impractical to seek warrants before tracking the global phone and Internet activities of groups like al-Qaida and terrorist sympathizers.

Yep, that pesky Constitution: Impractical. Oh, by the way: are you a "sympathizer"? You sure?

Sean Bonner of Metroblogging (an FM affiliated site) vents his frustration about how Google choses which sites to include in Google News. He even mentions Searchblog, which is not in the index.

Another great example of their weird acceptance policy, if they even have one that is, is the fact that the Search Engine Watch Blog is included, while John Battelle's Searchblog isn't - even though they cover a good deal of the same news.

We've seen this discrimination (don't really know what else to call it) first hand with Metroblogging. Google News includes our Los Angeles art specific blog art.blogging.la, but declined to include the main site www.blogging.la. They claimed it wasn't original news, but rather covered news reported elsewhere. They specifically asked if we could create a section of the site which highlighted the original news which they could then include in their index. We created the section and then they turned it down again without reason.

I have in fact asked Google why Searchblog isn't in the Google News index, and the answer is not specific, it's general - along the lines of "we prefer sites that are run by institutions, not individuals."

I think this points to a larger issue. Like the original Google index, Google News started pretty quietly, without a lot of concern about the impact it might have on sites it indexed. But as its grown and started to really matter as a source of traffic, the very same concerns which webmasters had about the Google index are surfacing. What do I need to do to be in the index? Why are my competitors there, but not me? How do you rank my stuff? Is Google singling me out?

It's clear that there is not, as of yet, a well communicated set of policies with regard to how Google makes decisions about what is and isn't news. And that's Google's prerogative. There is no question, however, that the company is making editorial decisions by including or excluding sites. If and when Google begins to make money from the site, however, those policies will have to be clarified. Given how long it's been around without a business model, it's fair to say that day may never come.

Update: A posting by Jon Udell of InfoWorld on this topic is worth reading.

G-Maps mobile traffic tracker
Google Maps adds a mobile traffic tracker, as well as allowing users to save routes. Currently only for mobile users (in 30 metro areas, on 100 types of devices), plans are in the works to expand services to online users.

Digg Labs
Digg Labs goes live, unveiling new infosthetic (data visualization) tools: Swarm and Stack---previewed earlier, in the version 3 launch.

Giants don't do 'niche'
A great post on BuzzMachine talks about the need for specialized search, and why that means the burgeoning "Google is not invincible."

Microformats
An interview with microformat thought leaders, Tantek Çelik and Rohit Khare, at Wharton.

Diigo
An addition to the social bookmarking bandwagon. Diigo's standout feature is that its a sticky-note and highlighter apps. run as an overlay, in situ on webpages.

David P of BB pointed me to this hilarious site where folks are busy "Web 2'ing" well known corporate logos. Very funny. There are literally hundreds of them, most are really well done. A total send up of the design grammar that has come to say "hip, cutting edge web company."

Though I'm not sure Google will use this one for external PR, it's pretty funny, and includes a tour of many Google features (Calendar, Base, Maps, Alerts etc) in the pursuit of one goal:

This article is about using the many Google sites and applications to get yourself a girl and get yourself laid. In it we’re going to use a guy called Johnny McCool. Johnny is a 22 year old Internet nerd. He works as a programmer with some megacorp, went straight from the computer labs in college to the cubicle farm. He needs to get out more and he needs a girlfriend.

(Thanks to Cory J.)

Jay Rosen, a leading thinker w/r/t new media and journalism, has launched the idea of NewAssignment.net. Launched an idea? Yup, he's postulated a new approach to covering the news, and wants to see if his audience can take it to fruition. Craig Newmark likes what he's hearing, and has offered to fund the first few stories. From Jay's post:

In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net.

The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.

In this sense it’s not like donating to your local NPR station, because your local NPR station says, “thank you very much, our professionals will take it from here.” And they do that very well. New Assignment says: here’s the story so far. We’ve collected a lot of good information. Add your knowledge and make it better. Add money and make it happen. Work with us if you know things we don’t.

A major release for the venerable blog search engine. Why describe all the new features, when they've make a really watchable screencast? Congrats, guys.

Dabble video search launches today. It accesses over 240 video hosting sites, including small independent sites alongside YouTube, Revver, Bilp.tv, Google Video, etc.

Its 120 partnerships (and growing) are more necessary in video search because active, direct collaboration is necessary where spidering is blocked. In the long run, this may help Dabble position itself as an axis for video content.

Dabble is working to systemize the varied permission methodologies of hosts to create their video database. Mary Hodder, CEO says, they're working on creating RSS feed standards with several sites, including Photobucket, as well on mirrorplay, a tag-sharing standard built on xFolk, with bilp.tv, mefeedia, and others.

This NY Post item caught my eye - YouTube was the toast of Herb Allen's Sun Valley conference, and therefore is now worth $1 billion. I don't buy it. I don't think the founders are smoking this shit, I think the media is - at least I hope that's how it is. Why? Simple really. While YouTube is an amazing service, with extraordinary uptake, I've been told (and it seems obvious on first glance) that its core content is mostly copyrighted material. (I make this statement after being told as much by two very senior folks at major media companies who have studied content patterns on YouTube.)

Now, folks who own copyrights are waking up to the power of letting their copyrighted content flourish on YouTube, but that particular worm has not turned - content companies are very, very wary of letting this genie out of the bottle.

