John Battelle's Searchblog

Matt Marshall, long of the SJMN and SiliconBeat, has launched his own site, VentureBeat. Congrats on going solo, Matt! Matt is working with FM, and I'm proud to be associated with him and his work.

The man hours devoted to separating me from my Kiehls face lotion. I mean, my goodness. If I wanted to destroy a plane with two ounces of face lotion, why, I might just figure out a way to add water later while in the air.

At SFO, there were at least ten full-time lotion swipers at work when I went through. I wonder, did they hire new staff? Repurpose others? There are at least ten more security screening sites like the one I was at in SFO, so that means 100 full time lotion swipers. At SFO alone. All day.

Are they doing this at all major airports? They took my toothpaste, my Carmex, my 4'n'1 sinus medicine (I forgot I had THAT in my bag).

More than one thousand TSA agents, dumping toiletries into the garbage. Something tells me there has to be a better use of manpower in the War on Terror (TM).

Or...maybe there's not. Maybe this is all for show. Maybe in fact if we gave the government thousands of foot soldiers to work on this War (TM), they'd have no idea what to do.

End of rant.

Not only is Live Search in advanced stages of testing, some influential folks like its video search. And MSFT is making the inevitable noises about launching an AdSense competitor (hello, about time...).

I was in the Austin airport today and a clip on CNN caught my ear. It was a piece on the "secret Senator" who had held up a bill, otherwise supported by a majority, which would require the creation of a database of government spending, in particular contracts, loans, and the like. What stopped me in my tracks was the anchor's use of the term "a Google-like search function" as the reason the bill was being held up. In other words, this bill was clearly threatening to bring transparency and ease of use to information about government spending, and someone was using the secret Senator, who turned out to be our pal Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens, to try to kill the bill.

Bloggers, however, made a huge fuss, CNN and its ilk caught onto the story. But, well, will the bill pass or not?

My money is on not.

Growing Google library
Google is now permitting free PDF downloading and printing of classic and obscure books---in addition to out-of-copyright books. However, Google will still only provide snippets around search terms for materials under copyright, unless permission is extended by the publisher. link (Gary Price timely points out other sources for free book printing.)

AT&T hack exposes 19,000 ids
A hack on one of AT&T's systems has exposed the personal data, including the credit card numbers, of 19,000 identities. link

Geotagging Flickr, more like an explosion
Flickr added a geotagging feature that in its first day gained more than 1.2 million geotagged photos. As you might guess, they're thinking very hard about how to scale "over a million new photos being added on a good day... [and the] billions of bits of data that go into the search (more than half a billion tags alone), along with privacy controls, group membership, and so on."

WikiPatents
WikiPatents is a new community site where the public can contribute commentary and organize around U.S. patent issues---including reviewing pending applications and voting on their merits. The first site of this kind, it's the brainchild of the US Patent Office own efforts to improve the technical merits and legal backing of patents. The user-base is now composed of "examiners, law firms, future litigants, licensees, potential investors, inventors, and patent owners."

Search driven charity drive
The local search engine iBegin, now servicing Toronto -- is donating 50 cents to charity for every new review and picture uploaded by users through September 15. link (This caught my eye because at first I thought it was a search engine for charity giving-- someone make that! Update: http://www.goodtree.com, thanks Alberto.)

My partner Tim today announces a new event in the Web 2 world - the Web 2.0 Expo. From his post:

...there's a long way between the big framing ideas of web 2.0 and their practical application. What's more, the Web 2.0 Conference sold out last year and is on an invitation-only basis this year, with far greater demand than the event can accommodate. And that's why O'Reilly and CMP have today announced a second, companion conference, the Web 2.0 Expo, to be held April 15-18, 2007 at the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco. The Expo will include a four-day hands-on technical conference and tutorials as well as a trade show floor.

Every big idea needs implementation. We saw the need for a second event that focuses on how to actually build effective Web 2.0 applications. We're tackling not just Web 2.0 as strategy but also design, programming, operations, and viral marketing -- the elements of execution that will ultimately separate the winners from the me-too companies in the space.

I'm really looking forward to this event, I think it'll be where the rubber meets the road. (Disclosure-As Program Chair for Web 2.0, I'm a partner in the Web 2.0 conference business with O'Reilly and CMP, though I am not directly involved in the Expo business itself.)

Google CEO Eric Schimdt has joined Apple's board. Given the way the Valley hovers over every possible implication of both companies' actions, there's plenty of conspiracies to be theorized here.

I covered Apple as a cub reporter, and learned how to deal with a company populated by brilliant, odd, and flabbergasting folks. In corporate history, logo color choice, and brand values, Apple shares much in common with Google, that is for sure. But I'm not sure there's too much to be made of this connection - yet.

Of course, Apple has a history with Microsoft, a long and storied one....

Man, do I know the pain he went through to make this decision. It's very hard to watch something you really love and worked so hard to build continue without you, but when you are not an owner in some way, it's harder still to understand why someone else is taking all the profits, and control, while you do all the work. I know Danny is a very reasonable guy, and the fact that he could not get the new owners of SEW to cut him in on the fruits of all his hard work means the folks running his ex-company are really not paying attention to where value is created in the media world these days.

Best of luck, Danny, I am certain you will do screamingly well in whatever you do next!

Marissa Mayer speaking in Scotland over the weekend:

"We're computer scientists," she said. "We're not brilliant storytellers or content creators."

Yahoo made news when it nabbed eBay's business in the US, but today Google announced it had secured eBay's international business, for both text ads as well as click for call. Tit, meet tat.

Question: Where's the big money in the IT business?

Answer: The enterprise.

Question: Who owns the enterprise desktop?

Answer: Microsoft.

Question: What should Google do about it?

Answer: Here's a start, an email forwarded to me about a new Google service which is clearly the start of a targeted offering for the enterprise:

On Monday August 28th we are announcing Google Apps for Your Domain. This brand new Google service allows everyone in an organization to collaborate and stay up-to-date through e-mail, calendar and instant messaging - anywhere, anytime.

Everything is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware to buy and maintain or software to manage, deploy and patch. The applications are fast, reliable, work from anywhere, anytime and have the elegant simplicity everyone has come to expect from Google. And they're free. The applications we're releasing at this time represent only the beginning; we're working hard to add more. We know you'll be pleasantly surprised!