So who might buy YouTube? A major entertainment company, like the ones mentioned in the Post piece? No way. That's buying a lawsuit or ten - if Time Warner bought YouTube, how long do you think it'd be before competitors sued to get their copyrighted stuff off TW's new service? And once that stuff is cleared off (YouTube does make a point of taking down copyrighted material when asked, but policing that massive service is not exactly a hand-rolled affair), what is YouTube worth then?

It's something of a catch 22, and augurs a waiting period of sorts. I personally believe YouTube proves that our culture wants desparately out of the traditional model of force fed television, and wants to move to a model where we participate in it - indeed, where we remix and share it. But change takes time, and Big Media Companies With Alot To Lose don't change that quick.

What about a new media giant buying YouTube - Yahoo, say, or Google? Or Microsoft? Nope, nope, nope. Yahoo is a media company, and acts like one. Google doesn't have it in its DNA to run a service like YouTube (though Google, with its Switzerland like approach to content, is the best fit, in my opinion). And Microsoft? They don't need any more legal headaches over in Redmond right now.

It should be an interesting Fall season, that's for sure. I'll be watching.

(While I was out, there was news about YouTube updating its Terms of Use. Boing Boing has coverage here).

Publishing 2.0 charges 'Hypocrisy in Google's User Experience Policies', after juxtaposing Google's penalization of AdWords advertisers for low quality landing pages and its simultaneous advocation of parked pages among AdSense users.

Publishing 2.0: Explain this — Google is penalizing AdWords advertisers “who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages,” and yet Google just signed a deal with GoDaddy.com to run AdSense on parked domains (via JenSense):
The program is called CashParking. And the monthly fee is scaled depending on what percentage of GoDaddy’s revenue you want to keep. It is worth noting that GoDaddy is sharing the revenue they earn from Google, so Google will still be earning money from each click on a parked domain page.

Google AdSense for Domains: "allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google’s semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names."

True enough, if Google assumes that parked pages are ill-advised search results and yet encourages their proliferation it would seem they are hypocrites. But then Google is only thinking of 'Google user experience', right? So this would assume Google intends to permit these pages to appear anywhere near the top results. (Most users only view the first page of results.) How likely is that?

To be a hypocrite is to elicit a false positive of good intentions. By that standard Google probably isn't hypocritical about its commitment to user experience, but just aiming to plug-up someone else's engine to their own profit. (Although there are adjectives to characterize that too.)

Fun with Google
- E4! on Google Earth.
Techkwondo is developing a game of Battleship for Google Earth that interacts for the drop with players' cell phone GPS signals. (via Blogscoped)
- Painting with Google.
Also via Philipp, a fan creates a working mock-up of what Google Paint might look like.
I've been messing around with Phillipp's new book, 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google-- and it is just that.

Keyword price down-tick
The average bid for search marketing keywords went down 8.6 ($1.27) in Q2, reports the research firm Fathom.

Search Zoom
Become.com introduces Search Zoom, which aims to capitalize on its vertical advantage with categories: buying guides, product reviews, discussion forums and product details. Become’s Sr. Director of Product Search, Jon Glick notes in Comparison Engines:

“If you’re a general purpose search engine, you can’t have 30 buttons across the top. As a vertical search engine, we just wanted to limit the choices to the decisions that people who need to make a buying decision need. We have a more constrained problem. We can help people in ways that Google as a general search engine can’t.”

Apparently not anymore. YouTube altered their Terms and Conditions to claim ownership a broad, sweeping license of all and parts of uploaded content---visual, audio, and all.

"…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business… in any media formats and through any media channels."

Will this give leverage the bumper crop of other collaborative community video site blossoming out in that fresh start-up air?
(Wired Music talks more. And, thanks Eric.)

This is a few days old, but it's worth the note whilst channeling some vintage Battelle circa 2004 (without consent in his hiatus, of course) ...Microsoft is marking the ground in enterprise search.

"Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off our plate, because that is what they are intending to do." Microsoft's Kevin Turner at a company conference.

The "people" that Turner was referring to was Google, and the "food" was corporate search customers...Turner, who joined Microsoft from Wal-Mart Stores 11 months ago, was adamant that corporate search is "our house." "Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business," he told 7,000 delegates in Boston. (From Forbes)

In 2004 Battelle wrote of Enterprise, after some yawning:
When Google goes public, and it seems that this is most certainly a when, rather than an if, it will have to grow. And once it's hit the plateau of consumer facing businesses, it will turn to the corporate IT market (it's already focused on the problem and is cranking up that focus). That market is still nascent, and there are buckets of money there (just ask Microsoft or FAST.) Mark my words, boring as it might seem, corporate search will be a big deal.

Whereas MSFT seeks MSN to miraculously overtake googlebot, GOOG aims to release a free beta for every office app. in Microsoft's toolkit---plus Enterprise. (Isn't this ripe for parody of 'I'm a Mac and I'm a PC' ads?)

Meanwhile, Microsoft announces Vista will allow users to use Google. Why, thank you for the permission and likely avoiding stacking the headlines with another grueling trust lawsuit. ...All right then, maybe not.

Google burps, we listen. In this case, Google Finance is registering hiccups from user feedback and has added some initial improvements:

- a stock-market module on the business section of Google News and support for multiple portfolios.
- auto-suggest feature to the search box.
- reverse chronological order for message boards.
- adding links to SeekingAlpha, which offers free transcripts on many earnings calls.

Yahoo plop
Yahoo share dropped "nearly 22 percent on Wednesday," reports the WashPost. "The wipeout erased about $10.4 billion in shareholder wealth," although the Q2 revenue is up 26%. (Thread Watch mumbles, 'because they can't keep up with pushing out more beta products like Google.')

India blocks ISPs for security
The block on blogging sties in India is reportedly due to a government security blackout aimed at derailing "terror units (read SIMI)" by physically locating IP addresses. According to Mutiny, India asked ISPs to suspend access to blogspot, typepad, and geosites. This may clear up the lack of explanation since Sunday, but it is unofficial and meanwhile Indians are fuming.

Estimating MySpace search
Whether or not the mega social site generates proportional ad revenue, it certainly is making a dent on search referrals. An interesting Business Week article suggests MySpace search is powered by RevenueSource (the auction specualtion continues) and parses stats on MySpace's generation of search traffic, but SEW says the numbers don't add up. Was that 5% of search traffic on the web, .06% in the US, or 8% of Google's search?

Post secrets
According to a new PEW study (PDF): Bloggers largely post about their personal lives (37%)---rather than general topics such as technology, politics, business or other news. Also, authors are generally young (54% under 30) and evenly divided between genders. (via Resource Shelf)

It's probably a good sign when the first response to a new service is, Why hasn't this happened before? dealspl.us (uncapitalized) users contribute posts on shopping deals they find and community votes determine the importance of a bargain, bringing it to the front page.

It's self-billed as a combination of Digg and BensBargains.net, for which one of the DP co-founders also serves as President. From the press release: "dealspl.us... is the first and only [community shopping] site [that] combines social bookmarking, user level, and non-editorial control over the posted content.

An interesting exchange on the Semantic Web yesterday, when Peter Norvig responded to Tim Bereners-Lee's presentation on AI. Norvig commented at length (venting some frustration) that the semantic web would facilitate the interloping spam and PageRank manipulation Google faces.

"What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?' I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first," Norvig said. Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user.
(CNet story has full quotes, via Resource Shelf)

Great net neutrality debate
Yesterday's conversation between Vint Cerf and David Farber on "What is Net Neutrality?" is available via podcast from the Center for American Progress: feed (mp3).

Bix
If American Idol is any indication, there's a ripe market to serve the hopes of aspiring stars as well as their entertainment to a wide audience. Launched today, Bix hopes to answer with a platform to run home-grown talent contests in video, music, and other media.

The farthest hub from hip
Meet Wal-Mart's miserable attempt to create a hip social video site: The Hub. Think MySpace stripped of content, striped with pending approval notices on what content is left, and emails sent to parents of teens who register.

Rank comparison
Fortune completes the first phase of research analyzing the comparative ranking methods of the Google, Yahoo!, and MSN engines. Amid differences, the three giant engines in common use the quality of incoming links as the most important off-page contribution to search ranking, and the quantity of those links as the least.

“So, yes we are IDIOTS — and please WRITE THAT DOWN," insisted CEO Eric Schmidt in an impromptu interview on Friday, referring to Google management between the IPO filing and going pubic.
From Reuters (the whole audio interview, here):

THE IDIOTS RUNNING GOOGLE
Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells reporters:
“(During the 2004 IPO process), between the time we filed and the time we went public, the press was among the most unpleasant I have ever experienced.
“We (Google management) were ‘idiots,’ we were ‘useless’… I thought ‘God.’…It is a terrible feeling of being on the other side of that (press coverage).
“So we looked at (Google’s Web site) traffic and revenue and they were exploding… We had a very, very strong quarter right after the worst possible press about ‘the idiots running the company.’
“I don’t know what that tells you.
Schmidt then paused and begged the reporters to create a new Google press frenzy:
“So, yes we are IDIOTS — and please WRITE THAT DOWN.”

WE HAVE EVERY PROBLEM YOU CAN IMAGINE… QUICKER
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “We have every known problem that a growth company has — quicker…Write down all the obvious problems, we have every one of them. So we make a list of them (potential problems) and we anticipate them.”
Reporter: Are there any non-obvious problems?
Schmidt: “No. no.”
Reporter: Is it a list of 10-15?
Schmidt: “I would say it is about 20.”

Last week Websense, a security company, found a way to use Google search to identify and capture malware. The software exploits Google's binary functions to view .exe files on Windows computers.

"The most interesting thing about Google's binary search capability is not its security implications, but the fact that it shows that Google may be thinking about becoming a file searching service." Johnny Long, a security researcher with Computer Sciences told PC World.

Websense planned to limit the release its software and findings for security. But now there's Metsploit, a newly erected "hacker-friendly" malware engine, similarly piggybacking on Google's engine.

Can't quite place that tune? Musiclens is a free German, search app. to find and explore music by varying the balance of several criteria --adjust between ear-busting to silent, or from instrumental to vocal; it also includes keyword and time period search.

Also, Last.fm music search recently went live, completing a beta phase begun last fall. Last.fm creates personalized radio stations by combining a user's favorite songs with an algorithmic recommendation feed taken from a network of users with similar tastes.

Last is similar to Pandora in its offerings (with the addition of a social space and communication tools between users). But Last's analytics rely on the frequency songs are played (by a user and their social network) and a folksonomy of tagging. In contrast, Pandora radio derives from the more ambitious Genome Music Project, which uses musical attributes and elements to create its search analytics.