We thought that as a Google Mini customer you'd be interested in taking a look at this exciting new service from Google. You can read more about this service and sign up at http://www.google.com/a. We are also working on an Enterprise version of Google Apps for Your Domain that will include features, integration options, capacity and support offerings designed to meet the needs of larger organizations.

Bloomberg reports that because Google has so much cash (more than $10 billion and growing very quickly), it's subject to SEC regulations as a mutual fund. Why? More than 40% of its assets are liquid, and Google wants to invest those funds in high yielding instruments, just like a mutual fund might.

Time to buy someone, Google...

Flickr images enter Yahoo
Yahoo begins to integrate Flickr images into search results. A corresponding new tool in Flickr allows users to remove their pictures from search listings. Everyone is asking: how are the images in results ranked? and how is Yahoo determining which keywords to use? Instead of all tags, only queries like "interesting photos" will return Flickr thumbnails. link

Checkout Affliates
Google Checkout launches an affiliate program with integration incentives for "e-commerce providers." Checkout is also running back-to-school promotional, accompanied by themed reasons to shop, like: "Jockey.com: Extra Underwear, Starbucks Store: All-Nighters."

Ask's new hire
Ask announces their new VP of Technology and Engineering, Chuch Geiger, former CTO at PayPal.

Comcast search
Comcast's Google-based search gets a new look, and is possibly a new deal. Tail Rank follows the trail, more

"A high class problem"
Google seeks an exception to invest in R&D, rather than securities, as its investments grow so large it risks regulation as a mutual fund-- a bid which Microsoft successfully secured in 1988. link

When it's good for all, who pays?
A viral AdWords ad for Honda in MySpace displays in Gmail, sparking Garret French's curiosity as he asks: Who is paying whom here? link

The recent news that Google has been granted a patent on "System and method for supporting editorial opinion in the ranking of search results " has been taken generally as a sign that Google may delve deeper into the world of social search, which was a hot topic of conversation at the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference (the one I missed due to my shoulder surgery).

But what I find interesting about it is the core: editorial opinion. At some point, algorithms have mothers, and those mothers have opinions. In the related art section, the patent application notes that Ask uses real editors to help it determine results, but that those humans don't scale:

AskJeeves (www.ask.com) generalizes the application of editorial opinion to a collection of pages. Their editors identify a set of pages that share a common theme (e.g., home pages of airports) and associate this set of pages with specific trigger words (e.g., the word "airport"). When one of the trigger words appears in the query, they present the user with a concise representation of the associated set of pages, allowing the user to choose one. Again, the scope of this technique is restricted to the set of pages that were reviewed by the editors, which tends to be many orders of magnitude smaller than the set of useful pages on the World Wide Web.

Yet this patent very clearly keeps the door wide open for samesaid humans. Quoting from the patent again:

Query themes refer to topics found to be commonly occurring in search queries deployed by users in the network ... Editors may, in an implementation consistent with the present invention, develop these query themes based on an examination of search query logs and determining categories of information for which people are entering queries. Exemplary query themes may be "sites that provide free software downloads" or "sites that help people find an accommodation."

Also critical to the patent is the development of "favored" and "non-favored" sources of information and "editorial opinion parameters": "the editorial opinion parameter causes the rank of those objects corresponding to favored sources to be increased and a rank of those objects corresponding to non-favored sources to be decreased."

In short, this is a patent for an algorithm of editorial judgement. It turns on human input, and will, if implemented, but tuned by humans as its shortcomings are exposed.

Another social site with web 2.0 goodness? Yes. Fanpop may standout, however, by picking the best qualities from a number of leading social sites and bringing them together in a neat integration. As they say, "We're a little bit of Digg, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, del.icio.us and Yelp all mixed into one."

Users can create topical federations on just about anything, giving it a resemblance to Tribe's flexibility. With 24 broad 'channels', Fanpop leaves room for communities to cluster around a long tail of interests. In the Fanpop spots, users can add links to relevant websites or news links, like Delicious. But in addition, submitted websites gain momentum from user voting--- giving Fanpop the interactive push of Digg and Reddit.

For search fans, there's the built-in "more on the web" option of out-bound searches keyword tied to the Fanpop title page you're on, to Google, Delicious, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, YouTube---probably a list that will grow.

Fanpop also offers forums--- which delicious lacks, and presents them in a more central way than Digg. It also has an internal messaging system -- a feature not offered on Digg and in a more developed version than in Delicious or MySpace.

Rewarding the active members is key for maintaining a loyal membership base, and Fanpop looks like it's learned that lesson. Fanpop rewards the most active members as "top fans" on the mainpage. It also features fans in a permanent way, versus the epherma of Digg, building communities more like MySpace, Tribe or Facebook. The main page also highlights recently updated pages, and displays a recurrently refreshed flip through existing fan bases.

What is this missing? Music and video, which are doing well on Digg and MySpace.

There are many social sites out there, too much to all survive, but aggregating the best features from specialized social sites may help this start-up rise to face the the largest player(s).
Fanpop brings together features I don't remember having seen aggregated elsewhere: If anyone has seen this all before---please let me know---because I'd be interested in comparing. (And yes, there is a Search Engines spot.)

Compete says up, alongside conflicting data from Hitwise (reporting a fractionally smaller boost) and NetRatings, recording a slight slip down. By Hitwise's measure, Google search share grew .4%, to 60.2%, in June. Neilsen-NetRatings shows a tiny dip of .2% in July. Tracking different metric sources, Compete reports that Google’s market share actually increased by .5% in July.

As mentioned earlier, Danny Sullivan is sharing some thoughts as he carefully picks through the details in a skeptical survey of all this. In response, ComScore wrote: "We agree with your assessment that a single-month decline does not constitute a trend. In fact, comScore also observed a similar seasonal decline for Google during the same period last year," before ascribing it to seasonal fluctuation.

From Cnet:

Microsoft failed to sign MySpace to an advertising deal, so the software giant went out and landed Facebook, the second-largest social networking site.

Late Tuesday evening, Microsoft announced that Facebook had agreed to allow the software company to provide search and advertising listings to Facebook's 9 million users. The Wall Street Journal reported that the arrangement was for three years.

SalesForce for AdWords
Today Salesforce launched AdWords campaign management technology. The new service allows users to directly buy keywords, place ads, and create performance reports in realtime. link

Spreadsheets makes the cut
In the wake of Video's upgraded status on Google's search page, Spreadsheets beta becomes an option for services in Google Mail.

Music Trends in GTalk
Google is releasing new data on Talk users' music listening tastes in the Labs. Within the Google Talk client, users can activate Google to mine and categorize their music habits. Other Talk upgrades, here.