If keyword search is hampered by orthography and text spam, imagine the challenges in harnessing ambient audio into a durable search engine--probably harder than Quaero would guess.

I very rarely, if ever, take a day where I don't check email, my feeds, or work.

That is going to change this coming week, starting Saturday morning. I've cleared out my email, and set the autoresponders.

For one week, I intend to not answer email. I will not post on the site. I will not answer phone calls.

I will be in the mountains, away from cel coverage, with my three kids and my extraordinary wife. We will be singing silly campfire songs and playing a lot of frisbee golf. Much wine will be consumed. Much hiking and yoga and fishing will ensue. And I for one can't wait.

Melanie will hold down the fort while I am gone, and for that I am thankful. Onward, to the Lair of the Bear.

A colleague from NY who prefers to be anonymous sends me this email:

Sitting stuck in traffic on way to Mumbai airport. Various peddlers offering flowers, newspapers, etc knock on the car window. And here's one with pirated books. My, the world certainly is flat I think looking at friedman's samizdat cover. And then I look down the pile -- and there is your book. It won't put food on your table, but you should be happy to know that the guys who rely on one or two sales a day and can only carry a few books have put you on their bestseller list.

First, amazing that he can send me that note while in traffic in one of the most perilous places on earth (at least, last week it was). Second, how cool is it that The Search is a street bestseller in Mumbai?! Do I care about the piracy? No. No, no no. I care that someone in Mumbai cared enough to rip it off, and that someone there might be reading my stuff. That is just cool. Commercial markets always follow the free, or, well, the pirates in this case. Always.

IM interoperability
Limited public testing is underway on integrated IM communication between Yahoo Messenger with Voice and Microsoft's IM service. Combined, Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger would comprise the world's largest IM community, and the first partnership of its kind.

Q&A with Hayden on Social Search and JetEye
David Hayden, co-founder of Magellan, talks about with SEL about his vision for the future of social search and his new project, JetEye.

So in a word, social search will be mainstream, because it represents the pursuit of knowledge over information, and the pursuit of knowledge must be a mainstream activity.

Watson customizable search
Watson, the free, contextual search sidebar by Intellext, is now customizable with sites like MySpace and the WSJ. Waston mines data in engines, social sites, desktops, blogs, news, subscriptions, and networks.

I don't say this much, but .... watch this space. GData has all the right geeks fibrillating...it's Hailstorm but....opener. (Nice touch, wanting to call it "Shitstorm....").

Fortune recently ran an interview with Google's Vint Cerf (I think it's in the current issue, it's not up on the site yet). That was unfortunate for Business 2.0, the magazine where I do interviews, because I had recently completed an interview with him as well. Given that B2 is monthly and Fortune comes out every two weeks, Fortune scooped B2, and now the magazine doesn't want to run my interview.

Well, that's great for us. Because B2 said I can run it here, a full month ahead of when it would get through B2's production process, and at greater length.

Vint, who is Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet, does not mince words in this interview. He's clearly got a point of view, and he is not afraid to explain it. Of note - Cerf understands the Bellhead point of view personally, he spent a fair amount of time at MCI before joining Google....

Here's Part 1, more coming as I edit it...

----------------------

Searchblog: I’ve got a bunch of stuff to ask you. I don't know if you saw - I posted on my site requesting questions for you...You do read Searchblog, right?!

CERF: Well I actually would like to, finding a few hours between midnight and 3 in the morning.

Searchblog: I knew it … Let’s get to the hot issue right now: Can you define the issue of net neutrality and why is so much at stake right now?

CERF: Okay, so let me try and we’ll see whether it seems to make sense to you. This whole issue arose when (AT&T CEO) Ed Whitacre made some charges in the press that Internet service providers or information service-providers or application service-providers were getting a free ride on his broadband network and he thought that was wrong. And he said that he was going to fix that problem - he was going to make damn sure that companies like Google paid him to get access.

Searchblog: This sounds a little bit like “I’m not making enough money in my core business and I’m a little jealous of Google’s business model.”

CERF: I would have to concur that it sure sounds like that.

Searchblog: Now the response of course is – “Well wait a minute, I’m paying 30 bucks a month for DSL or cable, and I’m sure Google pays its bandwidth bill on time every month. Isn’t this really about the idea of a tiered network?”

CERF: Well, the term “tiered network” turns out to be ambiguous, so let’s hang onto that for just one second. Let me come back to what we believe has been sold to the subscriber and then what we believe is inconsistently being said by the broadband provider. Now I don’t mean to suggest every broadband provider is necessarily behaving this way. Some of them are sitting back, maybe privately hoping that the claim that’s being made (by folks like Whitacre) will somehow be feasible or be achieved and then they’ll jump on the bandwagon.

Here’s what (folks like Whitacre) are saying: “Well, we built this network and we can do anything we want with it. And by the way, the FCC has now essentially released us of any common carrier obligations we ever had, thank you very much, and so we can do whatever we want to and why don’t you just buzz off.”

That sort of grates a little bit. Gee, excuse me, but we don’t get a free ride at all. We spend an awful lot of money being connected to the public Internet backbone, in addition to which we pay a lot of money for our own Internet backbone that links all of our computer centers together at substantial capacity, which is necessary to do what we do.

Moreover, the subscriber has been told (by the telcos and cable ISPs) that if you pay for broadband service, you’ll get access to everywhere on the Internet. But then they’re saying, in the same breath or same paragraph anyway, “Well actually, it’s not quite like that because the places you’ll be able to get to in this broadband mode are only the ones that we’ve done business deals with. So well we’re going to shut out Google unless they pay or, you know, shut out eBay, or Amazon.”

And so this means that the subscriber’s choice has suddenly been circumscribed by what business model the people at these broadband service-providers have been able to invent. My view of their invention is that the business model seems very 20th century and very backwards looking.

Searchblog: In what way?

CERF: They seem to be very focused on video as a service. Lots of people associate broadband and video as being somehow linked at the hip. What they do not understand, apparently, is that people are not necessarily eager to watch video in a streaming mode, limiting themselves to whatever is being transmitted at the moment. And if you’re paying any attention at all to Tivo and iPod and other fairly modern communication services, you’ll find people downloading things and then listening to or watching them later. And if you are no longer watching the video as its being delivered to your hard drive, then you no longer need for it to be delivered in realtime in a viewable form. The broadband providers seem to be reinventing the cable and satellite television service model for the Internet. What mystifies me about this is that they are therefore going after an already hotly completing-for market with a finite revenue stream. So the best they can do is a share of that market. Their entry is not going to increase the market, in my view.

Searchblog: Right.

CERF: They’d be renting or leasing or otherwise paying for content from all the same sources. And all it does is add a competitor who delivers nothing new. For the life of me I do not understand why one would base a business on this 20th century model, when you could be thinking the way the people in the U.K., in New Zealand, in The Netherlands and places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore are thinking. What they’re saying is let’s open this broadband pipe up. Let’s make sure that access to it is open in the sense that there isn’t any constraint as to where the subscribers to these services can go on the Internet. Let’s allow innovative new services to enter into the system without constraining them to pay tolls in order to deliver an innovative new service. Let’s look at Yahoo! and Amazon and eBay and Google. Here are four companies that did not need to get permission from the Internet service-provider or to pay a special tariff to the Internet service-provider in order to offer the service.

Part 2 Coming ....

I like the tone of this post refuting the widespread coverage of Eric's click fraud comments. It feels....like Google being part of a conversation. I wish it came a bit quicker, but it's worth a read.

Update: Donna Bogatin responds to Google's response...she's pissed....

A federal judge threw out KinderStart's sweeping lawsuit against Google yesterday, but left the door open for the whole thing to start again. The key thing here, I think, is the concept of "objectivity". From ZDNet coverage:

(Judge) Fogel wrote that a PageRank score reflects Google's opinions, and suggested that a score generated by a computer algorithm is likely not defamatory. But if KinderStart can prove a case of "manual intervention" by Google, Fogel wrote, the outcome might be different.

My interview with AOL's Jonathan Miller is up now on CNN/B2.0.

Excerpts:

..it's true that too much of our innovation was locked behind the subscriber wall. It was less than a year ago that AOL moved out onto the Web, launching AOL.com, which is such a good broadband portal that our friends at Yahoo (Charts) have redesigned their homepage to look a whole lot like it.

...AIM turns out to be more extensible than I think anybody would have imagined. As it turns out, it can be used for real-time voice communication, not just text. Adding in video chat and other things is another opportunity.

....All the players are trying to do the same fundamental things: e-mail, search, and now social networking. MySpace is the newest entrant - the new kid on that block, if it turns out they have real staying power.

The new entrant before them was Google. Everyone else in the rest of the group -Yahoo, Microsoft, and so on - is more than 10 years old, which I think is important to consider. Achieving one of those primary positions is genuinely difficult; it doesn't happen every day.

I'm less concerned about them and more concerned about the startups and other companies that might be gaining on us. If a hundred companies achieve the kind of scale we have, then the pie gets much more fragmented. As it is, there's plenty to go around between Yahoo and us and the others. ...

...Are we ready for a partial spinoff that would give us a stock currency of our own? We're still not quite there. This year we are very much in a process of transitioning the business. And there are very positive signs.

....What's your takeaway from the Google deal?

Well, I think the process reminded people that AOL has real value on the Web, and it was nice to be wanted. I think that was healthy for our company. We had to decide whether to extend a great partnership with Google or start competing with it. At the end of the day, it was too much of a jolt to leave Google.

And at crunch time, Google indicated a willingness to do some things with us that hadn't been on the table before, like letting us sell search ads directly to our advertisers and making a $1 billion investment in us. On the other side, with Microsoft, it was difficult to figure out how to run the proposed business.

A series of tubes, is what Senator Ted Stevens called the Internet. He has no idea what he's talking about, but he's against net neutrality, that's for sure, and he is, in fact, a major voice in the debate. Scary? Yeah. All you need to know, really, can be found here. Really. Listen. It's so....good. (Thanks, Bill Gibson).

Nat Torkington of O'Reilly is touring the Valley and talking to interesting companies, and writing up his thoughts. They are very good. So far he's done Meebo and Ning.

Yesterday Hitwise blogged a striking discovery: MySpace is bigger than anyone online. Well, sort of anyway - the fine print read:

...www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users.

Today, Yahoo begged to differ, issuing its own release. From the Mail & Guardian online coverage:

Yahoo! rejected the claim as "misleading" because it ranked the search engine's domains such as search, news, and e-mail separately instead of adding them together.