A dip in Google's search share
Danny Sullivan discusses the first dip in Google's market share in search in nearly a year, based on data from comScore and NetRatings: a fluctuation does not a downfall make. Sullivan agrees with comScore's assessment that Google may have a greater seasonal tie, adding that it may be due to a larger academic audience. Tomorrow he makes sense of a conflicting Hitwise report that Google gained share between June and July 2006.

Gauging Google's investment in India
"Rumor has it" Google plans to invest $1 billion into expanded R&D in Bangalore, India, in addition to Hyderabad. link

Yahoo Answers API
Yahoo releases an API for Yahoo! Answers that doesn't require proxy. Answers also adds additional search fields to access content, including by user, topic, and category.

Google Base API
Google Base releases an API for new applications that could create, edit and delete data, or specify queries.

Orkut's souring relationship with Brazil
Brazil may close Google's Orkut offices in Sao Paulo in regards to a federal injunction to release user information, reports Search Engine Watch.

Checkout back-ups
Google Checkout glitches caused an unintended sharing of discounts and delays for users. "For a short period last night [Tuesday], the Google Checkout icon was inadvertently assigned to ads for U.S. AdWords clients who are not Checkout users," Google tells ComptuerWorld. more

AOL cleans house
Following the privacy violation debacle regarding the release of users' search histories, AOL cleans house by firing the CTO Maureen Govern and two employees. link, Cnet follow-up

"The strangest and least economically rational technology bubble I've ever seen."

Those are Paul Kedrosky's words, discussing what now nearly everyone agrees is, well, some kind of bubble in the Web 2.0 space. I'm hearing it everywhere, and even more to the point, I feel it as well, in some odd and uncomfortable way.

Hold on, Battelle! Aren't you the guy who wrote an Op Ed in the New York Times claiming we're NOT in a bubble? Yeah, that'd be me, and I still hold to my arguments in that piece. We don't have a bubble in IPO markets, and despite a few questionable deals, the major companies aren't on a nutty buying spree either, so there's no bubble in M&A exits infecting large company stock prices. The only folks who might lose thanks to the current Web 2 funding rush are the VCs - and, well, they can afford it.

And yet....as I think about this a bit more, I realize that perhaps we are losing in a way - all of us in this Internet/Web 2.0-related market. We may be losing the lessons a healthy market teaches us when companies fail quickly. Allow me to explain.

First, I am noticing an uptick in the kind of behavior that got us into trouble last time - specifically, spending untethered to value by companies with unproven models. Also, I'm noticing companies out there that have the veneer of success, but to my mind are riding a wave of short-term infatuation buoyed by easy money and near-term enthusiasm, rather than long-term value creation bolstered by valuable customer relationships. As Paul noted, we have a bubble in company creation - there are far too many companies with very similar models and market niches. Now, at first blush should not be a problem. After all, I've argued that one of the really cool things about Web 2 is that you can keep making new companies, see if they work, then disassemble them and try again.

Only, that won't happen if the companies are kept falsely alive by a preponderance of venture capital and VC-related spending. And it doubly won't work if those companies have an average burn rate of a million or less a year. A million bucks is nothing to most VCs. A VC pal recently told me that there were more than 200 funded companies in the video search space, for example.

In short, we don't have a company creation crisis. But we might have a company destruction crisis. Something is off in our ecosystem - there's simply not enough failure out there right now. For an ecosystem to be truly healthy, bad ideas (or good ideas poorly executed) need to fail, so we can all learn from the failure, incorporate the lessons, and move on.

This failure to fail can't last forever. VCs, even the ones that funded video startup #200 and 201, won't keep funding non-performing companies over and over again (wait, well, maybe they will). But at some point, reason will creep back into the ecosystem. Right?

Last year marked the debut of a new feature at the Web 2.0 Conference, an event I have chaired since its inception in 2004. Called the Launch Pad, it highlighted a baker's dozen of companies that either launched a major new service, or their entire company, at the annual Fall event.

Earlier this year we announced the opening of the submission process for the 2006 event. And just like last year, I ask for your help (last year more than 50 submission streamed in after my post). But unlike last year, this year I am getting some help. Instead of me making all the decisions, this year I've recruited a stellar group of Launch Pad advisors, who will be helping me find the next group of companies to launch this November. The Launch Pad Advisory Board is comprised of:

Jim Bankoff, AOL
Ross Levinsohn, Fox Interactive
Megan Smith, Google
Shana Fisher, IAC
Allen Morgan, Mayfield
Bryce Roberts/Marc Jacobsen, O'Reilly Ventures
Chris Albinson/Mike Jung, Panorama Capital
Michael Hirshland, Polaris
Mike Arrington, Techcrunch
Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures
Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo

Jim Lussier, Norwest Venture Partners

I'm honored to have such an august group of folks helping us find the best companies to highlight at Web 2 this year. Some of the members are venture capital partners (partners of mine in FM, or at O'Reilly, or pals), others are responsible for charting the M&A strategies for the major platform companies, and still others (like Mike Arrington and I) are entrepreneurs and publishers. All are very experienced at grokking a new company's potential.

We're in the final stages of reviewing submissions (more than 100 have already come in), and I'd like to ask all of you to help us. If you or someone (or someone you know) are running a company that might want to launch a major product or service this November, please let us know!

Update: Submissions for the Launch Pad will close August 28!

Full disclosure: There is a fee if you are chosen, but we've kept it commensurate with the costs of producing the Launch Pad session. There is no fee to enter!

Quick: What post on Searchblog elicited the most comments of any post ever? Answer: My post inviting you all to join the limited beta of Farecast, the airline pricing search engine with a twist. So, it's worth noting that Monday, Farecast goes national. More here at Siliconbeat.

Update: No need to ask me for invites, folks - it's not a closed beta anymore!

I've written about this before, the deja vu of covering Google now, and Microsoft back in the early 90s, when MSFT ruled the (less large but no less self absorbed) IT roost. Paul Graham, one of my favorite occasional Google commentators, notes the sad case of Kiko, a Google Calendar competitor which seems to have lost its way since Google integrated Gmail with Google Calendar (Kiko is up for sale on eBay - current bid is around 50K, includes free shipping!). Reminds me of all those little app developers who got killed by MSFT back in the day....when MSFT decided a particular app was neat, and needed to be integrated into Office and/or Windows.

What I love about Paul's conclusions:

There's another encouraging point here for the new generation of web startups. Failure is not a disaster when you're very light. The total amount raised by Kiko in its existence would be about six months' salary for a first-rate developer. There's a good chance they'll recover most of it by selling their code. They only had one employee besides themselves. So this is not an expensive, acrimonious flameout like used to happen during the Bubble. They tried hard; they made something good; they just happened to get hit by a stray bullet. Ok, so try again. Y Combinator funded their new idea yesterday.

(thanks to Andre for pointing this out)

I've said that over and over, and the implications are very, very large. I'd love to see a study which tells us how much stuff on YouTube is commercial content produced for YouTube. Stuff like this, for example.

That's how much Google stock Google execs have sold. I really don't think much more needs to be said. It's quite a figure.

Google is a verb in our culture, in fact, it's more than that, it's a representation of a new way of understanding our relationship to knowledge. That's A Pretty Big Deal, and it's also got to be insanely frustrating to a company like, well, Yahoo, which had the chance to own the very same thing back in the late 90s. (It's also frustrating to the poor sods in Google legal, see here).

So I found this announcement interesting - Yahoo is asking its users to remix its brand, in what seems a clear attempt to nudge the Yahoo brand next to Google's in our cultural reference set. In fact, the blog entry announcing the contest acknowledges Google's dominance in the field:

There's been some reports about how Google is trying to stop people from using the term, googling. When I heard about it, I was like, "Hello, gift horse, mouth!"....People don’t often do what you want them to do, and brands are more about what consumers think, than what companies want. We're ok with that. You want the yodel? Have it anytime you want (just mouse over the ! on the front page and click). Is Yahoo! a verb, noun or exclamation? Maybe it's all of them.

So Yahoo is open sourcing its brand (and its yodel to boot.) Not a bad idea, but ... to quote another famous brand campaign: where's the beef? The only thing that will get culture to form a lasting impression around a brand, one that matters as much as A New Relationship To Knowledge, anyway, is, well, a new relationship to knowledge. That doesn't come around very often. Though, I must admit, I'm eager to see another one soon. It has been more than ten years since Alta Vista and Overture, after all.
(image credit)

This is really worth reading if you're at all interested in the issues I've been on about for so long...some tidbits:

...The Wall Street Journal Online invited Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group, to debate the issue with Markham Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, a lobby group for Internet firms including Google and Yahoo. Their conversation, carried out over email, is below....

Bankston: ...the DOJ's position is that ECPA doesn't apply to the search engines and search terms, the search engines themselves refuse to say what they think, and it hasn't been litigated yet. In the meantime, how the law does or does not apply is being hashed out secretly between DOJ investigators and search engines' compliance counsel; the public has no idea how the law is being applied, just as they have no real idea of what the search engines are doing with their data.

Which leads to the question, do you think that ECPA applies -- or should be amended to apply -- to search engines' disclosure of search logs? And shouldn't we have a federal law like the California Online Privacy Protection Act, establishing national minimum standards for privacy policies?....

The answer, from a fellow who represents leaders like Yahoo and Google, is pretty damn anemic. I've always criticized search engines for failing to take a leadership position in this discussion, and I very much believe that whoever does first, will win big in the hearts and minds of consumers.

Finding pictures in Picasa
Google acquires Neven Vision, a mobile photo search company, to bolster Picasa. Though there aren't any special features to show off yet, Google says "one day" image search could be "as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects."

Blinkx becomes a studybuddy

Blinkx moves its business model towards direct-paid services. In a recent partnership with AOL, Blinkx will provide an education-focused subset of its index to StudyBuddy.com. Blinkx founder and CTO said, "You are going to see us do more of these kinds of deals where we power video search on other sites and either get paid for it or share in the ad revenue that's generated by it."

Blotter
Dapper unveils a new service that gauges blog popularity. Blotter graphs link stats over time based on Technorati data.

Exalead: preview of new beta
ResourceShelf summaries the key features. Try it for yourself here (pw: beta).

If you have deja vu, then, yes, this story was first discussed by Vint Cerf in his Searchblog interview....Google is - for now anyway - not claiming to have plans for a national Wifi network, even as it launched its Mountain View Wifi net officially today.

According to AdAge:

The cable operator has bulked up its online-sales team and plans to open its Comcast.net portal to all its customers -- increasing the potential audience from its 10 million high-speed-data subscribers to its 23 million video subscribers. And that's just for starters.

According to TV network executives familiar with Comcast's plans through content-carriage negotiations, the cable operator has Yahoo-size ambitions and sees the internet as key to raising its profile, and share of ad budgets.

..."For us to be successful online, you have to believe that people will still want to come to a single source for much of their online-video entertainment," said Warren Schlichting, VP-new business strategies at Comcast. "That's the basic underlying philosophy. We think there's a role for somebody to work with many content providers."

Sounds like a familiar strategy....

But...I'm not optimistic that Comcast understands the genetics of making an online service. Just my two cents...

Reader Cyrus passed this link on to me from the EFF: How To Keep Your Search History Private.

This was posted yesterday in the wake of the AOL search data debacle.

I had a very intersting meeting last week with Michael Jackson, the man Barry Diller has appointed as the head of interactive programming for IAC. He'd been in New York, the Valley, and LA trolling for new ideas. Seems he's found one - this morning IAC announced they had bought a controlling interest in Connected Ventures, which runs CollegeHumor.com, among many other things. I've known and worked with Josh Abramson, one of the founders, at Boing Boing and FM. Congrats to him, and to IAC, which seems primed to do more deals like this one.

Just off the phone with an AP reporter (Jessica Mintz, sharp reporter from the Journal who moved over) who was grokking the fact that Google has added Video to its hallowed first tier of search options on the home page, and relegated Froogle to a pop up window off the "more" link. Does this mean Google is reacting to YouTube? Well, yes, of course, but also, Google is following the users, who told Google via YouTube's popularity that video means a lot to them, and that Google was failing to give the users what they want. And Google is also reacting to the market, which is saying it wants as much video advertising as it can buy. Will moving Video to better real estate mean Google Video will overtake YouTube? That is the billion dollar question. Google's recent moves with Viacom and MySpace may position the company as the "safe" alternative to YouTube, one could presume - and the company does have one hell of a network to work with AdWords/sense. But do the consumers want Google video? Despite the initial hit of traffic, it all comes down to community, methinks, and that's what Google so far has not done as well as others.