Reminds me of last summer...

When I left Wired in 1997, the company was in the midst of a very complicated financial transaction, the end of which was the splitting of Wired magazine from Wired Digital and Wired News. From that point on, the magazine was hobbled by not having its own domain, nor control of its own digital destiny. Now that oddity has been rectified, finally. I very much hope Conde Nast plans to let the newly reunited Wired brand sprout online wings and truly fly. Congrats, Wired! (image via Chris Anderson's site)

And by the way, Chris's book The Long Tail is #4 on Amazon today. His book launched this week, to great reviews, and I am so pleased for him. And check out what Amazon thinks is a good match:

In a public article, the Journal today has details on AOL's proposal to take portions of its service free.

Time Warner Inc. expects its AOL unit to sacrifice nearly $1 billion of operating profit through 2009 under a proposed plan to offer the online service free of charge to some customers, according to internal company forecasts. The company, however, is also forecasting that growth in Internet ad revenue will partially offset the expected decline in subscription revenue and ultimately leave the company more profitable.

The new proposal would cut roughly in half profit from AOL's sale of Internet subscriptions in the U.S. in the next three years, the forecasts show, from $1.6 billion this year to about $800 million in 2009. According to the forecasts, AOL, which has 18.6 million U.S. subscribers now, would end up with just over six million by the end of 2009...

...If AOL fails to meet growth targets for ad sales, Time Warner could take a substantial hit to its bottom line. The online division accounts for about 20% of its operating profit.

AOL's internal forecasts estimate revenue from sales of domestic Internet subscriptions to drop by a staggering $2.7 billion over the next three years, from about $4.2 billion this year to about $1.5 billion in 2009...

..The plan, to be put to Time Warner's board at the end of the month, comes as Wall Street has been pushing Time Warner executives to take decisive action to fix AOL. The Internet division's woes have weighed on the company's stock price for several years. Time Warner stock has fallen 11% since February.

The real question here is whether TW will let AOL pursue this, or if its content/cable roots will get in the way. If in fact this battle is lost inside TW, I wonder if Jonathan Miller will stick around. A guy can take just so much internal politics. Just a thought. ...

ExactSeek
ExactSeek search launches in beta, with an index of over 100 million documents and growing. ExactSeek accepts url submissions to its index, which provides a subject directory, covering the web, images, news, articles, and weblogs.

Baidu Space
Baidu, the dominant search engine in the world's second largest internet market, plans to launch a blogging platform, on Thursday, with keyword search. It joins "formidable challengers" including "Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Bokee.com, Blogbus.com and BlogCN.com. (SEJ)"

Scaling chores at Google
"Google Engineering is different," wrote Peter Norvig on the Google Research Blog in February. "We're different, and we like it that way." eWeek takes an interesting look at how Google extends its automatized mentality to the commonplace tasks of keeping books and files every business must handle.

Cult or Corporation?
The Register takes a snarky look at Google's modus operandi. Meanwhile, a piece at Short-Media analyses why "we" love Google but hate the RIAA.

API ovation
Google publishes a list of the most popular developers around the world, by downloads of their gadgets.

Anti-Trust Threat
If you didn't already catch this, Google made known it will not hesitate to press an anti-trust suit if net neutrality is uprooted through the telecommunications restructuring.

Barcodepedia
On this social site, one can upload barcodes via webcam into a shared database. A reader wrote in that Barcodepedia sounded a lot like the "building block for [the] 'wine' example" that Battelle used in The Search. (Thanks Brandon) (slashdot)

Eric Schmidt's recently discovered comments (via Donna Bogatin) about click fraud have got a number of folks headscratching. I've long concluded that for advertisers, click fraud is a tax, one that they will bear until it gets too onerous (in other words, until the cost of fraud outpaces the return of CPC advertising). Journalists lick their chops at perhaps someday breaking this story wide open. But if there is a larger story here, it will be broken by a deep throat inside Google, not by anyone else. That's where the truth can be found.

Fact is, we have no idea how much click fraud there really is. Recent reports put it at 14%, but whatever it is, it's a real issue in the minds of Google's customers, and making light of it sounds entirely off key. By calling the problem "self correcting" Google forgets that it profits from fraud, and that's a PR problem, if nothing else.

From Donna's post:

Schmidt indicates, however, that Google engineers think it is “great fun” to try and get ahead of click fraud:

"But because it is a bad thing, because we don’t like it, because it does, at least for the short-term, create some problems before the advertiser sees it, we go ahead and try to detect it and eliminate it."

It sounds like Google is "doing the advertiser a favor," rather than attacking and acknowledging a real issue in the minds of its customers. Seems to me that beating fraud isn't about having fun, it's about insuring your customers' trust in your business.

On Sunday, Yahoo Travel launched Trip Planner, a CPC ad-based search that drives traffic to online travel booking sites (earlier glimpsed here in beta). Yahoo hopes to secure a foothold in an increasingly tight travel market by integrating user generated content, including sharable trip albums and photo journals. In a Forbes interview, a Yahoo rep says that although the growth in the online travel market is slowing as it matures, the pressure on travel sites to find new sources of traffic will only drive demand for Trip Planner.

[Update: A Yahoo! PR rep. felt that Trip Planner is better described as an "online travel research resource," although it also serves the function of driving monetized search traffic.]