Remember when I posted about that Haas School of Business Study that I was interviewed for? Well, the Economist has read it now, and has an article keyed off both the study and the recent Google/MTV/MySpace deals here. The piece compares Google with Napoleon. Really.

Hey esteemed readers -
I'm a bit loopy after my shoulder surgery, and won't be posting much till the Percocet wears off. Meanwhile, how is it that the damn spammers always know when I'm offline?

Web 2.0 short doc
TechCrunch's Arrington delivers a 24 min. documentary, asking Silicon Valley leaders and start-up founders to define and discuss Web 2.0--what is it, and for how long? link

Two blogs born per second
Technorati's latest state of the blogosphere, from David Sifry. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months. link

Google...the musical
The Minnesota Fringe Festival is putting on an electronic musical about Google. A dark-comedic fable, the musical depicts what would happen if Google disappeared one day---after taking over the world, one thought at a time." Philipp has a detailed synopsis and review. link

Google Checkout expands
Google Checkout has now acquired more than 180 retailers and adds new categories---including Arts & Crafts, Beauty, Clothing, Home & Garden, Kids, Sports, Shoes, and Health. As Comparison Engines notes, there's no integration with Froogle yet--but that must be on the way.

As the search engine space grows and companies proliferate, bloggers within the engines are becoming an important human voice and point of contact for the public, competitors, and SEOs. At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose this morning, Danny Sullivan hosted a panel with Matt Cutts from Google, Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo!, Niall Kennedy from MSN, and Gary Price from Ask. Here are some of the views they shared on 'Speaking unofficially as search engine bloggers':

On keeping perspective:
Gary says he tries to walk the middle ground, blogging about MSN, Yahoo, and Google more than Ask—and the company encourages him to do so. All four say don’t let the PR department hinder them, though they sometimes give PR a heads-up. Also, though they write with independent voices, letting the company know a critical post is coming out will sometimes solicit more candid company updates. Gary says he tries to make Resource Shelf all things to all people—for the search companies, the SES crowd and library/reference professionals.

When company bloggers are the news:
Danny Sullivan asks if they avoid press coverage. Cutts says he just tries to be so monumentally boring and technical that the media won’t cover it, and says he’s been largely successful (though this editor disagrees that engagement quality is the cause). Zawodny says he keeps a news alert on his name, so he can sigh deeply every time a reporter attributes his comments in a Yahoo exposé. Kennedy says his blog has become one more end-point in a 72 million person company—helping people with specific needs connect with the company.

Are they PR guys?
Matt and Gary say no—Matt uses non-Google products (wordpress not blogger, etc) and Gary’s post up today is a positive piece on Google. While Matt says Zawodny is ballsy for listing out failures of Yahoo Finance, Jeremy follows up that indeed in some sense he is a PR guy. Once he let it slip that he hadn’t gone through media training, within a week that’s where he found himself.
“My exercise in figuring out where the line was repeatedly crossing it and then be told that I crossed it. Lawyers have come into my office three times.”— Zawodny.

Syndication
Price says weekly emails are still crucial to distributing blog content, aside from an RSS feed—which is rising but still not familiar to the larger audience. Zawodny likes to schedule postings – rattling-off a few and letting posts distribute automatically.
Gary, self-described as not the biggest fan of RSS syndication, says Ask is now playing with displaying the last three updated posts from a related feed above the organic results. Zawodny says he likes the feature and has been using it.

Vlogs, Podcasts
“You can write for 45 min. and say what does and doesn’t work. Or you can talk for five minutes and if you’re lucky someone will transcribe it for you,” says Cutts on the advantage of video (in reference to his recent foray with vlogging). He says there have been 80,000 downloads of Cutts’ random SES video Matt did on a weekend while the wife was away, but he’ll primarily stick with his blog.
Gary says Jim Lazone and he are going to start a podcast. Perhaps one aimed at the SES crowd, and another at the K-12 crowd who need so much help in familiarizing wtih search.

Topix expands its News Search ---providing access to article archives long past their expiration in Google or Yahoo news services. From a year of results, you can browse through a graphic timeline of stories relating to you search. Caps sensitive searches are also now a go, "for the true search geek" (very useful).

A very important piece of reporting, and a powerful reminder of the data corporations and the Govt. have access to.

NYT: A Face Is Exposed For AOL Searcher No. 4417749.

From it:

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

I spoke with one of the authors, Tom Zeller, late yesterday, and when he told me they'd easily found this woman, I was, in an odd sense, thrilled. In a way, this advances one of my goals - the silver lining of a data leak like this is that it allows the culture to have a conversation about what we're getting into here by tracking all this data (the Times quotes me saying as much.) Kudos to the Times.

Denise Caruso, a longtime friend and keen observer of the digital world, has emerged in the blog world with a post reminding us all that net neutrality is a movie we've all seen before...15 years ago. Good to see Denise at it again!

As previously reported, Google announced a new program allowing users to distribute ad-sponsored video streaming on websites and blogs. Google kicks-off its trial later this month in a partnership with MTV. I spoke with David Eun, VP of Google Content Partnerships, to get more detail.

Google plans to use the trial period as experimental research to determine the final layout of ad types and the pricing systems. For the trial, MTV will sell and serve its own ads. The ads will be video spliced into the content, for the trial and forward.

Google has not yet revealed other partnership negotiations in the wing, but an established deal with Viacom's MTV begs speculation about future deals on Viacom's full array of content subsidiaries. The biggest challenge Eun foresees is ramping up business development to the expectations of their partners.

Google says publishers, advertisers and content owners are relying more on Google as a network supporting media distribution--first for hosting, then serving, and now monetizing.

With a stress on scale, Eun said that the technology and publisher network already exists in the AdSense network.

“We already have thousands of advertisers and content owners in our network. And now we can work together to make more money for everyone involved,” he todl me. Eun muses that this “will hopefully turn into a virtuous circle.”

Eun did not detail if ads would continue to be sold algorithmically, or directly by Google's ad sales team.

Spotting the right image
xcavator identifies photos with similar combinations of color swatches--by color characteristics and placements chosen by the user. At the moment, this unique image search trolls Flickr for its demo.

Brokering a digital Alexandria
The University of California Library system is considering a partnership with Google to scan and make searchable "34 million volumes from 100 libraries on 10 campuses" (link). If the UC decision overcomes contentious debate about scanning copyright protected materials, the UC will join six other libraries sharing with Google. via

Stop Badware
Google now serves a warning before directing a user to a site reported to the 'Neighborhood Watch' campaign committed to fighting malware. StopBadware.org, led by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Oxford Internet Institute, will also begin providing site-specific reports on badware cautioned pages.

Checking it out
Google Checkout does not factor into AdWords quality score algorithm. This is among other details from Alan Rimm-Kaufman's interview with Benjamin Ling, Product Lead for Google Checkout.

Rollyo updates
Rollyo blog search now tracks news and trusted blogs, along with relevant web result updates. Rollyo's founder David Pell says, "This is really a game changer for me as a user. Now I can read what Searchblog says about topic A and quickly see what is being said about the same topic across the blogs and news sites I (or you) know and trust." Rollyo other improvements include a browser bookmarklet and users can now acquire any searchroll in the system by editing it.

International internet laws
The Senate has ratified an international treaty on cybercrime. Along with 40 other countries, the U.S. will now cooperate internationally to fight internet crimes committed via the internet---including those only in violation of foreign laws. EFF, link

No more bread-crumb trails
Finally, you can save locations on Google Maps. link

The bloke at the center of SES
A USA Today piece on Danny Sullivan orchestrating the SES conference from "the remote little village of Chitterne, about four hours southwest of London."

Where in wiki
Futef adds relevance search to wikipedia's many pages. While keyword search on wikipedia will return a list of its closest-matched topics, this Futeff serves a ranked list of relevant pages.

Like the folks in the click fraud de-fictionalizing department, Google's trademark lawyers are only doing their job. But as with so many things when your dorm-room inspired company gets huge, the Doing Of A Job runs entirely counter to the philosophical foundations of the company samesaid trademark lawyers are apparently doing their job to protect.

Allow me to explain (I didn't get a lot of sleep last night, sorry). If you are the holder of a valuable trademark (say, one of the most valuable brands in the world, for example), it's really, really bad for that same mark to be used casually to indicate an entire process, a process which, in fact, is generic and need not necessarily be tied to your brand or product. It's the same problem Xerox has with copying, or Kleenex with facial tissue. In short, Google might lose its trademark due to - overwhelming association with the problem its brand solves.

Now, no one at Google had a problem with Google entering the lexicon a few years ago. In fact, it was celebrated inside the 'plex, as I recall.

But trademark law says you have to show an effort to protect your mark, or you can lose it. Hence, Google now finds itself sending silly letters to newspapers who use the Google brand as a verb. Next up, I'm sure, are half hearted ads in the Columbia Journalism Review.

I can't imagine these letters are sent with any expectation of changing anything. But it's fun to see them in any case.

Here's the situation: on the one hand you have your customers, insisting that there is a problem and that you do something about it. On the other hand, you have your engineers, insisting there is not a problem. Further complicating the issue is that your customers, unsatisfied with your insistence that their concerns are, in fact, not a concern, have gone and hired third party firms who then validate their concerns (and turn click fraud detection into yet another industry - see the ads on here). Then, of course, the press whips those concerns into a major frenzy, threatening your $100+billion market cap.

And all of this is due to one thing: you aren't willing to show your cards as to why you believe your customers concerns are invalid in the first place. Doing so would dull the edge of competitive differentiation that made your product what it is in the first place.

This is the situation in which Google finds itself right now with its AdSense advertisers. It's not a pretty place to be. So to dampen the criticism, Google has responded with a 17 page white paper attacking the methodology third party click fraud reporting firms use. They'll have to walk a fine line here.

Titled "How Fictitious Clicks Occur in Third-Party Click Fraud Audit Reports," the paper sets out to set the record straight.

"We have seen numerous reports of click fraud estimates which we believe significantly overestimate the impact on advertisers," the report states in its background section. "The most fundamental flaw that we have seen in these reports is the existence of fictitious clicks: events which are reported as fraudulent but do not appear within Google's logs as AdWords clicks. This report identifies the root causes behind these fictitious clicks and illustrates the extent to which this flaw impacts click fraud estimates from these firms."

I am still reading this report, and was given a 9 am publishing embargo, so I'm going to go ahead and upload the document here, and let you all read it with me. I'll be back with more thoughts as they occur to me, or please, add yours to this thread.

Update: Wow, the document reads far more combative than I thought it would. It's more of an indictment of the nascent click fraud detection industry, and three firms in particular are called out. To wit:

We have been aware of the presence of fictitious clicks in third-party reports for some time. We have given feedback to advertisers (and indirectly, to some of these third-party auditing firms) and pointed out the various flaws weíve observed in their reports, but have met with little in the way of a positive response or interest in correcting their methodologies. They maintained that their click fraud detection methodologies differed from ours, and that fact alone accounted for any differences. ....

We discovered some basic engineering and accounting issues across the industry - problems which were in fact completely separate from the issue of accurate click fraud detection - which have in each case led to dramatic overestimation of click fraud rates by these firms. As an example, a single AdWords click may appear as five events in some reports, leading to (a) the identification of these events as "click fraud", and (b) the reporting of five fraudulent clicks. ...

Appendix B presents detailed case studies for three firms:

ClickFacts, Click Forensics, and AdWatcher. Click fraud estimates from ClickFacts and Click Forensics have
received widespread media coverage. And among third-party auditing reports submitted to us by advertisers, reports from AdWatcher are the most common.

All three cases studies exhibit the problem of severe click inflation in their reports primarily due to the presence of fictitious clicks, which generally render their published estimates on click fraud invalid.

I am still grokking this, I'm not a fraud detection expert. Watch SEW for more, I'd wager. Also, here is Google's post on the report.
And lastly, coverage from SEW from Publishing 2.0. Sounds like there were fireworks on stage, so sorry to be missing the conference...

Yow. From the Journal, more as I get it.

Google will pay News Corp. at least $900 million to be the search provider on MySpace and other sites. The move -- a blow to rival Yahoo -- gives Google exclusive access to one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and follows Google's $1 billion deal to provide searches on AOL.

No story I can find is up yet. I have pinged folks I know on all sides of this deal. Here's the release.

Udpate: A Google conference call is in progress here.

Eric Schmidt and Ross Levinsohn are on it, am listening now. In short, Google has guaranteed minimum payments based on expected revenues from search placements on MySpace.

The deal is all cash, there are traffic assumptions that they feel "comfortable" with, the deal feathers back if traffic goals are not met. "Our history is that we agree to these structures, and then we do better because of our synergies," says Schmidt.

AOL has officially responded to the recent ruckus over data released by folks in its research group. The summary: Man, did we screw up.