Publisher's Clearing House has acquired Blingo (site). Shoulda seen THAT ONE coming. PCH was the main salve for the magazine industry in the 80s and 90s - it was basically a sweepstakes that drove shitloads of magazine subscriptions. Folks usually subscribed to the magazines because they thought it'd increase their chances of winning the big prize. But in the late 90s the magazine auditors cracked down on PCH, and it really hurt the business. They lost their main customer and had to diversify. Well, here's the answer - giving stuff away when you search. Hey, it probably makes 'em money...

Over the weekend I got some research (PDF file) from Safa of Piper which says Yahoo and Google are going to have a better quarter than he originally thought.

We expect strong results from Google and Yahoo next week and, given current valuations, we believe the stocks will react positively. The continued strength of search in a seasonally slow Q2, which in the past has been disappointing, could be a major catalyst for the Internet sector which continues to trade near trough valuations.

(more coverage at Eric Savitz's blog)

Philipp finds yet more evidence of a Google personal computing environment, hard drive and all, and he finds it connected to Writely, the online word processor Google picked up a while back.

Tim has a great post on his conversations with Microsoft's Debra Chrapaty, VP of Operations for Windows Live.

People talk about "cloud storage" but Debra points out that that means servers somewhere, hundreds of thousands of them, with good access to power, cooling, and bandwidth. She describes how her "strategic locations group" has a "heatmap" rating locations by their access to all these key limiting factors, and how they are locking up key locations and favorable power and bandwidth deals.

..As Shakespeare said, "The game's afoot." Debra put more servers into production in the last quarter than she put in place in all of the previous year, and she thinks this is just the beginning. Operations used to be thought of as boring. It's now ground zero in the computing wars.

Krugle, an open source code search engine, quietly launched its public beta this week. I wrote about it previously here, when it launched its alpha.

The Journal covers disputes (paid reg) around Air Brin & Page.

Now the Delaware holding company that technically owns the 767, Blue City Holdings LLC, is embroiled in multiple lawsuits with an aviation designer hired to plan and oversee the massive plane's interior renovation.

...Messrs. Brin and Page "had some strange requests," including hammocks hung from the ceiling of the plane. At one point he witnessed a dispute between them over whether Mr. Brin should have a "California king" size bed, he says. Mr. Jennings says Mr. Schmidt stepped in to resolve that by saying, "Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom. Let's move on." Mr. Jennings says Mr. Schmidt at another point told him, "It's a party airplane."

Major insights into how the triumvirate manages Google, to be sure. "Sergey, you can have any size index you want!"

The article has pictures of the interiors as well. The interiors look pretty lux, but overall, this is not a pretty picture.

Update: Scott asked, I looked, and the article is tossed over the freewall at the Journal here. I've added a pic given that they have released this one into the wild. Man, will the Journal just get over the paid stuff and blow it out already?

Yahoo Ready!
Mobile access to Yahoo mail, IM, and contacts is now live in Ready beta.

"Did you Mean" my company?
Companies can EgoGoogle to see if Google turns them up as a spelling correction for multiple terms. Of course, some companies will display as top results even when the terms are separated.

Free Live Calls
Windows Live Local offers free calls for listed businesses. Search and find a business, enter your phone number, and Live will call both parties. In beta, it's available only in the US and cell phone charges still apply. Resource Shelf gives it thumbs-up on functionality, but speculates it could be the 'click-fraud' (annoy-competitors-to-death weapon).

Trumalia
Trumalia is a search engine with riddles, and prizes, via SEL describes it as "a Search-entertainment Engine for Riddle Lovers and Artists"

Searchles
Searchles socializes bookmarking, making friends' or wider circles of bookmarks serachable. Launched last week, plans underway to integrate Dumfind.

Clickfraud cost an estimated $800 million for advertisers in false hits last year, reports the Financial Times today, based on study by a media firm called Outsell.

And "more than a quarter of them have reduced their spending as a result..." Google, Yahoo and MSN, "have avoided putting a number on the incidence of click fraud but Outsell said it averaged 14.6 per cent of all clicks billed to advertisers, even after Google and others had filtered out those ones they believed to be invalid. The 14.6 per cent equates to $800m of the $5.5bn US search engine market in 2005."

However the number could be off by magnitudes in either direction, Danny Sullivan points out that "half the advertisers in the survey also reported they do nothing to audit whether they have click fraud happening or not. So Outsell asked them to estimate the percentage of clicks that are fraudulant, and half of them essentially guessed — and that’s making up this industry stat? It could be far less or far more than this guesswork is stating."

EBay just changed its policy to exclude Google Checkout from its accepted payment options, keeping PayPal in clearer pastures. eBay Strategies, lists the ins and outs: "In reality it's a credit card gateway (and the same one eBay spends millions with as the top google AdWords user) and credit cards are specifically allowed along with gateways (verisign/cybersource/authorize.net, etc.)"
Definitely a hamper on that big IF of Checkout's success that Om talks about, on the potential it could play in Google market development towards a pay-for-performance or cost-per-action system.