I emailed my contacts there and got an early draft of the release:

"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.

Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we're absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We've launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.

Here was what was mistakenly released:

* Search data for roughly 658,000 anonymized users over a three month period from March to May.

* There was no personally identifiable data provided by AOL with those records, but search queries themselves can sometimes include such information.

* According to comScore Media Metrix, the AOL search network had 42.7 million unique visitors in May, so the total data set covered roughly 1.4% of May search users.

* Roughly 20 million search records over that period, so the data included roughly 1/3 of one percent of the total searches conducted through the AOL network over that period.

* The searches included as part of this data only included U.S. searches conducted within the AOL client software."

The ever-growing Search Engine Strategies conference starts today, the overview is here. I'd love to meet up with folks at the event, but alas, I am going to be having shoulder surgery this week, and that means I must miss it. I'll be reading all the coverage in the b'sphere, however....

That's Google's US search share, Hitwise says.

AP just posted this story:

In a further reach for online video, Google Inc. will begin distributing clips from MTV Networks' shows to other Web sites through its budding video service in a model that offers content creators a new source of distribution and revenue.

The deal announced Sunday will begin as a test later this month, offering 100 hours of programming from clips of "Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County," "SpongeBob SquarePants" and MTV's Video Music Awards. The partnership will expand video through Google's advertising network to a variety of sites and is likely to spawn further such deals, making video a far more integral element of online advertising.

Combined with the AP news, it's clear that Google is starting to show it's hand with regard the media industry, and that hand says this: Work with us, and we'll get you paid.

Clearly Google and MTV lag market leader YouTube, and this alliance is probably just the start...

No, not the kind that might help you predict earnings, but the kind that might help researchers around the world play with massive sets of word phrases and figure out all kinds of new applications based on the core concept of n-grams (don't ask me, read this). Massive on the order of trillions, that is. On Friday Google's research blog announced it would be releasing such a trove, blog post:

We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data. It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together. That's why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.

It's good to see Google giving something back to the research community, in particular given the thread about this very topic on Searchblog earlier. But I'm going to guess that this will only whet the appetite of folks in pure R&D who'd love to see even more information shared - more complex patterns across data, for example - the very same information, unfortunately for them, that is the basis for competitive differentiation, and is not likely to be shared anytime soon.

Update: Yow. AOL release actual search data from half a million users, according to this post. Wow....

Scoble writes a nice post-Microsoft rant about what's wrong with his former company, and what the company should pay attention to. The answer: attention data. I agree. Positing a scenario in which he's looking for an office chair for less than $500, Scoble writes:

When I search on “Office Furniture” why is the first thing I see stores? I don’t wanna see freaking corporate info. I wanna know what HUMANS like to use in their offices.

None of the big search companies have figured out that it’s the humans who “optimize” the Web.

They just wanna collect the big company paychecks.

I’m hearing that too here at Podtech. It’s all bunk. If there is no audience, there is no advertising. I’m not an “eyeball” to be tracked, or optimized.

I’ll be looking for who lets me get to the other humans the fastest....

...Remember Active Desktop and Channels? Microsoft could have OWNED the blog world and RSS. Why did that fail? Cause when we looked at it all we saw were big companies.

If you optimize for them you’ll fail.

There's a new social service that pairs search users in part by their similar queries, as well as pages visited in web browsing and preferred interests. Others Online stands out from many social sites with its browser toolbar that when activated passively records demonstrated interests.

While a user is browsing they can check the Others toolbar to see who else is reading or interested in the topic or site, and a dropdown provides contact to their IM or email details---including a link to their MySpace profile or other social website.

So what this means is.... Every time you search Google, you see the people who relate to those same keywords, plus their Web pages, and you can connect with them instantly by IM or email.

There aren't too many details on the site on how they track and weight users' online movements, but it seems to cache much like Google Toolbar and feed users' background profiles by keyword and url. Although one can clear their search cache, there's no option to selectively delete.

Others Online will run contextual ads--based of course on its users web history--and says it offers companies a chance to build brand by retaining contact even when users have clicked away. via

Still reading this, but for your reading pleasure, this week BizWeek puts Digg on the cover.

Amr Awadallah, a Yahoo employee as famous for predicting Google's earnings (though not always correctly), yesterday posted that he thinks Google's revenues will slow down.

2006 is showing the early signs of slow down for four reasons:

1. Once you have tons of revenue, its hard to keep high Year-over-Year (YoY) growth rates
2. The search marketplace is slowing down a bit due to saturation in the US and European markets (still plenty of growth in Asia though, but Yahoo is stronger there).
3. Google launched almost all the tricks in the bag during 2003, 2004 and 2005, the only remaining tricks are visual placement tricks and looser matching (i.e. more, less-relevant, ads on top of web results).
4. None of Google’s other products, other than web search that is, have decent “money” marketshare. Google’s Image Search is actually pretty large, but they have no ads there (will that change in Q3? possibly).

The East Bay Express - an alternative SF Bay area publication - today published a piece about Google's advertising filters and the impact they have - and potentially have - on independent news coverage. It's an interesting read. From it:

Earlier this year, Salon signed a small advertising contract with Google, and employees quickly discovered that whenever a story dealt with sex too explicitly, the search engine would automatically pull its ads. Salon ran stories about a Senate hearing on the effects of pornography, a study on the effect of sex on stress levels, and British attitudes toward rape victims; Google pulled its ads for each of these articles. "What we found in working with Google was that because some of our content violated its 'family-safe policy,' as a result we had to work with other partners such as Yahoo," says Kathryn Surso, Salon's vice president of business development....

...Few bloggers rely on ad revenue to pay their bills, and Salon's advertising base is sufficiently diversified that dropping the occasional Google ad doesn't hurt it. But for smaller Web news outfits, losing Google revenue is much more serious. According to the publisher of a prominent news Web site who agreed to speak only if granted anonymity, his company recently signed a premium Google advertising contract that now accounts for a third of his site's revenue. A few months ago, his Web site ran a series of stories about a major bombing in Iraq. Within hours, he says, Google's ads vanished from his home page, and so did all the revenue they generated. "They said we had the word 'kill' on our site, and that killed the ads," the publisher said. "I wrote them and said that would be very difficult for a news site, which would often use the word 'kill.' They said, 'Those are the rules.'"

...When the publisher contacted Google and asked for explicit guidelines about what constitutes illicit content, company representatives refused. "I asked them for a set of keywords, and they wouldn't give me one," he says. "I don't know what the words are; we just have to approach it by toning down the language in our articles. ... It's just ridiculous. I don't think the [advertisers] are going to have a problem with us reporting the news. ... But they're Google, and we're a small site. So we'll have to conform to their regulations if we want their money."

Mitch Kapor is a legend in the IT world (he's the guy behind Lotus) and he's always interested in new models (he's an investor in FM, for example, which certainly influences my view of the guy). In any case, Mitch is starting another company, Foxmarks, which focuses, in Mitch's words, "on innovation at the intersection of search and social production." Richard at ReadWriteWeb has a writeup here. I'm a bit confused, however, if it's related to this Foxmarks, which lives in a similar vein. I'm pinging Mitch to find out...

Update: Mitch sez:

First we created a Firefox extension called Foxmarks that synchronizes bookmarks.  The URL you sent is for the main page of the web site, which happens to be a Wiki.

We used the bookmark corpus we collected to create the proof-of-concept system for the new startup.  We will keep building on this, but the extension is separate form the web site we are going to build.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announce they are joining forces to combat the click-fraud storm (both reality and accusations). The big three search engines will use their shared expertise, touching 86% of the game. The competitors plan to create common guidelines for clickfraud--- starting with defining it, then facing the complexities of tracking it.

AP: John Slade, senior director of Yahoo's defense against click fraud, predicted the alliance's guidelines "will be a game-changing step in measuring and fighting click fraud." It may take more than a year before the guidelines are finalized, said Greg Stuart, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The decision to develop the guidelines reflects the Internet industry's "commitment to being the most accountable advertising medium and providing marketers with the highest level of transparency," Stuart said.

(Slashdot, AP)

Live Spaces
Windows Live Spaces launches. TechCrunch notes: ...Live Spaces is taking over MSN Spaces completey - MSN Spaces pages now redirect to Live Spaces URLs. This is no small decision, because MSN Spaces is currently the largest blogging platform with over 100 million unique monthly visitors.

Toolbar packaged
Google Toolbar bundles with Firefox into a new multi-year package with RealPlayer: Real regularly distributes more than 2 million pieces of software a day worldwide. When users install RealPlayer, they will be given the option also to install either the Google Toolbar or Firefox.

Yahoo's new domains
It seems Google isn't the only one on a domain spree, as Yahoo has 11 new domains of its own. Including Yahoo-aromatherapy.com. (via ResourceShelf)

Google's Washington counsel talks
Alan Davidson, head of Google's government affairs office in DC talks about internet regulation and other policy issues. Admits Davidson, “As a lobbyist, we’re getting our butts kicked in Washington.” (podcast at MIT)
(via ResourceShelf)

Outsell, a research company I've come to know over the past year, is looking for an analyst in the search space. CEO Anthea Stratigos was kind enough to ask me to speak at their conference earlier this year, and I found the folks there smart and engaged. From their job posting:

Outsell is looking for an experienced, technologically savvy, and energetic Vice President & Lead Analyst to create innovative research and analysis about the Search, Aggregation & Syndication segment and players in the information industry and to work with our business development team to drive business in the space. As a core member of our market research and advisory business, the successful candidate will work in a collaborative environment and deliver executive-level analysis, including tracking and analyzing SAS companies and their customers and users, and providing strategy analysis and decision support to CEOs, COOs, and Marketing executives and their teams.

To whoever gets that job, I'm looking forward to getting to know you! (And hey, maybe I should start a job board here!)

Not unexpectedly, AOL has moved to a free model for web services. From the release:

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) today announced that AOL’s software and e-mail as well as various other products will be made available for free to broadband users in a move to enhance the growth of its online advertising business.
...Among the AOL products that will be available for free to anyone with an Internet connection are: AOL’s integrated software; communications features, including AOL e-mail, instant messaging, a local phone number with unlimited incoming calls, and social networking applications; and safety and security features, such as parental controls.

and interestingly:

In the weeks ahead, AOL will announce a number of free new products in such areas as safety and security, storage, personalized e-mail domains, video and search, as well as an update of its AOL software. Combined with AOL’s video search, video assets, compelling content, blogging and other existing free applications, these new products will allow AOL to compete across the board for new Internet users, both domestically and abroad.

So AOL, which also reported 40% growth in its advertising business (and TW reported a profit, which has to help) - is joining the Google and Yahoo model. AOL plans to continue to charge for its dial up service, but won't market it aggressively. In other words, hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing costs will instead fall to the bottom line. That can't hurt.

Slurp
Yahoo! inaugurated a new search crawler, Yahoo! Slurp last week, professed to be swifter and more efficient. "As a result, site owners will notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler...Owners should see a much lower crawl load without a loss in content coverage."

Disclosing invalid clicks
AdWords is now sharing data on invalid clicks with advertisers, as a new report feature in their account. (thanks wisegeek)

Search 2.0 v. traditional
Read/Write Web writes a comparative survey of the landscape, part one and part two: How is traditional search evolving to Search 2.0? Perhaps a better way to look at this: how is traditional search evolving to become more personalized and specialized?

Most valuable brands
According to Business Week, the 2006 list: #2 Microsoft. "Google now has the biggest one-year gain in the five year history of the list, up 46%," ResourceShelf, "but Microsoft's overall brand value still has a considerable lead. About 5x that of Google." --- #24 Google, #47 eBay, #55 Yahoo, and #65 Amazon.

The Funnies
Responding to Battelle's post citing an estimate that 12% of all eBay traffic comes from Google, a reader sent in a little game he invented.

What is an eBad and how do I play? eBad is a term I derived from "Bad eBay Ad". To play, search Google and get points when you find a funny eBay ad! What do you get with the points? Well... personal satisfaction! ... like if you search for 'stolen cars', you get an eBay ad that says "Looking for Stolen Cars? Find exactly what you want today...

That appears to be the case, as Philipp has learned. The deal appears to be a pay per click deal (these are not unusual between high traffic sites and major news services like AP and Reuters), but it does mark a departure for the service, and heralds an actual business model is coming. It short it augurs the day when Google (finally) starts making money of its highly trafficked News site by selling ads against it. From Philipp's site, Google's response:

Google has always believed that content providers and publishers should be fairly compensated for their work so they can continue producing high quality information. We are always working on new ways to help users find the information they are looking for, and our business agreement with the Associated Press is one example of that.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall when "fairly compensated for their work" is debated...