John Kricfalusi, creator of the wonderful Ren & Stimpy series and an all around worthwhile fellow to know (and new FM author) just pinged me with the news that YouTube is disallowing his linking of old Bugs cartoons on his site. Why? Because Warner Brothers, who now owns the copyrights, has no idea how powerful a marketing tool John's blog can be, that's why. All they want to do is prevent folks who might buy DVDs, merchandise, and view ads next to webisodes of Ren & Stimpy and Bugs from, well, buying DVDs, merchandise, and looking at webisodes of Ren & Stimpy and Bugs. Hey Warner, aren't you paying any attention to what is happening out here in the real world? You don't want to upset the creator of Ren & Stimpy, and force YouTube, which is providing a great service, to do the dirty work! Instead, figure out a way to work with the man! He'll help you sell far more stuff. As he pointed out to me:

"Classic cartoons are my biggest influence. These cartoons are rarely seen on TV anymore and they could be selling them all on home video. Normally, they would have to pay a lot of money to get so much notice that I give them for free.... Mostly I put up clips, not the whole cartoon. Aren't there "fair use" laws?

Well, yes there are, but they are in full retreat (and that's another story). But back to this one. John is a leader in the animation world, and his site is where tens of thousands of his rabid fans and influencers in the world of animation hang out. He's one of the biggest promoters of classic cartoons in the world...Nearly every post gets scores of comments. It's hardly the equivalent of some teenager ripping off music. John's posts promote and publicize Warner Brothers cartoons, if anything. In fact, John tells me he's filmed commentaries for Looney Tunes DVDs - they come to him to help promote the same stuff they are asking him to take down. One hand, meet the other....

If I were Warner, I'd be advertising merchandise and DVDs right alongside those YouTube videos on John's site. Hell, John is getting something like 100K visits a month, and his traffic is growing rapidly.

Previously: Set Bugs Free!!!

It's nice sometimes, three years later, to see your ideas, well, covered. Neat.

...for copyright infringement. But it's easier to sue Yahoo China, or Baidu, and anyone else who might be there and straddling the rather uncomfortable breach between Western copyright law and Chinese...well....exuberance. You go, music industry. Go go go. Sheesh.

There are always lawsuits against big targets, and initially the suit filed by KinderStart against Google, in which the parenting site/vertical search engine complained that it's ranking has been intentionally lowered, felt like a nuisance and nothing more. But sometimes interesting things come out of these complaints.

I was reading last Friday's Cnet coverage, for instance, and a Google lawyer was explaining Google's ranking. OK, well, I know enough about that to notice when things are being spun, and the spin was clearly on. Because it suited the defense, the lawyer decided to argue that Google's index was subjective - ie, that Google made editorial decisions about each site's quality.

Now, that strikes me as a bit askew from public perception, and from what Google encourages us to think, in general, about how it ranks. Here's how Cnet covered it:

David Kramer, a Wilson Sonsini attorney also representing Google, said the search giant's PageRank system is subjective, using a combination of reviews into whether a Web site is adhering to its guidelines and is worth a user's time to view.

"Google is constantly evaluating Web sites for standards and quality, which is entirely subjective," Kramer said.

The judge probed Kramer on the topic of whether Google engages in misleading behavior, and whether it uses objective criteria to evaluate sites--rather than solely relying on subjective reasoning.

"What if, say, Google says it uses facts one through 10 to evaluate a site, but actually uses number 11 to decide its rank. Isn't that misleading?" the judge asked.

Kramer, however, said Google readers understand that the site's ranking system is subjective and based on Google's opinion about whether a site is worth viewing.

Google's opinion? Really? Huh. That's a new one. More on this as I grok it.

Another Times piece on the Google phenomenon, with some interesting facts. Paul rounds them up.

The focus of the piece is on how Google has made infrastructure a core competence, to the point of designing and building servers and related software. This is not news to readers of Searchblog, but there are interesting contours to the story, including a response from Yahoo:

"At some point you have to ask yourself what is your core business," said Kevin Timmons, Yahoo's vice president for operations. "Are you going to design your own router, or are you going to build the world's most popular Web site? It is very difficult to do both."

Google, in fact, has decided it will do both.

And from Microsoft:

"Google doesn't have anything magic here," Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, said in an interview. "We spend a little bit more per machine. But to do the same tasks, we have less machines."

Google clearly believes that its infrastructure will prove a lasting competitive advantage, and the piece hints that Google may even get into microchip design. Hmmm, is Intel paranoid now?

Following Asha's lead, I'm finally posting this. I've backdated this post so it does not interfere with the flow of items on the site, and will post a link to this on the home page and every archive page.

Thanks to Melanie for helping me get this done.

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I love this guy's passion. If you aren't reading Bob LeFetz, you should be...Here's his take on YouTube. Comparing YouTube to Napster, he says:

And what happened with YouTube? The EXACT SAME THING that happened with Napster. Suddenly, digital exposition, FOR FREE, blew up underlying copyrighted material/shows. The classic case being "Lazy Sunday" from SNL. After MILLIONS of viewings on YouTube, ratings for SNL WENT UP! Sure, it was all based on copyright infringement, but if said law-breaking had not taken place, SNL wouldn’t have made all that extra MONEY! Because exposure begets revenue. The more people who know about something, the more people who are interested in buying it.

So what did NBC do?

They told YouTube to take the material down.

But now NBC has woken up. Rather than build from scratch their own site, a la Pressplay, a place with fewer eyeballs that no one cares about, they’ve thrown in with the company with all the action, where all the people are, YouTube. They’ve made a deal with YouTube, they realize it’s to their ADVANTAGE!